Survival Without Sanctuary: Sudanese Refugees Between Cairo and Tunisia

By: Amel Mohdali

To understand the conditions Sudanese refugees face today in Cairo and Tunisia, it is necessary first to know what they are fleeing. The war in Sudan is not an isolated humanitarian crisis nor a sudden eruption of violence. It is the result of decades of militarization, political neglect, and international abandonment. The ethnic cleansing campaigns in Darfur, the siege of al-Fashir, and the systematic targeting of civilians are part of a long continuum of violence that has been repeatedly normalized and ignored. Readers seeking deeper political and historical context on the conflict itself are encouraged to read our two previously published Blue Record articles, which examine the roots of Sudan’s war and the global failures that have allowed mass atrocities to continue.

Article 1: https://www.thebluerecordpodcast.com/posts/we7ysez6v1khasq3taqxk910aazwd7

Article 2: https://www.thebluerecordpodcast.com/posts/za4cv98bg0jz5z9rlze5bxxhp3k641

For many Sudanese refugees, displacement did not begin with a planned departure, a packed suitcase, or a destination in mind. It started in flight, often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Families ran from shelling and militia attacks in Darfur, Kordofan, and al-Fashir as neighborhoods were burned and civilians targeted along ethnic lines. Homes were abandoned mid-meal. Marriage certificates, academic transcripts, passports, and savings were left behind or destroyed as banks were bombed and entire cities looted. Survival, not migration, was the priority.

Yet fleeing ethnic cleansing does not guarantee safety. For Sudanese refugees in Cairo and Tunisia, displacement has transformed into a prolonged condition of suspension, defined by overcrowded housing, unaffordable living costs, legal invisibility, racialized exclusion, and institutional systems that recognize suffering but fail to alleviate it. What emerges is not refuge, but survival without sanctuary.

Cairo has become one of the primary destinations for Sudanese refugees since the outbreak of war in April 2023. Many arrived believing that Egypt would offer temporary stability, with a shared language, familiar religious practices, and proximity to home. Instead, they entered a city already gripped by economic crisis, where displaced people were absorbed into the most precarious layers of society.

Housing reveals the depth of this crisis. In neighborhoods such as Faisal in Giza, once considered affordable rent for a one-bedroom apartment has risen from roughly 3,000 Egyptian pounds to as much as 20,000 pounds. For families who arrived with no income and no assets, this increase has been catastrophic. As a result, overcrowding has become not an exception, but a norm.

Interviews with Sudanese refugees in Cairo reveal households where seven people share a single bedroom, and apartments where ten to fifteen individuals live together. Many sleep directly on the floor, using thin blankets or pieces of cardboard as insulation against cold tiles in the winter months. Mattresses are rotated. Children typically sleep first, while adults often wait until the early morning hours to lie down. Privacy is nonexistent. Illness spreads quickly. Exhaustion becomes chronic.

One Sudanese father described how his family sleeps in shifts. “The children lie down first,” he said. “When they wake up for school, we take their place.” Another woman explained that she has not slept on a bed since arriving in Egypt. “We sleep on the floor. Always the floor,” she said. “You get used to it because you have no choice.”

Food insecurity compounds these conditions. Inflation has driven up the cost of basic staples, while humanitarian aid packages have become smaller and less frequent in response. Many families described surviving on one meal a day. Parents often skip meals so their children can eat. When money runs out completely, people turn to mosques, not for charity in the abstract, but for survival.

Several interviewees described taking their children to mosques to beg for food. “We stand outside after prayers,” one mother said quietly. “We don’t want to do it, but what choice do we have?” Others rely on leftover food distributed after Friday prayers or on small donations from worshippers. For families who once lived comfortably in Sudan, this represents not only material deprivation but profound humiliation. Yet hunger leaves no room for pride.

Fear further shapes daily life. Deportations and restrictive residency policies push refugees into invisibility, forcing them to calculate every movement through the city. Many avoid hospitals even when seriously ill, relying instead on home remedies or informal clinics because seeking formal care risks exposure. Parents hesitate to enroll children in school or travel across neighborhoods, worried that a routine interaction could end in detention or removal. Police checkpoints, once mundane features of urban life, become sites of constant anxiety.

Exploitation thrives in this climate of fear. Employers withhold wages, knowing workers have no legal recourse. Landlords threaten eviction without notice, raise rent arbitrarily, or pack additional families into already crowded apartments. Refugees described sleeping lightly, afraid of knocks on the door in the middle of the night—whether from landlords demanding payment or authorities conducting inspections. One man explained that he keeps his phone on silent at all times. “If they call and hear Sudanese voices inside, they may ask questions,” he said.

Daily life becomes an exercise in minimizing visibility. People limit time outdoors, avoid public transportation when possible, and structure their days around prayer times or informal work schedules that reduce exposure. Even hunger is managed quietly. Families ration food carefully, avoid eating during the day to stretch supplies, and send children alone to collect donations so adults are not seen begging. Shame and fear intertwine, producing a form of self-erasure that allows survival but strips life of dignity.

Cairo, for Sudanese refugees, is not a place of rest or rebuilding. It is a city navigated cautiously, room by room, meal by meal, prayer by prayer. Survival depends not on stability or security, but on adaptability, on learning when to speak, when to hide, and when to endure. What was once imagined as a temporary refuge has become a prolonged holding space, where life continues but remains permanently constrained.

While Cairo represents economic suffocation, Tunisia exposes the limits of legal recognition. Conversations with institutional actors and Sudanese refugees reveal a system in which asylum eligibility exists in theory but rarely translates into protection. According to a Sudanese diplomat stationed in Tunis, between 10,000 and 12,500 Sudanese nationals currently reside in Tunisia without registration. Despite fleeing an internationally recognized armed conflict, only around thirty individuals are formally registered for asylum.

Most Sudanese refugees avoid contact with authorities out of fear; fear of arrest, deportation, or prolonged bureaucratic limbo. The diplomat emphasized that the absence of documentation should not be understood as a refusal to regularize status, but as evidence of a system that is inaccessible and ineffective. Appointments are delayed for months. Information is contradictory. Offices close without notice. In this context, avoidance becomes a rational survival strategy.

International and civil society institutions operate within narrow mandates. Migration organizations primarily focus on data collection, policy coordination, and voluntary return programs, providing limited long-term legal security. Non-governmental organizations have historically filled some of these gaps by providing legal aid, emergency assistance, and referrals. For many migrants, these organizations represented the only accessible form of protection.

However, funding shortages, administrative barriers, and political pressure have forced many organizations to scale back or shut down. Several refugees described losing access to assistance overnight. “One day they were helping us,” one man said. “The next day, the office was closed. No explanation.”

Irregularity in Tunisia carries severe consequences. Whereas only one Sudanese individual was detained in 2022, there are now approximately 600 Sudanese nationals incarcerated, many of them children under the age of sixteen. Detentions often follow attempted sea crossings, informal work, or border entry without documentation.

One case described by the diplomat captures the brutality of border enforcement. A Sudanese family attempted to escape by boat. The vessel capsized, and their two children drowned. When the parents reached shore, they were forced back across the territorial boundaries and left in Libya. The mother, now stranded without documents, cannot return to bury her children. Since 2023, similar accounts have emerged of migrants being expelled into the Libyan or Algerian desert, abandoned without water or resources.

Displacement, in these moments, does not end. It repeats itself.

Everyday life for Sudanese refugees in Tunisia is also shaped by racialized exclusion. Despite speaking Arabic fluently and sharing religious customs, many Sudanese, particularly those from Darfur and Kordofan, are racialized first and foremost by skin color. As the diplomat explained, “They don’t see that you’re Muslim. They don’t hear your Arabic. They see your skin.”

This racialization translates into material exclusion. Refugees reported being denied housing, blocked from formal employment, and excluded from education. Even those with documentation struggle to meet basic needs. One interviewee summarized it simply: “Recognition on paper does not protect you in life.”

Embassies and consulates offer limited relief. While Sudanese diplomatic missions have organized food drives and emergency aid during moments of acute crisis, they lack the authority to secure housing, employment, or legal regularization. Recognition exists symbolically, but not structurally.

Sudanese displacement differs significantly from other Sub-Saharan migration trajectories. Many Sudanese refugees emphasize forced displacement driven by mass violence rather than economic aspiration. This distinction becomes especially apparent in how legal exclusion permeates intimate life.

One Sudanese couple interviewed for this study illustrates this reality. The husband fled West Darfur after the first mass extermination of the Massalit people, walking thirteen hours through the desert before crossing into Chad, then Libya, and eventually Tunisia. Tunisia was never intended as a destination, Europe was the goal. Yet the couple cannot register their marriage in Tunisia. Undocumented migrants are prohibited from entering civil contracts, including marriage. Without a recognized marriage certificate, the wife, who holds a valid visa, cannot include her husband as a dependent for onward travel. Their relationship, though real and lived, is rendered invisible by law.

Migration control, in this sense, operates not only at borders but through the regulation of family, intimacy, and future possibility.

The cost of living in Tunisia further erodes any chance of rebuilding life. Rent is unaffordable. Food prices continue to rise. Formal employment is inaccessible. Informal labor is criminalized. Street vendors face arrest, fines, and confiscation of goods. “There are no contracts,” the diplomat explained. “This is not how you build a life.”

Still, people continue to arrive. A nineteen-year-old Sudanese refugee described choosing Tunisia not because it offered safety, but because it offered survival. Before the war, he completed secondary education under the British IGCSE system and was accepted to study engineering in Khartoum. Conflict drained his family’s resources, leaving him unable to continue his education. “My future depends on leaving,” he said.

The experiences of Sudanese refugees in Cairo and Tunisia reveal a central truth: displacement does not end when people flee violence. It evolves. Economic scarcity, bureaucratic obstruction, racialized exclusion, and restrictive border regimes reshape survival into a permanent condition of uncertainty. Legal recognition, where it exists, rarely translates into protection. Stable housing, dignified work, and the ability to plan for the future remain out of reach.

Until safety includes inclusion, Sudanese refugees will remain suspended, alive, but unable to live.

The conditions faced by Sudanese refugees in Cairo and Tunisia cannot be understood as the unintended aftermath of war or the failure of humanitarian response. They are better situated within a longer history of Western imperialism and its contemporary neocolonial configurations, in which violence, displacement, and containment are structurally linked.

The war in Sudan is sustained through international political and economic arrangements that include arms transfers, diplomatic shielding, and selective engagement by global powers. These same actors, having contributed materially and politically to the conditions that produce mass displacement, subsequently reposition themselves as humanitarian stakeholders. Assistance is redirected toward neighboring and transit states under the stated aims of stabilization, capacity-building, and migration management. In practice, this funding functions to immobilize displaced populations and prevent onward movement, particularly toward Europe, rather than to secure protection or long-term safety.

Humanitarianism, in this context, operates less as a mechanism of protection than as a technology of containment. Aid regimes are structured to manage displaced populations in place rather than to restore rights, mobility, or political recognition. Legal precarity, prolonged waiting, and dependency are not unintended failures of the system but core features of it. Refugees are rendered legible as beneficiaries of assistance while remaining illegible as political subjects entitled to asylum, freedom of movement, and self-determination.

This containment regime becomes most explicit at Europe’s externalized borders, particularly in Libya. There, armed militias, often operating with tacit recognition or indirect funding through migration control agreements, function as de facto border guards. Black migrants, including Sudanese refugees, are routinely intercepted, detained, and subjected to systematic abuse. Numerous accounts document arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, and extortion. Detention centers operate as sites of coercion rather than protection, where individuals are held indefinitely until ransoms are paid by relatives or community networks.

Beyond detention, migrants are bought and sold in informal slave markets, forced into agricultural labor, construction, domestic servitude, or militia work without pay. Others are trafficked across regions as commodities, their bodies exchanged for profit. For those deemed expendable or no longer profitable, expulsion replaces detention. Migrants are forcibly transported to remote border zones and abandoned in the Sahara Desert without food, water, or shelter. Survival in these spaces depends on chance rather than law. Many die unseen, others walk for days, only to be re-captured and returned to the same systems of abuse.

These practices are not aberrations occurring outside global governance structures. They exist within a broader regime of outsourced border enforcement in which North African states and armed actors absorb the violence necessary to prevent migration while Europe remains geographically and politically insulated. The absence of formal European border guards does not signal restraint, it reflects the displacement of coercion beyond Europe’s territorial limits.

This framework reframes what is commonly described as Europe’s “migration crisis.” Rather than a crisis of arrival, it constitutes a managed system of exclusion in which suffering is redistributed across space. Detention, forced labor, desert expulsion, and racialized abandonment replace visible border walls, producing a diffuse but highly effective architecture of migration control.

Within this regime, displacement becomes cyclical rather than terminal. People flee war only to encounter new forms of violence structured through economic deprivation, racialized governance, and administrative obstruction. Survival is permitted, but life remains indefinitely suspended. The persistence of this condition is not the result of oversight or humanitarian fatigue, but of an international order that treats displacement as a logistical problem to be managed rather than a political condition requiring structural transformation.

Continued engagement with Sudan must extend beyond episodic attention during moments of heightened crisis. Independent Sudanese-led organizations and decolonial advocacy platforms play a critical role in documenting ongoing violence, countering dominant humanitarian narratives, and supporting communities directly affected by war and displacement. Following @sudan_hf and @decolonizesudan on Instagram provides ongoing access to updates, educational resources, and concrete avenues for support rooted in accountability rather than spectacle. The continued sharing of Sudan-focused media, analysis, and firsthand reporting remains essential to disrupting the normalization of this crisis and sustaining pressure against the structures that enable it.

Author Notes:

All quoted material in this article is drawn from firsthand interviews conducted by the author between 2023 and 2025 with Sudanese refugees in Cairo and Tunisia, as well as conversations with institutional and diplomatic actors. To protect the safety of individuals who are undocumented or otherwise vulnerable to state surveillance, names and identifying details have been withheld or altered. Quotations reflect lived experiences shared directly with the author.