Family project or individual choice? Exploring agency in young Eritreans’ migration

ABSTRACT

Since the beginning of 2010s, the movement of unaccompanied minors from Eritrea has significantly increased and has become the object of international concern. This migration is often explained by media and humanitarian actors as the mechanical reaction to recent conscription campaigns by the Eritrean government. However, these explanations fail to consider that young people's mobilities emerge from a context of protracted crisis. Building on the literature on chronicity and crisis in the African context, this article examines what it means to be young in Eritrea and how it relates to the motivations for and the dynamics of youth migration from the country. Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, the article points to the active role of young migrants – even minors – escaping from contexts of protracted crisis. While analysing the structural constraints faced by Eritrean girls and boys, I first show how migration in this context is often seen as a crucial step to reaching adulthood that has significant gender differences. Then, I explore the interactions between family expectations and individual agency by analysing my informants’ mobility patterns outside Eritrea and in secondary movements towards Europe. While most available literature tends to portray young migrants’ trajectories as the result of structural circumstances or family projects, I illustrate how many of my informants often undertook their journeys without family consensus to pursue personal aspirations as well as communal values regarding moral worthiness and family well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Eritreans
• migration trajectories
• youth
• protracted crisis
• unaccompanied minors
• families
• border-crossing
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See for instance the following international news, http://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2012/3/4f6777426/fear-compulsory-recruitment-drives-eritrean-teen-flee-home.html [Accessed on 29.01.2019] or Amnesty International (2015).

2 It is important to note that the arguments presented here are based on my conversations and ethnographic research with one specific group in the ethnically and religiously diverse Eritrean society. Most of my informants were Christian (Orthodox and Catholic) Tigrinya. Some had an urban background while others came from villages. Tigrinya are the dominant ethnic group in the country and those who have engaged most in international migration to Europe. Although their experience of being young in Eritrea may be generalised to other minorities, their migration pathways do not necessarily apply to other groups which are less numerous in diaspora and have little historic and cultural exposure to international migration.

3 Following a power shift in Ethiopian politics, the newly established Ethiopian President, Dr Abyi Mohammed, has again opened the door for dialogue with the Eritrean leadership. This has led to a peace agreement and the opening of the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Moreover, UN sanctions imposed on Eritrea for their alleged support of Al-Shabaab were lifted. For more information see, for instance, the following BBC articles: ‘Ethiopia-Eritrea Border Reopens after 20 years’ (20 September 2018), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-45475876?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cen5×5l99w1t/ethiopia-and-eritrea-peace-agreement&link_location=live-reporting-story and ‘Eritrea Breakthrough as UN Sanctions Lifted’ (14 November 2018), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-46193273?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cen5×5l99w1t/ethiopia-and-eritrea-peace-agreement&link_location=live-reporting-story.

4 Here it is important to note that modernity not only results from recent global cultural circulation through media diffusion, consumption, economic and social remittances, but also from local historic processes (for a discussion on modernity, see for example Miller 1995). In the case of Eritrea, the idea of modernity has been shaped by colonial and postcolonial discourses surrounding progress, development and cleanliness (Reid 2005; Treiber 2010; Marchetti 2014).

5 In 2011, the UNHCR released a short video about Eritrean children (from 9 to 15 years old) who crossed into Ethiopia and ended up in camps. See the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiNqp82ixDA.

6 As I discussed elsewhere (Belloni 2019), my informants’ perception that Ethiopia and Sudan were unsuitable for long-term settlement was not only the result of the limited rights of refugees there (i.e. the lack of residence permits, limits on the rights of movement and work, harassment by the authorities). It also emerged from deep-rooted images, stratified communal histories and expectations shared by them and their families about the suitable final destination of a migrant journey (what I called ‘cosmologies of destinations’). These historically developed images mirror hierarchies of preferences about possible countries of settlement. European countries such as Italy and Greece are also not among those desired destinations, which are mostly Northern European countries, as well as the USA and Canada. Although there is no space here to expand on this, it is important to mention that the trajectories of young Eritreans through the Horn of Africa and Southern Europe are embedded in these imaginaries and represent some of their most concrete consequences.