Continuities in Crisis: Narratives of Citizenship and Belonging in Response to Refugees in Egypt

• In Event: 30821 - Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8

Abstract

Recent years have seen a rise in migration from neighboring countries - in particular from Sudan and Palestine, as well as from other African countries - to Egypt due to violent conflict, which has been widely reported in Egyptian media and on digital forums and framed as a national crisis affecting Egyptians’ access to resources. This article calls attention to the multiple historic discourses that emerge in the often racialized framing of refugees and migrants as “crisis,” and connects them to theories of territorialized identity construction to better understand the historical continuities reflected in the Egyptian public’s discourse of “crisis.” Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been useful in understanding how salient language practices produce, perpetuate, and reveal relationships of power and dominance. In Egypt in particular, research on media framing and state-media relations is crucial to analyses of social movements, political change, and civil society. By applying CDA to around 300 state-sponsored news media articles and independent journalistic sources published since April 2023, this paper focuses on the various narratives packed into three “crises” that are found in the framing of the presence of refugee and migrant communities in Egypt: the escalating costs of rent, the opacity of the true number of the refugee population in Egypt, and the perceived threat of Afro-centrism. I argue that the flexible categories of citizenship and refugeeness employed in Egyptian news media reflect how the collective identities of refugee groups are mutually transformative of the collective identities constitutive of the host country’s national narratives. I further argue that people’s existential concerns over land, agency, and futurity are not resolved by fixed definitions of citizenship, but that discourses of citizenship are telling of material changes in what it means to belong to a territorial history.

Author

• Salma Mostafa, Northwestern University