Based on repeated fieldwork in Chad over a period of more than twenty years from 2001 onwards, Andrea Behrends has encapsulated encounters and her own personal experiences and reflections under the theoretical heading lifeworlds. She writes about the lived experiences of elites and ordinary people, men and women, young and old, inhabitants on the Chadian side of the border between Chad and Sudan. Accounts of shared meanings, practices and everyday knowledge of people living in insecure and changing conditions, in between wars and conflicts, floods and droughts, hopes and regrets, personal dilemmas and national politics, make this a very rich book in the genre of relational ethnology.

Behrends emphasizes relationships, interactions and connections between people more than pure historical or political analysis. Thus, for instance, instead of conventional coverage and analysis of the war between Chad and Sudan (2003–10), she writes refreshing chapters (Chapters 5–8) in which international definitions of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are set against local inhabitants’ perceptions and understanding of their new (or old, or returned) neighbours. In this part of the book, Behrends takes a close look at how definitions, codes and categorizations within the international emergency and development aid vocabulary influence local understandings and responses in various situations of crisis. As illustrated by the title of Chapter 8 – ‘They are our relatives now: exiting aid, but exiting displacement?’ – renegotiating categories and adapting flexible forms of belonging are among the responses of the local population in the borderlands around Adré and Abeché in Eastern Chad. (The book was close to being published when the civil war in Eastern Sudan broke out in April 2023, and so these recent changes are only mentioned, not studied, in an epilogue.)

In the last part of the book, Behrends moves her focus from the eastern borders of Chad to the western parts (Doba and N’Djamena). Chapter 9 is a short account, essentially based on a diary the author asked a friend of hers to write and mail her in real time, of the unsuccessful coup d’état in Chad in 2008. Some 3,000 rebels from three different ‘politico-military movements’ entered N’Djamena during the first weekend of February 2008. Very close to the presidential palace, the rebels seemed to have gained control over the capital. ‘[W]hen smoke rose from the palace, people interpreted it as a sign of his [President Déby’s] defeat’ (p. 204). Some hours later this interpretation was shown to be incorrect. Behrends’ point is that people did not receive either protection or information, from either the rebels or the various government forces; instead, they had to rely on their experiences and personal localized knowledge to survive in this very uncertain situation. In my view, although Behrends remains faithful to her ‘lifeworlds’ concept, the chapter would have benefited from the use of various news reports of the event and of some of the broad range of academic literature about this momentous weekend in N’Djamena.

Since 2003, revenues from oil exports have fuelled Chad’s national budget. The final two chapters give us an understanding of how ordinary people have tried to get a share of this. The general sense of deprivation among the populace grew as public oil revenues increasingly benefited the elites connected with President Déby’s family, rather than benefiting public investment and ordinary people’s well-being. Many of the ideas found in these chapters have already been published in specialist journals by Behrends alone or together with Chadian colleagues. Still, the final part of Chapter 11, where Behrends moves back to Eastern Chad (Abeché), offers a valuable account and analysis of how oil money, together with emergency aid money, contributes to changing how people think and operate, as they take opportunistic decisions based on their localized knowledge.

Behrends insists that ‘the truth … lies in the eyes of the beholder’ (p. 69). Her aim is ‘to tell the stories of the people around the country who I met and came to know’ (p. 262). Certainly, with respect to this aim, the title of the book – Lifeworlds in Crisis: making refugees in the Chad–Sudan borderlands – is accurate. This is a multidimensional analysis of micro-level data – the lived experiences of a variety of people, including the author (in my view, there is sometimes too much of ‘the author’: for example, there are fifteen instances of ‘me’ or ‘I’ on p. 93), who are gathered together in very complex environments characterized by a high level of uncertainty. And the ‘borderlands’ can be understood both as a cultural hybridity where new forms of identity and community emerge as people blend traditions, languages and practices from different worlds, and as the concrete territorial border between Chad and Sudan.

The detailed accounts and reflections of daily, seemingly insignificant, activities, events and contacts, of the ways in which people seize opportunities and create innovations based on their localized knowledge, make this book relevant to students and scholars interested in relational ethnology and lifeworld studies rather than emergency aid practitioners and aid bureaucrats – although the latter should also read it to get a deeper understanding of the context in which they are working and to avoid essentialism and Eurocentrism.