Paper details

Paper authors	Katarzyna Grabska
In panel on	Transitory Spaces and Insurgent Citizenship Practices: Refugee and Migrant Activists as Humanitarian and Political Actors
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Nuer engagements with Khartoum have been changing over the time. Before the separation of Sudan and the creation of independent South Sudan in 2011, Nuer population residing in Khartoum enjoyed de jure citizenship status. Nuer people from Western Upper Nile in particular have had long-standing historical relationship with Khartoum, either as slaves, traders, labour migrants, or conflict-displaced second or third class citizens. Yet, throughout the decades of changing historical, political, economic and social climate, the Nuer population in Khartoum had been negotiating their multiplicity of belonging, identities and everyday livelihoods, and navigating the protracted uncertainty of their lives. The situation changed dramatically in 2011 with the creation of a new State, the Republic of South Sudan. As a result of political conflicts between Khartoum and Juba, the Nuer population as all the other South Sudanese became foreigners in Sudan. While many decided to move (back) to South Sudan, some never left due to their political, economic or social predicaments. The outbreak of the most recent conflict in December 2013 instigated by an attack of Salva Kiir presidential guards on the guards of vice-president Riek Machar resulted in the most devastating conflict among South Sudanese communities, with death and displaced of hundreds of thousands. Many Nuer from Western Upper Nile, and in particular from oil-rich Unity state, fled towards Sudan, as the most accessible option. Yet, their displacement experience in Khartoum has been different from the previous ones.

This paper is based on a longitudinal ethnographic research among the Nuer population of Western Upper Nile (since 2002) in Khartoum, and in particular, in-depth interviews and participant observation. I consider how Nuer women and men negotiate and navigate (see Vigh 2009) their unstable political conditions of non-citizenship in Khartoum, by enacting a transnational political agency of engagement, protest, resistance and co-optation both in the North and the South. I analyse specifically the practice of transnational political engagements directed towards the South, yet located within Nuer communities in Khartoum. In particular, I examine the activities in Khartoum of the Nuer Dok association and the local Nuer court practice. By using gender and generational lens of analysis, I disentangle the careful, complex, and everyday navigation of political, social and cultural inbetweenness of Nuer communities across time and space. I problematize how individuals and groups in precarious conditions re-interpret ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong 1999) by reinterpreting their multi-local belonging and practice of everyday life while faced with waiting, insecurity, protracted and radical uncertainty (Horst and Grabska 2015). As a result, a patchwork of practices emerges, that shows the tactical agency of some of the most dispossessed people and an emergence of translocal citizenship of the margins.

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