Panel 102: Eritrea – A Country Losing Its People

Since long Eritrea has been a country in which migration has played an important role. Without doubt migration, and especially forced migration had considerably increased due to the advent of the Eritrean decolonisation movement and the long war for independence, and reached its peak in the 70s and 80s of the last century, when refugees reached Europe and oversea countries for the first time in large numbers. The end of the war in 1991 brought hope that the problem of refuge and migration could come to a halt, but these expectations proved an illusion when the second Ethiopian-Eritran war broke out in 1998.

Since then Eritrean migration has reached a new dimension: although legal paths to leave the country are practically non-existant, we can classify this new migration movement as exodus. Mostly young people accept unimaginable hardships and dangers on their way out of the country. They got stranded in South Africa, in Turkey, in Libya, Russia or other countries, sometimes it takes them years to reach their final destination, sometimes they fail. On the other hand this new generation of migrants is networking amongst each other as never before. Next to paths of migration, we may find sophisticated paths of communication, and both are subject to extremely dynamic changes.

This panel aims at regarding the facts of migration and exodus from Eritrea under various aspects, and we expect analytical contributions as well as presentations of case studies.