5Moving Time

Time-Making toward the Distant Future

“DO YOU KNOW Tony Stark?” Tesfay asked us.

We stared blankly at him, not expecting him to open the conversation with a reference to the Marvel Comics’ Iron Man alias. We were sipping cappuccinos and hot tea at a café near Addis Ababa University on a cold, rainy summer day with Tesfay and Haile, two of the rare refugee students to attend the country’s most prestigious university. We met up with them whenever we were in Addis, but this time, when we were setting up our meeting on the phone, Tesfay was particularly excited and noted that he had a lot to tell us.

Seeing the blank looks on our faces, Tesfay continued, “Iron Man? How about Elon Musk?”

Snapping out of our stupor, we nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, of course we know Iron Man, Elon Musk, and Tony Stark.”

Tesfay then talked rapidly, with passion, and told us about his plans for a drone controlled by brain waves and a circular motorcycle of bulletproof plastic. He had been developing the material in the university science lab by melting down used plastic. “I’ve already developed a plastic that can stop a bullet,” he said. Tesfay explained that he had always been an inventor. He developed one of his earliest inventions in secondary school in Eritrea: shoes that allowed him to walk out over the Red Sea, at least a few steps, by freezing the surface of the water beneath them. Tesfay’s ideas quickly flowed from him, sometimes aided by sketches on a café napkin.

As he enthusiastically fielded Jennifer’s questions about his inventions, his friend Haile tried to explain the start-up they were developing to Amanda. It was formed by linking inventors in a kind of horizontal social network; it was similar, he explained, to blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Haile was as excited about linking people together in a decentralized network by way of a social media app as Tesfay was about his inventions.

The conversations that we were separately drawn into converged around the mining of Bitcoin. Tesfay and Haile were both animated by this topic; they spoke rapidly, completing each other’s sentences. They planned to use Bitcoin mining as a mechanism to not only generate funds for their start-up but to bypass the banking and regulatory institutions whose operations concentrate wealth and exclude people without citizenship, such as refugees. We had a lot of questions, as our twentieth-century brains accustomed to linear planning attempted to grasp the pragmatic and logistic leaps that their plan seemed to take. We managed to squeeze these questions in only to be met with a long explanation from each of them, accompanied by more diagrams on the napkin.

After a couple of hours of talking, the conversation wound down. Tesfay and Haile had an appointment with another student who was interested in investing in their Bitcoin project, and we had a meeting at the university. But before we wrapped up, Tesfay looked down sheepishly and said, “I have something else to tell you.” He confessed that he was considering dropping out of school. He evoked Elon Musk again and said that school was too small for him; it was not allowing him to think the way he wanted to.

We felt ourselves begin to panic a bit and said something to him along the lines of, “Don’t do anything too rash.” We stammered out that we wished he had brought this up earlier and asked what we could do to help him think this through. We glanced at Haile, who shrugged and said, “I told him these things.” Tesfay agreed to show us the lab where he was working in the university later that day; we hoped we might be able to convince him that the university had something left to offer him.

Why would Tesfay, a refugee who had a highly coveted spot at the most prestigious university in Ethiopia, complain that education had nothing to offer him and threaten to drop out? Tesfay’s temporal orientation reflects a reworking of teleological time. It claims an end point, but one that is on a distant horizon, located outside the frame of the near future. If the near future entails planning and staged growth toward a goal, the distant future, in contrast, is better arrived at through dreams, faith, magic, and hope.¹ We refer to this particular form of time-making oriented toward the distant future as future-making.² Unlike the discipline and planfulness embedded in school time, which is often disempowering, future-making is creative, open-ended, and hopeful. Future-making is an imaginative, phenomenological process that makes the distant future tangible in the present. We consider it a type of care akin to the forms of caretaking we discussed in the last chapter but focused on future-leaning care rather than care for the present.³

Refugees often weigh these different notions of teleology (one that is open-ended and oriented toward a distant future and the other that populates the near future with activities, plans, and goals to provide a linear pathway toward progress) against each other. Habtom, whose story we have discussed throughout this book, was capable of seeing his future simultaneously unfold across these different temporal trajectories and in multiple spaces. He understood the risks inherent in each choice and was capable of shifting between multiple temporalities, each of which placed differential emphasis on the present, near future, and distant future. Tesfay and Haile, in a very different way, existed in multiple temporalities and were keenly aware of the points of overlap as well as the incompatibility and the trade-offs between them. Habtom feared getting stuck in the empty present of the camp but could simultaneously envision a teleological near future for himself attending university in Ethiopia and a distant future for himself “out there” in Europe with his siblings, even though he was keenly aware of the risks involved in migration. Similarly, Haile and Tesfay were extremely successful in terms of getting a formal education, but, like Habtom, they also saw the limitations of this teleological pathway. Even though Haile and Tesfay were fortunate to live and study in Addis Ababa and did not have to bear the kinds of pressures brought on by the empty time in the camp discussed in chapter 4, the “chronic present” (Dunn 2017) still pressed in on them. While they had the ability to move with relative freedom through space, they shared with refugees in the camps the difficulties with being able to move in time—or, more specifically, to make time move. And, because they were students, they keenly felt the failures of teleological time and its inability to produce a viable future.

In chapter 4, we explored how refugees make time by caring for the present. In this chapter, we look at future-making as another form of time-making. To better understand future-making, we turn to explanations of “prophetic time” (Guyer 2007; Robbins 2004). Prophetic time manifests in numerous ways. It is teleological in the sense that it orients toward an end point (some would argue the ultimate end point). However, teleologies that are prophetic, apocalyptic, or millennial forge a very different relationship with both the present and the near future than modernist, progress-focused notions of teleology. Although Jane Guyer does not explicitly note the teleological nature of these shifting temporal paradigms, she proposes this notion as a temporality that “evacuates” the near future and attaches the present to a distant future.⁴ Furthermore, she suggests that these kinds of futuristic temporalities are showing up in seemingly disconnected fields. In our work with refugees both in camps and in Addis Ababa, we observed the numerous ways in which refugees prophetically ordered their future and present. We demonstrate here that the temporality of formal legal migration processes and their illegal “other”—irregular migration—were both structured prophetically. We also explore an array of other activities that are temporally prophetic—joining religious cults, trading in Bitcoin, and bringing “fantastical” inventions into being, as Tesfay was trying to do.

Future-Making, Choice, and the Distant Future

Many of us, refugee students included, function under the hegemony of conventional notions of teleological time that emphasize the necessity, if not the inevitability, of progress, making the lack of progress seem like an aberration and a personal failing, something we detailed in chapter 3.⁵ Given the powerful ways in which the temporal hegemony of progress-oriented teleologies structured the lives of refugee students, this leaping over the near future might seem surprising, particularly for talented and accomplished students like Habtom, Haile, and Tesfay, but, as we describe in this chapter, under the circumstances that refugees face, it often became the only logical form of temporal agency and, more precisely, the only viable way to “make” the future.

Much of the work on refugee futures suggests that the problem is that the future is uncertain, unknown, and unknowable (Dryden-Peterson 2017). While this is indubitably true, much of the literature on refugee futures stops with making the case that refugees need and deserve a much more predictable, knowable future, using this as the rationale for refugees to have better access to education as well as expanded opportunities for local integration. We agree (and more importantly, most refugees would agree) that enhanced local integration and access to education are essential. Educational opportunities should be advocated for, but we also note an absence of theory that helps us understand what refugees do in the face of this painful uncertainty.

Future-making is a process of holding open the potentiality of the future by making choices. As we have detailed throughout this book, refugees are faced with weighing many risks: like the risk of waiting and experiencing the kinds of temporal suffering we discussed in the last chapter versus the risk of irregular migration; or the risk of investing in an education that seems likely to lead nowhere, which we discussed in chapter 3, versus the risk of abandoning dreams of education, which may lead to a different nowhere. We often focus on how refugees are victimized by the trauma and violence associated with these risks, but here we would like to emphasize the choices they make about the present and the future and the actions they take based on those choices. Even though they know they may not control the outcome, having a choice between risky outcomes is essential, as it provides an agentive pathway through uncertainty. It can give rise to extraordinary creativity and care. But the extreme risks on all fronts—psychological and physical—expose the effects of the intertwining of teleological violence with temporal agency.

Future-making also entails aligning the temporality of the present with a distant, hopeful future and considering how the distant, hopeful future gives shape and meaning to the present. In other words, future-making requires taking specific and direct actions in the present to move toward the distant future on the basis of faith that a particular future will be even in the absence of knowing when it will be. Tesfay’s futuristic inventions and the way he diligently worked to make his inventions even in the absence of materials and technology are a prime example of this disciplining of the present and attaching it, materially, to the distant future. As we explore in this chapter, rituals performed in the service of unlikely and unpredictable resettlement processes and decisions to leave Ethiopia through irregular migration are also acts of future-making—they discipline the present through an orientation toward the distant future—as are planning for risky irregular migration and, conversely, rejecting migration.

Guyer’s framing of prophetic time allows us to parse out futurity in a way not often developed in the literature on refugees and temporality.⁶ Little work has looked at the phenomenology of how refugee agency forges a relationship between present and future.⁷ We show that prophetic future-making both imagines this relationship and brings it into being; it leads to decision-making that has consequences that are imaginative and material. By bringing Guyer’s work into conversation with work on cosmologies, magic, and hope, all of which provide frameworks for understanding how we take agency over the distant future by acting in the present, we can begin to understand how those who have very limited futures apprehend the distant future and use it to frame decisions. We can then begin to understand certain actions that refugees take as specific acts of future-making.

Guyer emphasizes the “fantasy futurism and enforced presentism” (2007, 410) that accompanies the evacuation of the near future. This framework entails a “downplaying or rejection of durational human reasoning” (Guyer 2007, 414, emphasis added). Durational human reasoning is a central component of modernist forms of teleological time in which time is thought to move (and improve) through controlled and measured steps from present to near future to distant future. Durational time moves forward incrementally toward its end, often assuming the certainty that we will arrive at that end point. Prophetic time, in contrast, is unpredictable, focuses on distant end points, and entails “no stages to reach for, no synergies of forces picking up on one another over time: no organization and no midterm reasoning” (Guyer 2007, 416). Thus, we consider our exploration of how refugees engage with the distant future as an effort to understand how they claim temporal agency and agency over the future without resorting to the kinds of modernist teleologies that have failed them.

Guyer calls on us to explore ethnographically “what becomes of ‘near’ when ‘near’ fades from collective consciousness” (2007, 410). This, in effect, is what we seek to do in this chapter. She provides us with several key analytics through which to explore ethnographically what happens when the near future recedes and the present is “indexed” to an “infinite horizon in the future” (Guyer 2007, 413). She questions what internal logics emerge when we find ourselves living in a “pause” or a “parentheses,” when time becomes “episodic.” These three analytics: living inside a pause, parentheses, or hiatus; the indexing of the present to a distant future; and the nature of episodic time are useful to understand how refugees make the future. As we discuss each category, we weave together a discussion of several other concepts: cosmologies, hope, and magic. These ideas help us demonstrate that the indexing of the present to the distant future is not a new thing; people have long had ways of enacting temporal agency amid uncertain circumstances in which they lack power.

Living in Parentheses

The notion of the pause, parentheses, or hiatus from durational time is key to understanding temporality among refugees. When constituted as a hiatus, the near future, according to Guyer, is “evacuated, in a way that is . . . disorienting and yet internally logical” (Guyer 2007, 414). Others liken this experience to “living in [the] parentheses” of prophetic time in which one reads signs and ritually orders everyday life while waiting for new temporal rhythm to begin (Robbins 2004, 159) or living in an unfinished pause or a break in temporal rhythms (Agamben 2005).

What does time look and feel like in this unfinished pause? It can look and feel like Haile and Tesfay putting their futuristic fantasies into action in the everyday sphere. It can look like the various forms of caretaking we described in chapter 4, such as joining a vocational education program knowing there are no jobs or opening a shop knowing there is no market for one’s goods. It often entails long periods of waiting. And in these parentheses, people experience a meticulous ordering of the present in the service of a distant future, either by planning for irregular migration or by engaging in the time-disciplining bureaucratic processes of resettlement or family reunification. The unfinished pause can also lead to risk-taking when waiting for the pause to end becomes unbearable, and one feels compelled to make time move again, even if that movement entails risk. It can also engender tremendous creativity and wild leaps of ingenuity based on a faith that a future that does not exist will one day come to pass.

The pause is interesting, because while prophetic time is teleological, the pause is not. The telos—or desired end—of what lies outside the pause can either make the pause bearable or put pressure on life in the pause. The former enables agentive waiting and caretaking. The latter has the potential to create an urgency and lead to risk-taking, particularly migration. Different kinds of teleologies exert pressures in different ways. For example, a need to progress in the near future may make the pause unbearable and create pressure to end it, but a focus on the distant future may order time in nonteleological ways and populate the present with meaningful activities.⁸

Time in parentheses is a pause, but it is a pause in which a particular outcome is imagined and the present is ordered by the daily, often ritualized, preparation for that outcome. The way in which prophetic time attaches the present to the future is distinct from durational, linear, punctuated time marching in stages toward its teleological end. Prophetic time is nonlinear, taking large but logical temporal leaps. Guyer notes that temporalities that abandon the near future set up the “distant future as the moment of truth” and the present as populated with choice, ingenuity, experiment, risk, and discipline; this “new indexing” of the “present to an infinite horizon in the future places people in emotional and sociological terra nova” (2007, 413). This raises the question of how the present becomes indexed to the distant future, which is not a new question in the anthropology of refugees, forced displacement, and precarity (Ramsay 2019; Dunn 2017; Khosravi 2017; Jansen 2008).

Indexing the Present to a Distant Future

Whether the experience of life in parentheses is bearable or unbearable depends on the level of faith in and hope for what lies outside the pause as well as the capacity of that faith and hope to order life in the pause. Anthropology has several tools to help us understand how life in the pause might index the present to a distant future. The concept of cosmology provides one such tool. Cosmologies might be thought of as religious or spiritual beliefs, but the concept has been used to understand how daily lives come to be structured and endowed with meaning through their connection with beliefs about how that which is beyond is ordered. According to Georgina Ramsay, “Cosmologies are those seemingly self-evident laws and logics of human experience and the universe that make some ways of being seem natural” (2019, 29). Cosmology can be an “important heuristic tool for linking representations of reality with perceptions of morality and prescribed actions” (Belloni 2019, 3). In her highly influential study of historical memory and political identity among Hutu refugees from Burundi in Tanzania, Liisa Malkki notes how refugees create cosmologies centered around a mythical future of return (Malkki 1995a). Malkki describes cosmological praxis as a “form of acting upon the fundamental order of the world” as people rework systems of categories and the relationships between them: temporal, material, spiritual, and social (1995a). In a similar vein, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn notes that refugees often ascribe the future with a mythical quality and long for their return to a place that likely no longer exists (Dunn 2017). These cosmologies of return frame decisions about how the present is lived and exert a kind of discipline over daily life.

Refugee cosmologies are not always oriented toward the myth of return. Indeed, they are specific to historical, political, and cultural contexts. For example, Ramsay (2019) notes how cosmologies among Congolese refugees in both Uganda and Australia are oriented around regeneration, feeding, fertility, and biological motherhood. This cosmology traverses space but is placed in crisis due to radical ruptures to familiar rhythms of daily life.

The cosmologies that organize Eritrean migration are oriented around the narrative of leaving to return. Many Eritreans view leaving as a patriotic duty that reflects the culture of sacrifice produced by the Eritrean state (Bernal 2014) and the unequal burdens placed on its territorially bound vs. diasporic citizens (Riggan 2013; Woldemikael 2018). Eritreans long to leave so that they can return and forge a different, diasporic relationship with their country (Riggan 2013). By leaving Eritrea, an Eritrean is transformed from a territorially bound citizen who is unable to leave the country and expected to provide forced labor for the state to a diasporic citizen who is free to come and go but expected to contribute financial resources to the state. The latter is the more valued and less oppressive contribution (Riggan 2016). Eritreans thus long for return, as do refugees in other contexts (Malkki 1995a; Dunn 2017; Allan 2013), but they long to return after having left, settled elsewhere, and transformed into diasporic citizens. Leaving in order to transform the nature of their national duties requires Eritreans to be successful in their migration. Milena Belloni’s argument that Eritrean migrant decisions are framed by a hierarchical “cosmology of destinations” helps us understand how migration trajectories, choices, and pathways are bound to the broader cosmology of return (2019).

Another way of indexing the distant future to the present is through hope. Hope might also be thought of as cosmological in the way that it hinges the present to the distant future. Hope points to an imaginative horizon (Crapanzano 2003). As Rebecca Bryant and Daniel Knight note, it “draws the not-yet into the present and motivates activity in the here-and-now” (2019, 157). Grasping the nature of hope is key to understanding how refugees make the future while existing in parentheses. Hope is a means of laying claim to the future and structuring the present according to that future (Jansen 2016).⁹ It is intricately connected to the “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2004) and is a component of “tricking” the future (Ringel 2016).¹⁰

Hope is a central feature in a number of studies of refugees. We observed that hope was extremely important to our interlocutors. Recall Berihu’s comment in the introduction, just before he told us about the traumas he had endured in the war, that he did not want to talk about his troubles, he wanted to talk about his hopes. Throughout the course of our fieldwork, in the face of extreme challenges, Berihu and others repeatedly returned to hope, clung to hope, asked us to help give them hope, and noted the dangers of losing hope. Hope in this sense—and in the sense that many refugees experienced (and mobilized)—resonates with Kirsi Kallio, Isabel Meier, and Jouni Häkli’s notion of “radical hope,” which we introduced in the last chapter. They argue that radical hope requires not only an “active orientation toward the present” (which resonates with our concept of caretaking for the present discussed in the last chapter) but also a “dissociation from the facts of anticipated futurity that constantly threaten to thwart people’s agency” (Kallio et al. 2021, 4008). We found that the facts that “threaten to thwart people’s agency” are often located in the near future. This means that the distant future is an important site for the maintenance of radical hope.

There are numerous examples of the ways refugees index the present to a distant future. Catherine Brun’s concept of “agency in waiting” allows us to understand how those facing protracted displacement link the everyday time of the present to an abstract future elsewhere through hopeful waiting, enabling them to cope with indefinite uncertainty (2015). Cindy Horst (2006) similarly illuminates how buufis, or dreams of resettlement, may help Somali refugees in Kenya survive despair and endless waiting, yet she cautions that these dreams can be painfully maddening when they fail. Diana Allan’s work reveals how talk about migration and dreams generates hope and a sense of futurity for Palestinian refugees long confined to the Shatila refugee camp. Allan argues that “emigration is tantalizing because it introduces the possibility of discontinuity—both spatial and temporal—between who (and where) one is and what one might become” (2013, 167, emphasis added). Emigration talk “creates space for fantasy, speculation and the promise of a meaningful life; as such, it represents an arena in which aspirations are cultivated and acted upon” (Allan 2013, 33). It serves as “a kind of anti-empirical approach to making sense of uncertainty” (Allan 2013, 156). Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia also turned to emigration as a way to structure their distant future. However, future-making was not limited to thinking about emigration; it enabled the imagination of other, sometimes surprising, futures as well.

Cosmological time and the temporalities of hope give the distant future meaning and make time in the parentheses—a time without telos—bearable.¹¹ Cosmologies and hope order time in the present in meaningful ways. Because of this, prophetic temporalities can lead to inspiration, creativity, and generativity. But they are also always intertwined with forms of temporal suffering, constraint, and an awareness of stalled futures.

Agency and Episodic Time

To say that refugees do not have control over their time would be a vast understatement. Not only are refugees subject to the regimes and power structures of being made to wait, but they are also subject to substantial date regimes (Strathern 2000). In other words, they are disciplined by a series of high-stakes dates, such as appointments with UNHCR, monthly rations allocation, and others (Guyer 2007). These high-stakes dates are disjointed, episodic events that are detached from other everyday occurrences and distinct in the way they punctuate the present with vague promises and threats of negative consequences should a refugee not show up for an appointment at the allocated time. This is particularly the case for refugees engaged in legal migration processes. Time in parentheses is a temporality in which the actor—the refugee in this case—does not have the power to produce a particular outcome in the distant future or even to determine when time would begin to move again. However, our interlocutors did believe themselves to have influence over the distant future and, perhaps more importantly, believed they could situate themselves for a distant future outcome and prepare themselves for when time might start moving again. This imagined relationship between present responsibility and future outcome attaches the present to the distant future in a very particular way. The stance toward the distant future reflects what Guyer says is emblematic of prophetic time as the time of “an enduring attitude of expectant waiting” in the gap between the past, when time was moving “normally,” and the distant future, when time is expected to start moving again. The “temporal sensibility” that has emerged inside the pause is “episodic” (Guyer 2007, 409).

How do we understand temporal agency inside the pause, when subjects lack the ability to plan or predict when the pause will end, on one hand, or to make time move, on the other? To understand temporal agency in the unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of living episodically inside a pause, we turn to studies of magic. These theories may provide us with some analytic frameworks that help specify what life looks like inside the parentheses and enable us to better understand the agency refugees take by making their own future.¹² Magic helps us understand the nondurational, nonteleological unpredictability of living in the episodic time of the pause, and theories of magic help us grasp the relationship between structural violence and temporal agency. Magic responds to unpredictable circumstances by situating routine and ritual everyday action within a broader cosmology. It does this by enabling actors to act on, or “trick” (Ringel 2016), an unpredictable future and simultaneously recognize that they are imbricated in a broader complex of power, a system in which they are not entirely powerless but are definitively subject to a power greater than them. Theories of magic give us tools to understand the phenomenology of indexing the present to the distant future.¹³

Magic can simultaneously provide an interpretive framework through which people make sense of power, especially when its function is mysterious and obscured, and form an agentive means of claiming power, in a limited way, in the midst of an overall condition of powerlessness (Geschiere 1997; Whitehead and Finnström 2013).¹⁴ The ways in which refugees make sense of and respond to the powerful, unfair, and nontransparent nature of resettlement programs resonate with how magic is used to make sense of other contexts that are opaque, mysterious, and violent. Seen through this lens, the magic of legal migration processes involves the creation and deployment of social categories, including powerful methods of dehumanization that temporally displace and incarcerate populations of people, leaving them suspended and expectant. Refugee attempts at future-making take these magical elements of power and invert them so that the future, a thing denied to refugees, becomes a tool to remake the world. We will now explore how people make meaning of and attempt to chart a path through an obscure, unpredictable, and high-stakes (life or death) process of refugee resettlement.

Life inside a Process: The Temporalities of Legal Migration

Jennifer and her colleague from Addis Ababa University, Dr. Alebachew Kemisso Haybano sat at a café in front of a tall building in the Mebrat Haile condominium complex on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, an area known for its large number of Eritrean urban refugees. We were talking with a group of women, many of whom had come to Addis Ababa to join their husbands or other family members who had already migrated, as part of a study of urban refugees. A few had gotten permission to leave the camps through the formal out-of-camp program, but most had left without official clearance and were effectively living as undocumented urban refugees. All were living without the benefit of assistance from UNHCR or the Administration for Refugee and Returnee Affairs (ARRA) or the right to work legally while they waited. The phrase I have a process and the question Do you have a process? punctuated this conversation.

These women were somber as they described the strain of waiting, which clearly wore on them. Some had processes in progress, while others were waiting for their processes to start. The stories about processes varied widely but were often filled with accounts of loss and disconnection, such as not being able to get in touch with husbands or fiancés abroad. It was also common to hear stories of women who had come to Addis hoping to be reunited with husbands or fiancés only to learn that they had been abandoned for another woman. One woman had accompanied her extended family’s children to Addis. The children were reunited with their parents abroad, and she was left alone in Addis. Although they made a clear distinction between those whose processes had started and those whose processes had yet to start, all of them described suffering from interminable waiting in similar ways.

In simplest terms, a process refers to a specific bureaucratic proceeding involving a trajectory toward migration either through refugee resettlement or family reunification. But what is the temporality of a process? Temporally, these processes, whether or not one has one, order time prophetically such that the everyday present is disciplined by waiting for an outcome whose existence was believed in but not known for certain. Having a process was a painful but coveted condition in which a refugee had theoretically moved from aimless waiting to waiting for something, but having a process did not create certainty; rather, it deepened the mystery that existed around legal migration.

Resettlement through UNHCR is a rare opportunity. In Ethiopia (and globally), fewer than 1 percent of registered refugees are accepted for resettlement (Paszkiewicz 2017). Still, this rare opportunity ordered the everyday lives of many refugees. Most expected prior to their arrival in Ethiopia that the resettlement process would be more transparent and much faster. They were often surprised to find that they had extremely limited access to UNHCR and were only able to meet with a resettlement representative once every few months. Even if they did manage to meet with UNHCR, they were seldom given adequate information about legal migration processes.

Resettlement processes were opaque and so complex that even UNHCR resettlement officers struggled to explain them clearly. These processes hinged on an outcome in the distant future that was hoped for but unpredictable and uncertain. To refugees, it felt as if a power beyond their reach was structuring outcomes in material ways. Refugees found it impossible to acquire information about these processes. The time spent waiting for resettlement was time in parentheses. Refugee behavior in response was disciplined and ritualized.

The frame of magic, or more precisely witchcraft, helps us understand how refugees made sense of resettlement processes, because in both cases, an opaque and far-reaching power was believed to structure outcomes in material ways (Geschiere 1997). Magic is a useful lens through which to view resettlement processes in no small part because refugees found it impossible to acquire information about these processes and had to resort to what might be thought of as ritualized behavior as well various forms of divination to develop a theory of how this power operated. Indeed, there were so many moving, interlocking parts involved in resettlement that even those who had power in the process never fully controlled it or grasped its mysteries.

Vetting refugees for resettlement is a lengthy process that often takes several years, particularly for resettlement to the United States, which remains the country that resettles the largest number of refugees from Ethiopia. A resettlement officer at UNHCR explained to us that keeping the right number of refugees in the pipeline so as to ensure that all resettlement slots are filled requires a complex calculus on the part of UNHCR staff in which they try to predict the policy future, anticipate the number of spots that will be open, and determine which profile of refugees will be eligible for those slots. All of this is made far more complex by the fact that each country has different resettlement priorities, criteria, and limitations that can, and do, change. At the time of our research, the shifting American policy field and the Muslim and refugee bans being tied up in courts wreaked havoc on this already complicated and confusing situation. UNHCR staff tried to mitigate against this unpredictability by systematically prescreening refugees for particular host countries so that they can move as quickly as possible should spots open up (though as quickly as possible is never particularly fast). The strategy inevitably results in some refugees starting a process that becomes stalled, sometimes permanently. Meanwhile, refugees themselves tried to make sense of this process from their limited vantage point on the ground in Addis Ababa or in camps, and they often developed theories of how one improved one’s chances of being resettled that were, in many ways, based on a kind of divination from scarce information.

Those seeking family reunification rather than resettlement might seem to have a clearer, more guaranteed, and more transparent process, but this is often not the case either. The opaque nature of communication with embassies and the lack of clarity about how to procure the needed documentation from UNHCR and ARRA made family reunification a process that was often as magical and confusing as resettlement. A UNHCR resettlement officer noted that family members often come too soon, such as when a relative is still awaiting an asylum determination in their target country. They may wait years while they see others’ processes moving quickly, and this may happen for reasons that are nuanced, complex, and hard to discern. But even in the midst of this opaque situation, refugees develop evidence-based explanations for the wait.

As a result, refugees experience a profound alienation from their own processes, which disempowers them and subjects them to powerful temporal discipline. Refugees are told that they can only go to the UNHCR office to inquire about their case once every two months. That means they have to order and organize their lives around those dates. However, when their turn comes, they often fail to get the information they need. Comments such as “there is no one over there,” as one refugee noted about the UNHCR office in Addis Ababa, speak to what feels like an unmanned process. Another refugee noted the mysterious nature of trying to get information: “No one knows where to go or who to approach.” Still another refugee described the infuriatingly mystifying nature of trying to access UNHCR officials: “When you go there [to UNHCR], if you speak to one officer, they tell you to go to Haya Hulet. You have to get to the right person, but they don’t tell you what they need. You have to talk through a glass and explain your case, and they won’t connect you with the person who can really help you.”

Being inside a bureaucratic process is about being spun around from person to person with no one having full information that can help. Another urban refugee said he showed up at the UNHCR office every week. He talked about engaging in this ritual in the absence of being able to get any information to help him comprehend, manage, or plan for the process:

It is about 8 months that I have been here. I needed to know what the problems of the refugees are. I searched the internet for information about education support and resettlement. Even doing so didn’t give me much information. Even in the camp, so many people are going through the resettlement process. They don’t know what percentage of the population is going through that. They [UNHCR staff] gather every Wednesday so you just go and get refused and simply you go every week. Finally, my wife and I got our turn and when we got our turn [to talk to someone], he didn’t quite describe the process of resettlement. I didn’t know what to say. This is my experience. It isn’t his fault, but I didn’t know how to communicate with him. This creates a barrier. What I am saying is if UNHCR could put a few guidelines about what programs are entitled to particular groups of refugees, it would create a better understanding than what is present now.

Refugees work extremely hard to decipher these mysteries and usually cannot. Without the ability to understand or plan, their engagement with the process becomes ritualized, and beliefs emerge about the capacity of arbitrary actions to influence a highly unpredictable outcome. Showing up regularly at UNHCR, even when they know that they probably will not get the information they need, is one such ritualized effort to engage with the episodic nature of these processes.

The opaqueness of living inside parentheses can lead to an intense subjection to a powerful regime of dates (Strathern 2000). When legal migration comes to fruition, it appears to drop out of nowhere, as do calls to report to an embassy or office to move one’s process forward. As with resettlement, so many factors influence when this opportunity will arrive that they appear to exist in a time of their own. Refugees wait for the opportunity, engaging in ritualized activity to make these opportunities come about, but in reality, there is little they can do but wait hopefully. The time of waiting requires a ritualized disciplining of one’s time, daily life, and near future. The dates of UNHCR appointments, for example, take precedence over school and other priorities. Refugees we spoke to described their rituals of showing up every Wednesday or waiting for their turn (which typically, in Addis Ababa, came every two months) to talk to a human across a thick piece of glass only to be told there was no information. Refugees seeking family reunification had similar stories to tell about life within a process as they engaged with bureaucracies at embassies as well as ARRA and UNHCR.

Processes mandate ritualized, date-driven events and have the power to hold people in particular places. In the midst of uncertain futures, refugees still had to make decisions about which future to invest the most hopes in. Doing so often determined where they would locate themselves spatially. In other words, the temporal discipline of life in parentheses, inside a process, structured choices in particular ways. There is some evidence that the mere existence of resettlement as an option, even if the chances of being resettled are very thin, makes it more likely that refugees will stay in Ethiopia (Mallett et al. 2017, 25). More specifically, both reunification and resettlement processes (and the process of waiting for the process) heavily influence refugees’ decisions about where to live. While family reunification tends to draw people to the capital city so they can locate themselves near embassies, resettlement tends to bind refugees to the camp. When we first began researching the university scholarship program, we often heard rumors that people could not be resettled if they were attending a university. This was quickly corrected for us by both UNHCR and various INGO workers, yet we kept encountering refugees who would not go to a university for fear that it would hurt their chances at resettlement. One of our key participants explained that he would not attend the university in Ethiopia because he needed to stay in the camp to await his resettlement opportunities. If he were to be called to UNHCR for an interview, the first step on the long pathway toward resettlement, his name would appear on a physical list posted in the camp. He could of course ask a friend to look at the list and then contact him to return to the camp, but he did not trust anyone enough to do so. Additionally, some were told indirectly that they would have less of a chance of being resettled if they were at the university. When we asked who told them this, one person replied, “It is not done directly, speaking like, you are not having a chance. They imply it. They tell you having a university education is a great opportunity. So how could you ask again [for an opportunity to leave the camp]? They tell you resettlement is an opportunity for those who do not have access outside the camp.”

This idea that staying in the camp was necessary to maximize one’s chances at resettlement was commonly held. In a focus group, refugee university students described the complex relationship between resettlement and being a student in a way that clarified how resettlement processes bind refugees to the camp, at times leading members of their cohort to drop out. One noted, “They prefer to go to the camp.” One of the complaints of this particular group of students was that they did not receive good information about their resettlement processes and lacked the ability to care for their processes while at school. They felt they got better care for their resettlement cases in the camps. There were also stories of university students who heard that their process was moving forward, left school, and returned to the camp only to be stuck there for years. Thus, the disciplining effect of date regimes might mean that refugees had to relinquish a scholarship and a coveted chance to study and move outside the camp; many returned to the camp to be closer to where they thought the people with power over their process were located.¹⁵

There is also some evidence that resettlement has the power to root refugees in Ethiopia itself and prevent illegal migration. An Overseas Development Institute (ODI) report on resettlement and onward movement noted, “By offering the possibility of an alternative future, the hope of resettlement incentivizes immobility over long periods of time” (Mallett et al. 2017, 25, emphasis added). The report further details what we would consider the prophetic ordering of resettlement and the disciplining effects of its processes: “It is clear that our respondents are operating on a long timeframe, placing great value on far-off goals (even if highly uncertain) and less on their present situation. . . . Many were willing to spend days waiting in line, and years waiting for a final decision” (Mallet et al. 2017, 25, emphasis added). These findings, like our own, suggest that the prophetic temporalities of resettlement order and discipline the present by attaching it to a distant, hoped-for future. In the face of being forced to wait, it is no surprise that refugees’ attempts to enact control over this future resonate with studies of magic. Resettlement is a particularly magical form of process because it is the least linear and the most opaque, and, as we noted earlier, it requires a complex temporal and demographic calculation on the part of the organizations managing the resettlement processes. UNHCR staff may barely understand their calculation of which refugees (and how many) may begin the resettlement process, let alone be able to explain it to refugees who experience this calculation through appointments held once every three months through thick glass in a UNHCR office in Addis or via a handwritten announcement posted to a bulletin board in the camp.

It is no wonder that refugees may develop their own somewhat magical practices in an attempt to divine the meaning of these opaque processes. Meaning is given to particular events, like the arrival in the camp of a white UNHCR Land Cruiser bearing the resettlement officer. Refugees keep timelines in their head and use those timelines in an attempt to divine the status of their process. They know, for example, that after their first interview with UNHCR, they are on some kind of list, but it will not be until after a second interview that their process actually moves forward. They may wait years after their first interview. A second interview indicates that their process is moving forward, and a medical examination indicates that the process may start advancing more rapidly.

The details of processes are turned over in an ongoing effort to make sense of them, and refugees attempt to distill meaning from the things that are happening to their peers. For example, if refugees watch others being called in for interviews or being resettled, they may question what has happened to their own process. The case of Trhas’s family, who we met in chapter 4, is a particularly acute example of that. When we first visited Trhas, she sadly recounted how long she had been in the camp—almost since it had opened nearly a decade before. Despite the fact that she was relatively well-off (her husband had a lucrative business) and she was living with three children in a house that had been renovated on prime real estate near the main street, the length of time she had been waiting in the camp was a source of pressure. She did not want her children growing up there. One time when we visited, she told us with great happiness that she had started a process to go to Australia. She rattled off the steps and the amount of time each should take, an attempt to ascribe predictability to an erratic process. On our next visit, however, she was no longer talking about Australia, but about Italy. She had been accepted by what turned out to be one of the relatively new “humanitarian corridor” programs that sought to relocate Eritrean refugees safely to camps in Italy; from there, they would be sent to other European countries. By our next visit several months later, she was, effectively, packing her bags. When we came back to the camp several months after that, we expected to find her gone. Instead, Trhas and her family were still there. She was confused and disappointed. Eager to have an explanation for what had happened, she suspected that someone had taken her place.

Many refugees had stories about resettlement opportunities being stolen by Ethiopians. Although we never met anyone this had happened to, these accounts showed up in the margins of our field notes and in the hissed anger of hushed conversations after focus groups ended. One man reported that someone he knew was ill and could not check his email for several months. By the time he became well enough to contact UNHCR, he was told that he was already moving forward with his process. Someone was moving forward with his process, but it was not him. Another person reported that their friend could not get information about their process for months, and when he finally did, he learned that according to UNHCR, he was already living in Minnesota. Refugees living in camps occasionally mentioned being aware of Ethiopians living in camps for a brief time prior to being resettled as Eritreans.

Allegations of resettlement fraud are clearly a sensitive issue that our research was not in any way poised to address. Osvaldo Costantini and Aurora Massa (2016) suggest that some people do manipulate social and symbolic borders to cross political ones; kinship, social, and trading networks have historically spanned either side of the border, challenging neat delineations of national identity. While we do not address the nature and extent of stolen resettlement in our research, these stories were common enough among refugees that they are important to mention, as they shed light on how refugees made sense of the impossible power dynamic surrounding processes. Regardless of whether or not these stories of stolen resettlement opportunities are true, they operated as a conspiracy theory through which people understood and engaged with the workings of the resettlement process. Conspiracy theories generate a framework for reading the workings of power in the resettlement system, one in which prophetic time holds forth transformative possibilities but portions them without predictability, clear logic, or a legible time frame. Regardless of whether or not they are true, they tell an important temporal story and reveal a great deal about refugees’ faith in the process and sense of hope.

The global system of migration management is fundamentally undemocratic and violent. It incarcerates and slowly kills large populations of people even as it promises asylum and the possibilities of social, spatial, and temporal mobility. Indeed, while resettlement promises a particular kind of shape-shifting to a rights-bearing citizen, it also involves the dehumanization of entire populations into bare humanity and objects of humanitarian aid left waiting for the chance to leave. Stories of stolen identities attempt to make sense of forms of corruption that appear magical in their obscure and transformative workings of power. They are thus a by-product of the opaque, nonlinear, and unfair nature of resettlement processes—a form of theorizing about that which is hidden.

As much as they expose deep contradictions, these theories are also part of the fabric of prophetic time-making. They anticipate a distant future but reconfigure the near future as stolen rather than simply mysterious. Consequently, as much as they cast aspersions on the implementation of resettlement processes (and the role of particular Ethiopian actors), these conspiracy theories reaffirm the benevolence of the process itself, positing that resettlement processes are impossible and opaque not because there is something fundamentally wrong with a system that stingily rations much-needed resettlement opportunities and leaves many others stranded, but because individual actors with more power than refugees are stealing these opportunities. They enable people to maintain faith and hope while waiting because they obscure systemic violence.

Conspiracy theories enable refugees to maintain hope in the midst of a hopeless situation. Hope enables and embodies an attachment to a distant future that is not just imagined or imaginary—it is material. The materiality of hope is manifested when refugees discipline themselves to choose the process over other goals, aspirations, and temporalities and shape daily life in such a way that one is constantly ready should that process move forward. But legal migration processes are not the only thing that does this. In the next section, we explore how the temporality of irregular migration is structured in similarly prophetic ways, but by replacing hope with risk.

Deciding to Move On: The Temporality of Risk

Most refugees were keenly aware that they existed on the knife’s edge of decision-making between staying and going. As one refugee put it, “Refugees are not stable. Everyone is changing his decision day by day.” It was common for refugees to put irregular migration and resettlement in the same sentence.

Here we suggest that in many ways, both hope and thinking about the risk of irregular migration are structured prophetically with an orientation to the distant future. Both entail forms of magical thinking—leaps over the near future and leaps of faith—that are attached directly to the structuration of the everyday, particularly the rituals and sacrifices in everyday life. As we saw earlier, the rituals that refugees undergo as they wait for legal migration options are disciplining; they foreclose certain options in favor of others, determine priorities, bind refugees to certain places, and create commitments to a particular set of actions.

Deciding to move on through irregular channels is also a form of future-making structured according to the logics of prophetic time. It abandons the commitment to waiting in place and all the discipline and sacrifice that waiting requires. Moving on entails a different kind of choice, one that is only made after carefully weighing the risks and sacrifices involved in staying against the risks and sacrifices of leaving. While some might sacrifice opportunities, such as education, to wait for the possibility of resettlement, others might sacrifice their bodies and their freedom, placing themselves at great risk through irregular migration. Refugees often talked about not feeling safe in Ethiopia; though they generally felt physically safe, they were referring to the fact that their future was not guaranteed. They discussed the psychological damage caused by delays in processes that could push them toward irregular migration. As one refugee put it: “UNHCR is playing with Eritrean refugees. Resettlement to the Netherlands was canceled. Our mind is destroyed by UNHCR.” Another refugee, who had been in process to reunify with his daughter for four years, noted: “The processes take so long that a lot of people get frustrated and leave.” And still another refugee clearly and succinctly articulated the relationship between staying and deciding to leave: “If I lose hope, I will turn to irregular migration.” This was a common sentiment; irregular migration was what refugees turned to when they could not hang onto hope. When seen from a temporal perspective, this exchange of hope for risk is not surprising because in many ways, the temporality of hope and risk are similarly structured.

Refugees knew that any of them might reach a point where they would exchange hope for risk. Both require a leap of faith, and they seem logical when the near future is not viable. By exchanging hope for risk, refugees trade one present for another: a present structured by waiting faithfully for a future that may never come, for a present full of risk in which one is moving toward a future that they may never reach. Both are unpredictable. Both require a remarkably similar vision of the distant future and a willingness to make sacrifices in the present. Both involve an abdication of control over the near future. One requires deciding to wait (to do nothing); the other requires deciding to move (to do something).

The risks of irregular movement are well known to most, if not all, refugees, as the following story told by someone who had attempted to migrate indicates:

Most of the Eritreans do not want to live in Addis Ababa.¹⁶ This is simply because there is no opportunity here. They cannot work. This is legally prohibited for refugees. They cannot continue with friends or family support for fifty or sixty years. They can’t continue for longer and longer period of time. So, they risk moving out from Ethiopia and try their chance to reach Europe. I tried the chance to go out from Ethiopia and finally I was caught by Bedouin smugglers and paid 32,000 USD ransom and was released back to Ethiopia. I witnessed 42 people who died at the hands of the Bedouin. . . . In Eritrea there is no opportunity and here in Ethiopia there is no opportunity so that is why refugees try their chance through the oceans. Even if I reach Europe, there are problems there. There are people who commit suicide. But even with all this knowledge Eritreans prefer to move out of Ethiopia.

Why would someone who had experienced the brutality of the irregular migration route firsthand express understanding and empathy for refugees who choose to move on? This quotation powerfully links refugees’ willingness to knowingly take risks in the hope of creating a better future with the impossibility of the near future in Ethiopia. To make this decision, refugees must suspend their thinking about the risks involved in the near future of migration and instead focus on the impossibility of the near future in Ethiopia. To make this decision, the dangers of staying must come to seem heavier than the dangers of leaving, as articulated here: “The Ethiopian government has been generous enough to let us stay here and we sleep safely with a roof over our heads, but that is not enough. Eritrean children are following dangerous routes. They don’t want us to face danger, but they don’t have alternatives here. However hard we try to settle here, Ethiopia has 100 million people to give jobs to and then they can help others. I have young kids and they will go through the dangerous route unless they see a change here.”

Refugees also turn to the past—previous experiences and earlier histories of instability in Eritrea and Ethiopia—as evidence of the unreliable nature of the near future. Eritrean refugees have already become conditioned for sacrifice. Many commented that experiencing ongoing military service in Eritrea (or Sawa, as it is termed) actually conditions refugees to face the hardships of migration, as it includes training to make arduous journeys on foot through challenging arid terrain, all while rationing supplies.

Similarly, waves of displacement make refugees feel like Ethiopia is not a stable place in which they can stay. The following quotation describes the instability and uncertainty that one refugee felt after being deported from Ethiopia and then returning as a refugee:

When the war broke out with Eritrea and Ethiopia, we were deported for no reason. My parents are traders. They are not spies. They were deported. When we went there [to Eritrea] we had to start our life from zero. In this situation I lost my father, brother, and friends. Life in Eritrea is so hard, so now I had to start my life again in Eritrea. It is so hard. I am Ethiopian by birth. There is a saying in Tigrigna. Today is OK, but we don’t know about tomorrow. So, I choose to leave this country if I get any opportunity. I need a country to call it a country. To call it mine. To marry. To have kids. I don’t have a guarantee here. I am not Ethiopian or Eritrean.

Effectively, his previous experience of deportation served as a constant reminder of the lack of trust he had in Ethiopia and the sense that the near future in that country would always be uncertain. In choosing to move on, refugees take agency over not only moving their bodies through space but also making time move toward a better future. The future cannot exist in Ethiopia; thus, to make the future, one must move on. This is one of the most profound forms of future-making. If prophetic time entails an abandonment of the near future in favor of the distant future, and if this distant future then serves as a modality to structure the present in ways that refugees have agency over, it is perhaps not surprising that hope (and the waiting it enables) and risk (and the movement it enables) occupy the same temporal field.

Although not explicitly a temporal analysis, Belloni’s discussion of refugees as gamblers is useful in illuminating the temporality of risk. As Belloni (2019) points out, migrants know about risks, but ultimately, the “jackpot” of reaching an imagined good life takes precedence over the fear of risks. She argues that as refugees progress along their rather episodic migration journeys, their willingness to take risks increases. This is in no small part because they have already invested a great deal financially and emotionally in the journey. They have also invested a great deal temporally, as migration trajectories may be long and entail multiple stages of waiting. Rather than deterring migrants, this arduous process makes them more determined, something noted in Ruben Andersson’s analysis of the temporality of migration and migration controls (Andersson 2014). Migrants are “all in” and, like gamblers, cannot divest of the risks they have taken once they have invested so much and are compelled to risk more. Theirs is a distant future–oriented strategy that is prophetic rather than teleological.

Like legal resettlement, irregular migration requires a suspension of thinking in step-by-step terms about how and when the ultimate destination will be reached. Irregular migration demands a suspension of disbelief about the actual risks; it involves not a rejection of their existence but a mental leap over them. In numerous interviews and focus groups, we heard refugees put the pain of the present with its interminable waiting on the same plane as the risks of migration. For many, there was a willingness to imaginatively leap over those risks in the interest of getting to a new place, as is evidenced by the thousands who routinely migrate onward. The sign on the wall of a small roadside restaurant in Mai Aini camp speaks to this importance of choosing movement over stasis: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”

Refugees do prepare themselves for the perils of irregular migration, but given its utterly unpredictable nature, their preparation serves as more of a ritual talisman than as an actual risk mitigation measure. For example, knowing how high the likelihood of their experiencing sexual violence is, women often take birth control as a precaution. There is a network of brokers and smugglers to guide and help refugees with their preparations. Some refugees engage in extensive preparations for the journey, while others make rather spontaneous decisions (Mengiste 2018, 2019). Although every journey involves risk, it is generally believed that the more planful one is (and the more money one has to invest), the safer the journey. Tekalign Ayalew Mengiste (2018) skillfully details in his research the social networks through which Eritrean migrants share information, plan their journeys, and build a community of knowledge. The horrifying risks of the migrant network, particularly for refugees who lack social and financial support, mean there is no assurance of progress or a desired outcome from one’s actions in the present; what is required is a leap of faith. Moving from the unpleasant place of the refugee camp to the unknown place at the end of the journey involves willingly and willfully erasing the space in between—but also the time. Brokers and smugglers play a key role here.

Fig. 5.1. A popular Mai Aini camp bar. Photo by Amanda Poole.

In many ways, just as low-level administrative functionaries behind glass windows in the UNHCR offices served as sorcerers in legal migration processes, brokers were the sorcerers of irregular migration. Both were actors who wielded power by virtue of having more knowledge about legal processes and migration routes, but neither had full control over these highly opaque, mysterious, and magical paths. Thus, there were always risks. On a visit to the Hitsats camp, Yirga, an Ethiopian man who works with an NGO, briefed us on the smugglers—or, as he called them, the “brokers.” He noted, “We are always fighting with the brokers. They lure young people away from the camp. People who have stayed in the camps for years will go abroad by any means.” The brokers are depicted as wielding a sort of dark magic and preying on the particularly weak and vulnerable.

We then asked Yirga about Habtom, whose story we shared at the beginning of this chapter. He had recently migrated. “Habtom went to Sudan,” he told us. “The brokers make attempts to lure people even in the universities. Habtom was lured away by brokers. They told him he didn’t have to pay. He came to Hitsats from university because he heard that his family in Eritrea had a financial crisis. Then the brokers lured him away.” We were then told that Habtom was arrested on his first attempt to leave and was returned to the camp, but when we last heard, Habtom was gone again. Yirga looked sad and said, “Eritreans are very attached to their families. If their family has a problem, they have to do something. If they get a call from their mother saying ‘I am in this situation,’ then they do something.”

This was not the first time we had heard about the predatory attempts of the brokers to lure young people away from the camp and the pressures that family crises back home in Eritrea placed on refugees. Residents of Hitsats camp were particularly familiar with the temptation of brokers. The camp was reputed to be a revolving door of sorts, where refugees were placed only to leave again. Concerns about brokers were addressed by the ARRA camp coordinator and members of the Refugee Coordinating Committee (RCC). As the RCC head told us:

Traffickers are seductive. They use beautiful words, like when someone is talking to a beautiful woman. They say nice things. They tell people they have a brother in Belgium or Germany and describe how nice it is. It is not true. Traffickers cannot enter the camp, but there are people who are like “tributaries” to the traffickers. They tend to talk with people who are from the same zone [region of origin in Eritrea]. . . . The tributary then feeds to a trafficker who is also from that zone. Known traffickers can’t enter the camp, but they’ll have a sort of broker or recruiter who will enter the camp or lives there and will try to seduce people. These people won’t report the traffickers to authorities because they come from Eritrea where no one trusts each other. This is the legacy of the Eritrean police state. Eritreans abroad pay their two percent tax, but don’t inform young people about what is going on or the dangers of trafficking. The traffickers themselves seduce young people telling them that if they can get their relative to pay half of the cost, they [the trafficker] will pay the other half. This is a lie. These recruiters never tell of the risks of this. Only the good things.

Commentary on the predatory attempts of the brokers and the traffickers to lure refugees out of the camp was widespread. Their presence was described as pervasive. If needing to be available to attend appointments with UNHCR or to check for names on lists for resettlement disciplined the present of refugees waiting for legal resettlement, it would seem that the constant, nagging, seductive presence of brokers structured their present as well, particularly as they contemplated an irregular migration decision.

While brokers were described as persistent and relentless, what many migrants said had pushed them toward irregular migration was a much more acute sense of temporality—an emergency back home. Refugees often told us that a relative was facing a financial or health crisis at home, which led to a migration decision or a sort of intense temporal trauma if they decided to wait and not to migrate. One of the reasons for the acuteness of this crisis was that refugees left Eritrea in no small part to be able to help their families. They were fleeing political circumstances that were often experienced collectively, at the family and the community levels, meaning that by leaving, refugees felt they could alleviate not only their own suffering, but that of their family.

We would argue that this is not just a communal phenomenon but a temporal one as well. Being able to care for and safeguard the stability and security of one’s extended family is a central part of growing up in the Eritrean context. As families are largely hierarchically organized, with members ranked in status based on a combination of age and wealth, older siblings often feel a deep sense of obligation to care for the entire family, while the rest of the members may try to improve their position in the hierarchy by seeking out channels through which to acquire wealth. This is a central part of the cosmologies that order Eritrean migration (Belloni 2019; see also Bernal 2014; Hepner 2009; Riggan 2013). Temporally, what this means is that familial pressures and expectations that Eritreans become members of the diaspora to care for the family push them to toward irregular migration. Thus, fleeing Eritrea and migrating onward become core strategies of making the future.

Migration in many ways is teleologically oriented, but not in the same way schools are; the ends of migration are located at a distant place and a distant future. As we noted earlier, the condition of refuge in a hosting state in the Global South, such as Ethiopia, creates a temporal paradox. A place like Ethiopia is a way station, and although it is a temporary stop, it may last indefinitely. This temporal paradox makes it futile to focus on the near future and adopt its teleological orientation—one that links the present to the near future in linear, planful ways. The distant future is far more logical. The refugees who were willing to wait in Ethiopia were the ones who seemed to be able to maintain hope for this distant future and to feel like they were actively taking steps to move toward it. However, the same logic that led them to stay could also turn on itself and push them to take risks and leave.

Prophetic future-making, whether through hope or risk, enables refugees to index the present to the distant future. Some were able to do so in a way that allowed them to wait hopefully. Others felt compelled to move riskily. The choice between legal and irregular migration was ever present and brought these two variants of future-making into a constant, tense relationship with each other. But choice also gave refugees a sense of agency over time. Perhaps ironically, choice enabled hope even though it also sometimes led to risk. A sense of urgency, such as that created by a crisis at home, could tip the balance from waiting hopefully to moving riskily. But the ongoing temporal trauma of waiting with little information about one’s process could also shift unpredictably, leading a refugee to suddenly choose to migrate. These, however, were not the only two choices available to refugees. There were other ways of making the future.

Creativity and Future-Making

Many refugees dreamed big—or, perhaps more accurately, dreamed long. As researchers, we were frequently awed by the inventiveness and boldness of these dreams. Refugees not only knew a great deal more about various manifestations of the distant future than we did but believed in its tangibility and ordered their everyday lives to work toward it. They were not merely struggling to survive, a point many scholars of refugees have made; they were actively engaged in making their future regardless of whether they had decided to wait for it, to take risks for it, or to engage in a number of other future-making projects. While thinking about futures that involved migration or waiting for resettlement involved risks and suffering, attachments to the distant future in other spheres were often a source of joy, pleasure, and hope. Most importantly, a telos located in the near future did not figure significantly in the way they forged their futures. Refugees were making their future in a fundamentally different way.

At the end of chapter 3, we discussed the formation of ERUSA, the Eritrean Refugee University Student Association. We might argue that ERUSA was a bold attempt at future-making that rejected the failed teleologies imposed on refugees. ERUSA members had the audacity to imagine a very different kind of future for refugees in Ethiopia and behaved in ways that assumed that future already existed. For example, unlike many refugees in both camps and urban areas who believed they should be silent and thankful, ERUSA leaders never considered themselves to be docile guests, instead representing themselves as equals who could walk into the offices of ARRA officials and university administrators to boldly advocate for refugee university student needs. ERUSA was logical, strategic, tenacious. It was also keenly aware of the barriers and impediments in its way and did not assume its own success. In that sense ERUSA members had faith that by ordering their present as if it were already part of a particular future, that future would come to be.

Similarly, many refugees had creative entrepreneurial ideas for businesses and the arts. In addition to their many other ideas, Tesfay and Haile had a vision for a take-out coffee place that would serve cappuccinos in creatively shaped recyclable cones. This was visionary in a couple of ways, as it recognized that increasingly busy Addis Ababa residents might not have time (and often the means) to sit at a café and drink a cappuccino nor could Addis Ababa sustain the levels of pollution that plastic cups would bring. Gerie also had a vision; he hoped to build an internet café near a housing condominium where refugees resided. All the internet cafés were in the center of town, but refugees likely had greater need for them. Another refugee, a filmmaker, had dropped out of the university to move to Addis and pursue filmmaking, something he had done in Eritrea. He spent well over two hours with us one day detailing the complex and riveting plot of the film he hoped to make, a love story about shifting identities that are concealed and revealed in the context of flight and refuge. Another refugee discussed how migrants could use their phones to generate revenue in ways that bypassed the Ethiopian legal prohibition on refugees working or owning businesses. At first glance, these strategies might seem more pragmatic, planful, and oriented to the near future than the phenomena we discussed earlier. Indeed, these plans, which were developed by university students, are in many ways teleological. And yet they reject the teleological chronotope of education, calling its bluff, refusing to submit to its discipline and violence, instead daring to imagine a different, more inventive future. In this way, they attach the present to the distant future. The examples below illustrate even more pointedly how the distant future becomes a “phenomenological existential position” (Brun 2016, 401) as refugees work to move toward it even in the absence of knowing exactly how to get there.

Prophetic Time, Literally

In the school closing ceremony at the Mai Aini camp discussed in chapter 3 parents, staff, and students were given the chance to make comments. Most of them lauded the value of education and expressed concerns about the vast number of refugees who did not attend school. Many people noted that education was everything and was far more important than fleeing through irregular migration. One of the last speakers was a young woman who said she had stopped coming to school because of some problems. Iyob, who was sitting next to us, leaned over and whispered that her “problem” was that she had joined the followers of a local monk, and when her family was resettled, she chose to stay behind. She continued: “This year there were some good and bad students, some happy and some not happy. Some passed and some didn’t. The students should come to school, just playing is not good. I dropped out because of my problem, but students should come to school. I felt bad to stop. Why did I stop? I have my own aim for the future. For the others they live in their houses. It’s better to be in school because it’s better to not be idle. It’s better to create something for the future. This is the base of your life.” At first, her words sounded like the typical “education talk” of disciplined teleological time—creating the future, avoiding idleness. We later realized this woman’s story revealed a commentary on future-making rather than teleological time.

According to Iyob, there were about three or four hundred children who had begun to follow a radical Orthodox Christian monk in the camp who was convincing children to not be resettled in the United States. This monk himself was supposed to be resettled with his family as a child, but he had refused to go, fearing America to be the land of the devil. He remained in the camp and continued to frighten children about America by telling them that what violent movies portray is real, that gang hand signs are the devil’s sign, and that the devil’s number is in America. We wondered why anyone would forgo the highly coveted opportunity for resettlement. It turned out it was not just about fear but about the kind of future envisioned as an alternative. Iyob told us, “She didn’t go with her family for resettlement because she thinks Jesus is coming.”

Jennifer, trying to grasp the temporality of this choice, asked, “When?”

Iyob’s answer revealed the logics of prophetic time: “I do not know the date.” It is hard to think of a more ap illustration of the nature of prophetic time than waiting for the Second Coming of Christ. For these young followers of the monk, a point in distant future when Christ would return had become more tangible than the coveted distant future of resettlement. But more importantly, despite their locus in the distant future, resettlement and the Second Coming occupy a similar temporal position that is tangible, orders everyday life, and pressures important choices. This shows that refugees are faced with making choices not only between empty time, teleological time, waiting, and risk-taking but also between an array of distant futures, all of which order the present in very different ways.

Followers of this monk were dedicated to a pious present. They walked barefoot, dressed simply, and lived together. There is a long tradition in Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity of including young people in the work of the church and of people abandoning the world to live piously and ascetically within the walls of the church or monastery, relying on alms and spending their days praying. But in this case, the nearby orthodox monastery refused to support this monk, considering him too radical. Most of the people who followed the monk were boys, and there was nowhere to house girls, which was part of the problem for the young woman who spoke at the school closing ceremony. The present was oriented toward piety and simplicity and was disciplined not by date regimes of resettlement, the temptations of brokers, or the crises back home but by a rejection of immorality and a distant future oriented toward religious salvation.

The effects of choosing to wait for the Second Coming were powerful, material, and far-reaching. In the middle of this conversation, Berhane arrived and added to our understanding of this issue: “It is worse even than refusing to be resettled, because if the child is a minor, it messes up the whole family’s resettlement case.” He knew of several other specific cases where this had happened. In one case, a relative came from abroad to convince the child to do a resettlement interview, but the child refused to go. The relative tried to force the child to do the interview, and the child had the relative arrested after accusing him of kidnapping. In the end, the relative was released from jail, and the child was finally convinced to do the interview. “But I don’t think the story is over,” Berhane added. “He could refuse later in the process.”

This is literally prophetic time in which the near future is abandoned for the distant prophesized future—in this case, the Second Coming. With both migration and its millenarian disavowal, the mundane world of incremental progress exists in a suspended state as a false promise. For millenarian followers, it is a spiritually dangerous promise. Ironically, the prophetic time-making of millenarianism may be more successful than education in generating the desire among refugees to remain in Ethiopia. Its promises, after all, rest in the distant future and therefore parallel other forms of prophetic time-making. There is agency in deciding to reject something that others covet so much and in choosing a different prophecy—one that is biblical—over the prophecy of life in an evil land.

Material Fantasies: Futurism and Cryptocurrency

Before we conclude this chapter, we would like to return to our discussions with Tesfay and Haile. The two took us on a tour of the department where Tesfay was studying. Earlier, when Tesfay had shocked and awed us—and, frankly, talked way over our heads about his futuristic inventions—he shaped our imaginaries of glass-plated labs and scientists scurrying about with tablets and spotless white lab coats, like something from one of the science fiction movies that he had referenced. In reality the lab he had been allocated was a machine shop, and the materials he hoped to experiment with were in a scrap heap in one corner, seemingly discarded and uncared for. The disjuncture between the aspirations he had evoked and the space he had to work in was enormous. It was easy to see why he felt that the university was not the right home for his ambitions. As we toured the facility, Tesfay greeted everyone and was greeted warmly. Clearly, he was well liked. Toward the end of our tour, we visited the dean’s office, where the sample of the plastic he had made was being held. He approached a secretary and asked if he could take it. He asked if the dean had had time to look at it yet, to which she replied that he had not. The plastic was a solid square, approximately one foot by one foot. He said he had tested its strength and endurance.

This square of plastic was the material embodiment of Tesfay’s vision of the future. For Tesfay, it was a tangible representation that that future was possible, germinating possibilities for bulletproof fabric and circular, transparent bulletproof motorcycles. Far from the high-tech laboratories of Elon Musk—and perhaps as far from there as from the fictional laboratories of Stark Industries—Tesfay tinkered away at his inventions in a forgotten, dusty, and disheveled corner of the faculty of engineering at Addis Ababa University, producing a square of plastic on which he did not so much pin his hopes as he tried to create his own evidence that his vision of the future was not as fantastical as it might have seemed.

It would be easy to dismiss Tesfay’s vision of the future as far-fetched. Instead, we suggest that in a world in which a near-future-oriented telos is out of reach and teleological time does harm, this kind of “fantasy” futurism is not only logical, it is the only way to remain hopeful and, therefore, sane. Tesfay’s dreams of future inventions were a phenomenological strategy to claim control over time and to order the present toward the future in a particular way.

Throughout this chapter, we have shown that both legal resettlement and irregular migration are structured temporally as prophecies. The prophetic future is one in which the near future is irrelevant, and the distant future becomes a tangible thing to be worked toward as if it were a certainty, even though the materiality of when it will occur is never known.

When Tesfay was not busy tinkering with his inventions, he and Haile were deeply engaged in discussions with other refugees and students about Bitcoin. Indeed, when we saw him a few months later, he had not dropped out of school but he also did not want to talk about school. What he was really excited about was his cryptocurrency business, which seemed to be booming. They had to explain cryptocurrency sales to us several times. The dots did not quite add up, but in some ways, that was the point.

Bitcoin emerged in 2008 as one of several electronic currencies in circulation. It is “a system that uses a decentralized, peer-to-peer network to produce and transmit value tokens” (Swartz 2018, 6). Bitcoin can be acquired in exchange for goods, services, or other currency, much as most conventional currency is acquired. It can also be electronically mined. A limited number of minable Bitcoin mimics “the increasing scarcity of commodity mining” (Swartz 2018, 7) and therefore controls the value.

But in our conversation with Tesfay and Haile, the question we kept coming back to was where the immediate value came from—the kind of value that they seemed to derive from Bitcoin to be able to pay their rent. Tesfay and Haile attempted to explain to us how value transferred from Bitcoin to material goods and back to birr (Ethiopian currency), noting that in other countries, you could actually withdraw your Bitcoin from ATMs, but that was not yet possible in Ethiopia. The trajectory through which Bitcoin was transformed into value that Tesfay and Haile could actually make use of leapt over space and traveled from electronic symbol, to material goods, to paper symbol, following pathways that currency itself often traveled. For example, when Eritreans send remittances to relatives in Eritrea or elsewhere, hawala agents often make use of the same kinds of pathways that use currency in country A to purchase valuable material goods in country B that are exported and sold in country C, where the value transfers to local currency. This system is well understood, and its existence enabled brokers to transfer funds between people instantaneously at favorable rates, subverting banks and, in the case of Eritrea, the government. What we could not understand vis-à-vis Bitcoin was where the equivalent transfer of value in material goods was occurring. To the best of our understanding, unlike cash transfers through the hawala system, there was no import-export business to which it was attached. When we pushed on this point, Tesfay and Haile shifted to talk about how the mining of Bitcoin and the fact that only a limited number could be mined ensured that they would increase in value.

The “techno-economic imaginaries” of Bitcoin have been described as both prophetic and linked to precarity (Swartz 2018). As Lana Swartz notes, money is “always hypothesizing and projecting a particular future,” but Bitcoin does this in a certain way that creates value by speculating on its own future value on the basis of a utopian vision of that future (2018, 2). It is also key that it emerged during a financial crisis and thus was arguably born of precarity, “distrust in institutions” (Swartz 2018, 2), and distrust in the teleological pathways through the near future that we had been told for so long were reliable. In other words, Bitcoin fundamentally relies on trust—in mathematics, in the community that mines them, and in a particular vision of the future. Swartz’s analysis of Bitcoin also points out that it will create a new financial system that is anarchic, flattens access to wealth, and evades surveillance, but there are many critiques, and Bitcoin has strayed from its original vision. On one hand, high-tech “factory” mining of Bitcoin has changed the community on which it is based. Meanwhile, others say that the immediate value given to Bitcoin constitutes a Ponzi scheme (Swartz 2018).

Opinions about cryptocurrency vary wildly depending on the temporal frame through which one looks at it. Viewed teleologically through the lens of the near future, cryptocurrency may look like a giant pyramid scheme. Viewed prophetically, cryptocurrency looks like a revolution in the future tense, a way to wrest financial power from banks and the linear control over currency and value that powerful bankers have created simply by making rules and holding us all to them. So, in selling shares in cryptocurrency, were our friends engaging others in a giant pyramid scheme? Or were they helping them get in on a new form of value that was more egalitarian, flatter, and more accessible to a population that had been systematically denied access to every other modality of increasing their income and creating stability? Answering this question is far beyond the scope of our research. But the Bitcoin investments were perhaps the most material of all of our examples of prophetic future-making based on a faith in a particular future—a future that refugees would typically not have access to.

Conclusion

For refugees in camps and in Addis Ababa, decisions about migration populated both the present and the future. By the time they arrive in a hosting state like Ethiopia, refugees are already “on their way.” Migration decisions are hierarchically ordered as a “cosmology of destinations,” with Ethiopia ranked low on the desirability of destinations (Belloni 2019). Whether refugees had an immediate or a distant plan to leave, the future was almost never imagined in Ethiopia. Understanding how refugees think of the relationship between present, near future, and distant future and how they hinge relationships with place to those different futurescapes illuminates the complex conditions that facilitate, inspire, shape, or forestall migration decisions. But to equate migration and places “out there” with the future would be an oversimplification of refugee future-making projects.

Desires to live elsewhere are not only about place-making; they are also a response to particular temporalities—specifically the temporality of progress. We would argue that for refugees, this is less about achieving a settled end than it is about wanting to be in a place where there is a possibility for time to move and progress toward something better.

Here we have explored various future-making projects and why some refugees are willing to wait indefinitely for resettlement or family reunification while others feel pressured to risk irregular migration. The orientation toward the distant future explains why Habtom chose the dangers of migration over a full university scholarship, why Tesfay and Haile thought they had more of a future in Bitcoin than at the university, and why some chose to wait in the camps for the Second Coming. These choices are framed by refugees’ understanding of the relationship between an indeterminate and open-ended end in the distant future and life in the pause, or parentheses, of the present. Caught between the trauma of empty time and the violence of modernist teleological time, many refugees abandoned the near future in favor of the distant future, which can be the object of hope. As the near future has become evacuated in favor of a distant one, the idea that one can rationally plan for progress or have much control or power over the future is abandoned.

As with the caretaking activities we discussed in the last chapter, the kinds of future-making we have examined here are forms of care. More precisely, they emerge from a need to care for the future. They might be thought of as an effort to safeguard one’s “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2004), to nurture “radical hope” (Kallio et al. 2021), and to enact “existential mobility” (Hage 2005) by “expecting to have expectations” (Bryant and Knight 2019).

But these methods of future-pointing caretaking are also always intertwined with forms of temporal violence and are thus risky. The future will always be, in large part, unknowable and outside of refugees’ capacity to control. Prophetic time entails a radical temporal reorientation—“living in the present with the knowledge that what it means will only become clear in the millennial future” (Guyer 2007, 415). It entails living with a distant end point in mind and living in a way that both holds that end point open and connects with it somehow—magically, ritually, or hopefully—on a daily basis. For refugees, these efforts at making the future will seldom be effective at “tricking” the future (Ringel 2016; Moroşanu and Ringel 2016). The dots that we were desperately trying to connect in our conversation with Haile and Tesfay about Bitcoin value are never going to fully connect. Refugees know this, which is why hope is such a necessity. When hope fails, there is a risk of falling into stasis with “ruptures of process, demanding extraordinary effort to counteract and regain any sense of momentum” (Guyer 2007, 418). This is one of the reasons why many refugees choose the risks of irregular migration. It is also why the distant future keeps showing up in extremely creative and innovative ways. It shows up not only in dreams of migration but in faith in the Second Coming, the solvency of cryptocurrencies, or plans to invent something that is not yet technologically possible. While stuck in parentheses where time does not move and where one is subject to endless waiting and the incessant discipline of date regimes, it is easier to care for those points in the distant future than it is to care for the near future, where the evidence of teleological violence can be experienced daily. It is easier to have hope for those points on the horizon. Doing so enables living with the kind of inventiveness and creativity born of believing in a future that you cannot completely understand but are compelled to work toward. The dots may never connect, but there is evidence that for some, that distant future eventually arrives.

Notes

1. We derive our distinction between near future and distant future from Jane Guyer’s 2007 work.

2. There is an increasingly vast literature on future-making (see, for example, Ringel 2016, 2021; Jansen 2008, 2014; Bryant and Knight 2019; Appadurai 2004). Our use of the term future-making is limited to a focus on making the distant future. In this way, we distinguish it from the near-future-oriented activities and the present-oriented activities discussed in earlier chapters.

3. Our thinking here again resonates with Felix Ringel’s notion of tricking the future, which we mentioned earlier. According to Ringel (2016, 2021; see also Moroşanu and Ringel 2016), planning is a component of “tricking” the future. Although Ringel acknowledges that the capacity to trick time is not equally distributed, less attention is paid to how the future is tricked by those who have been deprived of the capacity to make plans that will be viable. In many ways, we are putting Ringel and Arjun Appadurai in conversation here by asking how the future gets “tricked” by people who lack the “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2004). Refugees have minimal likelihood of succeeding in tricking the future in terms of actually affecting outcomes, but the attempt to do so is an essential antidote against the suffering of camp time and the teleological violence inherent in linear, progress-oriented activities, such as schooling.

4. In a somewhat similar vein, Helga Nowotny (2018) argues that progress—with its linear temporal formulations—is dead. Nowotny and Guyer (2007) both call our attention to how the contemporary era has fundamentally altered the way we temporalize in general and think about the future in particular. They both note profound shifts as a result of the cyclical nature of late capitalism, the sense of simultaneity, and the pressure to innovate, which forestall the linear planning so prevalent in temporalities that emerged as a result of industrialization. However, where Guyer emphasizes the differences in the apprehension of the future, Nowotny emphasizes the increased cyclicality of the present.

5. Our notion of hegemonic temporalities comes from Paul Stubbs, who develops this Gramscian concept based on Michele Filippini’s work (2017): “the notion of ‘hegemonic temporality’ [is] found in a re-reading of ‘time’ in Gramsci’s work. ‘Hegemonic temporality,’ according to Filippini, is a force which prevails over other temporalities, overdetermining ‘the rules of the struggle’ (Filippini 2017, 106) while never managing to assimilate other temporalities completely” (Stubbs 2018).

6. For an exception, see Jansen (2008, 2014). Drawing on Guyer and others, Stef Jansen explores how the reconceptualization of the distant future reframes the present.

7. Increasingly, work on refugees and time has taken up this precise issue. Brun (2015) argues that there is agency in waiting. Kallio, Meier, and Häkli’s (2021) notion of radical hope is another reframing of the phenomenologies of present and future.

8. The pressure that the near future places on the present is the kind of teleological violence we described earlier. Schools are adept at producing these pressures but are certainly not the only institution to do so. In contrast, the kinds of caretaking activities we discussed in the previous chapter enable the present to be bearable.

9. Hope, in the way we use it, is fundamentally agentive. There is a good deal of debate in the literature about hope as emotional disposition or affect versus hope as a way of framing agency, action, or choice. Hope has traditionally been thought of as an affect or emotion, as in a feeling of hopefulness (Bloch et al. 1986). Building on this, Hirokazu Miyazaki (2006) describes hope as a method, a way of being that points toward an indeterminate future. Moving away from the distinction between hope as affect versus action, Jansen (2016) usefully differentiates between intransitive hope, which is both a state of being and an affective feeling of hopefulness, and transitive hope, which has an object and is oriented toward a particular end or ends. This is the difference between “being hopeful” and hoping for something specific. The intransitive form of hope is more akin to Miyazaki “hope as method” or hope as a way of being. However, when scholars talk about the unequal distribution of hope (Hage 2016; Appadurai 2004), it is not completely clear whether they are speaking about hope in its intransitive form or its transitive form. We are mostly thinking of hope in its transitive form—for example, the hope for life in another place, the hope for resettlement, the hope for policies that would allow refugee graduates to work. While we did not find that refugees had an abundance of hopefulness (intransitive), we did observe that they were actively engaged in the act of hoping for something.

10. Felix Ringel (2016) notes that “By predicting, forecasting, prophesising, conjuring, pro- and evoking, adumbrating, dreading, hoping, planning, projecting, envisioning, arranging, intending, designing, budgeting, aligning, organizing, coordinating, we attempt to subject the future content of the progression of time to our agency” (2016, 8). We note that many of these modes of “tricking” (or enacting agency over) the future are products of modernist teleology. For example, predicting and forecasting are practices that often require forms of knowledge and technology only available to elites. Meanwhile, planning, budgeting, organizing, and coordinating are all technologies of modern forms of organization, bureaucracy, and institutions. They are modalities associated with modernist teleological time. They are also the types of temporal agency that students are expected to master in the process of schooling but that refugees find will not—and cannot—bring about their desired future.

11. There is some debate on whether hope is damaging or helpful. Lauren Berlant’s (2011) notion of cruel optimism suggests that hope is damaging, as it encourages people to engage in actions that are not in their interest. Meanwhile, other scholars see hope as a critical form of agency that endows us with the imaginative and agentive capacity to bring future potentialities into the present in meaningful ways (see Bryant and Knight 2019). When we think about the function of hope in our field site, we find ourselves wanting to view it as neither a bane nor a boon but as a social fact, an unavoidable necessity. While cruel optimism forms a central component of our discussion of teleological violence and hopes invested in education were certainly damaging, we see the kinds of distant-future-oriented hopes that we are discussing in this chapter as distinct. At the same time, we do not think that hope is always rooted in things that can potentially come to pass.

12. We turn to studies of magic, in part, as an alternative form of “time tricking.” As stated in an earlier note, many of the modalities of time tricking discussed by Ringel are unavailable to refugees. We find that studies of magic, particularly those that put magic in conversation with modern institutions (Geschiere 1997; Whitehead and Finnström 2013), highlight other modalities of tricking the future. Anthropological theories of magic are fundamental to understanding how people confront unpredictable and high-stakes circumstances (Malinowski [1925] 1954), interpret the workings of power in the world, and exert agency (Geschiere 1997; West 2008; Whitehead and Finnström 2013).

13. Drawing on the broad literature on the anthropology of magic, Neal Whitehead and Sverker Finnström (2013) apply the framework of magic to modern, high-tech warfare, using it to explore an array of phenomena including drone warfare, video games, forecasting, and the role of cultural expertise in the military. We adapt and adopt their perspective on magic to suggest that processes of legal resettlement appear similarly magical.

14. For example, Peter Geschiere (1997) uses magic to make sense of politics that are profoundly disempowering, David Price (2013) and Jeffrey Sluka (2013) use it to explain drone warfare, and Roberto J. González uses it to explore military forecasting (2013).

15. Relinquishing a scholarship might also be thought of as a necessary sacrifice, part of the “global rule of magic” in which the possibility of future reward is proportional to sacrifices made (Stroeken 2013).

16. This was an urban refugee, so his orientation was toward the capital city of Ethiopia. Suffice it to say that the camps were even less desirable to live in. Indeed, after study of both urban and rural refugees, it would seem that most urban refugees felt just as unsettled as camp refugees.