Epilogue

Unfreezing the Ethnographic Present

WHEN WE WROTE this book, Hitsats, like the other camps, seemed frozen in time. Our writing reinforced this as we slipped into the ethnographic present to describe what life there was like, the cartography of the camp, wandering along the hard-baked ravines between housing zones, and stopping to talk with shop owners taking shelter from the sun in doorways and under makeshift porches. Hitsats, we wrote, was this place where people made do in the context of teleological violence and temporal harm. It was a place where, as people insisted on each return visit, nothing happened.

The ethnographic present can deny coevalness to people; it can misrepresent culture as frozen and bounded in time and space, the very things we are working against. When we wrote this book, however, we slipped into the ethnographic present as a way to describe and generate a sense of connection to lived time, a recognition and witnessing of how people cope by caretaking the present and holding open the possibilities of better, if distant, futures.

Hitsats camp no longer exists. People living there faced unspeakable violence and were displaced yet again; many did not survive. As we began drafting this epilogue, Mai Aini and Adi Harush were on the front lines of a war that was nearing its second anniversary. The stories of violence were chilling. Throughout this book, we have focused on various forms of temporal harm, but as a result of the war, refugees became victims of physical violence that far exceeded anything we have written about here. We feel it is important to detail the events that occurred in and around the refugee camps in northern Ethiopia following our fieldwork and to acknowledge how they profoundly ruptured refugees’ already precarious lives.

From the outset of our project, we, as researchers, wanted to be hopeful about the new role that Ethiopia was carving for itself as a refugee host and what appeared to be magnanimous gestures of hospitality. Refugees thought otherwise, and we listened. Early on in our fieldwork, an old friend of Jennifer’s from Eritrea noted that the only people who would even consider staying in Ethiopia long term were those who had family there, and even those people would prefer to move on. Eritreans in Ethiopia recalled the past as a reason to not stay in Ethiopia. They talked about the border war and the animosity against Eritreans that arose with the deportations. As we have written about elsewhere, Eritrea has been imagined and reimagined in the Ethiopian political landscape many times (Poole and Riggan 2022). Ethiopia has never fully let go of Eritrea. This creates a highly unstable situation for Eritreans in Ethiopia, something they are keenly aware of. Their understanding of Ethiopian hospitality was thus based not on a linear trajectory toward progress and improvement in relations and circumstances but rather on a cyclical one in which they were constantly aware of the possibility that the political circumstances could loop back to the past, with its conflicts and animosities. Things could always get worse again.

Although temporal violence cannot be equated with the horrific brutality brought on by the war in northern Ethiopia, there is a link between the physical violence of war and the teleological violence of policies that posit places like Ethiopia as a viable—and safe—end point for refugees. Somehow the promotion of Ethiopia as an end point seems particularly egregious given that refugees understood that waves of war, expulsion, and ethnic targeting had occurred repeatedly throughout the long history of Ethiopian-Eritrean relations. They did not trust Ethiopia’s assertion of its own stability and their safety. They often stated that they felt unsafe and precariously situated in Ethiopia because history might repeat itself. In short, refugees knew that this could happen again.

This assumption that Ethiopia is a safe, stable place fundamentally misreads and misrepresents the history of political violence there and the violence that was occurring in various parts of the country even at the time of our fieldwork. More specifically, it ignores the ongoing instability of being an Eritrean in Ethiopia (Poole and Riggan 2022). Ethiopia has worked hard to project an image of itself as politically stable despite waves of political violence throughout the country in recent years (Tronvoll 2022). Ethiopia’s projection of itself as a stable, reliable place was necessary in order for the country to posit itself as a long-term home for refugees and was central to the role the country seemed to be carving out for itself on the international stage as a leader in what were then new refugee and migration management initiatives. As we noted earlier, refugees were constantly calling our attention to how Ethiopia was not stable, even if it was relatively safe at the time. Needless to say, Ethiopian stability turned out to be as illusory as refugees asserted that it was. Refugees suffered tremendously when this illusion dissipated.

In 2018, a series of seismic political changes swept through Ethiopia. Abiy Ahmed came to power as prime minister in April 2018, overturning decades of rule by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which was dominated by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The decentering of Tigrayan power would turn out to have substantial implications for Ethiopia’s relationship with Eritrean refugees, the majority of whom were located in Tigray, on the Eritrean-Ethiopian border. As the field of power began to shift, both in Tigray and in Ethiopia as a whole, the categorization of Eritreans in Ethiopia would continue to be a volatile and unpredictable process.

We arrived for a period of fieldwork in June 2018 to find Addis Ababa filled with images and talk of the new prime minister. Abiy had come to power that spring against a backdrop of government protests that led to the resignation of the former prime minister and EPRDF chair, Hailemariam Desalegn. An ethnic Oromo leader, Abiy promised sweeping reforms and an era of peace and unity to confront the ethnic divisions that fueled the recent protests. He moved quickly to release political prisoners and lift media restrictions.

Abiy also had plans with regard to Eritrea and Eritreans in Ethiopia. He declared peace with Eritrea in July 2018, ending a twenty-year standoff that had followed a three-year border conflict—an act that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. The news on the day of our arrival featured Abiy’s declaration that people should pack their bags, as flights to Asmara were poised to resume for the first time in two decades. Main city thoroughfares flew Ethiopian and Eritrean flags side by side for the arrival of a high-level delegation from Asmara. Less than two weeks later, Abiy and Isaias Afwerki, the president of Eritrea, met in Asmara to declare the end of the war and “a new era of peace and friendship.” As events unfolded and phone lines opened up, the mood in Addis was euphoric. It even looked like the pledges that had been made would finally be passed into legislation.

We encountered a starkly different atmosphere when we visited the Mai Aini refugee camp in northern Ethiopia only days after peace was declared. Despite the celebratory tone of national and international reporting, Eritrean refugees were worried about the implications of peace, which they believed would destabilize the Tigray region. They expressed concern that a new alliance between the Ethiopian federal government and Eritrea would create a profoundly unsafe situation for them. This alliance might result in the rollback of Eritreans’ refugee status, compromising their chances at resettlement and endangering their long-term stability and safety in the region (Riggan and Poole 2018). Furthermore, should the border be opened, some worried that Eritrean security forces would have access to refugees, many of whom were regarded as political dissidents. In short, they began to think that Ethiopia was no longer a safe place for them. When we raised refugees’ concerns with officials at ARRA and UNHCR, we were assured that the border would not open quickly, that the process of border opening would be slow and deliberative, and that protection of the refugees living near the border would be a high priority.

As it turned out, the refugees were right about the pace of the border opening. Shortly after the peace agreement was signed, the border opened on September 11, 2018, for a brief period, making travel, family reunions, and widespread trade possible (BBC News 2019). For Eritreans in Eritrea, the border opening meant that for the first time since the border war, they could leave the country without undergoing a grueling (and seldom successful) process of acquiring a passport and exit visa to leave the country legally or risking prison and torture or death at the border if they crossed it illegally.

Not surprisingly, the opening of the border led to an influx of Eritrean refugees into Ethiopia. In the first two weeks that the border was open, UNHCR reported that ten thousand Eritrean refugees were either registered or awaiting registration (UNHCR 2018e; Gardner 2018). UNHCR estimated that around six thousand Eritreans arrived in Ethiopia every month in 2019 (UNHCR 2019).

Somewhat mysteriously, formal border crossing points closed almost as quickly as they opened. By March 2019, all but one crossing point had been officially closed. A few months later, by April 2019, all the official border crossings were closed (Belloni and Jeffrey 2019). On Riggan’s last visit to Ethiopia, she heard accounts that it was possible to cross the border, but unofficially. “The guards just look the other way,” one interlocutor told her. “You can’t take your car, but there are porters waiting to take your belongings across the border,” another noted. It seemed that the leadership of both countries had agreed to informal border traffic while formally maintaining a closed border. This was a vast improvement over Eritrea’s decades-long reputed shoot-to-kill policy that put many refugees fleeing Eritrea in grave danger when they attempted to cross into Ethiopia. But while many appreciated this opening and relished being reunited with family members, the lack of clarity about the terms of peace, the delineation of the border, and the creation of border protocols did nothing to reassure refugees about the stability of the situation.

In January 2019, the long-awaited refugee proclamation was voted into law, but as we have noted elsewhere, many of the key details remained unaddressed, such as the specifics of whether refugees could legally work, making the proclamation feel a bit anticlimactic. A year later, in January 2020, Ethiopia quietly began to roll back the long-awarded prima facie status to Eritrean refugees, noting that only certain categories of Eritreans merited this status. They also announced the planned closure of the Hitsats camp. Closing a camp is conveniently in keeping with the trend toward local integration made in the 2016 pledges, but the closure was not accompanied by other components of the pledges that would enable refugees to establish secure livelihoods outside of the camps. Refugee leaders and the humanitarian community raised concerns about forced relocation to the older, more crowded camps during the pandemic (Creta 2020).

In November 2019, one month after Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he disbanded the former ruling political party, the EPRDF, and formed the Prosperity Party. The Tigrayans refused to join, indicating further tensions to come. Meanwhile, it was unclear whether Ethiopia would have the same commitment to refugees—and to Eritrean refugees in particular—under Abiy’s leadership as it previously had. Abiy’s new alliance with Eritrean leadership, coupled with the fact that Eritrea considers those who flee to be criminals who have unlawfully defected from national service, led Eritreans to worry about whether their refugee status in Ethiopia would continue to be honored and if they would still be protected.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia descended into political chaos. In the summer of 2020, political uprisings following the assassination of popular singer Hachalu Hundessa resulted in the death of over two hundred people, the arrest of nearly five thousand people, and a military clampdown. But with the whole world focused on the outbreak of COVID-19 in the first half of 2020, little attention was paid to Ethiopia. Tensions between Tigrayan leadership and Abiy’s government continued to worsen, escalating sharply when Abiy postponed the elections slated to be held that summer and Tigray held its own elections (Paravicini 2020). In October of that year, the federal government withheld funding from Tigray, leading to both sides issuing “dueling statements of denunciation and derecognition” (Tronvoll 2022).

In early November, war broke out and escalated quickly. Each side differed in their interpretation of events that triggered the war. The federal government cited a Tigrayan attack on federal military installations in Tigray (the so-called Northern Command), and Tigrayan leadership claimed the attack was self-defense against an operation launched by the federal government that same day (Weldemichael et al. 2022; Tronvoll 2022).

A media and internet blackout made it almost impossible to know precisely what was happening in Tigray. It was well known that Eritrea was almost immediately embroiled in the war, although they denied involvement repeatedly. In retaliation for Eritrea’s involvement, Tigray launched missiles at Asmara in mid-November. In late November 2020, Ethiopian federal forces captured Mekelle and declared victory, but the war was far from over (Anna 2020).

There was little information available about what was happening in refugee camps during the blackout. Still, stories of atrocious violence against civilians and refugees, including attacks in the historic town of Axum, ethnic massacres, and the use of rape as a weapon of war, began to trickle out, although these would not be fully reported on until early 2021 (Human Rights Watch 2021a). Anthropologist Natalia Paszkiewicz, who had worked with an INGO in the Hitsats camp, began receiving phone calls with details of the atrocities occurring in the camps, which she published on social media and later assembled into one of the first reports on what happened there (Paszkiewicz 2021). It became clear that refugees were being brutalized by all sides—first by the Eritrean forces, later by Tigrayans. Poole also received calls from an interlocutor in the Adi Harush camp who was desperately trying to get his family away from what had become a front line in the fighting. Along with the atrocities committed against the civilian population in Tigray, there were horror stories in the camps of forced returns to Eritrea, rape, indiscriminate killing, and torture, but a full picture did not emerge until the blackout was lifted in late January 2021.

Eventually, published reports assembled and detailed an account of what had transpired in the camps during the early months of the war, and satellite images showed that the Hitsats and Shimelba camps had been destroyed (Mersie et al. 2021; EHRC/OHCHR 2021; Human Rights Watch 2021b; Miller 2022; Weldemichael et al. 2022). UNHCR staff left the camps as soon as the war began. After that, refugees were repeatedly targeted by several different actors in the conflict—Eritreans, Tigrayan militia, and possibly Tigrayan government forces and Ethiopian federal forces. Between November 2020 and January 2021, the Eritrean army and Tigrayan militia alternately occupied the Hitsats and Shimelba camps, which housed approximately twenty thousand Eritrean refugees at the start of the conflict. Eritrean forces were targeting refugees, many of whom were regarded as political dissidents. By many accounts, the Eritrean forces had lists of names of people in both Hitsats and Shimelba. People who were able to escape told stories of forced return to Eritrea and destruction of houses and humanitarian infrastructure in the two camps.

When Eritrean forces withdrew from the camps, Tigrayan militias forcibly returned refugees who had fled Hitsats back to the camp. In the process, refugees reported killings, sexual assault, looting, and arbitrary detention without food during the occupation of the area by Tigrayan militias, who also sought out and punished refugees, possibly because they suspected them of participating in looting the local town and likely also because they were Eritreans and, ironically, were blamed for the atrocities committed against the civilian population by the Eritrean army in Tigray.

Like the refugees in Hitsats, those in Shimelba, many of whom are ethnic Kunama, were forced to flee due to heavy fighting around the camp, intimidation by both sides, and concerns about possible revenge attacks by the host community for the reportedly widespread killings and rapes of Tigrayan civilians committed by Eritrean forces (EHRC/OHCHR 2021). When UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies were finally able to visit the camps in late March 2021, after a protracted news blackout, they found them empty and destroyed, with many of the shelters and aid offices burned to the ground (Human Rights Watch 2021a).

Because of these dangers, many refugees struggled to find somewhere to go. Some of the refugees displaced from Hitsats and Shimelba arrived at the older camps of Mai Aini and Adi Harush. There, they faced crowded conditions, dwindling water supplies, a lack of health services, and violence and looting from armed militias. Some refugees fled to Addis Ababa early in the war, but they faced hardships there as well. Assistance from UNHCR and ARRA was initially not forthcoming for refugees who self-relocated to Addis Ababa, meaning those who had fled to the capital city had no way to live. There were accounts of refugees being returned to the camps by ARRA officials who told them it was safe. In December 2020, for example, Reuters reported that a busload of Eritreans were forcibly returned to Tigray from Addis with military escort (Reuters 2020). A handful of diaspora-sponsored GoFundMe initiatives cropped up to fill the gap that the humanitarian apparatus left open, but the reach of these initiatives was limited to the immediate networks of those sponsoring them, and refugees who were not connected with these particular networks still lacked resources to live. Refugees staged a protest supported by a Twitter storm to demand assistance (Endeshaw 2021), which they eventually received from UNHCR (2021a).

Impeding the flow of aid to both refugee and civilian populations has been a tactic deployed primarily by the Ethiopian government throughout the war, leaving refugees with no good options. Throughout the course of the war, blockades against humanitarian convoys were deployed, stopping much-needed aid from reaching displaced civilian populations and Eritrean refugees. When aid workers were able to access refugees and civilian populations, they found people in desperate need and food sources deliberately targeted (Anna 2021). Refugees who tried to escape the region on foot through the mountains did not fare much better, as they found themselves caught in the cross fire between warring sides. They were targeted by Tigrayans because they were Eritrean (and therefore associated with the invading Eritrean army) and by Amharic- and Oromo-speaking troops who associated anyone who spoke Tigrigna with Tigrayans (Rudolf 2022).

No one was surprised that fighting continued following Ethiopia’s declaration of victory in November 2020. In June of the next year, the same month that Ethiopia held delayed elections and formally elected Abiy, the tide of the war shifted again. Tigrayans regained control over their region and by late June had retaken the capital, Mekelle (Walsh 2021). They continued to push into the Amhara region, eventually capturing several key towns, including the symbolically important UNESCO World Heritage Site, Lalibela, in late August (Reuters 2021). In November 2021, roughly a year after they declared victory, the Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency and “called on its citizens to pick up arms to defend the capital” as Tigrayan forces advanced southward toward the capital after capturing the key towns of Dessie and Kombolcha, which lie only 160 miles from Addis Ababa (Walsh and Marks 2021).

The war altered course several times, but one consistency was the extreme vulnerability of both refugees and the civilian population, particularly given the limited and fluctuating access to the region by both reporters and the humanitarian community. Aid agencies reported being repeatedly blocked from accessing camps (Miller 2022). There were accounts of Eritreans trapped in Mai Aini and Adi Harush camps in Tigray as fighting escalated in June 2021 (Schlein 2021), and food shortages and overall animosities created by the war may have triggered tensions between refugees and local populations. In July 2021, UNHCR issued a statement of concern that refugees were being intimidated in the camps (UNHCR 2021b). In June 2021, the Alemwach camp for Eritreans was set up in the Amhara region. It has been similarly difficult to ascertain the status of refugees there, but personal communications with interlocutors and social media have revealed atrocious conditions, attacks on refugees, and profound insecurity in Alemwach. Additionally, the camp was located close to the front lines and was likely unsafe (Weldemichael et al. 2022).

In October 2021, Abiy was formally sworn in as prime minister, and two weeks later, Ethiopian defense forces launched a new round of strikes in Tigray. By the end of December, the Ethiopian forces had begun using drone strikes, resulting in a retreat of the Tigrayans to Tigray (they were either driven back or they strategically withdrew, depending on one’s news source). Ethiopian air strikes continued, worsening in January 2022 and leading aid agencies to suspend operations again (UNHCR 2022a). On January 7, Reuters reported that three people were killed in an air strike on Mai Aini camp, two of them children. It was suspected that these were Ethiopian government air strikes because they were the only actor with this capacity in the region (Reuters 2022). On January 21, 2022, UNHCR issued a statement saying that they had not been able to reach the camp for three weeks, and when they did, they found refugees struggling to access food, water, and basic medical care (Miller 2022). Additionally, the spread of the war into the Afar region meant that Eritrean Afar refugees in the Berhale camp faced similar shortages of food and supplies and also experienced the territory on which the camp is located changing hands multiple times (Weldemichael et al. 2022; Miller 2022).

The government declared an indefinite humanitarian truce in March 2022, and the first international aid convoy to arrive by land since December reached Mekelle on April 1 (Al Jazeera 2022). Still, Tigrayans complained that the government had limited the flow of aid to a trickle. The government denied this and in turn blamed the Tigrayans (Mwai 2022). Angered by Western allegations of a government-sponsored blockade of Tigray, Abiy accused international aid agencies of collaborating with terrorists (Africa Confidential 2022). Some aid eventually reached civilians and refugees during the humanitarian truce, which lasted roughly five months, but the situation remained tense. In July, there were accounts of the arbitrary detention of Eritreans in Ethiopia. A group of Tigrigna speakers including Eritreans, Tigrayans, Eritrean refugees, and Eritreans with foreign passports were detained near Debark, in the Amhara region, in harsh conditions (Kassa 2022).

The humanitarian truce broke down in late August 2022, when all parties to the conflict moved to solid war footing. The renewed fighting was preceded by mass mobilizations and conscription in Tigray and the Amhara region (De Waal 2022a). In Eritrea, a country in which forcible conscription of civilians, even in peacetime, is one of the main drivers of refugee flight, coercive conscription has gone to unprecedented lengths to boost the country’s military capacity (BBC News Tigrinya 2022). It has been argued that the Eritrean president had been calling the shots in this war and that his personal desire to obliterate the Tigrayan leadership once and for all was the driving force behind the resumption of fighting (De Waal 2022b).

According to UNHCR’s flash update in late September 2022, fighting occurred on multiple fronts in the Tigray, Afar, and Amhara regions. The Ethiopian government announced that aid organizations should cease work in certain areas in Tigray, leading UNHCR to suspend field missions there. They once more lost access to several refugee camps and sites for internally displaced persons. Additionally, authorities in the town of Shire advised humanitarian agencies not to travel to or from Adi Harush or Mai Aini; however, UNHCR and the World Food Program (WFP) were able to distribute food and other staples to 9,800 refugees before ceasing operations (UNHCR 2022b).

The scale of humanitarian emergency and human suffering due to the war in Ethiopia was staggering. Although difficult to estimate the human cost of the war, experts say that half a million people probably died—fifty thousand to a hundred thousand due to being casualties of fighting, a hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand due to starvation, and another hundred thousand from the absence of medical care (Ghosh 2022). Prior to the humanitarian truce, 9.4 million people were in need of assistance, an estimated 425 to 1,201 people were dying of starvation per day, and displaced people had resorted to eating leaves (Miller 2022). As of late August 2022, the WFP estimated that thirteen million people in the Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions could be severely food insecure, including nearly half (47 percent) of Tigray’s six million residents and large numbers of people in the Afar and Amhara regions (WFP and FAO 2022).

On November 2, 2022, the TPLF and the Ethiopia government signed a cessation of hostilities agreement which “promised to disarm Tigrayan troops, return control of Tigray to the Ethiopian government, end the Mekelle Offensive, and permit full humanitarian aid access to Tigray” (Council on Foreign Relations 2023). Although the war seemed to be over at the time of this writing, the situation in Tigray was still tense and Eritrean refugees were unsafe in Ethiopia.

Meanwhile, migration northward has also grown more dangerous as European countries seek to put an end to irregular migration. Even as Ukrainian refugees are welcomed in Europe and North America, the migration of Africans is being actively deterred through measures that make their journeys more dangerous. The United States is still detaining migrants to await asylum processing in Mexico, where there is concern for their human rights. Although these are predominantly migrants from South and Central America and the Caribbean, African migrants, including Eritreans, do routinely find their way to the US-Mexico border. Controversially, Britain has recently attempted to relocate asylum seekers whose cases are pending to Rwanda. African and other migrants who are fleeing horrifying circumstances are systematically denied the ability to receive refugee protections in the name of migration deterrence.

The central Mediterranean route, most commonly used by Eritrean migrants, is a particularly deadly and torturous route that has been made more dangerous due to migration-deterrence policies. Twenty-three thousand people are estimated to have died crossing the Mediterranean since 2014, and sixteen hundred people are estimated to have died making the journey in 2021 alone (Ritter 2021). Meanwhile, Italy has struck various deals with Libya to avoid doing some of the less legal and more unsavory parts of migration deterrence (Vari 2020). Italy’s 2017 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Libya gives Libya greater tools to intercept boats crossing the Mediterranean as well as to detain migrants and return them to their country of origin regardless of protected status. This MOU effectively relocates migrant detention to a highly unstable state, making migrants vulnerable to trafficking, extortion, and torture and making Mediterranean crossings more dangerous (Vari 2020). As a result of the memorandum, the rollback of search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean, and the rise of border protection activities by Frontex, conditions in Libya and on the Mediterranean crossing have deteriorated steadily.

Describing the horrifying conditions in Libya, an Eritrean quoted in a report by Médecins Sans Frontières noted, “Trying to cross the sea is facing death, but staying in Libya is facing death too” (2022). We would emphasize that staying in (or returning to) Eritrea is also facing death, particularly in the face of new waves of far more stringent mass conscription. And staying in Ethiopia means facing the risk of death, both because of insufficient food supplies and medical care and because all actors in this particular war have targeted Eritreans with egregious and punishing violence. It seems that they have run out of choices.

Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia are caught between a war that seems to have no end and laws and practices that effectively end their ability to seek safety. The policies of local integration that we analyze and discuss in this book appear to be a more benign companion to these deadly migration measures, but they have always also been about securitizing the racialized borders of the Global North. Local integration, as we have argued in these pages, sought to locate an end to Eritrean migration in Ethiopia in a broader policy setting that emphasized an end of migration in other large hosting states in the Global South. These policies are about the desire of countries in the Global North to find an end to what is depicted as an endless flow of irregular migrants, predominantly black and brown people, regardless of the dangers that they are fleeing from. The desired end to migration trumps the profound need among refugees for safety and protection. In the service of seeking that end—an end to migration—those who are already safe and settled (in predominantly and historically white countries) determine who will belong to a class of people relegated to endless suffering.

What kinds of temporality relegate places like the Hitsats camp to the permanent ethnographic present, while in reality, they are vulnerable to obliteration? We would argue that this is the ultimate teleological violence—the assertion that places like Ethiopia will guarantee not only progress but also safety and stability for refugees, while those places are far from stable, safe, and capable of promising progress. Indeed, those places subject refugees to the worst excesses of violence.

Changing these passages to past tense felt like its own version of teleological violence, generating distance from our lives now, or from a common future, by sticking things back in time and doing nothing to fix the lack of coevalness attributed to migrants and refugees. Weeding out the ethnographic present in this book and rendering descriptions of people’s lives in past tense have involved the pain of coming to terms with the horrors facing people throughout the Tigray region. They have also meant coming to terms with how small these ethnographic efforts to generate empathetic connection feel in the face of the immediate brutality of war and the chronic brutality of global migration deterrence.