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Learning to Be Displaced: Notes from Cairo, October 2025

Learning to Be Displaced: Notes from Cairo, October 2025

Katarzyna Grabska, Research Professor, Centre for Humanitarian Studies, University of Geneva
Katarzyna.grabska@unige.ch

October 2025. I am visiting Cairo for a conference at CEDEJ Khartoum on the lived experiences of Sudanese refugees in Egypt. This time, I’m presenting a short paper on the trajectories and experiences of Sudanese artists — mainly those with whom I used to work in Khartoum, who came to Cairo at the onset of the current war (since 15th of April 2023). My relationship with Cairo, Egypt, Sudan, and Sudanese people spans more than two decades. I lived in Cairo between 2002 and 2006, when I worked as a research coordinator and researcher at the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Centre (as it was known then) at the American University in Cairo. Later, between 2013 and 2016, I lived in Khartoum being affiliated with the CEDEJ Khartoum as well as working as assistant professor at the Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman and carrying out research in Sudan and Sudanese communities across different locations.

This blog draws on long-term research with Sudanese artists and cultural practitioners in Khartoum (since 2014) and follows their journeys into displacement. I explore how the ongoing war in Sudan shapes Sudanese arrival and initial settlement in Egypt. This project, partially funded by CEDEJ Khartoum, examines how migrant status, class, race, and gender intersect — and how these intersections structure both the possibilities and impossibilities of finding refuge amid increasingly restrictive bordering processes in the region and globally.

Over the past two and a half years, Cairo has witnessed a number of initiatives by Sudanese artists, filmmakers, musicians, and photographers who found themselves displaced to Egypt after the war broke out in Sudan. During my visits in July 2024 and in October 2025, I attended several exhibitions, concerts, workshops for artists, and photography shows presenting the work of Sudanese artists.

Evening of 10th of October 2025. I’m sitting in Amira’s1 studio in New Cairo. I have known her since 2021 from my research with artists in Khartoum. She is a young curator and artist, well established on the Khartoum art scene. Like many others, she moved to Cairo in May 2023 after the outbreak of the war. She tells me proudly how, after almost two and a half years, she finally feels that things are turning out better for her. She managed to have a couple of shows of her work in Cairo, found links to local galleries and artists, and has finally managed to rent a small flat and turn it into her own studio. At last, she has a space where she can create her colorful artwork. We discuss the initial struggles of leaving the country, being forced from one’s home, and leaving everything behind. She also tells me how difficult it has been to live with the trauma of forced displacement – of what happened to her home, her friends, the separation of family due to displacement. She mentions the struggles of securing residency permits and navigating a new environment in Cairo. At the same time, she notes that in many ways r it has been easier for her than for some other Sudanese, as she knew Cairo from before and could rely on some family connections. Yet becoming no one and losing one’s home, artworks, networks, and social status has been a deeply traumatizing experience.

Displacement, belonging and class
Since the start of the civil war in April 2023, more than 12.4 million people have been forced from their homes in Sudan. Over 3.3 million have crossed into neighbouring countries, half the population is at risk of famine, and more than 200,000 people have been killed — with many more unaccounted for. Some 1.5 million Sudanese (UNHCR 2025) have crossed into Egypt during this period, making Sudanese the largest refugee community in the country. Yet by mid-2025, more than 190,000 had returned to Sudan — a fivefold increase from 2024.

Many artists who arrived in Cairo hoped that their longstanding ties to Egypt and to Sudanese communities already established there would ease their displacement. Yet shifting political conditions, tighteninig of immigration policies with the introduction of a new law (2024), and Egypt’s worsening economic situation complicated their experiences.

Highly educated, middle- and upper-middle-class artists from Khartoum — many of them women — now find themselves navigating a context in which they are both foreigners and racialized “brothers and sisters” (see Fabos 2008) of lower social value, what I earlier called “poor cousins” (Grabska 2006). While they enjoyed privileged access to networks and resources in Khartoum, these forms of social capital translated only partially into the Cairo context. Recreating familiar notions of home and social status proved difficult. This raises questions: How do class and gender shape artists’ experiences of displacement? How do they navigate Cairo’s restrictive immigration regime? And what new hierarchies emerge as a result?

Through my longitudinal research with Sudanese communities since 2002, I offer temporal and spatial depth to these questions, tracing how strategies of arrival, settlement, and life-planning have shifted since 2023. Class, despite its centrality in people’s lived experience, has been relatively understudied in forced migration research. Too often, displaced populations are treated as homogeneous, and class is assumed to be flattened or lost through displacement. Here, I follow Hunkler et al. (2022), who argue that class remains a useful concept alongside other forms of social differentiation such as race, gender, and social status (Anthias 2005). I will address some of these issues in the next sections.

Pre-existing Ties — and the Myth of Temporariness
Many Sudanese artists who fled after the war had prior connections to Egypt. Some had family here; others had vacation apartments; came for education or medical care, or visited frequently. These pre-existing networks and access to financial and social capital shaped their choice to come to Cairo. Many also saw Egypt as close enough to Sudan that returning home quickly — once the war ended — would be easy.

Since May 2023, I have interviewed and followed digitally about 15 Sudanese artists – women and men, married and single – who moved to Cairo. Everyone I interviewed, whether online in 2023 or in person in 2024 and 2025, insisted that they were coming “just for a short time.” Some did not even initially focus on restarting their creative practice, assuming the displacement would be brief. “We thought we would only be here for a little while,” one artist told me, “So it didn’t feel necessary to invest in making art.”

Another artist, a curator I had known in Khartoum, happened to be in Cairo when the war erupted. A few weeks into the conflict, he told me over the phone: “I have to learn to be a refugee now — a label I never thought I would carry.”

Others emphasized that they were “not technically refugees” because they did not hold asylum status in Egypt, instead relying on other types of residency permits. Sudanese displacement to Egypt must be understood within the long and entangled histories between the two countries. Sudanese migration to Egypt reflects evolving political ties, economic interdependence, and conflict-driven mobility. Yet those arriving since April 2023 have faced rapidly changing policies, restrictive residency regimes, and limited access to work and rights. Registering as a refugee is slow and offers limited benefits, pushing many to seek alternative forms of legal stay.

Learning to Be Displaced
Back in her studio, Amira shows me a painting dominated by blue tones. “I don’t usually paint in blues,” she says. “But here, the metaphor of water felt right. There’s something about moving in water that captures this experience — the limbo, the drifting, the uncertainty. You try to find a current, or maybe you just go with it.”

Almost all Sudanese artists who arrived in the city in search of safety and protection felt that their status had changed significantly from when they held an established position in Khartoum and were recognized as artists. Most came from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, and in addition to being artists, many were also art professors, curators, gallery owners, or cultural practitioners. At the beginning of displacement to Cairo, most experienced a downward shift in social status. Some mentioned that nobody knew them as artists; they missed their friends, family members and social and professional networks from Khartoum. Access to residency permits and to work became major constraints in establishing a sense of stability, legality and security. Almost all spoke about having to learn to live in a city and a country where they became nobody. Some described learning to be refugees; others emphasized the traumata oof displacement and the loss of homes and status within their own communities.

Learning to be displaced is a process of becoming and coping. It involves separation from what is known — from emotional and physical safety and security — but also requires opening oneself to a new place. Navigating radical and protracted uncertainty (Horst & Grabska 2015; Brun 2015) is deeply gendered and strongly shaped by class. This is reflected in artists’ initial sense of loss after reaching physical safety: not knowing how to navigate the new environment, constant worry about those left behind, the emptiness and trauma of what they had witnessed. Reaching safety was only the first step; securing “bread” was the next; and then figuring out how to live within a condition of permanent impermanence (Brun 2015).

Experiencing downward social mobility, feeling stuck due to complicated residency regulations, and facing limited or no access to work or opportunities to show their creative practice, some artists felt that while the moved physically, they were stuck socially. Yet some managed to navigate this initial stuckness, finding ways to exhibit their work, secure formes of employment, and expand their audiences – both locally in Cairo and internationally through Instagram and other digital platforms. Amira managed to show her work in Cairo, collaborate with artists in the city and abroad, and felt that the place was also changing her creative practice by allowing her to experiment with new themes, colours and canvas. Learning to swim in the water opened new possibilities enabling upward movement in social status, while in other areas artists experienced a deep sense of downward movement.

Some artists – often men with gendered responsibilities for providing for their families and unable to find work in Cairo – decided to leave the city and the country, either returning to Sudan or moving to other countries in the region in search of better work and creative opportunities. In my meetings with artistes in October 2025, I sensed a deep sadness and depression in response to the current situation in Sudan and the recent atrocities in Darfur. Yet, they continued painting and creating – to find solace, to continue living and feeling alive, to keep finding and creating a place in displacement.

As the examples of Sudanese artists’ experiences in Cairo show, forced migration and displacement need to be studied in dialogue with the mobilities paradigm. The lives of forced migrants are characterised by an inherent tension between spatial movement and staying put, and between upward and downward social mobility.

 

Footnotes

1 The names of the artists and some of the details of the stories have been altered to protect their privacy according to their wishes.

References
Anthias, F. (2005). Social stratification and social inequality: Models of intersectionality and identity. Sociology, 39(1), 77–95.
Brun, C. (2015). Active waiting and changing hopes: Toward a time perspective on protracted displacement. Social Analysis, 59(1), 19–37.
Fabos, A. (2008). Brokers of belonging: Sudanese community life in Egypt. New York: Berghahn Books.
Grabska, K. (2006). Marginalization in urban spaces of the global South: Urban refugees in Cairo. Journal of Refugee Studies, 19(3), 287–307.
Horst, C., & Grabska, K. (2015). Flight and exile: Uncertainty in the context of conflict-induced displacement. Social Analysis, 59(1), 1–18.
Hunkler, C., et al. (2022). Rethinking class in migration studies. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(9), 2011–2029.
UNHCR. (2025). Sudan situation regional update. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
cedejsudan (17 décembre 2025). Learning to Be Displaced: Notes from Cairo, October 2025. Researching Sudan - A perspective on contemporary Sudan. Consulté le 8 mars 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15ddo


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