Refugee Protections from Below: Smuggling in the Eritrea-Ethiopia Context

Abstract

This article is an analysis of the role of human smuggling practices and of the transnational social relations of Eritrean refugees exiting and transitioning through Ethiopia. Based on two years of multisited ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how smugglers, aspiring migrants, and former migrants, settled en route and in diasporic spaces, try to minimize the risk of violence through communities of support and knowhow. In so doing, I argue that smuggling is a socially embedded collective practice that strives to facilitate safe exit and transitions of Eritrean refugees despite the criminalization of migration, the militarization of borders, and the potential and existing criminal activity along Eritrean, Sudanese, and Ethiopian migratory corridors. The facilitation of irregular transits by migrants themselves reproduces a collective system of migratory knowledge that aims to bring refugees to safety—a community of knowledge—in which smuggling emerges as a system of refugee protection from below.