Building one's own house: power and escape for Ethiopian women through international migration

Abstract

This study uses ethnography along Ethiopian women's irregular migration routes through Djibouti to analyse the complex reasons women leave home to seek labour opportunities in the Gulf States. Theories and policies that either narrowly depict women's motivations as economic in nature or focus only on women's needs for security and protection, fail to account both for the politics of seeking employment abroad, and the ways migration provides women a potential refuge from various forms of violence at home. Using a feminist analysis, we argue that women do not migrate only for financial opportunities, but also to escape combinations of domestic, political and structural violence. As such, irregular migration both evinces a failure of asylum systems and humanitarian organisations to protect Ethiopians, and a failure of the state to provide Ethiopian women meaningful citizenship. Lacking both protection and meaningful citizenship, international migration represents women's journeys for opportunity and emancipation.

African Perspectives on South–South Migration

“…While there has been some critical work to challenge the passivity of migrants in their subjectivity to smugglers or traffickers by scholars (Raineri 2018;Belloni 2019;Zeleke 2019;Carruth & Smith 2022), the practitioner and policy literature, and especially the popular media portrayal of migrants in the Global South continues to suggest that their agency is so severely limited that migrants are often in need of rescue (IOM 2020). New research ought to simultaneously engage with the demand and supply side of migration brokerage and the various intermediaries that enable the translation of aspiration into capability, making migration a reality and understand the different mechanisms migrants use to overcome the challenges they face and their different pathways of incorporation at the place of destinations and transit within Africa.…”

“…Such a broader conceptualization of a migrant and migration deviates from the simplistic binaries of forced versus voluntary, refugee versus economic migrant, etc. Such an approach involves a form of 'categorical fetishism' (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018;Hamlin 2021;Carruth & Smith 2022). Hence, this volume presents cases drawn from empirical studies addressing the lived experiences of African migrants from different walks of life and migration experiences and identities, ranging from skilled and unskilled labor migrants to refugees and others forcibly displaced as reflected in the contributions.…”