Sudanese Displacement in Egypt: Rewriting Agency, Refugeeness and Visibility
Noura Bou Farraj, Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity, Lebanese American University
Introduction
Labels are deployed to construct the world in convenient images. They are a powerful explanatory tool, but they also reveal the inconsistent—and often exclusionary—impacts of humanitarian interventions on refugees’ lives. “Refugeeness” is not a fixed category but an everyday terrain that displaced persons must navigate, shaped as much by bureaucratic labeling as by lived experience. The proliferation of refugee labels has shifted political discourse from rights and entitlements to the state’s prerogative in legitimizing exclusion. In this context, refugee-led organizations have emerged as pragmatic responses to the failures of humanitarian aid systems, offering more sustainable and empowering alternatives for displaced communities.
This article situates these dynamics in relation to Sudanese displacement in Egypt—a population historically present but persistently underrepresented in political, media, and humanitarian discourse. Egypt has long functioned as a country of origin, transit, and asylum, hosting waves of forced migrants from its neighbors. Since April 2023, renewed conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces, the Rapid Support Forces, and allied militias has driven hundreds of thousands to flee, with many choosing Egypt due to shared histories, language, and cultural ties. Yet Sudanese refugees’ visibility remains muted in comparison to, for example, Syrian refugees, whose plight dominates Egyptian media narratives.
While Egypt is a signatory to the Refugee Convention and its Protocol, the absence of domestic asylum legislation means refugee protection is delegated largely to UNHCR, mediated by restrictive immigration laws. The recent passage of Egypt’s Asylum Law No. 164 of 2024 and the creation of the Standing Committee for Refugees’ Affairs have been framed by the government as steps toward alignment with international standards. Critics, however, warn that the law’s vague provisions—such as the reference to “values and traditions of Egyptian society”—risk legitimizing discriminatory practices, including the revocation of status for LGBTIQ refugees and heightened policing of already marginalized groups. Instead of strengthening refugee protection, these measures compound the legal precarity of Sudanese refugees and obscure their agency.
Against this backdrop of state failure, donor fatigue, and intersecting crises, Sudanese refugees in Egypt are recast not as passive victims but as architects of their futures. Employing an intersectional lens, this paper foregrounds how race, class, gender, and legal status shape Sudanese displacement and illuminate the alternative, self-reliant strategies refugees develop to survive protracted exile. By centering their voices and initiatives, I aim to reframe Sudanese refugeeness in Egypt as a space of both constraint and creativity—where agency is exercised in ways often erased from dominant narratives.
Performative “Refugeeness”
Refugees are often constructed through performative expectations that cast them as passive, dependent, and lacking agency. To gain entry and retain host acceptance, they are expected to embody the role of the “victim,” which renders them more deserving of rescue by states and humanitarian actors. In this framing, refugeeness becomes less a right than a commodity—something to be earned and regulated.
This construction is reinforced by media portrayals that recycle dominant frames of refugees as either national security threats or economic burdens, emphasizing border control and dependence on welfare. Bureaucratic labels such as “illegal asylum seeker,” “undocumented migrant,” or “economic refugee” similarly reproduce an image of marginality, dishonesty, and threat. These cultural scripts echo longer colonial traditions of representation: the West has historically constructed the “non-Western other” as uncivilized and unruly, requiring guidance by supposedly superior Western virtue, while presenting itself as moral and knowledgeable.
Such representational politics are not confined to the West. In Egypt, selective media coverage amplifies the visibility of Syrian refugees while erasing the presence of African refugees from national discourse. This deliberate obscuration undermines Sudanese refugees’ agency, dignity, and right to shape their own narratives. By denying visibility and reinforcing stereotypes of passivity, these portrayals confine refugees within narrow, disempowering categories that obscure the complexity of their lived realities.
Intersectionality in Refugee Experience
An intersectional lens better captures the lived realities of refugees as they navigate the layered complexities of displacement. Class, gender, neocolonial hierarchies, and legal precarity intersect to produce compounded disadvantages that cannot be understood through single-axis frameworks.
The conventional definition of “refugee” leaves many displaced people unaccounted for. In some contexts, for example, women may be granted forms of limited or conditional protection that reinforce their roles as dependents or victims rather than as rights-bearing subjects. Such partial recognition underscores how intersecting categories of identity and status shape the politics of belonging.
In Egypt, these dynamics become particularly pronounced. Syrian refugees living in remote desert areas face reduced access to jobs and services, restricted mobility, and heightened insecurity compared to those in Cairo—reinforcing their portrayal as helpless and dependent. Legal precarity compounds these disadvantages: refugees are only able to work formally if they secure employer sponsorship, a condition rarely met and designed to prioritize Egyptian workers. As a result, most are pushed into informal employment, where exploitation and abuse are rife.
For Sudanese refugees, racialized discrimination and everyday hostility sharpen these vulnerabilities. Young men describe routine bullying and physical assaults due to their appearance, while many recount experiences of isolation despite living in crowded urban spaces. The looming threat of deportation dominates daily life, with reports of arbitrary detention even of those with valid documents, pregnant women, and survivors of gender-based violence. Simultaneously, cuts to humanitarian funding have left tens of thousands without essential child protection services or medical care.
Even where formal rights exist on paper, access remains constrained in practice. Sudanese children are entitled to enroll in Egyptian public schools, yet many are excluded due to missing certificates, bureaucratic obstacles, or linguistic differences in the Arabic dialect. Such barriers illustrate how overlapping inequalities—legal, racial, economic, and gendered—combine to undermine protection and deepen refugees’ vulnerability.
Amplifying Refugee Leadership
Much of the earlier literature on refugees emphasized vulnerability, particularly of women, portraying them primarily as victims in need of protection. Such framings obscured their resilience, strength, and capacity to shape life in exile. More recent accounts, however, highlight the activism and resourcefulness of refugees themselves, reframing exile as not only a site of loss but also one of resistance and emancipation. This section amplifies Sudanese refugee leadership by tracing how individuals and communities mobilize resources to build empowering programs.
Refugee-led organizations provide crucial support to their communities, yet their role remains marginalized in research, policy, and programming. Their limited visibility within formal frameworks belies their reach and impact. A notable example is a coordination platform formed by a network of 14 Sudanese refugee- and migrant-led organizations. Serving thousands of families, it provides shelter, psychosocial support, and facilitates children’s school enrollment. Such initiatives reflect a widely shared conviction among refugees: that those who endure displacement are often the best positioned to assist others.
Individual leadership further illustrates this agency. Determined to rebuild her life, Nada Fadol, a 31-year-old Sudanese refugee, established a multi-purpose center in Cairo. The center offers medical services, vocational training for young women, art therapy for youth and adults, and cultural gatherings celebrating music, peace, and home. Similarly, the collective Camirata—a band of twelve Sudanese poets, researchers, and musicians—preserves folk traditions while fostering solidarity. For them, music is not only an art form but also a strategy for healing, enhancing mental health, and sustaining connection to ancestral homelands.
Yet leadership is not evenly visible. Structural homophobia in Egypt compels LGBTQ refugees to conceal their identities, even during UNHCR registration. This silence results in a lack of data and recognition of their initiatives, leaving refugee-led efforts by gender and sexual minorities under-documented. Their absence from academic and humanitarian discourse highlights a critical gap in acknowledging the full diversity of refugee leadership and resilience.
Concluding Remarks
This paper has sought to unsettle the dominant narrative that frames Sudanese refugees in Egypt as passive victims, recasting them instead as agents, leaders, and architects of their own futures. By foregrounding their voices and initiatives, it highlights a displaced population that remains largely absent from political debate, media representation, and humanitarian programming.
Amid the collapse of aid infrastructure and the failures of international protection systems, Sudanese refugees have forged grassroots strategies that respond to immediate needs while imagining sustainable alternatives. Their practices reveal both the constraints of structural exclusion and the possibilities created through resilience, solidarity, and self-organization.
Attending to these lived realities requires more than acknowledging vulnerability; it demands reforms that address systemic gaps and an intersectional approach that recognizes how gender, class, race, age, sexuality, ability, and legal status intersect to shape displacement. In amplifying these perspectives, this paper calls for a reorientation of refugee studies and policy alike—toward frameworks that account for agency, embrace complexity, and value the knowledge and leadership of refugees themselves.