The stories of lives fragmented by wars, experienced in several contexts and pieced together in the aftermath are seldom told. This book follows the efforts of seventeen Nuer families and over fifty additional individuals who fled their homes due to the violence and wars that tore their communities apart, were displaced throughout Sudan and East Africa and eventually settled in a refugee camp in Kenya. In the process, their lives were irreversibly changed, and in unexpected and differentiated ways. Many years later, in the aftermath of repatriation, they and their relatives and friends who were displaced elsewhere, or who had stayed behind, have come together to (re)create and (re)build a home, a community and a nation. The narratives of those displaced and those who had stayed behind reveal the complexity of social change in the context of forced displacement and nation-building.

Since the mid-1990s, I have been following the developments in Sudan and consequently in South Sudan, first during my MA studies, later as a researcher of Sudanese refugees’ livelihoods in Cairo and subsequently as a doctoral student between 2005 and 2010. Based mainly on multi-sited ethnographic research in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya and in South Sudan between April 2006 and September 2007, which formed the fieldwork for my DPhil in Development Studies, this book narrates and analyses the experience of gendered and generational displacement of the group of Nuer women and men whom I followed.

In Chapter 1, I explain in more detail the methodology on which the fieldwork was based as well as the choice of interviewees. The three main characters whose narratives constitute the backbone of the story line in the book were chosen deliberately. I became very familiar with the lives of these three individuals and their families throughout my research, meeting them first in Kakuma and then throughout my time in South Sudan. I have also kept in touch with them since 2006. I felt that their individual stories presented a set of diverse experiences of single mothers, young women and men who were the main groups of refugees I encountered in Cairo or in Kakuma. My respondents insisted that I refer to them using their real names as they wanted their experiences to be shared with others.