How did ordinary working people imagine their political communities and futures within displacement and conflict in Khartoum, and how did they try to turn these ideas into action? The introduction sets out the book’s key intervention in African intellectual histories, opening up working-class and displaced people’s political projects outside of print media and universities, built around exploitative jobs, surveillance, and everyday violence and racism within the war. Challenging current political analyses of modern African civil wars, it also explores its wider contributions to ideas of Blackness and racial identification in modern Sudanese and African histories, and to urban histories of displacement and refuge, setting intellectual history within its practical and time-consuming context of long bus rides, paperwork, jobs, and racist policing. The Introduction also outlines the methodological basis in a creative but fragmentary archive and competing translations and interpretations, setting out a structure for the following chapters.

This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the main terms used in the books (e.g., radicalization, extremism, milieus, groups, and ideology). The core of the chapter is a review of the state of the art regarding the development and change of political attitudes in general and within extremist environments. The methodology of the book (criminological storyline approach) is explained and the most pressing gaps in the research literature regarding (extremist) side-switching are outlined. In short, the topic is highly under-researched and promises to offer fascinating insights into the relationship between extremists and their groups.