Becoming Refugee in Cairo: The Political in Performativity

Global mobility continues to challenge and unsettle forms of citizenship, political engagement, and belonging in various ways. Within this voluminous and wide-ranging movement, it is particularly the figure of the ‘refugee’ that has come to question the “national order of things” (Malkki 1995). Paradoxically, refugees both disrupt this order by simply existing and depend on it to exist in the first place. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as someone who “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (UNHCR 2010, 14).