Paper short abstract:

Migrants that has escaped to the town of Maroua from the Boko Haram insurgeny, navigate complex conditions marked by continuities in their utilizaton of priviously established networks, and rupturs in the ways the cross border population is attempted devided according to nationalities.

Paper long abstract:

Maroua, the province capital of the Extreme North province in Cameroon, has received numerous migrants from the border areas with North-Eastern Nigeria as a consequence of the Boko Haram insurgency. The extreeme violence has been well documented by the media. My interest is how these people on the move navigate the complex and fluent conditions they are faced with. Continuities exists in the ways the migrants make use of previously established networks - religious and business networks, relatives, friends, ethnicity. But the conditions are also marked by ruptures. Families have been dispersed and have lost their previous livelyhood, but also the way the Cameroonian state and the UN/NGO systems attempt to separate internally displaced Cameroonians and Nigerian refugees creates ruptures. The authorities pretends that they are able to order the migrants into these two categories in a neat and tidy way. As cross border citizens, the migrants have multiple identities and have earlier been floating quite freely across the boarder. Based on their resources the migrants now tries to navigate the established categories of refugee and internally displaced in order to realize social security and economic opportunities.