The Big Gamble The Migration of Eritreans To Europe Milena Belloni Digital Version 2025
The Big Gamble The Migration of Eritreans To Europe Milena Belloni Digital Version 2025
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SOCIOLOGY | ANTHROPOLOGY
belloni
Tens of thousands of Eritreans make perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediter-
ranean Sea every year. Why do they risk their lives to reach European countries where
so many more hardships await them? By visiting family homes in Eritrea and living with
refugees in camps and urban peripheries across Ethiopia, Sudan, and Italy, Milena
|
Belloni untangles the reasons behind one of the most under-researched refugee pop-
“Milena Belloni’s engrossing ethnography—carried out across time, space, and place—
is particularly commendable because of her scholarly commitment to ‘getting things
right.’ The Eritrean women and men whose lives provided its empirical ground will see
their pain, joy, and contradictions reflected back at them. This is scholar activism at
its finest.” LAURA BISAILLON, Professor of Health and Society, University of Toronto
Scarborough
“The Big Gamble is a study of a migrant group that has received very little scholarly
attention. Its focus on the Eritrea to Europe corridor is a novel approach, and Milena
Belloni has produced a compelling and courageous account.” PETER KIVISTO,
“A monumental and perceptive story of migration, taking the reader on a journey not
just from Africa to Europe but through reflections on moralities, risk, and trust that are
central to contemporary mobility and immobility. Belloni’s account of Eritrean migra-
tion experiences is powered by formidable fieldwork and written with warmth and
wisdom.” JØRGEN CARLING, Peace Research Institute Oslo
Milena Belloni
28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C onte nts
Acknowledgments vii
List of Protagonists ix
Introduction 1
1. When Migration Becomes the Norm: Ingredients of an Ordinary Crisis 25
2. Hypermobile and Immobile: Diverse Responses to Protracted
Displacement in Ethiopia and Sudan 50
3. An Endless Journey: Transnational and Peer Pressure in Onward
Migration in Europe 79
4. Moralities of Border Crossing: Inside the World of Smuggling and
Transnational Marriages 101
5. Entrapped: Making Sense of High-Risk Migration through Gambling 125
Conclusion 137
Postscript 145
This work would have not been possible without the help and care of my Eritrean
informants, whose real names have been changed to protect their safety. They are
the protagonists and the soul of this book. Among them I would like to mention
my friends Violetta, Johanna, Lwam, Alazar, Adonay, Gabriel, Esther, Saba, Baba,
Gebreyesus, Samuel, Michael, Paolos, Noah and his Kunama family, Maria, Sister
Kudussan, and Sister Lethe Brahne and the nuns of her congregation, whose work
is of immense relief to many. It is to all of them that I dedicate this book.
I am obliged to Ambassador Renzo Rosso for providing me with institutional
support while doing fieldwork in Ethiopia, and to Dr. Fekadu Adugna and the
Department of Anthropology of Addis Ababa University for facilitating my local
academic affiliation. I am also deeply indebted to Martina Messa, who welcomed me
in Asmara, Ernesto Molinari and his family in Addis Ababa for their support during
the initial phases of my stay in Addis Ababa, and to Khaled Mohamed for facilitat-
ing my entering Sudan. I owe a special thanks to Ephrem Tadesse for his logistical
support in Shire and to Mohand Hassan Fadeel for his priceless help in Khartoum.
The writing process has been long and strenuous and would have not been pos-
sible without the encouragement of my family and friends. But money also helps,
and I am indebted to the American Academy in Rome for awarding me with the
Italian Fellowship in Modern Italian Studies and providing me with the perfect envi-
ronment and means to complete the first draft of the book. I am especially grateful
to Eric Cazdyn for pushing me to get to the core of the ideas that inspire this book.
At the University of Trento, I would like to thank Paolo Boccagni for his patient
comments and Giuseppe Sciortino for his wise jokes, which made my doctoral
time much more inspiring. Finally, I would also like to thank Jørgen Carling, Nauja
Kleist, Michael Collyer and Anna Triandafyllidou, who encouraged me to turn my
thesis into a book, and the anonymous reviewers who critically assessed it.
vii
Protagonists
It was 2016. Surrounded by the perpetual noise and relentless coming and going
of Termini Station in Rome, my friend Alazar and I were drinking coffee at our
usual meeting point.
“My brother is saying that I should join him in Canada . . . ,” Alazar said.
“How is that possible?” I answered, surprised.
“My brother said not to worry . . . that he will find a way for me,” Alazar replied
quietly.
Alazar, whom I have known since he sought asylum in Italy in 2008, had finally
found a job in a local restaurant and seemed to be feeling quite at home in Rome.
After surviving a war when he was only eighteen, enduring a troublesome Medi-
terranean crossing, and spending a few years of unstable existence between Italy
and the few countries in which he had sought asylum afterwards, Alazar had
finally found some stability, I thought. He had a full international protection, a
lot of friends and spoke some Italian. Apparently, however, he was not yet at his
final destination as far as his relatives were concerned. Life was not easy for Alazar
and many of the other Eritrean refugees I knew in the city. They often lived in
poor housing and had few, irregular jobs. But I nonetheless had trouble under-
standing how Alazar’s brother could even think that moving to Canada, probably
through an incredibly dangerous and expensive crossing of the Mexico-U.S. and
then the U.S.-Canada borders, could be a good idea. Why gamble resources, time
and energy again for an unsure outcome?
Such situations were not new to me. The restless search for a suitable final
home in spite of all obstacles characterized the trajectories of most of the Eritre-
ans I met during my research across Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Italy. The
dream of fulfilling family expectations and finding not only a safe haven but some
1
2 Introduction
M O D E R N C O SM O L O G I E S
Since starting to work with Eritreans in 2008, I have come to realize how the
desired outcomes of their migration trajectories are patterned along a geographic
hierarchy, with Canada, the United States, and the Scandinavian countries at the
top and Eritrea at the bottom. In the middle, countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, and
even Italy were perceived only as transit places, unsuitable for long-term settle-
ment. Although individual preferences, family connections, rumors about recent
policy changes, and other contingent circumstances could orient choices of a final
destination—“Is it better to go to Sweden, Norway, or Switzerland?”—Eritrean
refugees I encountered seemed to share common perceptions about the levels of
safety, individual freedom, and labor market opportunities in different countries
both among themselves and with their relatives around the globe. Far from being
simply a configuration of geographic imaginaries, this hierarchy—which I define
as a cosmology of destinations—also reflects a pathway of moral achievements
and recognitions. Migrants’ journeys are constructed as more or less successful,
depending on the final country of settlement.
In anthropology, cosmologies are conventionally defined as widespread repre-
sentations of the world as a hierarchically ordered whole.1 Traditionally pertaining
to the vocabulary of religion studies, cosmologies have progressively come to refer
more generally to systems of classification and their related moral and emotional
attitudes. Although for a time, this concept has been regarded as an outdated and
ethnocentric notion, it is nevertheless an important heuristic tool for linking rep-
resentations of reality with perceptions of morality and prescribed actions.2 The
concept of cosmologies has recently been used, for instance, to talk about social
security conceptions in South Africa (“cosmologies of welfare”),3 to refer to the
capitalist system and its encompassing narrative,4 and to denote the system of reli-
gious values underpinning the economic transactions involved in irregular migra-
tion from Fouzhou in China (“cosmologies of credit”).5 Cosmologies are crucial
in Liisa Malkki’s Purity and Exile, a founding text in refugee studies. Malkki illus-
trates how the mythico-historical reinterpretation of the Burundian genocide—a
cosmology in its own right—shaped refugees’ understanding of daily life in the
camps and oriented their interactions with locals. Hutu refugees regarded inter-
marriage with locals and residence outside the camp, in particular, as threats to
the purity of their identity.6
Whereas Malkki’s Purity and Exile examines the cosmological beliefs of a lim-
ited number of refugees living in a confined camp, The Big Gamble aims to make
sense of transnationally diffused worldviews among migrants in transit, their
families back home, and their relatives and friends in the diaspora. Their views
emerge not only from a national history of the Eritrean people as colonial subjects,
war martyrs, and sacrificial migrants, but also from the wider effects of global
cultural circulation on local cultures of migration, imaginaries and aspirations.
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