Node 40 - Caravan
Ended
February - November 2024
Countries: Egypt
Nodes: Cairo
How Many Sudanese Kairos?
This ethnographic report examines the Sudanese diasporic presence in Cairo as a dynamic and stratified space of forced mobility, political exile, and gendered solidarity, emerging in the wake of Sudan’s ongoing (un)civil war and the April 2023 conflict. Framed within the conceptual lens of routes as subaltern infrastructures, the study interrogates how displacement is not a linear trajectory but a process of continuous overwriting—historically sedimented through colonial legacies, postcolonial crises, and contemporary border regimes.
Cairo appears as a Sudanese Kairos: a critical, ambivalent spacetime where survival, waiting, and aspirations intersect under conditions of precarity, racialization, and securitized migration governance, intensified by Egypt’s role as an outsourced EU border.
The report foregrounds the gendered dimension of exile, documenting how women (constituting the majority of recent arrivals) mobilize dense networks of mutual aid, both offline and through digital platforms, to sustain livelihoods and affective ties. These practices of solidarity, often invisible to formal humanitarian frameworks, challenge patriarchal norms and reconfigure social roles within transnational families. Simultaneously, the research highlights the hostile environment produced by restrictive Egyptian migration policies, deportations, and systemic exclusion, situating these within broader geopolitical assemblages linking EU externalization strategies and regional authoritarianism.
Finally, the report explores vernacular humanitarianism through cultural and artistic interventions (counter-mapping, exhibitions, and memory work) that function as acts of resistance and collective healing. These initiatives articulate a politics of presence and belonging against erasure, reframing art as a critical infrastructure of survival and as a counter-discourse to dominant humanitarian logics. By tracing these layered routes (material, affective, and symbolic) the study contributes to debates on diasporic urbanism, intersectional solidarity, and the entanglement of migration governance with global inequalities.
