By Prof Tanja R. Müller, Professor of Political Sociology

Idris (not his real name) has always known Khartoum as home. He was born in the Sudanese capital and grew up around the city’s children, mostly Sudanese citizens. He played the same games as other children, went to the same schools, and even attended the same church, an affiliate of the Egyptian Orthodox Church. Idris excelled at his secondary schooling and easily achieved the grades necessary to join university. At that point, however, the fact he was born to Ethiopian refugee parents suddenly presented a hard border in his life.

Sudanese law stipulates that children of refugees are treated like foreign students when it comes to university education, regardless of how long they have lived in Sudan. This means they have to pay their fees in US dollars.

For Idris’ family, this was impossible, as it is for any refugee without close relatives in a wealthy Western country, who may be able to help out. Idris was lucky in the end. After many failed attempts, he eventually secured a scholarship and joined university.

But for some years, the city he calls home, where he has been part of a neighbourhood and the community all his life, became something else: a place where the life and career he had envisaged no longer seemed possible.

Idris’ experiences of Khartoum are not unusual but represent normality for too many refugees and migrants. Many experience feelings of un-belonging even in cities of sanctuary that have introduced initiatives to make refugees and migrants feel part of their social fabric. This alienation hinges on the contradiction between being established within neighbourhoods, workplaces and communities, while at the same time legally precarious and often quasi-invisible with respect to state-guaranteed rights in countries of residence. The term ‘liminal legality’ has been used in academic literature to put the focus firmly on this grey area of the simultaneity of social existence and legal precariousness, but also the variations of liminality within cities of residence.

In a recent paper, I use the example of Khartoum to bring the concept of liminal legality together with the literature on lived citizenship that analyses citizenship as an activist act of claim-making in everyday life. Before the war that broke out in Sudan and Khartoum in April 2023, Khartoum was a typical capital city with a significant population of refugees/migrants who had been living in the city for a substantial number of years – or even all their lives – in liminal legal conditions.

Often, liminal legality can be navigated in the everyday and with the help of local residents. This may be a Sudanese business person who lends a business licence to a refugee/migrant to open a transport business or a corner shop. This may be the employer who provides assistance beyond employment. These may be neighbourhood associations who help and support everybody in the neighbourhood. But once organs of the state interfere, confiscate licences, try to extort bribes or question the validity of papers, lives are easily uprooted and the place that one calls home turns into a hostile environment.

I demonstrate in concrete detail the multiple ways in which liminal legality is intimately connected to belonging and the promises of lived (versus legal) citizenship. I also show how the city is an important space to contest exclusions of those without citizenship status, thus giving impetus to the conception of ‘city-zenship’. This is important, as many refugees/migrants in cities the world over find themselves in a situation where they are seen and themselves feel to belong to neighbourhoods, communities, places of work and worship; have allies within civil society and often also the business sector and/or local policy makers.  At the same time, when looking more closely at their lives, the impact of state laws and regulations is mighty, not only in everyday encounters but also for the formation and realisation of future aspirations, as Idris’ experiences clearly demonstrate.

But it is not legal liminality alone that produces an ambivalent mixture of belonging and un-belonging. Social recognition also plays a significant role, as feelings of third-class citizenship and rejection by certain sections of the population can impinge on a person’s social existence. While status papers provide a pragmatic solution to work restrictions and open gateways to study or access government services, they only address parts of refugee/migrant exclusions.

While in certain instances the city – or, rather, important sites where migrants shape the city – can serve as a locus of conviviality, this also has its limits. The more pressures from the outside occur, like in times of crisis, the more refugee/migrant communities turn inwards, towards the groups to which they feel most allegiance, be they ethnic or national kin. Lived citizenship turns local, so to speak.

The everyday struggles of refugees/migrants in conditions of liminal legality should therefore be analysed with specific contexts in mind. Different acts of lived citizenship may have different meanings for refugees/migrants and local citizens alike, creating different forms of conviviality and belonging. The fact that local Sudanese, for example, let refugees/migrants use their licence for rakshas or shops may be an act of conviviality, or simply a clever business decision. Whatever the case, it has changed the urban fabric. To combine the concept of legal liminality with lived citizenship puts the focus on understanding the tensions that characterise refugee/migrant struggles in cities all over the world.

The full open access paper that provides a comprehensive analytical framing of the above is entitled: ‘Liminal legality and the construction of belonging: aspirations of Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants in Khartoum‘, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2374997

The research on which this blog is based is part of the project: Transnational Lived Citizenship: Practices of Citizenship as political belonging among emerging diasporas in the Horn of Africa (2020-2024), funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, Grant number: ES/S016589/1. The project was led by Prof Tanja Müller (PI).

Note: This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.

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