Resilience in Precarity: Living Conditions of Afghan and Eritrean Refugee Families

The project examines the lived experiences of interlocutors with Eritrean and Afghan migration backgrounds across origin, transit, and destination contexts, including everyday life in Germany. It traces not only the differentially precarious situations they endured but also the resilience they mobilized and their ongoing efforts to pursue long-term perspectives. We conceptualize precarity as structurally produced instability and as conditions that worsen individuals’ social and economic situations, and resilience as relational, situated practices and efforts to improve these conditions rather than as a fixed personality trait.  

Drawing on biographic-narrative interviews, the study reconstructs non-linear trajectories and foregrounds how people juggle simultaneous projects, seeking protection, earning income, acquiring skills, while reorienting plans over time. A central focus is the role of family and informal networks as resources for immediate stabilization (housing, information, emotional support) and for building long-term prospects (education, labor-market entry, status). We analyze how collective family goals enable or constrain individual priorities and decision-making, illuminating the ambivalences of support, obligation, and separation that shape refugees’ pathways.

The biographically and narratively reconstructed lived experience of refugees as a non-linear, path-dependent trajectory from origin through transit to everyday life in Germany, alongside the role of family and informal networks in immediate stabilization, long-term prospects, and the influence of collective family goals on individuals’ priorities and decisions. Additionally, we position our framework along a “continuum vs. contiguum” distinction: we decenter continuum approaches that portray lived experience as a linear progression and recenter a so-called contiguum perspective that traces complex, overlapping trajectories and contiguities across places, statuses, and times. Within this contiguum, we foreground family networks and intra-family decision-making as key mechanisms shaping stabilization and long-term perspective building. 

Ethnographic interviewing has been central to recovering everyday perspectives shaped by shifting legal regimes and reception contexts. Yet despite a growing literature, biographical studies still rarely follow the entire refugee trajectory while preserving narrators’ temporal order and cross-border linkages, especially for routes culminating in Germany (Rosenthal, 2022). Our project addresses this gap by reconstructing whole-of-trajectory accounts that span country of origin, transits and (current) destination as connected by the narrators themselves. 

A second gap concerns the persistent organization of refugee programs around linear approaches. Prior work shows that refugee lives unfold through overlapping statuses, infrastructures, and jurisdictions rather than a neat “asylum → language → integration” staircase (FitzGerald & Arar, 2018). We therefore move away from continuum models and instead propose a contiguum perspective that understands refugee and migration trajectories as non-linear and composed of interconnected experiences across different places. It accounts for how processes such as seeking asylum, education or work, and care and community are often experienced simultaneously, and how these trajectories are shaped by detours, pauses, and new beginnings.

The study reconstructs biographic-narrative, nonlinear trajectories of Afghan and Eritrean refugees across origin–transit–Germany, preserving narrators’ temporal logic and identifying ruptures, recursions, and reorientations mainly focusing on the resilience of refugees and different  precarious situation they have been facing.  

It also analyzes how family and informal networks enable or constrain immediate stabilization and long-term perspectives, deriving a practice-oriented typology with implications for counseling, municipalities, and policy. 

We use a qualitative, biographic-narrative design with 32 interviews (16 Eritrean, 16 Afghan). Interviews begin with an open life-story prompt and narrative probes; recordings are anonymized and analysed via sequential case reconstruction and cross-case comparison. We also make use of two interpretive sessions, one Eritrean (three individuals), one Afghan (three individuals), mostly with experts from the same countries of origin (community practitioners, scholars) to complement findings and critically reflect on researchers’ interpretations of interview materials.

Drawing on the lived trajectories of Eritrean and Afghan refugees, this paper argues that their experiences are best understood through a contiguum approach, namely, as a process of closely connected and interrelated phases of lived experience rather than clearly separated stages of a migration trajectory. Based on biographic-narrative interviews covering participants’ journeys from their countries of origin, through transit countries, to their lives in Germany, the paper demonstrates that these trajectories do not unfold in a linear or orderly way. Rather, refugees simultaneously seek protection, generate income, acquire skills, and navigate both transit settings and life in Germany, while continuously pursuing longer-term goals. To make sense of these dynamics, we conceptualize precarity as structurally produced instability and as conditions that worsen individuals’ social and economic situations, and resilience as relational, situated practices and efforts to improve these conditions rather than as a fixed personality trait. This approach highlights how precarity and resilience are intertwined across the entire trajectory of displacement.

• FitzGerald, D. S., & Arar, R. (2018). The sociology of refugee migration. Annual Review of Sociology, 44, 387–406. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073117-041204. 
• Fuchs, Lukas M.; Hagos, Samuel Zewdie (2025): Return aspirations and the life course of refugees in Germany: Study report. Bremen: Forschungsdatenzentrum Qualiservice. DOI: 10.26092/elib/3797.  
• Fuchs, Lukas M.; Hagos, Samuel Zewdie; Yanasmayan, Zeynep; Rischke, Ramona (2025): Return aspirations and the life course of refugees in Germany. Interview transcripts: Dataset. Qualiservice, PANGAEA. DOI: 10.1594/PANGAEA.976952. 
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• Ilcan, S., Rygiel, K., & Baban, F. (2018). The ambiguous architecture of precarity: Temporary protection, everyday living and migrant journeys of Syrian refugees. International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 4(1–2), 51–70. 
• doi.org/10.1086/499509.  
• Rosenthal, G. (Ed.). (2022). Transnational biographies: Changing we-images, collective belongings and power chances of migrants and refugees(Göttingen Series in Sociological Biographical Research, Vol. 9). Göttingen University Press.