Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which non-European nationals have found ways to elude border regimes as a collective political act.

Paper long abstract:

Eritreans are the third largest refugee group arriving to the European Union by boat. This tertiary wave of Eritrean refugees, is the second diasporan generation, 90% of whom are under the age of twenty-four. Since the 2000's Eritrea's young have been leaving in droves. Based on two months of fieldwork in Bologna Italy, I argue that Eritrean diasporan subjects have played a pivotal role in non-institutional, de-centralized, local responses, to the European migration crisis. This political work, rather than being inspired by an abstract altruism, is often mediated by complex personal histories of familial betrayal or abandonment. More broadly, I argue that this form of non-institutional, grassroots aid arising from within marginalized communities, forces us to re-conceptualize the nature of humanitarian work. But for Eritrean Europeans this network of non-institutional humanitarian care and aid serves to instantiate an alternate diasporan community, following in the steps of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front's success in constituting an Eritrean transnational civil society in the 1970's. According to diasporan subjects who provide assistance, the provision of non-institutional modes of humanitarian aid serve to undermine the affective hold of the People's Front for Democracy and Justice, the ruling party and offshoot of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front, for the greater Eritrean diaspora. This political work recognizes the importance of diasporan politics both for recent refugees and their chances at inclusion and integration in their receiving countries, and for the future of the Eritrean nation itself.