“Introduction: Precarity, Time-Making, and the Case of Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia” in “Hosting States and Unsettled Guests”
Precarity, Time-Making, and the Case of Eritrean Refugees in Ethiopia
“My Dream Is So Many Things”
Sitting on a low concrete bed in the tent issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that he shared with seven other young men in the Hitsats refugee camp, Habtom told us that he had a hard choice to make.1 Ethiopia was supposed to have been a way station as he followed his two younger siblings from Eritrea to Europe. When he set out on this journey, he knew the risks of northward migration could include torture, slavery, death, or winding up as a refugee back in this camp or an asylum seeker in another country for an indefinite period of detention.2 In the camp, to his surprise, he was drawn into government- and international non-governmental organization (INGO) sponsored programs designed to slow onward movement; he was hired to do work for a small amount of incentive pay with an aid organization, volunteered as a teacher with young children, and successfully passed the matriculation exam with the help of an INGO tutoring program, earning him a scholarship to attend a university in Ethiopia.3 And yet, despite his relative success and his excitement about the possibility of university education, Habtom was haunted by the specter of falling into nothingness in the camp: “Simply sleeping and eating is boring to me. We are like animals.” Habtom was so terrified of being stuck in a temporality that he equated to being “like animals” that he was not willing to abandon his goal of northward migration. When we first interviewed him, he surprised us at the end of the interview by asking us to advise him about which possible future to choose: “My dream is so many things! What should I do?” Several months later, Habtom had migrated onward.
Habtom’s story is far from unique. His dilemma is particularly striking when we consider that it occurred against the backdrop of a wave of policies put in place to deter migration. Spurred by target countries in the wealthier parts of the world, approaches to migration management increasingly seek to block the flow of migrants and refugees moving northward through offshore asylum processing, detention of migrants and refugees on arrival, or by failing to ensure humane crossings over borders and seas (Collyer 2019; Andersson 2016b). Meanwhile, in the Global South, policies that merge humanitarianism, security, and development function as a form of migration deterrence by encouraging migrants to stay in their home or transit countries.4 Thus, as literal and figurative walls are thrown up in an effort to deter migration to wealthy countries in the Global North, there are corollary efforts to deter migration in the Global South that are oriented around emphasizing long-term hosting and local integration as the most promising of the three “durable solutions” for refugees.5
Despite programs designed to stem onward movement and a widespread awareness of the horrors that migrants face at every step along their journey, Eritrean refugees make up one of the largest groups of migrants attempting to reach Europe, and many of them pass through Ethiopia. At first glance, Habtom appeared to be a poster child for the success of programs aimed at deterring migration by offering opportunities in Ethiopia; he was planful, ambitious, determined, hardworking, and intelligent. His aspirations to continue his education aligned with the goals of educational programs offered to refugees. Significantly, opportunities to study at the university level and work in the camps made Habtom pause and consider remaining in Ethiopia, yet in the end, he migrated. Why would someone take such a risk when they were offered a safe place to stay?
After several years of research in camps and urban settings in Ethiopia, variations on Habtom’s story became a familiar refrain. We realized that refugees are motivated not only by place but also by time. Although the camp was a safe place, Habtom said that living there relegated him to a time that was dehumanizing. It was just as important to Habtom to have a future oriented toward what he regarded as progress as it was to have a safe place to live.
What is this notion of progress, and why is it worth the risk of death? Why was the offer of progress in Ethiopia not enough for refugees? To answer this question, it is important to move beyond the idea that all refugees need is a safe place. Our work joins a growing literature that demonstrates that a focus on temporality is essential to understanding both the lived experience of refugees and the discrepancies between how refugees enact temporal agency and the temporal assumptions embedded in humanitarian and migration management policies and practices (Brun 2016; Çağlar 2016; Dunn 2017; Hoffstaedter 2019; Feldman 2018; Horst and Grabska 2015; Jacobsen et al. 2021; Ramsay 2019). One of the premises of our book is that the fundamentally spatial orientation of global approaches to migration deterrence clashes with refugees’ fundamentally temporal orientation. While these new policy paradigms look promising for an international community eager to find humane solutions to the so-called migrant crisis, they ultimately misread the needs and motivations of refugees, mistaking their participation in programs or attendance at a university as a desire to settle permanently in Ethiopia and making assumptions about how they think about both the present and the future.
New policy paradigms aimed at local integration are teleological. They are oriented toward an end. This emphasis on a singular end posits a binary between staying and leaving. Not only is this binary problematic, but it also contains a key temporal paradox: policies intend to encourage refugees to stay, but discourses, practices, and policies related to hosting refugees (not to mention the material conditions of political instability and violence) continue to promote a sense of temporariness. This sense of permanent (or indefinitely extended) temporariness causes refugees to experience the present as protracted and discontinuous with a hopeful future; we refer to this as temporal suffering. The juxtaposition of an end point with this condition of permanent temporariness results in a particular form of temporal suffering that we call teleological violence. Temporal suffering and teleological violence ensue when refugees work hard to succeed but face structural and symbolic barriers that prevent them from moving forward. These barriers include, but are not limited to, the legal prohibition of refugees’ working in the formal sector in Ethiopia and their inability to continue their education at the graduate level. Educational programs, which are often a key component of initiatives to stem migration, play a particular role in teleological violence; they not only promise progress, they also orient people toward it, and yet, the harder refugees work to achieve this promised progress, the more painful temporal suffering and teleological violence become.
New efforts to encourage refugees to stay offer powerful alternatives that refugees take seriously, knowing the perils of irregular migration. Yet the sense of impermanence in the host state and the pain of interminable waiting for opportunities for legal migration are a source of suffering for refugees. This is at the heart of Habtom’s choice and of the choices that many refugees are faced with.
Time in Unstable Places6
“There are always 30,000 people in the camps, but never the same 30,000 people,” a camp official told us when we struggled to comprehend the unchanging nature of population data in the face of camp spaces that were constantly in flux. We returned to the camps in northern Ethiopia every few months between summer 2016 and summer 2018. On each return visit, we found businesses, shops, and restaurants that had previously been open closed, and others that had been closed were open. Some of our interlocutors opened and closed a different business every few months. A young woman who we got to know, the daughter of one of our interlocutors, was engaged in something different every time we came—school one time, then school and a dance group, then just the dance group, then nothing. School directors in the camps constantly bemoaned the fact that they could not hang on to refugee teaching staff because they quit. This everyday instability was often blamed on “onward movement.” However, we knew that many who had quit businesses, jobs, or activities had not gone anywhere. They were moving on but without moving out.
We might think of these shifts as attempts at effecting temporal movement. Spatially, camps are spaces of waiting and containment, but temporally, they are spaces of flux and change. Refugees moved from activity to activity, like opening and closing shops and restaurants, hoping that something would yield progress, but it seldom did. As we will detail further, the economy of the camp could not sustain the abundance of small businesses, and refugees were legally prohibited from working or owning businesses outside the camp. The fact that these changes never led anywhere can illuminate our understanding of the relationship between structural violence and agency.
This account of fluidity and flux in the camp is indicative of broader realities of refugees’ lives. And yet, refugees are often characterized by their separation from past lives, land, and culture while simultaneously being analytically and physically separated from host country nationals. Until fairly recently, the emphasis on place and place-making neglected the temporal dimensions of migration.7 One of the reasons migration is regarded as a spatial rather than a temporal process derives from what anthropologists have termed the “sedentarist bias,” which asserts that the “natural” condition for humans is to be settled in one place and that each human being has a natural place in their country of origin (Malkki 1995a, 1995b).
The sedentarist bias is problematic because it leads to the assumption that migrants and refugees are supposed to be attached to a particular place, but it also contains within it a linear, teleological narrative. Displacement is supposed to have a beginning, a middle, and a settled end point. Refugees are thought of and think of themselves normatively as being on a linear, teleological trajectory away from a “bad” place and toward a better one (Ramsay 2019). Embedded in these characterizations are assumptions that forced migration is fundamentally spatial rather than temporal, and if time is considered, it is construed as linear and unidirectional. These limited perspectives deny the multimodal, multifaceted, and temporal nature of displacement, which may begin long before people leave their home and continue long after they reach a destination.
As anthropological work on displacement and precarity has begun to more closely examine time, scholars have begun to understand that people are not only uprooted from place; they are uprooted from daily temporal rhythms that order and provide coherence to social life (Ramsay 2019).8 They are “distimed” (Jansen 2008). This temporal displacement operates on multiple registers. Displacement ruptures incremental time (the rhythm of the day, week, year, etc.) and the coherence of daily routines as people are displaced from habitual routines of thought and action. It also ruptures the life course, operating on an existential level, obliterating expected futures. As Georgina Ramsay observes, displacement involves the loss of the sense of permanence of place and time, “forcing people to radically rethink themselves in relation to a new, uncertain, and often disconcerting projection of the world and future possibilities within it” (Ramsay 2019, 17).
Eritreans are a case in point of the temporal nature of mass displacement, or “distimement” (Jansen 2008). The Eritrea where we lived in the mid-1990s (shortly after Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia) through the mid-2000s (long after the border war had ruptured the postindependence benevolence between the two countries) no longer exists. The places that we inhabited are still there, physically. Some, like the capital city, Asmara, seem frozen in time—it contains a menagerie of Italianate modernist architecture and was declared a World Heritage Site in 2017. But the social relationships that made these spaces into places have profoundly shifted as people fled and families fractured. Long before Eritreans flee the country, they experience both temporal and spatial displacement.
Displacement in Eritrea happens in the context of a temporal incarceration that ruptures both everyday rhythms and a sense of time moving forward. The Eritrean state radically controls people’s time in intimate ways. Eritrea is governed as a military encampment that surveils and commandeers human lives and futures. Mandatory national service for all adults in Eritrea extends indefinitely and often involves military service in harsh conditions far from home and the rural and urban livelihoods that depend on them. National service workers receive meager stipends and face extreme restrictions on work and travel that curtail their ability to start or support families. Indeed, some Eritreans we met in the refugee camps noted that the austere political control of life in Eritrea inhibits conception, as husbands may rarely get the chance to visit their wives. The lack of a rule of law and the severe punishments for perceived acts of political disloyalty (like attending a prayer meeting for a religious group outside of the few state-sanctioned religions, attempting to evade national service, or criticizing the single-party state) displace people from a sense that their world is predictable. People may be arrested arbitrarily and detained indefinitely. Asmara may look like a museum in United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) catalogs, but for many Eritreans, life there entails both being cut off from a planful future and being displaced from the temporal rhythms of daily life at individual and collective levels as people flee, hide, are detained, and disappear. Thus, Eritrean refugees do not become displaced when they flee, but before. Fleeing is their first act of temporal agency. The temporality of displacement begins long before migrants move from place to place. While the temporality of displacement does not begin with fleeing the country, it also doesn’t end with asylum in Ethiopia – the bureaucratic temporalities of humanitarian policy profoundly shape time for refugees in ways that continue to be destabilizing.
Speed Bumps and the Slow Temporalities of Humanitarian Policy
We met Habtom for the first time in September 2016, the same month that Ethiopia was taking center stage as a cohost of Barak Obama’s Leader’s Summit on Refugees, which immediately followed the United Nations Summit for Refugees and Migrants. The United Nations General Assembly had called for the summit of world leaders to encourage global coordination around refugee and migration management. To this end, the 2016 Refugee Summit and subsequent Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration placed a strong emphasis on migration management through changing the nature of refugee hosting in the south with support from wealthy northern countries. The Global Compact joined an emerging series of global policy efforts, like the Khartoum Process and the Rabat Process, to stem the flow of migration, in part by making southern states better hosts. Ethiopia, host to 883,546 refugees at the end of September 2017 (UNHCR 2018a), played a key role in these efforts. Initiatives like the university scholarship program that attracted Habtom are seen as models of good refugee hosting, as is the out-of-camp program (OCP), which has allowed a limited number of Eritrean refugees to reside outside of camps if they can show they have an Ethiopian sponsor.
At the 2016 New York Summit, Ethiopia made nine pledges, many of which were oriented toward ending camp-based care by promoting local integration with the goal of making life for refugees in Ethiopia more viable. These pledges included expanding the OCP to 10 percent of the refugee population; making work permits available to some refugees; creating a hundred thousand jobs in industrial parks, one-third of which would go to refugees; making land available to a hundred thousand refugees; and enabling local integration for refugees who have been in Ethiopia for more than twenty years (UNHCR 2019). There were also pledges to enhance social services, particularly education, and provide documentation, such as birth and marriage certificates, drivers’ licenses, and bank account information, to refugees.
The New York Declaration itself came on the heels of the Khartoum Process, which was initiated in 2014 and proposed to coordinate countries along the Horn-Europe migration route to address the dangers of irregular migration. Each of these policy initiatives reflects a major shift in global refugee management paradigms by emphasizing local integration, rather than repatriation and resettlement, as a durable solution for refugees. Refugee studies scholars Alexander Betts and Paul Collier detail the rationale for this policy shift as an economic solution to a failing system of global refugee management, one that would restore “refugees’ autonomy through jobs and education” (2017, 10) by incentivizing investment from wealthy nations and corporations into “haven” countries like Ethiopia, where refugees could be incorporated as economic actors, laborers, and entrepreneurs.
Although praise has been given to Ethiopia for its role in refugee hosting, the relationship between the host country and its restless guests is a fraught one. Refugees’ perspectives on these emergent migration management paradigms were shaped by their experiences with the tremendously slow rollout of new policies, their awareness of the curtailment of legal migration options, and their knowledge of the increased dangers of irregular migration. While donations immediately began flooding in following Ethiopia’s pledges in fall 2016, the developmentalist focus of these pledges met with a great deal of skepticism on the ground. Donors pledged to mobilize $500 million for two industrial parks provided that one-third of the jobs go to refugees, but refugees and INGO aid workers alike wondered who would be willing to move out of the camp and possibly forgo rations and free, if inadequate, housing to work for a dollar a day in industrial parks. Despite the disbelief that providing refugees with work in industrial parks could be an effective strategy, talk about this continued among Ethiopian government officials of the Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA), the INGO community, and refugees themselves. Yet there was no specificity about the important details, including which of the many camps in the periphery of Ethiopia would provide refugee labor and whether refugees would be given work permits and asked to apply for these and other jobs or be assigned to them. After many months of asking about the status of this pledge, we collected several rumors, all shared in off-the-record conversations, that the move to provide industrial park jobs to refugees was the brainchild of public-private partnerships (not ARRA) and was driven by the goal of attracting funding for industrial parks rather than helping refugees. The link to refugees appeared to be a loose, perhaps only rhetorical, coupling.
As we detail in the next chapter, INGO, and government actors continued meeting to develop plans to implement Ethiopia’s new approach to refugee management. Refugees, meanwhile, were told of these pledges in large meetings and reminded of them any time they asked for needed changes to rations or pass permits or for opportunities for higher education or employment. But the new refugee proclamation sat for years, waiting for parliamentary approval. Refugees waited, growing more cynical as the months and years wore on. They had no means to gather information about the status of the pledges, the proclamation, or the implementation of any of these changes. Reminding refugees of the pledges operated as a sort of antipolitics machine; the pledges were a mechanism to keep refugees waiting hopefully instead of pressing for resources that might make their lives in Ethiopia more viable.9
On one of our last visits to the camps in summer 2018, we sipped Cokes with Fitsum at a bar along the road that passes through the Mai Aini refugee camp, one of four camps that host Eritrean refugees in northern Ethiopia. As a refugee community leader who had lived in the camp for nearly a decade, Fitsum offered a perspective on change in the camp that was always valuable, even though he typically spent a good deal of time telling us how nothing had changed since our last visit. His analysis of what constituted nothing was always incisive.
Refugees in the camp had been waiting for two years for “the pledges” to be implemented into law. Torn between hope and cynicism, they were eager to know what change this promised law might bring but skeptical about whether anything would really improve. As we wrapped up our conversation about the sluggish process of implementing these changes, Fitsum gestured to the busy road in front of us and said with a smile, “One thing has changed. Do you notice anything different?” A large bus, used for long-distance travel along this major transportation route, lumbered over an enormous speed bump in the road, while a smaller minivan and an SUV with an INGO logo on its door slowed to a stop to wait its turn.
“Of course!” we answered. How could we have missed the speed bumps? Only moments before, our own vehicle had made the slow climb over the speed bumps spaced along the crowded road that divided refugee housing, restaurants, and bars from key service providers, such as schools, the UNHCR office, and clinics.
Fitsum told us about his efforts to get speed bumps installed. “We’d been asking for speed bumps for a long time, and they did nothing. Then a child got killed,” he said flatly. “It was really a terrible accident.”
The speed bumps are emblematic of the slow temporalities of policy. At once a lifesaving triumph and the result of death, they are a persistent reminder that those who create and implement policy designed to protect refugees in their day-to-day lives often remain oblivious to the real needs of refugees—and that people die as a result. The speed bumps were the result of a project that refugee leadership invested in to improve the safety of the camp residents. They are a pointed example of refugees’ ongoing and intensive struggles to insert themselves and their needs into the conversation about things that affect them but also a reminder that their efforts may be neglected, even if disaster strikes and people die.
The incident related to the speed bumps calls our attention to temporality in a variety of ways. First, it highlights the sluggishness of humanitarian time. Second, it points to the everyday prioritization of a humanitarian policy that is responsive to procedures set elsewhere. It stresses the fact that refugees probably will not be able to insert their own sense of urgency into those priorities. Finally, it reveals the knowledge refugees gain from living in the time and space of the camp, where attention is often focused on the community and the quotidian dangers and stresses faced by its members. Fitsum’s story about the speed bumps thus reveals the disjunctures between the temporalities of humanitarian policy and practice on one hand and refugees’ everyday time on the other.
The stalled pledges, which promised progress, provided further evidence that camps were a place where time did not move forward. Refugees waited for years for the rollout of this series of policy reforms that they were repeatedly told would radically improve their prospects. However, a redrafted refugee proclamation, which included provisions for greater freedom of movement, expanded access to education, and delimited rights to work, run businesses, get land, and even attain citizenship, was only voted into law shortly after the conclusion of our fieldwork in January 2019. Furthermore, most components of the revised proclamation, including those that were poised to help refugees the most (for example, the provision of work permits), were not worked out. Refugees in Ethiopia also could not work or open a business legally, nor could they pursue a graduate degree. Their status as noncitizens clearly placed them in subordinate positions. As time passed, refugees felt the potential for each initiative waning.
Ethiopia’s 2019 refugee law and the pledges that preceded it were part of a bold experiment in global migration management that encompasses and intersects with a number of initiatives oriented toward stemming onward migration from the Horn of Africa, including the Khartoum Process and the New York Declaration. Viewed from the perspective of migration-deterrence initiatives that seek to secure the borders of Europe while attempting to adhere to humanitarian principles, these new trends suggest a shift in border maintenance southward—or, in other words, an off-offshoring of border management—transforming what has been called a humanitarian-security nexus into a humanitarian-security-development nexus, something we discuss in detail in chapter 1. In other words, these policy paradigms sought to merge the management of humanitarian emergencies with migration deterrence through a new emphasis on local integration in large refugee-hosting states in the south.
Given the stalled rollout of new policies, why were Ethiopia’s pledges and the Global Compact hailed with such hopes? Why was it thought that these promises would actually make things better for refugees and for the global “refugee crisis”? We would argue that this has little to do with the demonstrated efficacy of such policies and more to do with the underlying assumptions of these policy paradigms. On one hand, these assumptions are teleological; they seek to assign an end point to the trajectory of refugee flight. On the other hand, these policies, as with many refugee policies, contain within them a sedentarist bias that fixates on place rather than temporal notions such as progress, waiting, and being stuck. Taken together, these two assumptions work to locate the end point for refugees in large hosting states in the Global South, such as Ethiopia. We develop both of these points later in this chapter. However, to understand why it is problematic to consider a place like Ethiopia as an appropriate end point for refugees, it is important to recognize Ethiopia as a place of chronic instability with an ever-changing stance toward Eritrea and Eritreans.
Instability in the Hosting State: The Case of Ethiopia
The first time we met with Berihu, a young refugee who would become one of our closest interlocutors, we sat with him on a hotel balcony in the small town adjacent to the camp where he was living. “People always talk about their problems—their pain and their pressure,” he mused, “but I want to talk about my hopes.” Berihu’s talk of the future, however, was threaded with stories of his past. As a young boy, he had witnessed the border war when his town was attacked by Ethiopian forces: “I’ve seen people shot in front of me, it was terrible. I’ve seen terrible things during the war. Loud noises still disturb me.” His memory of conflict and his fear of violence from the Eritrean government contributed to his overall sense of precarity in the camp, which was too close to the border for comfort. Being there gave him an interminable sense of stagnation and of anxiety for his safety. At one point during our conversation, a truck bed abruptly dropped to the ground with a loud bang that made all of us jump. We looked quickly to Berihu and found him shaken but holding himself together. “It’s OK,” he told us. “This is daylight, and we are outside.”
Berihu’s concerns were shared by many Eritrean refugees hosted in Ethiopia, a country that had forcibly expelled people of Eritrean descent just a few decades ago. The concerns of Eritrean refugees like Berihu focused not only on the past but also on their long-term safety in the region. They raised critical questions about the meaning of hosting and hospitality in contexts of instability. And they reminded us that policies related to stricter migration controls and the rollback of refugee protections might be global but are always shaped by (and are themselves a form of) regional politics. The formation of the camps to house Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia and the development of policies specifically focused on Eritrean refugees are constituted by a complex history between the two countries. This history, in turn, shapes the experiences of refugees in Ethiopia. Regional politics are the grounds on which the biographies of people and policy intersect.
Because of the complex history between Ethiopia and the large numbers of Eritreans attempting to migrate to Europe, Eritrean refugees have been at the vanguard of many of Ethiopia’s integrative policy initiatives. Eritrea gained its independence from Ethiopia in the early 1990s after thirty years of guerrilla warfare. Prior to Eritrea’s 1993 independence from Ethiopia, Eritreans were considered Ethiopian citizens. Following the outbreak of a border war between the two countries in 1998, an estimated seventy-five thousand Eritreans, suddenly recategorized as foreigners, were forcibly deported from Ethiopia to a country that many had never been to. In the early 2000s, after fighting ended and a long state of no war, no peace had begun, Ethiopia started to welcome Eritrean refugees.
In 2004, Ethiopia instituted an open-door policy to Eritrean refugees, ensuring rights of asylum to any who crossed the border. Ethiopia established Shimelba camp in 2004 to house the continuous influx of Eritrean refugees fleeing the country and to provide safer accommodation for the thousands who had been living in Waala Nihibi, a temporary camp located on former battle grounds close to the border (Treiber 2019). Since then, four camps were established in the Tigray region and two camps in the Afar region.
Tens of thousands of Eritreans fled into neighboring Ethiopia, which officially hosted over a hundred and seventy thousand Eritrean refugees in 2018, many of whom resided in six camps along the border (UNHCR 2018b). Some of our interlocutors had been born and raised in Ethiopia, were deported to Eritrea, and then fled back to Ethiopia as refugees. For many Eritreans, however, Ethiopia is a stop on a longer journey that involves extremely dangerous and costly attempts to reach a final site of asylum. In 2015, UNHCR reported that eighty-one thousand registered Eritrean refugees were missing from the camps and were suspected of moving on through irregular channels (UNHCR 2016, 2017a, 2017b).10
At the time of our fieldwork, Ethiopia granted prima facie recognition to most asylum seekers from surrounding countries, a practice that was framed by government officials as a form of regional grassroots diplomacy and “people-to-people relations.” Eritrean refugees were a particular target of these strategies of grassroots diplomacy. As such, they were perceived as being singled out for special policies that gave them more mobility and privilege than other refugees. For example, in 2010, citing historical and cultural linkages with Eritreans, Ethiopia created the out-of-camp program (OCP), which allowed Eritrean refugees who had a sponsoring family member in Ethiopia to forgo refugee assistance in exchange for living out of camp. Similarly, a college scholarship program was formed to enable refugees who pass a matriculation exam to attend college in Ethiopia. These policies enabled a certain amount of mobility for Eritrean refugees, with limits. The OCP was restricted to Eritreans with family in Ethiopia who may support them, and as work permits were not provided to refugees, many were unable to afford life in urban areas with precarious and low-paid positions in the informal economy. Also, college scholarships were limited in number and accessible only to those with the education level to pass the exam.
Even though Eritrean refugees were the focus of these pilot policies, the process of changing policies to move toward greater local integration was slow and failed to benefit Eritrean refugees. Although Ethiopia declared that it was moving away from a policy of encampment, this long-standing approach to refugee hosting persisted. Eritrean refugees continued to be subject to prohibitions on work in the formal economy and stringent restrictions on mobility. The pledges, and later the new refugee law, promised economic and educational opportunities that never materialized. For Eritreans, the possibility of belonging in Ethiopia was complicated by their refugee status, but also by the political history between the two countries, which we discuss in chapter 2. Thus, Eritrean refugees who had fled an indefinite national service program that commandeered their everyday lives, goals, and future while forcibly containing them in space, then found themselves in Ethiopia, where their refugee status and internment in the camps did the same.
Berihu’s fear points to the salience of regional politics but also to the discordant temporalities of hospitality and precarity. There is a rich and growing literature on the concept of hospitality and hosting refugees (Agier 2021; Dikeç et al. 2009; Friese 2010; Rozakou 2012). Much of this literature astutely details the specific culturally contingent political logics and power dynamics involved in guest-host relations, including examinations of how culture in host states and even national identity can form around the act of being a good host (Agier 2021; Appadurai 2019). However, very little of this work explores the notion of hospitality in countries in the Global South. What are the temporalities of hospitality in highly unstable places? How do they engage with the temporalities of local integration, migration, and encampment to shape the relationship between refugees and the hosting state?
We contend that there is a massive disjuncture between the ostensibly permanent nature of integration, which is proffered as an end point, and the impermanent nature of hosting and hospitality. A guest, by definition, is temporary. Furthermore, hospitality may be rendered unstable by the broader political and security situation. The welcome extended to the guest can be revoked. Refugees’ status can change. This has certainly been the case in Ethiopia. Policies that posited Ethiopia as a viable long-term hosting state contained within them both a sedentarist bias and teleological assumptions about the ends of refugee flight; however, with the slowness of the policy rollout and the instability of Ethiopia itself, it seemed impossible to imagine that Ethiopia would ever be a place that could provide that end.
Teleological Violence
One of our goals in this book is to explore the intersecting and often clashing nature of different temporalities, the violence of dominant temporalities, and the opportunities that exist for temporal agency (Mathur 2014; Stubbs 2018).11 We have already noted several different temporalities in refugee and migration management policy—the slowness of humanitarian bureaucracy, the sense of crisis, and the sedentarist teleology inherent in identifying a safe place at the end of refugees’ journeys. Teleological time and teleological notions of progress are important to examine because of their dominance in the early twenty-first century. Teleological notions of progress can be thought of as a “hegemonic temporality” (Filippini 2017; Stubbs 2018).12 Hegemonic temporality, according to Paul Stubbs, “is a force which prevails over other temporalities . . . whilst never managing to assimilate other temporalities completely” (2018, 27). Drawing on Stubbs, we argue that teleological time is hegemonic, not only in refugee policy, but in refugees’ temporal imaginaries, even as it is interwoven with other temporalities.
In its broadest terms, teleology is concerned with ends and movement toward an end point. In anthropology and elsewhere, teleology is often equated with modernist notions of progress and viewed through a critical lens (e.g., see Ferguson 1999). Dating back to the Enlightenment, the belief in progress became a conceptual underpinning of the Industrial Revolution, where time was money—an equation that worked to produce a temporally disciplined population and an incessant movement toward “the open horizon of the future” (Nowotny 2018, 48). Recent scholarship in anthropology has reconceptualized teleology in a more general, open-ended sense as the daily experience of working toward certain ends that may be disrupted by conflict, displacement, or loss of agency (Bryant and Knight 2019; Ramsay and Askland 2020).
One might think of modernist conceptions of teleology as distinct from more open-ended notions, but we see them as intertwined and interdependent. The former equates notions of teleological ends to modernist notions of progress, evolution, and the belief in the capacity (or inevitability) of humanity to move forward in a positive direction. The latter focuses more broadly on ends, acknowledging that we are all moving forward toward multiple ends through our ordinary everyday activities. While our focus on the developmentalist underpinnings of local integration policies (especially schooling) leads us to emphasize teleology as progress, we suggest that it is always difficult to disentangle these more open-ended notions of teleology from those of progress. Indeed, putting these different notions of teleology in conversation with each other allows us to raise questions about temporal power and exclusion: Whose teleologies benefit whom?
For example, in some parts of the world, notions of progress may seem obsolete;13 however, not everyone has the privilege to leave them behind. This is particularly the case when “ends” are pursued in the context of daily life by people who face profound social and economic marginalization. For marginalized people such as refugees, progress is not thought of as a luxury or an option; it is necessary to survive. But even if progress is essential for refugees, it is also elusive, if not impossible to achieve. The necessity of progress coupled with the elusivity or impossibility of actually progressing constitutes teleological violence.
The concept of teleological violence sheds light on how and why policies and projects that seem so aligned with refugee aspirations, such as education and work opportunities, may not only fail to meet intended outcomes but also put refugees in harm’s way. In the sections and chapters that follow, we introduce refugees’ accounts of the lived experience of teleological violence and how they navigated its painful and vexing contradictions.
Teleological time becomes violent when people believe that hard work, discipline, having a plan, and attaching that plan to broader developmental goals will lead to personal and collective progress and prosperity but also know they will face very specific impediments that will stall their progress and aspirations. In other words, teleological violence ensues when refugees feel beholden to temporalities that promise the rewards of a bright future but also know that that future is out of reach, a condition Elizabeth Cullen Dunn notes in her work on “nothingness” in refugee camps (2017). Teleological violence results from the temporal contradictions produced when disadvantaged populations have experiences that lead them to believe that they can and must overcome limitations that are impossible to overcome.
Time without Telos: The Violence of Waiting and Stuckness
The camp in particular and Ethiopia in general are purgatorial spaces of suffering. Time in camps thickens and becomes weighty and sluggish in no small part because of how narratives of migration and progress position the camp as an unmoving space of stuckness and waiting. It is a way station, not an end point. Refugees are not just incarcerated spatially in camps and detention centers but temporally as well; they are mired in a state of liminality that cuts them off from the future (Brun 2016; Dunn 2017; El-Shaarawi 2015). Long periods of waiting are a component of what we call temporal suffering. Temporal suffering refers to how structures that constrain refugees physically also act temporally. One example of temporal suffering is when refugees are forced to endure the “chronic present” when they are relegated to the refugee camp (Dunn 2017). Refugees suffer because there is too much time but also because time lacks meaning. And most of all, they suffer because they have a desire for a future that they cannot control or act in meaningful ways to bring into being.
The problem of waiting is emblematic of both the structural control over refugees’ time and the violence of teleological time.14 Waiting is a key means through which power works through the body in time and space. Pierre Bourdieu discusses the problem of waiting for a future that is “too slow in coming” (Bourdieu 2000, 209). This is not only painful; it is also an expression of power that produces dependency and vulnerability as marginalized groups are made to wait by those who control time and whose time is deemed more valuable. Waiting is also tethered to teleological time for displaced peoples. They are left to wait for an end point of integration or resettlement into a nation-state (Drangsland 2020) in which the present—and the refugees or displaced peoples inhabiting the present—are always incomplete, behind, and lacking (Khosravi 2021). The problem of waiting is not limited to refugees; it also applies to other forms of marginalization and failure to progress (Auyero 2012; Brun 2015; Janeja and Bandak 2018; Jeffrey 2010; Khosravi 2017). However, the constant pressure of teleological time on refugees makes waiting and stuckness particularly acute.
We might think of enforced stuckness as time without telos (empty time, time that stands still, the future that lacks an end point). Time without telos is not inherently painful, but the hegemony of teleological temporalities that normalize progress makes time that does not progress seem like a failure and thus a source of suffering. Teleologies produce particular notions of “ends” and end points that frame assumptions about wants, needs, and a sense of what one deserves (see Olwig 2021 for a discussion of how this plays out in asylum processes). They organize time through a staged, linear sequence oriented toward progress while also assuming the inevitability of progress.
Schooling and the Violence of the Unknowable Future
Teleological violence leaves refugees stuck in an extended period of waithood where time is stripped of telos, while also foreclosing on the future that is promised by teleologies. Many studies of education in refugee camps have pointed out the dilemma of an “unknowable” (Dryden-Peterson 2017) or profoundly precarious future for refugees (Bellino 2018; Dryden-Peterson et al. 2019; Pherali and Moghli 2021; Stevenson and Baker 2018). Cindy Horst and Katarzyna Grabska (2015) refer to this as a condition of “protracted uncertainty.” By exploring the problem of the future for refugees, these studies pave the way for us to understand the gravity of the situation that emerges for refugees when they lack a future but desperately need and want one. They do not have the ability to actualize meaningful movement toward an end point, something Ramsay and Hedda Haugen Askland (2020) think of as “teleological rupture.”
We can find an example of these violent temporalities in Habtom’s story. Habtom was well aware that a university education in Ethiopia might feel like progress in the short term, but because refugees are not permitted to work legally or continue with their education at the graduate level, he knew he would likely wind up overeducated and stuck back in the camp with no prospects for progress. There were plenty of other refugees who had traveled that path, many of whom expressed bitter regret.
Formal schooling is often looked to as a way to fix the problem of the unknowable future and provide a sense of certainty. Indeed, refugees would agree that opportunities for further education are essential. However, making formal schooling available without providing opportunities to use that education is a form of teleological violence that deserves particular attention.
Formal schooling experiences—and success at schooling in particular—produce an orientation toward the future and present that is rooted in both individual ambition and a sense of duty to help society develop. Schools are factories of modernist teleology and a key part of the machinery that has made it so ubiquitous. Furthermore, temporality in schools has been theorized as disciplined; it is ordered incrementally to work toward this teleological end (Foucault 1978). Present and future are ordered in a linear sequence in which one step builds on the previous and leads toward the next. This linear ordering inherently disciplines its subjects, leading them to believe that their actions in the present will shape their future (Foucault 1978). The refugee condition, however, entails structural constraints that prevent refugees from actualizing ambitions installed by the temporal machinery of schooling. Formal education results in teleological violence not only because formal schooling fails to enable refugees to progress but also because it creates expectations.15
Teleological violence acts both by blocking the possibility of actualizing certain timelines and holding open other—often more risky and always more painful—timelines. As such, it operates symbolically and structurally but can lead to actual physical violence either through neglect, while refugees wait for promised opportunities, as we saw in the case of the speed bumps, or when refugees give up on waiting and instead actualize their ambitions by making the risky decision to migrate.
The growing literature on temporal precarity among refugees and particularly the notion of the “unknowable future” (Dryden-Peterson 2017) orients us toward thinking about the dilemma of time for refugees, particularly refugee students, but we fill in an important gap in this literature by asking what people do in the face of this unknowable future. Our exploration of the interplay of time without telos and different manifestations of teleological time extends and specifies these discussions about the pain caused by the unknowable future.
In contexts in which change is radical and constant, forms of temporal violence, such as waiting, stuckness, and the foreclosing of the future, are complicated by other embodied experiences of time that are at once less linear and more agentive, pushing us to consider a theory of practice that is adapted to understand situations of radical precarity. As Katerina Rozakou (2020) points out, there is a lot of attention paid to the condition of waiting and other forms of temporal suffering for migrants and refugees, but there has been far less focus on “struggles over time.” Here, we develop the concept of time-making to explore how refugees fill empty time with meaningful activities that are palliative but also take agency by making their own future. However, even with these highly agentive forms of time-making, refugees never fully escape the pain of time without telos or teleological violence.
From Having Time to Making Time
The Meskel holiday of 2016 was celebrated on a hot September day in communities across the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, including the four Eritrean refugee camps there. In the Mai Aini camp, the two top Ethiopian administrators were positioned alongside leaders of the Orthodox Church on plastic chairs under ornate umbrellas to witness the five-hour drama recounting and celebrating the discovery of the true cross. Hours later, the bonfire was set ablaze, and people danced and sang in a wide ring around the fire until, much to the crowd’s relief, the cross in the center fell heavily to the south, indicating peace for the year to come. In the ceremony, the religious calendar points to a year that should be marked by something different from the last. And indeed, a degree of uncertainty undergirded life in the camps, along a contested border, even for those who had lived there since the first camp for Eritrean refugees opened in Ethiopia in 2004. In everyday life, though, people in Mai Aini were stuck waiting in a sort of timeless space. One of the administrators explained the length of the ceremony that hot day, leaning over to us under the shade of umbrellas held by children, whose arms must have been exhausted by that point: “They are refugees! They have a lot of time.”
This statement—that refugees have a lot of time—is misleading. While having time calls our attention to an abundance of time that seemed to permeate the refugee camp, the experience of having time was juxtaposed with the experience of being controlled by time. Refugees had little control over how much time they had, when events occurred, or how time was allocated, let alone how resettlement processes unfolded in ways that were experienced as obscure and nonlinear. The assumption that refugees have a lot of time, particularly in the present, often accompanies depictions of their lives as empty, vacant, and unmoving. As we noted earlier, these concepts are central to teleological violence. However, failing to acknowledge that refugees also have temporal agency can result in an emphasis on their victimhood and therefore miss the temporal dimensions of decisions that they make.
How do we make sense of temporal agency in the context of displacement and humanitarian containment? Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische define temporal agency as “a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past . . . but also oriented toward the future” (1998, 962); it is the capacity to imagine alternative possibilities and operate practically in the present in relation to an evaluation of past and future. This definition was developed to avoid linearity and is useful in terms of thinking through how people draw from the past and future to act in the present, but we find that it does not fully escape the idea of a unidirectional movement of time. Indeed, we found that refugees often engaged with time in ways that reflected their rejection of the idea of past as behind, future as in front, and present as sandwiched in between. Instead, they practiced stretching and shrinking different units of time by making them meaningful or altering their meaning.
Focusing on disruption complicates these ideas about the relationship between past, present, and future (Kallio et al. 2021).16 Sami Hermez’s notion of “in the meanwhile” calls attention to how the present and future are put in a nonlinear relationship with each other, selectively decoupled and recoupled (2017). In between bouts of conflict in Lebanon, Hermez’s interlocutors created a sense of normalcy while anticipating the possibility of new waves of conflict breaking out at any time. Refugees’ orientation toward the present is similarly bracketed by the anticipation of unforeseeable yet expected events in the future and a need to find meaning in the present despite concerns about the future. Similarly, Kirsi Kallio, Isabel Meier, and Jouni Häkli’s notion of “radical hope” explores how displaced people find meaning in the present and future and in the relationship between them. Radical hope “involves an active orientation toward the present along with dissociation from the facts of anticipated futurity that constantly threaten to thwart people’s agency” (Kallio et al. 2021, 4008). These perspectives on temporal agency are critical because they push back against the dehumanizing forms of temporal violence that leave people waiting, steal their time, and render them perpetually backward or as not belonging to modern times and places (Khosravi 2021). We explore particular mechanisms of temporal agency that become ways in which refugees seek solace in their efforts to improve the present and insist that a desired future be possible.
What we call time-making is an agentive response to the pain brought on by temporal suffering and teleological violence. In colloquial speech, making time is a saying suggesting that amid a chronic shortage of time, we can make more time—which is, of course, impossible. The phrase I’ll make time evokes a spatial imagery of squeezing things in or moving large objects. What we are really doing when we claim to make time is prioritizing, giving precedence to certain activities or events over others; for example, rest or time with family and friends gets pushed to the side to make time for work, or a passion project gets delayed when someone of higher rank tells us to focus on what they want us to focus on. When we say we will make time, we are saying that certain things warrant more time or are better suited to certain specific times than others. In other words, making time is an act of ascribing meaning to events within time. Although refugees do not often suffer from a scarcity of time (although they sometimes do), given the abundance of temporal pressures that they face, they still prioritize how to use their time and engage in acts that make time meaningful, and many resent when their ability to make time is taken from them.17
To understand how time is made meaningful, we draw, in part, on theories of place-making. Through processes of place-making, people engage in symbolic practices and rituals that endow space with social meanings. More than just serving as a neutral background for social action, place involves social processes and practices that are shaped within particular environmental, historical, and political conditions (Altman and Low 2012; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Raffles 2014). As a result, everyday spaces become meaningful places, but they also attach themselves to longer-term time as it punctuates the life cycle and cosmological time as it attaches a lifetime with a broader set of meanings. Just as refugees ascribe place with meaning (Lems 2016), they also engage in temporal strategies that make time meaningful. Indeed, for people who are forcibly displaced and then forcibly contained as a result, having agency over making time meaningful may be more important than making place meaningful and also may be an integral part of coping with precarity, permanent temporariness, and living in undesirable places. If place-making is about endowing physical space with meaning through a variety of social and relational processes and thereby turning it into place, then similarly, time-making endows particular points in time with meaning through sociality and relationships.
Time-Making and Teleological Violence
In the vignette that began this introduction, Habtom spoke of the pain of living in the camp. Time in the camps has been described both in the literature and by refugees themselves as “nothingness” (Dunn 2017) or “empty time”—what we also think of as time emptied of telos. Research in camp settings explores how this temporality is fraught with uncertainty and suffering, as refugees are unable to work meaningfully toward a desired future (Brun 2016; Dunn 2017; El-Shaarawi 2015) and are stuck waiting in conditions of protracted containment (El-Shaarawi 2015). We might say that Habtom had lost what Arjun Appadurai calls the “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2004). And yet, he continued to aspire, clinging to “radical hope” (Kallio et al. 2021).
One of our objectives here is to understand how temporal agency manifests among a population suffering under one of the most repressive sets of structural constraints. We shift focus to supple, multitemporal connections between actions and aspirations, the imagination of alternate futures that lack connective tissue to the present, and alternate relations to the present that are not just about waiting but also about care. We argue that temporal agency in conditions of displacement exists in a symbiotic relationship with teleological violence. Temporal agency manifests in the presence of stuckness and spatial constraint, especially given that stuckness renders the present unstable and the future out of control.
We take up several questions as we theorize the symbiosis of temporal agency and teleological violence among refugees: How does temporal agency work in conditions of displacement, where the temporality of suffering is openly acknowledged and teleologies are simultaneously desired and acknowledged as a source of suffering? What kinds of temporal practices reflect the phenomenology of the unstable present and out-of-reach future? How does taking agency over time—what we call time-making—enable refugees to cope with enforced stuckness while waiting for a future that may or may not come? How do refugees take control over a future that has been all but foreclosed?
Time-making calls our attention to the materiality and phenomenology of lived everyday experience as they are embedded in and exert pressure on the broader imaginaries and narratives of time, progress, and stuckness. Borrowing from approaches to phenomenology that place phenomenological perspectives alongside an analysis of social structure and political economy (Desjarlais and Throop 2011), our concept of time-making seeks to place the temporality of refugee experiences alongside both imaginaries of progress and structural constraints to achieving progress.18 This resonates with practice theory, which explores the dialectical relationship between structure and agency, as humans are shaped by social, economic, and political structures but are simultaneously participating in and altering the ways in which these structures shape them, along with the structures themselves (Ortner 2006).19 Bourdieu’s theory of practice is also foundational to understanding the temporal operation of power and structural violence (1977). Bourdieu understands the actor to formulate a relationship to the near and distant future while rooted in present experiences. Through bodily action and rhythm within particular social spaces, the body forms a relationship to space and to time. Lines of difference and power operate within the context of this spatiotemporal habitus.
We explore three distinct strategies by which refugees make time. The first includes a strategic embrace of the telos of education—particularly higher education—that recognizes and pushes back against barriers faced by refugees. The second strategy involves caretaking, a form of time-making that is concerned with the present and involves warding off stuckness, imposed waiting, and the purgatorial suffering of empty time. Finally, a critical form of time-making involves prophetic future-making. Distinct from the linear and incremental expectations of planning, prophetic future-making attaches to a point in the distant future (Guyer 2007) and disciplines the present in accordance with that distant future that may not ever come.
Refugees engaged with education as a form of time-making that embraces teleological time, in spite of its contradictions. Teleological time is both a source of suffering and extremely important to refugees. Refugees often described education as a counterpoint to the empty time in the camp because it was a medium that should connect the present to a hopeful future if one is willing to work hard enough. Education not only produces an imaginary of progress, but through processes of schooling, it also disciplines people such that they order and organize their daily lives in service to that notion of progress. Habtom noted, “People [will] work for development in general. You need quality of life. That is why I’ll take any education—in order to bring progress, to grow up.” But, as we detailed earlier, these notions of teleological progress also hurt refugees because they shifted the focus away from the structural impediments to progress toward refugees’ use (or misuse) of time. Despite the pain caused by education, refugees wanted—and felt that they deserved—progress. This is why many refugees sought out educational opportunities, and even in light of the failure of education to produce a viable future, they advocated for more. In order to make formal education arrive at its promised end, educated refugees organized and advocated for refugees to have the same future opportunities as Ethiopians; they engaged in teleological time-making.
Caretaking involves efforts to fill the present in meaningful ways. The concept of temporal caretaking that we develop in chapter 4 focuses our attention on how certain habits, rituals, and practices geared toward the present play an important role in supporting mental health and community building. Refugees’ efforts to improve their communities are palliative forms of time-making by which they heal from temporal harm, even as it is constantly unfolding. Caretaking wards off the suffering caused by waiting, stuckness, and enforced presentism by making a temporary place more livable. Caretaking often involves a focus on community, such as grassroots centers to care for the mentally ill, small businesses, and youth tutoring programs. At the same time, caretaking rejects the teleological orientation of policies that posit Ethiopia as a permanent end point—a place of settlement.
The third time-making strategy we explore is prophetic future-making. Given the precarity of teleological time, how do refugees make the future? The problem of the future for refugees and other marginalized people has been well theorized. Ghassan Hage (2016) discusses the importance of a future in which you can expect to have expectations. Appadurai theorizes people as inherent future-makers. Relatedly, a rich literature on hope notes its particular temporal structuration (Miyazaki 2006; Brun 2016; Jansen 2016). We contend that hope is an essential temporal concept, but it needs to be understood for its phenomenology, its material effects, and its particular relationship to the future. When Berihu recounted the traumas of war and the strains of living as a refugee in Ethiopia, he introduced his comments by saying, “I want to talk about my hopes.” Hope, as we discuss in chapter 5, is not a luxury; it is an essential strategy of prophetic future-making.
Caught between the specters of traumatic, empty time and the violence of teleological time, refugees turn to various incarnations of future-making that are oriented toward what Jane I. Guyer calls prophetic time (2007). Prophetic time is a temporality that abandons the near future and a sense of incremental planning, focusing instead on the distant future. Prophetic time enables an escape from the drudgery of empty time, arguably making the emptiness of the present bearable. It also leaps over the incremental steps of teleological time. Prophetic time-making is not simply imaginative; it leads to decision-making that has material consequences as planfulness and caution are abandoned and risky actions, including but not limited to secondary migration, come to seem like the only option. Future-making based on prophetic notions of time is a way of conceptualizing the future in a manner that rejects the logics of linear teleologies and instead moves toward a future that is out of reach, distant, and does not have clear steps to reach it. In this dispensation, the dream of the future is actualized in the present through a series of daily disciplined actions with no direct connection to the aspirational future. It is based on faith that that future will come to pass. Prophetic future-making correlates with caretaking because it abandons the near future and any prospect of planning for or controlling it.
Although refugees are faced with certain structural constraints and temporal violence, they are not without agency. When we first visited the camps, we were struck by what appeared to be an abundance of time and how slowly things seemed to move. As we spent more time in the camps, it became clear that the slow pace did not indicate a lack of urgency or forward thinking. This was not a vacuum where time—or forward-moving time—did not exist; it was a space of clashing temporalities. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, we explore these strategies in more detail, noting that refugees make time through acts of caretaking, their advocacy for making teleological time work for them despite their wariness of it, and the selection of distant- over near-future-making. These stories help us appreciate how, although people suffer tremendously because of time and telos, they are not passive.
Methodology
Our research took place between 2016 and 2019 and involved six periods of fieldwork in three Eritrean refugee camps in the Tigray region and longer-term research in Addis with urban refugees and policy makers over the course of a year (2016–2017). We have focused on education as the crucible in which refugees come to position themselves in relation to their home and host state, craft their aspirations, and understand belonging in local and global communities. As such, we observed classrooms and interviewed school directors, teachers, students, and former students of the primary and secondary schools that refugees attended. We conducted focus groups and individual interviews with students in various stages of participating in Ethiopia’s refugee college scholarship program, from those preparing for the matriculation exam, to enrolled students, to graduates. We also interviewed NGO workers and administrators involved with vocational training programs, psychosocial support programs, and community theater programs geared toward limiting secondary migration. In addition to face-to-face interviews with Eritrean refugees living in and out of camps, we have used social media to connect with focal participants, some of whom have left the country, matriculated to distant university campuses, relocated to urban areas, or returned to camps. Our research draws heavily from interviews with young men, who make up most of the camp populations and the population of refugees involved with the college scholarship program. As a multisited project, this is not an ethnography of the refugee camp as such. Rather, we focus on the overlapping temporal and spatial realities facing refugees who live in or move through Ethiopia.
This research focuses on three of the camps in Tigray—Mai Aini, Hitsats, and Adi Harush—as well as on refugees in Addis Ababa and at various universities. Mai Aini was formed in 2008 and was the site of intensive programming related to the care and education of youth and minors. In addition to the Ethiopian and transnational organizations operating in Mai Aini, there were nine camp-based organizations that formed to assess and address refugee needs, including a youth association and children’s parliament (UNHCR 2018c). A short distance from Mai Aini, Adi Harush was established in 2010, bringing a population of refugees to the camp and attracting local Ethiopians to the adjacent village of Mai Tsebri, which grew into a town with a bustling market and a secondary school filled with Ethiopian and Eritrean students. Opened in 2013, Hitsats was the newest camp and was the only camp in Tigray not connected to the national power grid. Hitsats was more isolated, located farther north at the end of a gravel road in a depression that creates a hotter climate. Despite its resource issues, the most rapid expansion of infrastructure was occurring at Hitsats during our fieldwork, and the largest number of new arrivals were being sent there. Also, Hitsats had a reputation for being the camp to which refugees were sent when it was suspected they may attempt to leave the country. We also held regular focus groups with Axum University students and were in touch with refugee university students and graduates in Addis Ababa.
Throughout the course of our research, we attempted to balance ongoing relationships with breadth. We connected with people who were particularly insightful—both refugees and INGO employees—across time and sometimes space. One of the biggest challenges with multisited research is not having enough time to allow relationships to develop organically. For this reason, having an intentional focus was essential. While we did make efforts to connect with a variety of people, education served as a fulcrum for this work, and we made extra efforts to seek out those who were attending or had attended a university; our visits to the camps were ordered with visits to the schools and other facilities that were providing educational programming. However, we also made sure to conduct focus groups with out-of-school youth, recent arrivals, and dropouts and to converse with people we met on meandering walks through the camps, although wandering through the camps was often challenging.
Research across time and space reveals excruciating inequalities and disjunctures. We often had to work at a frenetic pace to conduct research with people who were stuck in place and had a lot of time. In contrast, we never had enough time. Our own schedules and the demands of being hosted in the camps meant that we were often rushed. And yet we valued any time we could find to just “hang out,” the most tried and true of ethnographic methods. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of our most useful research relationships have emerged in the electronic sphere, in the space between visits to “the field.”
All of our research encounters were overshadowed by the pressing question of the meaning of research. One of our interlocutors, on our first meeting, stated, “You keep coming back and asking us questions, and nothing changes.” At first, we were confused. We had never met this individual before, but his comment spoke to the perceived futility of research on and with refugees. In contrast, another interlocutor regularly implored us to “be a big microphone” and to find a way to broadcast refugee concerns to the world. We close with the words of one of our interlocutors, who emailed us as we were drafting this introduction: “If it is too late for me, it is not too late for my son. You must tell the story that we are not free to tell. The world must know about our struggles.” The assumption here is that those who hear these struggles are not already aware of them and will care to change them. We write this in the hopes that this is true.
Overview of the Book
Teleological time is part of the processes that generate displacement and the cruelties of temporal and spatial confinement. It produces particular notions of “ends” and end points that frame assumptions about what refugees need or want. Teleological violence forms a through line for this book. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on how policies and bureaucracies produce these forms of violence. Chapter 1 explores a new wave of policies emphasizing local integration as a form of teleological violence brought into being in response to a perceived migrant crisis in Europe and the requisite mandate that the crisis be addressed by stemming migration in home, host, and corridor countries in the south. Chapter 2 specifies the case of Ethiopia and demonstrates that despite Ethiopia’s being positioned as a stable country and a viable end point, the long history of animosity (particularly toward Eritrea and Eritreans) and the always-temporary nature of hospitality explain why refugees regard it as a transit country rather than a viable end.
Chapters 3 through 5 turn to forms of refugee agency, exploring the interplay of temporal violence and distinct strategies of time-making. Through projects of time-making, refugees strategize toward different kinds of future and engage temporally with particular spaces. Each chapter takes up a different form of time-making among refugees and examines its intersection with temporal violence. Chapter 3 takes up the paradox of teleological time, which refugees both covet and understand as causing them tremendous suffering. Chapter 4 looks at the interplay of camp time, which is structured by the politics of waiting and the bureaucratic-legal limitations faced by refugees (even outside of refugee camps), and caretaking, a form of time-making concerned with making the present more livable, even in a temporary place. Chapter 5 turns to the future and considers the ways that refugees function as future-makers even amid extremely constrained—and perhaps impossible—options.
Notes
1. All names used throughout this book are pseudonyms.
2. Throughout this book, we use the term refugee, rather than asylum seeker or migrant. We do this for several reasons. First, we set out to study refugees and the policies, laws, and practices of refugee management in Ethiopia. The majority of our interlocutors were legally refugees in Ethiopia; all identified as refugees. Second, we believe that the term refugee is more specific than migrant in an important way: it refers to people who understand themselves as having fled from a life that was untenable due to war, natural disaster (including climate change–related disasters), political persecution, or a broad swathe of other circumstances that put them in danger. We do not use the term as a means to draw arbitrary, legal distinctions between refugees, asylum seekers, or migrants or to privilege the refugee category. Indeed, the individuals we are writing about would likely be labeled asylum seekers or migrants if they chose to leave Ethiopia and migrate elsewhere. The term refugee is an important one because it emphasizes those in need of refuge; however, the current, increasingly restrictive laws, legal systems, and legal processes around the world are not capable of determining who is and is not a refugee. The legal terminology, therefore, is reductive. Around the world, there are exponentially more people who merit refugee status than receive it, including many Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia who make the journey northward.
3. Refugees who live in camps are not legally allowed to work, but they can receive a small amount of incentive pay, which amounts to pocket money for work done. Incentive workers often perform vital functions in the camp, and the lack of payment for these services is something that is noted as problematic. Incentive pay, at the time of our fieldwork, was approximately one dollar per day.
4. We adopt Catherine L. Besteman’s (2019) framework of the Global North and Global South to describe migration management paradigms, pointing to the bifurcation of the world into zones of resource extraction that have made daily life unsustainable and zones of wealth accumulation (namely the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, the Gulf States, and East Asia).
5. The three durable solutions are local integration, resettlement, and repatriation. In light of protracted conditions of war and political violence around the world, repatriation is increasingly seen as a very limited durable solution. More recently, with the drying up of resettlement opportunities due to policy shifts in the United States and elsewhere, local integration in countries of first asylum is often posited as the most viable option.
6. Our thinking here is inspired by Carol J. Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz, and Kay B. Warren’s work (2002) on ethnography in unstable places.
7. Even initial attempts to focus on time and temporality in humanitarianism have had a spatial focus, emphasizing being stuck in place as a precarious liminal condition. We draw on and contribute to a growing body of literature that shows being “stuck” is a complex, nonlinear temporal condition (Brun 2016; Dunn 2017; Ramsay 2019; Horst 2006).
8. Traditional analyses of time in anthropology have not adequately accounted for situations where things are simultaneously in almost constant flux and in stasis. Time is often thought of as instrumental on one hand and linear on the other. Earlier anthropological approaches were particularly interested in two elements of temporality: first, understanding how time was organized and coordinated incrementally in the short term (hour, day, week, year), and second, understanding the processes of meaning-making vis-à-vis the much longer passage of time (lineage, descent, heredity, cosmology). Émile Durkheim observed that time provides a frame to organize common human experience and divide experience into categories ([1912] 1965). Bronislaw Malinowski focused on time as a measuring and coordinating device (1927). Time is also a way to produce and reproduce common meanings. Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard introduced a dual/concurrent notion of time as divided into ecological time, which refers to everyday temporal rhythms, and structural time, which points to structures that allow for the long passage of time—in his case, intergenerational descent (1939). Building on Evans-Pritchard’s assertion that time is not only a means through which to unify, organize, and coordinate, but also embedded in the lived, social experience of the everyday, the field of anthropology has continued along this trajectory, detailing and exploring the ways multiple temporalities coexist and intersect. These same framings are helpful to understand what happens when time is ruptured.
9. These policies can be seen within the conceptual framework developed by Tricia Redeker Hepner and Magnus Treiber (2017, 2020) to consider how refugees are depoliticized by contemporary migration management policies.
10. According to UNHCR’s end-of-year reporting on numbers of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia at the end of 2016, there were 165,300 Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia (2016). During 2016–2017, data collection including biometric verification was improved. In 2017, UNHCR reports two different sets of numbers of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia. End-of-year reports indicate that there were 164,700 Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia (2017a). However, the UNHCR website on Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers from Eritrea to Ethiopia notes significantly different numbers: “By the end of 2017, UNHCR, in partnership with the government of Ethiopia, partners, and the donor community provided protection and humanitarian assistance to 75,074 Eritrean refugees hosted in 6 camps in the Tigray (38,064) and Afar (37,010) regions” (2017b). In conversations with NGO officials, ARRA staff, and camp administration, it was commonly noted that some eighty thousand to ninety thousand refugees had been “lost.” There were various theories for this, including data collection errors, a large amount of onward movement between 2016 and 2017, and undocumented refugees living in urban areas.
11. Nayanika Mathur (2014) notes the multiplicity of forms of temporality and discusses the intersection of several different ones, bureaucratic and nonbureaucratic. She argues that bureaucratic time mediates between conflicting temporalities. We take our cue from Mathur’s work in our understanding of the relationship between different temporalities but focus less on bureaucracy and instead examine how notions of teleology show up in different temporalities.
12. It is useful here to think about how Stubbs brings together notions of heterotemporalities (or multiple temporalities) and hegemonic temporality. According to Stubbs, “Taken together these concepts allow us to address ‘temporal plurality’ without ignoring dominant power structures which tend to unification” (2018, 3).
13. Helga Nowotny argues that the concept of progress has aged in recent decades, overcome by planned obsolescence, waste products, environmental crisis, and war, leading her to question how people claim temporal agency when the present begins to “devour the future” and “the horizon remains flat and motionless” (2018, 49). While this is an important observation, we also note that the concept of progress still holds sway in many parts of the world and among marginalized, precariously situated populations who still need to progress (or at least to believe in progress) to survive.
14. Waiting has become a popular topic in the anthropology of time, particularly among anthropologists interested in the condition of marginality and displacement. Craig Jeffrey, Patricia Jeffery, and Roger Jeffery (2008) note that waiting may be an existential condition, as people wait for a future that conditions of marginality have held at bay, a situation that is particularly painful for educated people who have done all the “right” things and failed to succeed. Vincent Crapanzano theorizes “waiting as a de-realization of the present” and further elaborates that “waiting . . . is directed towards the future—not an expansive future, however, but a constructed one that closes in on the present. . . . Its only meaning lies in the future—in the arrival or non-arrival of the object of waiting” (1985, 44).
15. In contexts where there is overeducation, the wrong kind of education, and/or mass youth underemployment, education can also produce false hopes and lead to despair (O’Neill 2014; Mains 2011; Jeffrey 2010; Jeffrey et al. 2005; Derluguian 2005). This notion of a future that is inaccessible or out of reach due to structural barriers provides the foundation for much work on youth unemployment, structural barriers, and precarity. For example, in the context of urban youth in Iran, Shahram Khosravi explores how keeping people waiting without losing hope has “been part of the mechanism of domination” (2017, 79)—a technique of statecraft that produces dependent subjects, or what Javier Auyero refers to as “patients of the state” (2012). Waiting and boredom are also key attributes of unemployed educated Ethiopian youths’ sense that they have been betrayed by the future (Mains 2011). Unemployed educated youth embody a set of habits and practices that reflect this complex relationship with a future that they still want to have hope in, despite the visceral evidence of it having failed them. As they fill the time with chewing khat and other activities, they remake social worlds around the precarity of the future. In a similar vein, Jeffrey’s (2010) work on Indian unemployed youth explores an array of similar practices, referred to as “timepass.”
16. Kallio, Meier, and Häkli draw on Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) Meadian conceptualization of the three temporal facets of agency related to past conditioning, problematizing the present, and responding to possible future uncertainties (Kallio et al. 2021). But their emphasis on disruption allows them to move beyond the predetermined sense of how the past, present, and future influence each other that is part of the Meadian formulation.
17. In some respects, this is similar to the concept of “time tricking,” which refers to the “different ways in which people individually and collectively attempt to modify, mangle, bend, distort, speed up or slow down or structure times they are living in” (Moroşanu and Ringel 2016, 14). Roxana Moroşanu and Felix Ringel argue that time tricking has two manifestations—changing perceptions of time and changing the contents of time’s succession. Less emphasized in the concept of time tricking is the present, particularly the phenomenological present that is lived in a state of stuckness or waiting and the relationship of the present with the making of the future that serves as a logical response to the foreclosure on teleological notions of progress.
18. Robert Desjarlais and C. Jason Throop (2011) argue that phenomenology often has been misunderstood based on simplistic understandings of consciousness and a flawed belief that phenomenological approaches did not acknowledge the presence of politics, structures, or discourses. The variant of phenomenology that we draw on is similar to practice theory in that both look at the dialectical relationship between structure and agency.
19. Temporalities of practice theory are often more concerned with historical time. Sherry B. Ortner (2006) notes that things change slowly, so attending to historicity matters. Thus, for practice theory, a turn to historicity was important to make other imperceptible changes perceivable over time. However, we need to raise questions about this for a couple of reasons: First, how is this assumption of change as slow and hard to perceive without attending to the long durée relevant to contexts where change is radical and constant? What does it mean to bring theories of temporal power into phenomenological discussions of temporal agency?
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