Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the interrelations of class, ethnicity and education of young Sudanese refugees in Egypt after fleeing the war in Sudan. It sheds light on how these factors influence social navigation of surviving or building a life in Egypt and how young people reflect upon it themselves.

Paper long abstract:

Based on one month of ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Aswan and Cairo in Egypt between mid-January and mid-February 2024, this paper discusses the different experiences of young Sudanese refugees escaping the war in Sudan and their various attempts to build a new life in Egypt. The results of this field research are brought into connection with the results of one year of ethnographic data collection in Sudan between October 2021 and February 2023, which was part of a Ph.D. research project on Khartoum’s revolutionary movement and their resistance to the military coup d’état in 2021.

This paper relates individual narratives of escaping war and ways of navigating the self through the requirements of the new context in Egypt. It further analyzes them with their embeddedness in the socio-political contexts of Sudan and Egypt, drawing out the different power relations, especially class relations, that are manifested in the ways people escape the war and the possibilities they have of settling in Egypt. How do young people reflect on their escape? How do they judge the situation of refugees in Egypt? For this, it particularly puts the narratives of people from Darfur and people from Khartoum into analytical comparison.