Intensifications of Border Governance and Defiant Migration Trajectories in Ethiopia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article unpacks how state-led borderwork from above is dynamically and creatively negotiated and navigated from below by migrants and smugglers. It identifies certain everyday borderwork assemblages and describes the struggles that produce social and material infrastructure and geographical reconfigurations of mobility. The empirical material presented in this study is drawn from legal and policy reviews, life-story interviews with return migrants and key informant interviews with refugees, smugglers and migration-governing actors. In the Horn of Africa in recent years, Ethiopia has become a major sending and transit country of migrants and asylum-seekers. This development has generated both internal political challenges, as well as ΕU pressure on the Ethiopian government to introduce legislative and organisational structures to control clandestine migratory exits from and refugee transitions through Ethiopia. In exchange, the EU extends various promises to provide, for example, development aid and economic cooperation. However, the external pressure calling for stricter border controls and Ethiopia’s tighter migration laws have not stopped clandestine migration and refugee transits, nor have they facilitated safe and orderly migration, as promised. The article argues that migrants, their families and brokers continuously struggle and develop new strategies to redirect and spatially reconfigure migratory departures, despite the new restrictions. These are manifested in Ethiopia by the emergence of dynamic forms of clandestine migration pathways and complex smuggling arrangements facilitating migration to the Middle East and southern Africa.