ABSTRACT
In September 2018, the long-conflicted border between Ethiopia and Eritrea opened for the first time in 20 years. Friends and family embraced in emotional reunions, while Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed met at newly opened border crossings to celebrate the reconfigured border as ‘a frontier of peace and friendship’. These celebrations, however, ignored the fact that border crossings were not a new phenomenon. Both Eritrea and Ethiopia have selectively managed porous borders, forming, over the past 20 years, two distinct, innovative political strategies that have existed in an oppositional relationship with each other. While Eritrea has enforced militarized borders to contain its population, Ethiopia has encouraged flows of people across borders, in part through its standing as one of the largest refugee-hosting countries in the world. Drawing from ethnographic research on refugee policy and the care of Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia, this chapter explores the local, national, and global politics that have emerged around the management of mobility on the Eritrean-Ethiopian border since Eritrean independence from Ethiopia in 1993 and reflects on the implications of renewed regional conflict for the safety and stability of people caught between nations.
