In the summer of 2015, over one million refugees from the Middle East and Africa entered the European Union, producing a so-called "migrant crisis." Many of the migrants originated from Eritrea, a former Italian colony whose government, ruled by a single party since 1993, has been charged with crimes against humanity. Fiori Berhane argues that the marginalized position of Eritrean refugees in Italy offers a unique perspective on important issues of our time: racial disincorporation, structural abandonment, and migrant criminalization. Berhane shows how Eritrean dissident activists engage with local, national, supranational, and transnational migration policies and politics to campaign for the rights of refugees in the face of rising nativism globally.
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Berhane's work describes the series of bureaucratic and legal binds Eritrean migrants face--what she calls a crisis of legibility. As postcolonial subjects in a society that has largely forgotten its colonial past, and as Black refugees who face racist suspicion, Eritrean activists in Italy contend with multiple registers of erasure and structural forgetting. As Berhane argues, Eritrean activists challenge core aspects of European society--its norms, political structures, and moral and political economies. By actively reframing "the crisis" in their political organizing, they make clear the colonial and racial politics that undergird the stark contradictions within the project of Western liberalism.