Preface

WHEN WE STARTED our fieldwork in 2016, the world seemed united in optimism about its capacity to address what had been termed the global refugee crisis. Even though we found many reasons to be critical of the specific policy proposals that undergirded this optimism, we still had hope. Along with many refugees and humanitarian professionals, we hoped that Ethiopia’s pledges and the Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration that followed would provide a platform to leverage even more substantive reforms in Ethiopia and beyond. For refugees in northern Ethiopia, this was not to be the case.

In spring 2020, a year after our last visit to Ethiopia, the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, effecting stringent border closures and stranding many already isolated refugee communities. But in Ethiopia, the worst was yet to come.

In November 2020, on the night of the presidential election in the United States and only days after we submitted the complete draft of this manuscript to the press, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, launched a military offensive in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia in reputed defense against a Tigrayan attack on the government’s military base in Tigray (Miller 2022; Mersie et al. 2021). This launched a brutal civil war that has decimated the Tigray region, where the majority of Eritrean refugees resided, as well as the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions. Eritrean forces have played a central and controversial role in the war.

This complex and seemingly intractable civil war stunned even the most battle-scarred of observers with its horrific levels of brutality toward civilians (including refugees) and its tactical deprivations of aid to both civilians and refugees. The Hitsats camp, where we conducted our fieldwork, was destroyed early in the war, as was the Shimelba camp. Two of our other field sites, the Mai Aini and Adi Harush camps, were on the front lines of fighting. We were unable to locate many of our interlocutors. Information blackouts made it impossible to get accurate information.

Given how much has changed and how much instability still persists, a full discussion and analysis of developments after the war began would require turning this into a very different book. For this reason, the primary scope of this book is limited to the initial years of our fieldwork: 2016 through early 2019; however, where we can, we discuss developments beyond 2019. We have also added a brief epilogue noting changes that took place after the war began. The conflict in Tigray raises serious questions about the viability of places like Ethiopia as safe places for refugees to settle long term. The case we discuss here—Ethiopia between 2016 and 2019—is important because it reinforces the need to listen to refugees’ concerns about political and policy developments. Refugees always knew that Ethiopia was an unpredictable, uncertain, and potentially unsafe place for them. This book illuminates the effects of policies, which expanded the role of hosting states in the Global South, on unsettled guests who were in search of safety and stability. The guests who appear in these pages became increasingly desperate in the wake of war. As is the case with Eritreans, safety continues to be an elusive goal for increasing numbers of displaced people. We believe that makes this book more relevant than ever.