In the following author interview, Fiori Berhane reflects on what she calls the “paradox of humanitarian recognition” among the Eritrean community she works with in Italy. In her accompanying article, Berhane shows how Eritreans, despite their extremely high protection rates in the global North, nonetheless face detention, exploitation, and criminalization at the confluence of anti-migrant policies and anti-Blackness. In this interview (which was recorded on Zoom and then condensed and edited for clarity), Berhane elaborates on the temporal, spatial, and political dimensions of refugeehood that extend beyond the moment of recognition, and she stresses the importance of understanding and relating to her migrant interlocutors as situated political actors with their own lived contexts, histories, and communities of solidarity and care. This interview was conducted in September 2024.

Sharon Jacobs [SJ]: So, I want to start off with a really broad question. Why, in this article, do you talk about refugee recognition as a “paradox” for the Eritrean people that you’re working with?

Fiori Berhane [FB]: I started my fieldwork in summer 2015 when the “migration” crisis hit. In 2013—October 3—the Lampedusa sinking [had] occurred, and most of those who died were Eritrean. After the sinking and after the summer of migration crisis, for Eritrean activists, the question of Eritrea, its political problems, and the suffering of people trying to migrate became incredibly visible. [In 2015] the UN [United Nations] Rapporteur published a report about the state of human rights in Eritrea. Although UN representatives couldn’t enter the country, the Rapporteur concluded that the Eritrean regime may be guilty of crimes against humanity. Activists and regular people saw this as the first time in which Eritreans were visible as a group of people. And many activists believed that maybe this will change European policies towards Eritrea—which at that point were disengagement and some official censure, but nothing beyond that—and also, many activists believed that this would change political understandings within the [Eritrean] diaspora.

But by the time I left fieldwork in 2018, it was the complete opposite. The October 3 sinking actually created the Khartoum Process¹, which is a multi-lateral framework for addressing human trafficking from the Horn but has been responsible for increasing repression towards Eritrean refugees. And soon after 2015, Eritrea started getting more development aid from the European Union (EU). After I returned in 2017 for long term fieldwork, I saw fewer and fewer people coming across the Mediterranean. At that point my interlocutors were dealing with the fallout from the deals with Libya², with people who were calling them in desperation who were held in indefinite detention there.

The political situation had radically shifted in a very short period of time. But at the same time, refugee recognition rates didn’t decrease. Eritreans were still considered refugees. I wanted to account for these dramatic shifts in policy that happened within, really, maybe a three-year timespan. That was the kind of broader historical juncture that I was grappling with.

SJ: You’re in a sense responding to scholars who’ve written about how legal exclusion leads to political and social exclusion for people who aren’t able to win asylum, and scholars who’ve spoken about the exceptionalization of the figure of the refugee. What you’re talking about in this article is something really different: It’s, actually, the act of being recognized as a refugee itself; it’s actually the fact that Eritrea has such high recognition rates, that then creates problems for people from Eritrea down the line.

This is partly a facet of the Eritrean case, specifically. But it’s also broader. One of the things you talk about is the Dublin procedure, where people should apply for asylum in the first European country of arrival, and if they try to apply somewhere else, they are sent back. So that, paradoxically, arriving in Europe becomes in itself a sort of barrier. So, how specific is your understanding of refugee recognition as paradoxical?

FB: Part of the point that I was trying to make is that there is specificity to the Eritrean example, but what I’m grappling with is the way in which we conceptualize the category [refugee] itself is delimited to time and space. What happens before, temporally, in their lives, politically, historically, spatially—where do refugees have to cross, and then what happens after the dramatic moment of rescue? I’m seeing asylum seeking itself as a historical and social process. When we look at it that way, how the category is actually lived and practiced, and how what recognition means depends on the politics of distinct sites, you see that the category itself is a much more contentious, malleable, and an unfixed category.

Refugee recognition itself—it matters. Granted, the activists I’m working with are not being held in detention. Many of them have refugee recognition. But if you think about it in terms of intergroup dynamics, [refugee recognition is] not the kind of panacea that we assume that it is. In practice, there’s a whole world in which what it means to be a refugee takes place.

I’m trying to think about the category in terms of its lived dimensions, and then in terms of its political salience for Eritreans. More importantly, I wanted to account for how Europe is responding to refugees. There is the liberal desire, the humane desire, to welcome. But at the same time there are deeply racialized structures in place. And these are, especially for Eritreans, kind of butting heads.

SJ: Thank you for that. And I did want to ask you also, specifically about the tension in the intersections between refugeehood and anti-Black racism. What does anti-Blackness means in this field?

FB: If you look at recognition rates by nationality, most people of African descent have much lower recognition rates than even the general recognition rate in the EU. For example, Gambians coming to Italy—Gambians also live with a very authoritarian regime—their recognition rates are like 28%³. In some ways, Eritreans come out as an exception to this. Eritreans, historically, have also had high recognition rates, beginning in the 1980s, when the thirty-year nationalist war between Eritrea and Ethiopia took place. For me, there was something perplexing and confounding about the Eritrean situation, because ostensibly, on paper at least, Eritreans weren’t experiencing the kind of anti-Blackness that inheres in the refugee regime, which focuses on illegalization. How do I explain, nevertheless, the fact that these people are facing these obstacles, injustices, etcetera, despite their extraordinarily high refugee recognition rates?

One of the places where I saw that anti-Blackness was most pronounced was in what happens in Libya. Libya since 2011—since the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] intervention—has fragmented. Even USAID [the United States Agency for International Development] wrote a report about how anti-Black and anti-migrant exploitation actually power the entire Libyan economy, because of the devastation the Libya state has experienced in the aftermath of the NATO intervention.⁴ So here are, in some ways, this group of people that evade the structural anti-Blackness that inheres in refugee recognition rates—in which, most of the time, Black people are illegalized. And yet, I see the ways in which anti-Blackness is expressed through extra-legal mechanisms to keep people out—including the Khartoum process, the deals with the Libyan authorities….

[Anti-Blackness for Eritreans is] not necessarily about the particular moment in which recognition happens, when one enters Europe. It’s about the moments that precede it, within Libya. And the ways in which, by displacing violence, and by extra-territorializing borders, European governments are attempting to displace legal responsibility for refugees, both in protecting refugees and in being a party to the violence refugees experience in transit. In casting externalization as a war on smuggling—and Italy has used existing anti-mafia legal mechanisms to enlarge the jurisdiction of the state’s policing powers—Italian and EU authorities were able to expand the jurisdiction for migration policing. You have a situation here where with policing there’s no limits to jurisdiction, whereas rights are so limited jurisdictionally. I was left with these conundrums to make sense of.

I saw that push towards the extraterritorial as part of a logic of anti-Blackness that still preserved some appearance of the rule of law, in terms of, the fact that Eritreans are still recognized as refugees. But there’s all this violence that happens elsewhere—and European leaders’ response is “we’re not responsible for that.” Anti-Blackness was central to the logic of extra-territorialization.

SJ: Another thing you talk about in the article involves kidnapping and being held hostage for ransom, which affect Eritreans especially. And that also struck me as a combination—something that may not happen as much if the recognition rates weren’t so high, but also is tied to anti-Black racism. And in the article you connect it with dehumanization, that certain kinds of violence are excusable on certain kinds of bodies.

FB: Yes. There was a Nation article where Eritreans were held in these makeshift detention sites, and Libyans call them “dollars and euros.”⁵ There are situated histories even within these sites of abjection. Extortionists know that Eritreans are exploitable, not only because they’re Black, but because, by being refugees over generations, they’re also relatively well off. Extortion was possible because of the paradox Eritreans experienced: Being “blessed” as refugees and being cursed with having to transit through Libya as Black people. These dynamics are occurring at once to create this particular kind of violence. It’s only excusable because the dehumanization of Black people goes unchecked, but at the same time kidnapping and extortion betray the logic of economic exploitation. Those are all kind of coming to a head in the example of kidnapping and ransoming.

SJ: Yes, it strikes me as a really specific conjuncture of different forms of exclusion and racial hierarchy-making. Do you see the paradox of recognition as something that is inherent to liberalism, to the political order that we live in? Or do you think that’s something that’s occurring at a particular historical conjecture, as we’re seeing European governments moving to the right?

FB: That’s a great question. I think, even the deals with Libya—some of [my interlocutors] were responsible for making sure that these secret deals became public knowledge. And at the end of 2023, the Italian supreme court ruled that they were illegal. Does that mean that they have in practice stopped? I don’t think so, at this moment, yet. I think that we are in—I’m going to use Gramsci—in the interregnum⁶. That we are in this moment in which, migration deterrence and the politics around it aren’t necessarily embedded in just the logics of liberalism. I think that the politics of migration deterrence shows us that we are moving into some other kind of political formation.

The liberal period around migration policies, characterized by refugee resettlement policies, was, for many Eritrean refugees, exemplified by the 1980’s and 1990’s when many arrived to Europe and the United States. That early generation of refugees nevertheless lived difficult lives, they too experienced racism, but they had—I think this is common within the community—people had some protections and didn’t experience the level of predation and criminalization recent refugees do. These systems—even though they were exclusionary in some ways—they worked for many Eritrean refugees at the time. People believed, and many activists continue to do so, in a notion of human rights, and used the language of the rule of law.

Now, we know in our etic understanding as anthropologists, that this is only partly the case with liberalism, that liberalism has to self-avow its own violence through legal reasoning. But I think that this [today] is a particular moment of “might makes right,” and a moment of structural and institutionalized impunity, in which some of these post-World War II structures—international structures that had legitimacy, that could exercise some restraint—are losing their legitimacy, their ability to restrain, even, the powerful. And I think that, then, the story of Eritreans is no different from many other groups that are experiencing this context of institutionalized and globalized impunity.

My interlocutors are very aware of the structures that they face—the criminalization, they know what’s happening in Libya, they’ve experienced it themselves, they document what’s happening. I mean, this is part of what motivates them and keeps them going. They understand the political juncture that we’re in. But I also find that they persist. And that persistence gives a kind of meaning to what they’ve experienced. It creates solidarity. They strive to create structures of accountability. They help one another.

I do try to end in those discussions with centering their own insights on this disordered world. And part of my impetus is to see them not as—I often think that, in our literature, the “migrant” comes as this figure that just stands against or outside of state power. But instead I understand my interlocutors as historically situated political actors, and they’re acting within the kind of constraints that they find. They’re still very much alive, and people: people struggling against a system that produces these horrific effects. It is nevertheless a difficult and depressing situation. But other parts of my writing look at quotidian solidarity and care, and how deeply important that is, even across scales, as the Libyan example shows.

One of my interlocutors would receive call after call from Libya, just telling people trapped in indefinite detention there to stay hopeful. He would also coordinate care with Doctors Without Borders. So even that kind of work can counter that abandonment and dehumanization refugees in Libya experience, which I think is very important, because people do survive. And they do find a way to make a life against these systems that are stacked against them.

SJ: I think an important part of what you’re saying involves viewing people as—not migrant-qua-migrant, or refugee-qua-refugee, if that makes sense—but that people’s lives expand beyond these categories. When you talk about quotidian practices of solidarity, that’s where my mind is going. In this article, as well, we see people who have really different stances about the political order they’re ensconced in, who are talking with each other and expressing different positions. You can see that people’s lives are richer than simply responding to an order, reacting against something.

I find it exhausting to write about this situation that people are finding themselves in in Europe today, when there is such, not just disorder and chaos, but active persecution. What keeps you going as a researcher, and also as a person, continuing to engage with people who are really struggling?

FB: Everybody asks me that question! My sister gets overwhelmed, and then she sees me working on, she says, brutally difficult things, but marvels at the fact that I remain cheerful. She thinks my reaction makes no sense. But I think about my work in terms of my social and political responsibility. I find that turning away can be a form of privilege; my interlocutors were really forcing me to look.

In the beginning of my research, two of my interlocutors debated what I would find in field research—one of them surmised that no one was going to talk to me. And my other interlocutor emphasized that I was engaging the difficult stuff, like migrant smuggling and trafficking. The one who believed no one would speak to me became very upset, and he responded, “She has to face it.” He continued by saying, “Everyone here is somehow entangled in smuggling or trafficking.” Which isn’t to say that Eritreans are smugglers or traffickers, as the prosecutions of Eritreans in Italy portray. But that this discourse that blames smugglers for migrant deaths, and the people transiting, embroils community members within this nexus of criminality or criminalization. In helping family members cross, individuals do have to engage, at times, with criminal actors to get your family a ransom, etcetera—to ensure their family members’ safety.

It was an interesting point, for me, that as an anthropologist I learned to face the totality of people’s experiences. It’s not just that my interlocutors are victims. They’re also agents. They’re also very funny, engaged people. They have lives, they have histories. I think it’s the commitment in the day-to-day with the people that I worked with that gets me through writing about these difficult topics.

There’s a way in which, as a fieldworker, you do get transformed as a person. And in that transformation, I think that wider structural transformation is possible. Fieldwork helped me to look at difficult things without despair, and without learned helplessness. And I think that something that we need to cultivate is to look, but not in despair, in confronting the poly-crisis that we’re in, with an awareness of the kind of stakes, and the kind of backlash one can face.

I think about this in terms of looking towards, without that move towards innocence. Innocence is a posture of power—you can look to Gloria Wecker’s work⁷. That kind of structural ignorance, that, “oh, woe is me,” is not going to change the world. Changing the world requires that we face the world as it is and find ways to move beyond the impasses and the taken-for-granteds that we hold.

In general, when I think about the refugee regime—and its historical constitution has been on exclusion—there’s the geographic exclusion⁸, there’s always been exclusions within this category of exception. I think to myself, what kinds of forms, what kind of world can we create in which vulnerable people find justice and safety. And in doing so that would mean all our safety in the world. It would mean thinking against imperialism and authoritarianism together

Notes

1 Part of the EU’s efforts to externalize migration control, the Khartoum Process is a joint effort between the EU and African Union.

2 The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Migration was signed between Italy (with EU support) and Libya in 2017, and renewed in 2020. Under the MoU, the EU provides financial and technical support to the Libyan coastguard to help it prevent people from crossing the Mediterranean. Abuse and exploitation have been widely documented among those intercepted and detained in Libya (MSF 2022).

3 According to the Migration Policy Institute, the average asylum recognition rate for citizens of the Gambia in 2017 was 22.6%, compared to 46.4% for nationals of all countries (MPI)

4 Romanet Perroux 2020

5 Tubiana 2019

6 In ancient Rome, the habitual period in between the rule of one sovereign and the next, when the legal order could be temporarily suspended. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci uses “interregnum” to refer to extraordinary situations of transition, in which “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.”

7 Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

8 The original Geneva Convention, ratified in 1951, effectively applied only to European asylum seekers.