Introduction

According to a report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published in 2018, more than 244 million people across the world live in countries other than their country of birth; indeed, by the end of 2016, over 22.5 million people were refugees (IOM 2018). The same IOM report indicates that 16 million Africans live in other African countries, with another 16 million living outside of the continent altogether. Nonetheless, in recent years migration from sub-Saharan Africa has attracted increasing attention from scholars and European and African policymakers alike, focusing on the flow of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

The international migration of Ethiopians is not a recent phenomenon at all. But Ethiopian mass migration has become more prevalent in recent decades. The complex political and security situation in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution and the protracted conflict that followed (domestically and internationally) serve as a critical juncture in Ethiopian migration (Semela and Cochrane 2019). At this time, political dissidents and the intelligentsia sought opportunities and took refuge elsewhere, while ordinary people who opposed the Derg military regime (1974–91) fled persecution and reprisal. In the later stages of the Derg regime, new insecurities emerged (both physical and political), resulting in waves of migration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including after that regime had been toppled (Estifanos n.d.). The past two decades have witnessed a growing stream of people moving from the countries in the Horn of Africa—especially Ethiopia—through Sudan and Libya or other alternative routes, and into Europe. Even though a huge number of lives are lost along the way, migrants are still determined “to try their chances” in the face of very real, existential threats.

The literature on migration largely focuses on discovering why migrants originating from developing countries want to travel to developed nations. Reasons include structural differences in labor, income, capital, and more between regions and rational decision-making, whereby individuals decide to move to regions with less intense labor and high wages (Arango 2000, 285; Jennissen 2007, 413). On the one hand, this individual decision-making can be seen on a household level, that is, as a means of diversifying risk (Massey et al. 1993, 439; while, on the other hand, the concept of migration networks might give us a more universal picture, whereby networks themselves spread and fuel further migration (ibid., 448).