Gender, Forced Migration & Ontological (In)Security between Eritrea and
Tel Aviv

In a recent study published in Conflict, Security & Development (2024) and co-authored with Skyler Inman (Brandeis University), we focus on Eritrean asylum-seeking women in Southern Tel Aviv. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in homes, public spaces and the Eritrean Women's Community Center (EWCC) in southern Tel Aviv—a grassroots community-based organisation run by asylum-seeking women—we investigate their quest for ontological security in the outermost margins of the international sphere, as this quest emerges throughout the migrant route.

​

We address these Eritrean women as international actors, and demonstrate how they perform multi-sited OS-seeking work: First, in negotiating their autonomy through the decision to flee their Eritrean homeland, and in managing their genderial identity and dignity in the liminal unprotected spaces of the migrant route. Second, in Israel their OS-seeking strategies unfold continuously by creating ‘islands of being’ for their children; legally resisting their children’s educational discrimination; creating an alternative motherly protective shield through religion; and utilizing their foundational experiences of inner rupture as a motherly strategy of OS-seeking in itself.

​

The study exposes the emerging  OS-seeking strategies that thrive in the developing spaces of world politics, while shedding new light on the gendered politics of forced migration.