'The ones who walk away': An ethnography of exiled Egyptian expatriates in Istanbul

This ethnographic study delves into Egypt's post-2013 politically-motivated migration wave. After the military takeover of the country in the summer of 2013, numerous Egyptian opponents fled the country in fear of the state crackdown. In this study, I delve into the nuances of what it is like to be an Egyptian political migrant living in Istanbul. Looking at the potentialities between the "not yet" and the "no longer" and the spaces between hope and despair, I attempt to explain how these exiled individuals engage with the political situation in Egypt given that their physical presence became elsewhere. This study was carried out between the years 2021 and 2022, combining several qualitative methodologies. I conducted fifteen semi-structured in-depth interviews. I merged my interviews with participant observation, attending social gatherings, a live concert, and drama shooting days. I also included a digital ethnographic method, which allowed me to explore how my interlocutors express their emotions in the digital space which is the only space that ties them to their homeland. Lastly, I integrated a content analysis method to highlight the recurrent themes in the drama produced by exiled artists in Turkey. Using Derrida's concept of hauntology (1993), Turner's theory of liminality (1967), and Deleuze's "lines of flight" (1987), I argue that these expatriates are constantly haunted by the memory of their homeland and the specter of the unfulfilled yearnings of the so-called Arab Spring. In the artistic sphere, some of my interlocutors found themselves reliving the pain of forcibly fleeing the country while they also found a way to escape their realities and create new meanings. Respectively and in light of the three aforementioned theories, I focus on three particular affects, namely nostalgia, ambivalence, and hope. In these ways, this ethnography also adds to the quite-scarce anthropological literature on the Egyptian post-2013 politically-motivated migration wave.