Hosting States and Unsettled Guests

Book excerpt: 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.