1Migration Deterrence and the Nexus of Humanitarianism, Development, and Security

“In Ten Years, We Will Not Have Refugee Camps”

When we first heard the above words spoken by a midlevel administrator at the Ethiopian Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA), we thought it sounded fantastical. Up until this point, Ethiopia had maintained a fairly strict encampment policy, placing the vast majority of nearly nine hundred thousand refugees in camps constructed along the perimeter of the country. But then we heard the same thought repeated almost word for word by ARRA’s deputy director. Soon, the phrase started appearing on television, in various media sources, and in policy documents. Clearly, Ethiopia’s refugee policies were on the move, even if their end goal was to ensure that refugees would not be. What was going on here? Although depicted in Ethiopia as a component of the country’s distinct strategy of being a generous host of refugees, something we take up in chapter 2, this shift away from encampment and toward local integration also reflects global changes in the humanitarian policy apparatus and in migration management.

There are long-standing and well-developed critiques of the humanitarian policy apparatus. While all these critiques acknowledge the inability of the humanitarian regime to properly care for or protect refugees due to lack of funding or political will, many focus on the problem of the so-called durable solutions.¹ Durable solutions are based on a sedentarist teleology; they are focused on getting refugees to a safe place and as such are teleological, or oriented toward a particular end. This emphasis on place inherent in durable solutions fails to recognize that the problem of refugees is not only physical (locating bodies in places) but also political and thereby neglects refugees’ elusive quest for rights, which are denied in no small part because refugees do not fit into the “national order of things” (Malkki 1995b). We would extend this argument to say that the problem of the humanitarian apparatus is also a temporal—and a teleological—paradox. While the humanitarian policy apparatus has a mandate to come up with a settled end point for refugees, it inevitably fails to do so. Indeed, local integration has been critiqued for creating a class of people deemed settled but without full citizenship rights (Hovil 2014).² Meanwhile, refugees have their own teleological orientation and desire for progress, which illuminate the teleological violence of both durable solutions and the policy paradigms introduced to replace them.

Several suggestions to address the failure of durable solutions have been proposed. Katy Long (2014) notes the need to exchange the settled ends promised by durable solutions for more open-ended and long-term processes of development and peace building. She also argues for thinking about more open migration as a trajectory apart from durable solutions. Indeed, a growing literature argues that migration is a key strategy of development, and the fact that the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration were created in tandem and are often referenced together seems to recognize the importance of considering the linkages between the two phenomena.³ However, in contrast, migration management paradigms in Europe and elsewhere have only grown more restrictive. Migration management has been in transition for several decades, with a clear trend: following the oil shocks in the 1970s, it has steadily become increasingly difficult for economic migrants to access legal pathways for migration northward (Andersson 2016a) and for asylum seekers to access legal channels to migrate and claim asylum.

Alexander Betts and Paul Collier propose a different approach to the refugee crisis (2017). They detail the political and economic fallout that they believe would ensue from guaranteeing the right to migration. They also challenge the current ethics that underpin the refugee regime, questioning the extent to which it is the international community’s responsibility to protect and provide safe havens for refugees. The concept they develop that has been most resonant with policy, however, is that of the win-win solution: creating greater economic opportunity for host countries through emphasizing refugees as economic actors.⁴ This raises a critical question about whether this new emphasis on development is supplanting traditional notions of protection.

The emphasis on development over protection is found in an array of initiatives, some of which had been in place for several years, and others that were coming online at the time of our fieldwork. The Khartoum Process and the Global Compact on Refugees—the former intergovernmental and regional and the latter intragovernmental and global—are different from each other in many respects; however, they converge around the common notion that development will stem irregular migration and facilitate economic opportunities for both refugees and hosts.

This developmental approach to refugee management has often been paired with initiatives that sought to limit migration. The Rabat and Khartoum processes in 2005 and 2014, the Valletta Summit and subsequent development of the European Trust Fund for Africa in 2015, and more recently the Global Compacts, have led to an increasingly securitized form of migration management. These recent processes have not only solidified the long-term trend of securing northern borders but also have extended this border protection southward into countries like Ethiopia with a new suite of policies focused on encouraging migrants to remain in their region of origin (Andersson 2016a; Collyer 2019; Chandler 2018).

A key question that needs to be raised is whether these economic development approaches to refugee management are something new or are another form of local integration stripped of the humanitarian promises of an end point, a safe place, and protection. When viewed from the perspective of refugees who continue to languish in camps, initiatives such as the Khartoum Process and the Global Compacts seem to be the latter, as they fail to bring about the promised sea change in refugee management; however, they have been effective in shifting discourse on migration management and refugee hosting at the global and regional levels. The underlying assumptions about time and place inherent in these developmental initiatives still relegate refugees to a particular place—the Global South—and delimit progress and ambition to what can be accomplished in that settled place. These assumptions also reflect two different teleologies. The first is the teleology of durable solutions, which posits that the international community has a responsibility to ensure an end to refugee flight in a particular place; this approach does not always consider the differences between how refugees and the humanitarian apparatus view that end point. The second is the inherent teleology of development, which posits that development and developmental approaches bring about a better future for refugees.

These paradigms not only rest on shaky assumptions about the temporal and spatial nature of development and integration, they also rest on other fault lines. The same ARRA official who first told us about the end of camps also noted that open borders in Ethiopia are tied to stronger walls around Europe. Indeed, these global policy shifts have implications for countries all along the migration routes, albeit in different ways for refugee- and migrant-producing countries, transit countries, and target countries. Migrant-producing and transit countries like Ethiopia are the particular focus of development initiatives aimed at encouraging migrants and refugees to stay, but these initiatives are also paired with funding for security and border management. At the same time, these global management regimes espouse the humanitarian goal of preventing death and suffering proliferated by illegal secondary migration.

These goals crystallize in what we call the humanitarian-dvelopment-security nexus, which is the fusion of the humanitarian-development nexus and the humanitarian-security nexus. The humanitarian-development nexus is a concept that has received more focus in recent years to bridge the disjuncture between short-term, typically postconflict relief and long-term development. It can be defined as “transition or overlap between the delivery of humanitarian assistance and the provision of long-term development assistance” (Strand 2020, 104).⁵ This term—the humanitarian-development nexus—is used in the applied literature to explore an integrated service delivery model. Because of this emphasis on the pragmatics of policy implementation, the nexus is not particularly focused on the question of whether vulnerable populations are adequately protected, leaving some scholars with concerns about the incommensurability of development practices with humanitarian ideals (Lie 2020). Understanding the humanitarian-development nexus is important to our discussion of locally integrating refugees, as it undergirds efforts in Ethiopia and elsewhere to host refugees long term; however, the term we develop below—the humanitarian-development-security nexus—has a different genealogy. It emphasizes not only the fusion of development and humanitarianism but also the preoccupation with the security of northern borders.

The Emergence of the Humanitarian-Development-Security Nexus

What has been called the humanitarian-security nexus has emerged in recent years in response to the perceived “migrant crisis” in Europe (Andersson 2017; Jones et al. 2017). Building on work on migration and border management, scholars theorized a humanitarian-security nexus in which the mandates of securing borders through policing and being humanitarians (often through saving lives) become intermingled (Andersson 2017; Jones et al. 2017). We explore the function of the humanitarian-security nexus at the borders of Europe and argue that the humanitarian-development nexus in places like Ethiopia effectively extends the humanitarian-security nexus southward, externalizing processes of borderwork and humanizing it through the auspices of this new convergence of development and humanitarianism.

Because the humanitarian-security nexus is rooted in a response to the so-called migrant crisis, it is important to look at this crisis a bit more closely. Ruben Andersson argues that the increase in illegal migration was produced by the long-term erosion of channels for legal migration (2016a, 2016b). Andersson’s work details the history of migration policy and demonstrates that while there were many pathways for legal migration from Africa to Europe prior to the 1970s, since then, these have been consistently eroded. Thus, while media representation and public perception presents 2014–2015 as a moment of “crisis” requiring a security response, the numbers of migrants and refugees entering Europe through irregular channels had been steadily rising for several years. Additionally, a security response to these increased flows had already been in place for some time (Andersson 2016a). The so-called migrant crisis is thus much more a crisis of European borders than one of movement.

Subsequent policy responses have appeared to address the vulnerabilities of asylum seekers while actually foregrounding the concerns of European countries. Over the past few years, a growing literature has attended to “the emergence of a transnational discourse of compassionate border security that fuses humanitarian and militarized logics” (Little and Vaughn-Williams 2016). This literature explores phenomena such as the offshoring of border protection through migration deterrence, the interplay of duties and mandates between humanitarian actors and border patrol, and the overall linkage of humanitarianism with border security (Pallister-Wilkins 2015, 2017; Andersson 2016b; Little and Vaughn-Williams 2016). Similar to borderwork more broadly, “humanitarian borderwork” is conceptualized as an effort to “govern mobility” (Rumford 2008). However, humanitarian—or compassionate—borderwork attempts to govern mobility and guard borders while supposedly “alleviating the worst excesses of violence that take shape around sovereign borders” (Jones et al. 2017, 59). In this process, actors charged with protecting borders also wind up attempting to fulfill a humanitarian mandate—preventing migration but also preventing people from dying while migrating (Pallister-Wilkins 2017). Although we see these practices of humanitarian borderwork most acutely in search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean, they have other manifestations as well. For example, an array of partnerships between countries in the north and south result in the offshoring of border controls to countries on the southern side of the Mediterranean, often in exchange for development funds (Andersson 2016b). Efforts of countries in the Global South to retain refugees can be seen as a form of “humanitarian borderwork,” as they keep refugees away from the borders of countries in the Global North but do so in ways that ostensibly improve the lives and safeguard the humanity of refugees.

Conceptualizing the borderwork on the southern/Mediterranean borders of Europe as humanitarian or compassionate illuminates a key paradox: securing a porous border across which many people would flee from desperate circumstances is, inherently, a violent process. It cannot be done compassionately. Each new attempt to humanely secure the Mediterranean border of Europe renders the entire region more violent and inhumane. We suggest that as it becomes increasingly clear that the paradox of humanitarian bordering is unresolvable, the quest to be humanitarian while protecting European borders shifts southward, focusing away from border management and fixating on the root causes of migration. This shift is generally depoliticized in that it focuses on poverty, rather than political violence, as a key driver of migration, and it also focuses on development, rather than political reform, as the solution.

Not only does the humanitarian-development-security nexus depoliticize the conditions that produce forced migration, it also deepens the vulnerability of migrants. According to Adrian Little and Nick Vaughn-Williams, “Compassionate borderwork enacts worlds, creates and delimits political and ethical possibilities, and has concrete and often contradictory—if no less violent—effects on the lives of targeted populations produced as ‘irregular’” (2016, 3). Indeed, increased securitization of the migrant “crisis” has transformed migration from illegal to criminal (Chandler 2018; Hovil and Oette 2017). Smugglers are criminalized ostensibly to protect migrants. In the process, however, migrants themselves are increasingly treated like criminals through the auspices of increased detention and violence. The criminalization of smuggling might be seen as one of many facets of humanitarian borderwork, while the criminalization of migration is anti-humanitarian borderwork.

As the humanitarian rationale of these north-south partnerships wobbles, it reveals a political economy of amplified risk and reward—what Andersson calls an “illegality industry” (2016a). Because smuggling is demand-driven and the demand does not cease when states on both sides of the Mediterranean cooperate to limit migration, increased security around migration means that migrants are forced to utilize more dangerous pathways. If this illegality industry was brought into being by earlier reforms that limited legal migration, then the criminalization of migration and smuggling has made this industry even more risky and therefore lucrative for smugglers. Limitations on legal migration enact and enable a thriving illicit industry but also a particularly symbiotic relationship between countries in the north and south.

While scholars have noted the presence of a migration-development-security nexus (Andersson 2016a) and the increased usage of development funding to enhance the capacity (and will) of states bordering Europe to curtail the numbers of migrants, less attention has focused on the similar usage of development funding further south in large refugee-hosting states such as Ethiopia. It is important to examine this because increasingly, through the auspices of regional intergovernmental migration management initiatives, such as the Khartoum Process and the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migrants, new emphasis is placed on development. A closer look at how the humanitarian-development-security nexus is produced in these global migration management initiatives in the south further illuminates the contradictory landscape that blurs humanitarianism and development—and, in doing so, erodes the security and well-being of migrants.

The Humanitarian-Development-Security Nexus in the Khartoum Process and the Global Compact on Refugees

Generated thousands of miles away from each other and drawing together very different kinds of actors, the Global Compact on Refugees and the Khartoum Process have spawned initiatives that share an emphasis on funding development in large refugee-hosting states. In the case of the Khartoum Process, there is an express language of addressing root causes of migration through sustainable development, while in the case of the Global Compact on Refugees, the emphasis on development is couched in terms of alleviating strains on host communities and increasing resilience among refugees. Both initiatives share a focus on local integration and development assistance for both host communities and refugee communities in large hosting states in the Global South, such as Ethiopia.

The Khartoum Process, otherwise known as the Horn of Africa Migration Route Initiative, was modeled after the Rabat Process, launched in 2005. Both processes are an initiative of the European Union’s (EU’s) Global Approach on Migration and Mobility. Although the express goal is to reduce the dangers associated with illegal/irregular migration, the more important implicit goal is radically slowing migration to Europe, often doing so through the twin processes of connecting migration to development (and thereby addressing the assumed root cause of migration) and securing borders (Stern 2015). Importantly, unlike the Rabat Process, the Khartoum Process has included little emphasis on legal migration, safe passage, or humanitarian corridors. Funding available through the auspices of the Khartoum Process is focused almost exclusively on border security and local integration/development initiatives.

Following the Valletta Summit, the Valletta Action Plan outlined goals for the Khartoum Process and allocated resources through the auspices of the European Union Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF). The 2015 Valletta Summit Action Plan identifies five “priority domains” and sixteen “priority initiatives.” The priority domains relate to development benefits of migration and addressing root causes of irregular migration and forced displacement; legal migration and mobility; protection and asylum; prevention of irregular migration, smuggling, and trafficking; and return, readmission, and reintegration. Of these, the first and third are almost exclusively focused on development. The first priority concentrates on various facets of development, including alleviating poverty, building resilience, facilitating sustainable livelihoods, and attracting investment and creating jobs in Africa. Similarly, the third goal focuses on asylum largely in the country of first asylum and frames protection as an issue of alleviating strain on the host community. The Regional Development and Protection Program (RDPP), which funds development projects for refugee and host communities, is housed under the third priority area as a protection measure (Valletta Summit Action Plan 2015). Michael Collyer’s analysis demonstrates that 95 percent of financial commitments for the Valletta plan went to initiatives oriented toward development-focused priority areas (70 percent was specifically allocated to the first priority area). However, these goals were also coupled with a focus on security, and there is a political expectation that these development projects will reduce irregular migration (Collyer 2019; Chandler 2018).

The Khartoum Process is based on a “problematic political economy,” as Lucy Hovil and Lutz Oette detail (2017). It entails a political asymmetry that elevates the need for European states to secure their borders over the varied needs of origin or transit states. In doing so, it assumes that migrants make it to Europe due to the technical incapacity of states along the migration route rather than the fact that refugees cannot or do not want to stay in origin or transit countries for an array of reasons (see also Stern 2015). This configuration puts European states in the role of generous donor, neglecting the fact that states in the south are already bearing most of the burden for refugees. It also casts migration as economically motivated, ignoring the reality that many refugees in the Horn of Africa are fleeing political persecution (Hovil and Oette 2017). Indeed, the Khartoum Process has often been criticized for bringing the governments from which refugees are fleeing to the table and, in the name of providing technical support, funding militias, particularly in Sudan. The Khartoum Process also configures a relationship in which transit or origin states along the migration route are coopted into a system of externalized management of European borders (Andersson 2016b), effectively pushing the defense of European borders not just offshore but also far offshore (Hovil and Oette 2017). This externalized management of European borders involves offering both international legitimacy and resources—in the form of development funds—to countries that are stable enough (or perceived as stable enough) to stanch migration to Europe (Stern 2015). In this process, migration is depoliticized and recast as a development problem, and the emphasis on curbing the onward migration of refugees is addressed through the durable solution of local integration.

Following on the heels of the Valletta Summit and the launch of the EUTF, in September 2016, the United Nations Summit for Refugees and Migrants produced the New York Declaration, which later spawned the Global Compact on Refugees. This nonbinding compact resulted in UN member states making specific pledges regarding their role in managing flows of refugees globally. The Khartoum Process and the Global Compact are different in that the former is regional and intergovernmental while the latter is global and intragovernmental, but there are similarities.

Like the Khartoum Process and the RDPP, the Global Compact on Refugees placed programmatic emphasis on development. The Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) emerged as the blueprint for addressing refugee needs. It has four goals: to ease the pressure on host countries, to enhance refugee self-reliance, to expand access to third-country solutions, and to ensure safe and dignified returns to countries of origin (UNHCR 2018d). In practice, three of these four goals are oriented toward refugee hosting in countries in the south. Only the third goal, which focuses on third-country solutions, requires any commitment from northern or target states. Unlike the Khartoum Process, which focuses on development as a root cause of migration, the Global Compact focuses on development as “easing pressure on host communities” and enhancing the “self-reliance” of refugees. However, the assumption that refugees will remain in the south is the same, as is the assumption that development will stop migration. In addition to stemming the flow of refugees and migrants, this approach hopes to simultaneously reduce dependency on dwindling international assistance and integrate refugees into the labor market (Lenner and Turner 2018; Bardelli 2018). A 2018 UNHCR report on progress made toward the compact is particularly telling. While there is an abundance of funding that has streamed to countries like Ethiopia for these local development initiatives, there is far less commitment to third-country solutions. Indeed, there are fewer resettlement placements available than when the New York Summit took place (UNHCR 2018d).

In an array of conferences, publications, reports, and popular writings, the three durable solutions for refugees (repatriation, resettlement, and local integration) are increasingly reduced to only one truly viable solution—local integration (Betts and Collier 2017; Papademetriou and Fratzke 2016). Since safe and voluntary repatriation is highly unlikely to many of the countries from which refugees come and there is little hope that the supply of resettlement opportunities will match the need, local integration is increasingly seen as the remaining solution. This merger of development and humanitarianism is thus held up as a panacea for many problems—migration toward Europe, dwindling funding for UNHCR and the refugees, and the challenge of finding durable solutions. The new focus on development assumes that if the root causes of migration are addressed, the countries that people migrate from (or in some cases transit through, such as Ethiopia) will become places where people will want to stay.

This assumption is deeply flawed and, we would argue, is a key component of what Catherine Besteman has termed a system of “militarized global apartheid” (2019). The assertion that underdevelopment is one of the root causes of migration casts migration as a symptom of poverty. Collyer analyzed longitudinal data and concluded that not only does development not curtail migration but it also often leads to higher rates of migration because it tends to integrate people into global patterns of travel, education, work, and commerce (2019). In contrast, the global migration compacts discussed above proffer a vision of development for Africa that is peculiarly containerized, severing African countries from global socioeconomic mobility. In doing so, it relies on a sedentarist teleology that refuses to see mobility as something all humans do, tethers progress to places, and relegates would-be migrants to places that are close to their home countries. It not only depoliticizes refugees’ movement but also ultimately pathologizes the movement of racialized bodies (Besteman 2019) and creates a structure to keep them in the places from which they come.

There is a great deal of concern about the mismatch between the goals of migration management (to stop illegal migration) and the goals of development funding (poverty alleviation). Drawing on Ana López-Sala’s notion of three forms of migration dissuasion—preventive, coercive, and repressive—Collyer argues that these new forms of migration management blur the lines between these forms of dissuasion. Development, which is typically considered preventive dissuasion, is merged with coercive dissuasion, which includes border controls and other forms of interception, and repressive dissuasion, which includes detention and police and military action against migrants (Collyer 2019; López-Sala 2015). Although using development to deter migration is not new, the increased fusion of development with security and migration management may obscure a “hidden agenda” of what we might see as coercive or repressive dissuasion (de Haas 2012, cited in Collyer 2019) and may undermine public support for both migration and development.

Another critique is that development funding is being rerouted toward security measures to curtail irregular migration rather than focusing on poverty alleviation. At one level, it appears that funding for development projects is opening up. The EUTF has given €2.5 billion across Africa since 2015. The EUTF derived 70 percent of its funding from the European Development Fund. However, despite the fact that the resources allocated for migration management come from development funding, much of it goes to border security. These funds are increasingly channeled to what is effectively migration management. In Ethiopia, a large portion of these funds went into the RDPP earmarked for addressing root causes of migration. A related critique is that the effectiveness of development programs is being assessed on the basis of their success at slowing migration rather than alleviating poverty (Oxfam 2017).

The fusion of humanitarianism and development also effectively depoliticizes refugee protection (Bardelli 2018). Humanitarianism creates categories of giver-receiver and protector-protected (Feldman and Ticktin 2010). Although these categorizations are clearly problematic and have been roundly critiqued, they render the refugee as a particular kind of rights-bearing subject. Indeed, refugees derive any rights they may have from their protected status (Pallister-Wilkins 2017). Although this protected status often falls short of its stated objectives, leaving refugees bereft of adequate food, shelter, and protection from violence, it is a status they may use to advocate for what they should have. Protection and humanitarian relief, unlike development, are mandated to be equally allocated to all refugees, whereas development inevitably marginalizes some while it helps others (Bardelli 2018). Even if the on-the-ground implementation of protection falls short, protected status for refugees is the only way refugees can claim any rights at all. For example, although refugee status often binds refugees to the camp, casts them as victims in need of aid, and proffers aid that is often insufficient, it at least ensures they have the right to some basic protections. Protected status also guarantees refugees the possibility of resettlement, distant and unlikely as that may be.

Like humanitarianism, developmentalism is depoliticizing, but in a different way (Ferguson 1994). One might say that this blurring of development with humanitarianism under the auspices of securing European borders is erasing the category of the refugee itself. Extending James Ferguson’s conceptualization of development as an “anti-politics machine,” Tricia Redeker Hepner and Magnus Treiber argue that refugee management and asylum processes around the world are increasingly a depoliticizing “anti-refugee machine” that strips refugees of their political status and threatens their right to claim protection under international law (Hepner and Treiber 2017, 2021). Even if refugees are not officially stripped of their protected status, their subjectivity under developmental rather than humanitarian regimes is configured around the assumption that they are motivated more by a desire to improve their livelihoods than by a desire to be safe from political violence. Under the humanitarian-development-security regime, the political subjectivity of refugees is effectively sidelined. Being a refugee involves reliance on a political designation, but subjects of development interventions have no such protected status. Developmental subjects, particularly in light of the neoliberal turn in the development industry, are expected to be entrepreneurial hustlers, not cared-for subjects. Although the reality is that refugees cannot rely on assistance and aid alone and are constantly hustling for additional income, their status as protected is essential to their survival.

What is conveniently forgotten in this new configuration of humanitarianism and development is the history of development. Many development initiatives are arguably ineffective at best, inhumane at worst, and more concerned with making profit for economic elites than viable livelihoods for the vulnerable (Lenner and Turner 2018). Ironically, there is also a long history of development-induced displacement in the Global South, including in Ethiopia, where notorious development schemes have uprooted millions (Scott 1998). One need not look back as far as villagization in the 1980s to find such displacement in Ethiopia (Pankhurst and Piguet 2009). Indeed, contemporary dislocations caused by rampant urban development in Addis Ababa have uprooted entire neighborhoods (Megento 2013; Yntiso 2008), and agricultural development has displaced others (Lavers 2012; Makki 2012).

We offer another critique of the utility of development to stem migration that has not been addressed in the literature. The new policy configurations that promoted local integration by merging it with development initiatives made temporal assumptions about what would make refugees stay in a place like Ethiopia. They assumed that development, with all its failures, would bring about hope for a brighter future and that this would be enough to get refugees and other would-be migrants to wait for it. We pick up on our analysis of temporal and spatial assumptions in these new policy paradigms in the last section, but first it is important to provide some context for Ethiopia’s particular role in these initiatives.

Ethiopia and the Humanitarian-Development-Security Nexus

As European countries continue to seek solutions to the so-called refugee crisis by attempting to prevent refugees from arriving on their borders, host countries in the Global South, such as Ethiopia, acquire global significance, financial support, and diplomatic standing. While Ethiopia is able to firm up and leverage its status as a host country in international and regional spheres, the unfolding of refugee policy on the ground also reflects the contradictory nature of the humanitarian-development-security nexus.

Although Ethiopia does receive funding for security and migration management (Mengiste 2019), the majority of its funding through the auspices of the Khartoum Process is allocated toward development projects.⁶ A 2017 Oxfam report found that unlike transit countries further north in the Sahel and North African regions, Ethiopia earmarked 79 percent of EUTF funding for development projects focused on providing basic services such as education and health care but allocated only 15 percent to migration management and 5 percent to security and peace building (Oxfam 2017). The RDPP provided particular support for Ethiopia’s hosting of Eritrean (and Somali refugees) and has resulted in thirty million Euros for Ethiopia to implement projects that focus on integrated service delivery, development, and capacity building for refugees and host communities.

In refugee camps in Ethiopia, there was little evidence of the Khartoum Process, which is telling. What was much more prevalent during the time of our fieldwork (beginning in summer 2016) was talk about Ethiopia’s pledges, and later the Global Compacts and the subsequent initiatives, such as the CRRF. The nine pledges Ethiopia made at the 2016 Summit were oriented toward greater local integration and improving the livelihoods of refugees. Ethiopia pledged to expand its out-of-camp program (OCP) to 10 percent of the refugee population; make work permits available to some refugees; create one hundred thousand jobs in industrial parks, one-third of which would go to refugees; make land available to one hundred thousand refugees; and enable local integration and a possible path to citizenship for refugees who had been in Ethiopia for more than twenty years. The country also promised to enhance social services, particularly education, and provide documentation, such as birth certificates, drivers’ licenses, marriage certificates, and bank account information, to refugees. Donations for Ethiopia’s increased efforts around refugee management began flooding in immediately following the country’s pledges in fall 2016. Additionally, as a focus country for the CRRF, Ethiopia took up the global effort to engage in a whole society approach to improve refugee hosting while easing pressure on host countries.

In moving toward local integration and away from long-standing policies of encampment, Ethiopia joined other countries, such as Jordan and Uganda, in viewing refugees as potential economic assets. The proposed policy changes promised to give larger numbers of refugees access to education, the right to work, and the right to reside outside of camps. Overall, these policies were aimed at shifting refugees away from dependence on humanitarian aid (Brooks 2017; Mallett et al. 2017). Policies that promised to give refugees work permits and to provide jobs in new industrial parks recast refugees as economic actors. They also attracted funding (BBC News 2016). The World Bank pledged funding for development projects for refugees and host communities (Ethiopian News Agency 2016) and praised Ethiopia for linking socioeconomic opportunities for refugees to its broader plan for rapid industrialization. They joined an array of funders providing financial support for industrial parks with the hopes that they would bring economic benefits to both Ethiopia and refugees (World Bank 2018). The pledges attracted $500 million in donations from the United Kingdom, European Union, and World Bank (Igunza 2017). Even though industrial jobs have failed to bring economic benefits to refugees or to stem onward movement, linking industrial development with stopping onward movement has seemed to be an effective fundraising strategy for Ethiopia.

These projects of humanitarianism not only garnered financial resources for Ethiopia but became a critical component of Ethiopia’s international reputation as a stabilizing force in an unstable region (Riggan and Poole 2019). Despite authoritarianism and human rights abuses among its own citizenry, Ethiopia gained a seat on the UN Security Council for a two-year term beginning in 2017. A former Ethiopian foreign minister was appointed head of the World Health Organization (WHO). Dr. Tedros Adhanom declared his appointment to be an indication that Ethiopia had “won the respect and trust of the world” through its diplomatic role in peacekeeping efforts and pointed to “addressing illegal migration” as one of two major goals (along with combating terrorism) during its term on the council (Tesfa-Alem 2016). Indeed, Adhanom’s appointment as Director General of the WHO should be seen in a similar light as Ethiopia’s critical role in hosting refugees; both raised Ethiopia’s international stature.

Ethiopia’s willingness to host refugees was also politically strategic at a regional level—a topic we take up in more depth in the next chapter. Ethiopia appeared to be situating itself as a generous host, rather than a beleaguered host country, in part to recalibrate relations with people displaced from neighboring states and to assert a leadership role as regional peace builder. As the Ethiopian state governed subjects who are not its citizens, it extended its reach across borders.

However, the situation on the ground in places like Ethiopia has been complex and shifting. These policies seem to have done more for the country’s reputation than they have to stem the flow of refugees from Ethiopia. Even though it has been roundly critiqued for its human rights record, generates its own refugees, and had one of the largest populations of internally displaced people on the planet in 2018 (IOM 2018), Ethiopia remained a popular testing ground for these new policies.

While the intended outcomes of these policies rest on shaky grounds, there are also unintended outcomes. Participation in these broad global migration management initiatives has yielded different results for different actors within Ethiopia, and not all state agencies seem to benefit equally. Just after Ethiopia’s pledges were voted into law, ARRA was reorganized, supposedly to play a more limited technical role. Despite the fact that ARRA took the lead in advocating for the pledges and was often heard making a hard sale for Ethiopia’s capacity to host refugees in exchange for resources in the wake of the New York Summit, it seemed to be left out in the cold as local integration funneled funds to the Ministry of Finance and other line ministries.

Pledged funds seemed extremely slow to arrive. Interlocutors at ARRA informed us in June 2018 that the World Bank withheld funding for industrial parks as leverage to ensure that Ethiopia passed its new refugee proclamation. What had appeared to be a seamless merger between funding for industrial parks and the pledges in 2016 had yielded little two years later. Most of the parks had not gotten off the ground, and we heard of no refugees working in them. Additionally, it did not seem that much thought had been put into how and why refugees would work in industrial parks. The ends of both developmental efforts and local integration were elusive. Meanwhile, reality in the camps was completely untouched by these policies.

Spatial and Temporal Disjunctures: The View from the Camp

The emergence of a humanitarian-development-security nexus that places greater impetus on large refugee-hosting states in the south and has the potential to make new resources available to them may be a political and financial boon to countries like Ethiopia, but how will it affect refugees themselves? We argue that the insertion of development into new paradigms of migration management relies on a particular spatiotemporal imaginary that is asynchronous with the way refugees think about time, space, and movement through them. Consequently, it is more likely to deepen the vulnerability of refugees than to meet their short- or long-term needs. The spatiotemporal imaginary of policies orchestrated from within the humanitarian-development-security nexus is not only at odds with refugee experiences and aspirations; it is also at odds with the actual spatiotemporality of both humanitarian protection and development aid, which appeared grindingly slow, unpredictable, and, in the words of one refugee, “completely planless!”

Humanitarianism has a particular temporality that is distinct from that of development. In reports and commentary on these new initiatives, particularly on the Khartoum Process, it is noted that “long-term” development goals differ greatly from “short-term” humanitarian goals and that this is likely to become a challenge (Hovil and Oette 2017; UNHCR 2017c, 2017d). However, while the connotation of humanitarianism is that life in a condition of emergency is urgently oriented around the short term—the now—the reality is that living in the humanitarian condition requires lengthy, prolonged, passive waiting (Dunn 2017). Indeed, from the viewpoint of the camp, the stalled pledges fit firmly within a temporality of humanitarian aid, which, in situations of protracted emergency care, cuts off refugees from a planful future and consigns them to the position of waiting in an indefinite present (Brun 2016). If we embrace the notion that humanitarianism, like development, is long term, what is similar and different about the temporality of humanitarianism and development?

Although both humanitarian and developmental temporalities are long, development is intentionally so, while humanitarianism is unintentionally so. The crisis-oriented temporality of humanitarianism conceptualizes a beginning and an end to that crisis (even if that is a fiction). Humanitarianism always promises certain rights and possibilities, including the right to be cared for, even if that care is insufficient, and the possibility of resettlement, even if a minuscule proportion of refugees ever see that possibility. Humanitarianism thus attaches refugees to an international system and the possibilities of life elsewhere, however nebulous that attachment may be. Development holds out no such possibilities; it promises a process, but one that is located in a particular place, a place that is “developing.”

The time-space of development also departs from that of humanitarianism because it posits a very different subject position for refugees, one that makes them responsible for the outcome of that process. Developmental subjects are charged with maintaining their survival. While one can be protected through the auspices of humanitarian aid and lay claim to certain rights through protection, development requires doing something—and doing something that you can fail at, often with dire consequences and through no fault of your own. When refugees suffer, the responsibility for alleviating their suffering rests with institutions of humanitarian protection, and even though this does not work very well, refugees can and do utilize their protected status to lay claim to rights and resources. When subjects of developmental interventions suffer, no one is responsible for alleviating their suffering, and furthermore, they are thought of as responsible for their success or failure. Another way to think of this is that each paradigm—humanitarianism and developmentalism—gives rise to a different form of temporal violence. While the humanitarian apparatus keeps refugees waiting, stuck, and in stasis due to its failure to bring about any kind of durable solution, development has no better track record. Development holds out a promised end but takes no responsibility for removing the structural barriers that impede reaching that end (Ferguson 1994). Both humanitarian and developmental teleologies relegate refugees to a time that is “belated” or behind other parts of the world—particularly the parts of the world that refugees are trying to reach when they migrate (Khosravi 2021).

When asked why this shift to development was important, the EU’s ambassador to Sudan, interviewed by Caitlin L. Chandler, noted the importance of giving long-term hope to refugees: “The real question is: Do you offer hope to these people or not? If they have no hope they will move. You have to offer hope and that can only be relatively long term . . . there are no quick fix solutions.” There are two problems with tethering hope to the temporality of development and its long-term vision of progress. First, personal aspirations for development differ from regional or countrywide aspirations. Personal aspirations involve social, spatial, and temporal mobility. They may lead people out of Ethiopia and toward places that are already developed. Second, replacing the short-term humanitarian notion of protection with the nebulous idea of hope is met with a great amount of justified concern by refugees who have been making use of these protections in critical and creative ways.

Ethiopia’s pledges were greeted with concern about what the realities of a move from humanitarian aid to a developmental model would look like. This shift suggested a need for refugees to transform from passive recipients of aid to self-sufficient economic actors. However refugees were already economic actors. In fact, the insufficiency of aid required that they be economically savvy. For example, refugees commonly sold rations in the local market and worked as day laborers in the camp and seasonally on agricultural schemes out of the camp. Despite this, the aid refugees received was essential because it was integrated into their economic activity. Refugees’ economic acumen amidst scarcity was reflected in their opinions about a proposed scheme to change the provision of aid from rations to cash. No one could live on assistance alone, which was why many sold their rations for cash on the market, and yet many refugees were critical of the proposal that they receive cash instead of rations. Although administrators envisioned this shift as one toward development and away from humanitarian aid, refugees viewed the provision of rations rather than cash as one of the ways that they were protected. They believed that cash would leave them vulnerable to the potential for graft on one hand and to the vicissitudes of markets on the other. Many feared that this shift would take away economic agency rather than making them more self-sufficient.

There was similar skepticism about industrial park jobs, one of the cornerstones of the Ethiopia’s pledges. While the European Union, the United Kingdom, and others pledged hundreds of thousands of euros for the development of industrial park jobs with the caveat that 30 percent of the positions would go to refugees, refugees were skeptical that this model would produce jobs that were stable, pay decent wages, and provide opportunity for advancement. One refugee remarked, “Especially for refugees who settle in Tigray, they are told to get job opportunities around Mekelle in industrial parks. They promised like that. This is a promise.” He suspected that refugees would fill the lower positions: “If I expect to be a manager, it doesn’t happen. I expect some mothers will work as cleaners, and some refugees will be drivers.” Indeed, there was broader debate about industrial parks in Ethiopia and the likelihood that low pay and challenging work conditions would lead to difficulties retaining labor, as has been the case in Ethiopia’s textile industry (Hardy and Hauge 2019). Additionally, the parks were not planned for locations that were close to refugee camps, which would mean that refugees would need to relocate away from the camps, leaving them with neither aid nor sufficient wages to support themselves. Seen from the vantage point of refugees, industrial parks and the hope for economic self-sufficiency were a strange pairing.

Refugees described vocational education and small business development programs as almost equally futile. Our interlocutors told us that because they could not work in the formal economy, they had limited opportunities to use vocational skills. They described vocational education as a way to fill their time and develop skills that could help them once they made it to another country. Those who used their skills to open businesses also faced problems. Outside of the camps, refugees were not allowed to own a business without an Ethiopian partner, making them vulnerable to exploitation and theft. Inside the camps, the market was saturated, and it was hard to pay back the loans they took out based on the limited number of customers and resources. Thus, existing efforts to make refugees into viable economic actors were thwarted by legal limitations on work and business ownership. Many refugees held out hope for work permits, another of Ethiopia’s pledges, but it was unclear if these would ever materialize, and if they did, how many permits would actually be distributed and what kind of work or procedures would be involved.

Another experimental approach was getting refugees out of camps through the auspices of the OCP. The OCP reversed decades of encampment policies by allowing a limited number of Eritrean refugees to forgo assistance and live out of the camp provided they had a relative in Ethiopia who would sponsor them. The expansion of the OCP was viewed optimistically as an early move away from the strict encampment policy. But the OCP clashed with material realities. Refugees who left the camps could not work formally, leaving them with no legal means to support themselves. While most refugees said this was a good program and very much wanted the option of living out of camp, they noted the large number of people who wound up back in the camp after taking advantage of this program because they could not support themselves financially without assistance.

Embedded in these policies and programs are assumptions that attach refugees temporally and spatially to Ethiopia. Policies intended to promote local integration through development rely on a sedentarist bias and a linear temporality that assumes that refugees are just looking for a place to settle down and will travel a straight path until they find such an end point. Development efforts are intended to constitute particular locations—in this case Ethiopia—as a place where refugees can stop moving and end their journey. However, it is important to question how and for whom Ethiopia could become an end point. Laura Hammond argues in her influential ethnography of the repatriation of a group of Ethiopian refugees from Sudan that repatriation is not an end point, rather, it is the beginning of a new process with a new set of vulnerabilities (Hammond 2004). Georgina Ramsay’s (2019) ethnography of refugee resettlement in Australia makes a similar point about resettlement processes. Why would we think local integration for refugees in Ethiopia would be any different? For whom is local integration an end point? Certainly not refugees, who, as we demonstrate in subsequent chapters, think about time and space in more strategic and multifaceted ways. Perhaps local integration, like repatriation or resettlement, is an end point for humanitarian organizations. As one of the three durable solutions, it remains to be seen how durable local integration will be.

Ethiopia’s pledges were intended to make refugees feel like they could stay, but they fell short. Refugees were aware of the content of the pledges years before the process of voting them into law and implementing them began, leading to disappointment and frustration. The pledges were announced formally at the World Refugee Day celebrations in the camps in 2017 and generated expectations that things would change. The slow rollout of the pledges revealed a disconnect between refugees’ urgency and policy makers’ sluggishness. One refugee remarked wryly that after the passage of so much time, “I am taking this as a long-term plan.” The pledges came to feel like an instrumental attempt at luring refugees to stay in Ethiopia, while they amounted to empty promises of legal work that never materialized. One refugee, who graduated from college in Ethiopia and was back in the camps collecting rations, explained how much hope he felt when he first heard about the pledges: “I was happy for one month. I was feeling like a man! A fresh man.” He added that when the implementation of the pledges was delayed, “I can say it was like cheating.”

In summer 2019, almost three years after the New York Summit, refugees were still waiting for the implementation of the pledges. When we started this research, we envisioned that we would track the rollout of these policies, laws, and programs over the years of our fieldwork—from 2016 until 2019—but instead we wound up doing an ethnography of waiting. Refugees were told that big changes were coming but were kept in the dark about the details. The new refugee proclamation, which sat before parliament for well over a year, was not be passed until January 2019, and even then, the logistics of its implementation have yet to be determined at the time of this writing. As policy promises failed to materialize, one pledge that actualized early in 2018—vital events registration—did provide some hope to refugees that the remaining pledges might someday become a reality. But most in the humanitarian community acknowledged that the pledges that had the potential to be most meaningful to refugees—namely the expansion of the out-of-camp program and the provision of work permits—were politically sensitive. The details of these pledges were unlikely to be agreed on any time soon. From the perspective of those in the camp, the plans that circulate in New York, Rome, Geneva, and even Addis Ababa often look like no plan at all. And the hope that these planless plans are supposed to engender is no hope at all.

The Teleological Violence of Local Integration

Local integration as a durable solution has received criticism. While resettlement and repatriation remain elusive, local integration is more complex. As Lucy Hovil notes, efforts to locally integrate refugees are always partial and, in many cases, occur in the margins of the law creating a class of people deemed settled but without full citizenship (Hovil 2014). Thus, attempts to locally integrate refugees are often represented as moving toward a settled endpoint, but instead they result in an extended limbo for refugees. We would suggest that promising refugees an endpoint that is really nothing of the sort is a form of teleological violence.

A key question that needs to be raised is whether these new economic development approaches to refugee management are actually new, or just another form of partial local integration stripped of the humanitarian promise of an end point, a safe place, and protection. When viewed from the perspective of refugees who continue to languish in camps, initiatives such as the Khartoum Process, The RDPP, the Global Compact, and the CRRF, seem to be the latter, as they fail to bring about the promised sea change. However, these initiatives have succeeded in effectively shifting the discourse on migration management and refugee hosting at the global and regional levels.

There are underlying assumptions about time and place inherent in these developmental measures. These initiatives relegate refugees to a particular place—the Global South—and delimit progress and ambition to what can be accomplished in that place. They effectively normalize stasis, leaving refugees in a place where development is behind and progress moves slowly. They rest on teleological assumptions that reveal a disjuncture between the perspectives of refugees and those embedded in the policy apparatus, but they also illuminate the internal contradictions of the policies themselves. As we noted earlier, durable solutions rest on a sedentarist teleology that posits that the end point of the refugees’ journey is to be in a settled place (at which point the responsibility of the humanitarian apparatus also ends). This spatiotemporal relegation of refugees to host states in the Global South makes a number of problematic assumptions about the nature of belonging and who belongs where. Containing refugees in countries close to their point of origin reflects and reinforces a racial segregation of the world (Besteman 2019; Khosravi 2021).

The telos of development is also problematic; it is utopian and hopeful, belying the experience of precarity, marginality, and insecurity. Policies that posit development-oriented solutions to somehow stem the flow of migrants northward seem to have amnesia about the previous failures of these measures. The utopian, teleological ends of development exist in an indeterminate horizon, yet refugees and other would-be migrants are expected to wait hopefully for it.

Notes

1. Repatriation is often impossible due to the protracted and uncertain nature of political and conflict situations that produce refugees. Meanwhile, resettlement relies on the generosity of host states, and the demand always far outpaces the availability of resettlement opportunities. An estimated 1 percent of refugees worldwide are resettled.

2. Hovil (2014) differentiates between de facto and de jure local integration, noting that there are many “locally based,” informal forms of integration as people move to settle in host countries, while de jure local integration requires citizenship or some form of permanent belonging, which is elusive.

3. Since the early 2000s, the literature on migration and development has exploded, moving far beyond a simplistic debate about whether migration is bad for development through processes of brain drain or good for development by increasing household revenues. Rather, newer work on remittances, cultural aspects of labor migration (Dick 2018), and more complex theoretical models to make sense of this relationship (De Haas 2019) have emerged.

4. Betts and Collier (2017) draw heavily on discussions of the Jordan compact, as well as the economic activity present in the Zataari camp in Jordan. They also hold up Uganda as a model of the type of activity they advocate for. For a more critical perspective on the Uganda model, see Hovil (2016).

5. It sometimes integrates peace into a “triple nexus,” referencing a “humanitarian-development-peace” nexus (Barakat and Milton 2020).

6. There has been little comprehensive analysis of Ethiopia’s specific role in the Khartoum Process, but from existing analyses of funding streams coming out of the Valletta Summit, we can surmise that the majority of funding from the EUTF to Ethiopia is for development rather than migration management or border security.