Overview

As wealthy countries build literal and figurative walls to keep migrants out, Ethiopia has welcomed refugees through policies that promote local integration. But do these policies enable refugees to consider their new country home? Focusing on the experiences of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, Hosting States and Unsettled Guests tracks the introduction, implementation, and evolution of policies that began in summer 2016, shortly before the New York Summit on Refugees prompted new national refugee legislation in Ethiopia. Using ethnographic interviews and participant observation with government officials, intragovernmental organizations, NGOs, and refugees in three camps in northern Ethiopia and Addis Ababa, Jennifer Riggan and Amanda Poole explore new efforts to halt treacherous, secondary migration to Europe. In particular, they explore the concept of refugee time-making, a theoretical model to better understand precarity, and a focus on education. An important read, Hosting States and Unsettled Guests makes key empirical and theoretical contributions in forced migration studies, East African studies, and anthropology. Riggan and Poole deftly shift the focus of refugee studies away from Europe to regions in the Global South, revealing emerging forms of migration management.

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9780253067982

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Reviews

"""The book provides detailed, nuanced, and critical perspectives on some of the most important challenges of refugee life and refugee policy today: what it means to live as a refugee, how to work with host countries in the global south to ensure refugee's rights and needs are met, how to design education and economic opportunities for refugees, and how to ensure refugees' hopes and dreams for the future are not cruelly disregarded or undermined.""—Lauren Carruth, author of Love and Liberation"

"""Hosting States and Unsettled Guests unpacks the complex temporalities of migration. Temporal discombobulation begins under repressive rule in Eritrea. In Ethiopia, refugees' briefly-regained agency is lost in the face of sluggish humanitarian bureaucracy, and troubled relations with the unstable host country. In deftly documenting refugee agency, precarious journeys, and the systemic odds migrants encounter, Riggan and Poole make tremendous contributions to refugee studies and studies of the contemporary Horn of Africa.""—Awet T. Weldemichael, Queen's University-Canada, author of Author of Piracy in Somalia. ""In this exemplary ethnography, replete with vivid details and theoretical nuance, Riggan and Poole analyze how Eritrean refugees weather Ethiopia's shifting paradigms of refugee management and pursue pragmatic visions of their possible futures in a time of political and economic instability. This book is a deft and absorbing piece of anthropological and international scholarship.""—Lesley Bartlett, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Co-Editor of Humanizing Education for Refugee and Immigrant Youth ""The book provides detailed, nuanced, and critical perspectives on some of the most important challenges of refugee life and refugee policy today: what it means to live as a refugee, how to work with host countries in the global south to ensure refugee's rights and needs are met, how to design education and economic opportunities for refugees, and how to ensure refugees' hopes and dreams for the future are not cruelly disregarded or undermined.""—Lauren Carruth, author of Love and Liberation ""In a detailed ethnography that profoundly reconceptualizes time and temporality, Riggan and Poole show us the political reality and predicament of life and struggle in refugee camps in northern Ethiopia. This book is a welcome contribution to the field of forced migration studies.""—-Shahram Khosravi, author of Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran ""Through the moving stories that they collected between 2016 and 2019, Riggan and Poole's engaging ethnography traces the fate of Eritrean refugees in a very unstable Ethiopia. The authors brilliantly examine how temporality (and not just spatiality) plays key roles in understanding Eritrean refugees' everyday lives in refugee camps and urban settings in the years that led up to a devastating war. The authors unveil how Eritrean refugees inescapably experience temporal suffering and teleological violence within these structural barriers, while their present becomes ungraspable and thus unmovable.""—Sabina M. Perrino, Binghamton University, SUNY"

The book provides detailed, nuanced, and critical perspectives on some of the most important challenges of refugee life and refugee policy today: what it means to live as a refugee, how to work with host countries in the global south to ensure refugee's rights and needs are met, how to design education and economic opportunities for refugees, and how to ensure refugees' hopes and dreams for the future are not cruelly disregarded or undermined. --Lauren Carruth, author of Love and Liberation

Author Information

Jennifer Riggan is Professor of Historical and Political Studies at Arcadia University. She is author of The Struggling State: Nationalism, Mass Militarization, and the Education of Eritrea.Amanda Poole is Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

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