Conflict, gender and ontological security-seeking between Eritrea and Tel Aviv

ABSTRACT

The proliferating research in ontological security (OS) studies explores how irregular situations of ‘radical disjuncture’ remove the protective cocoon of routinised trust relations that enables the actors to ‘bracket out’ daily threats and dangers. Following this loss of trust, the actors perform a variety of OS-seeking strategies in their attempts to re-establish their lost trust in themselves and their surroundings. But how do disempowered actors in global politics, who suffer multiple marginalities and flee states that turn against their own citizens, seek ontological security (OS)? Focusing on Eritrean asylum-seeking women in southern Tel-Aviv, we rely on ‘thick’ ethnographic data to demonstrate how even when statist violence is the norm, the quest for OS persists in unexpected ways. Adding new insight to the growing research on trust and OS in international relations (IR) and security studies, the article exposes the multiple emerging OS-seeking strategies that thrive in the developing spaces of global politics, while shedding new light on the gendered politics of migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Ontological security
• conflict
• gender
• development
• multiple marginalities
• asylum seekers

Introduction

In recent years, a growing number of works in international relations (IR) and security studies focus on trust as a foundational element of ontological security (OS).¹ Drawing on Giddens,² these studies explore how irregular situations of ‘radical disjuncture’ – such as Brexit, environmental emergencies, economic crisis, war, or forced migration – remove the protective cocoon of routinised trust relations that enables the actors to ‘bracket out’ the daily threats and dangers implied by ‘the very business of living’.³ As a result, these critical situations unleash the actors’ anxiety, cause their loss of agency and challenge their fundamental ability to ‘go on’.⁴ Following this loss of trust, the actors then perform a variety of OS-seeking strategies in their attempts to re-establish their lost trust in themselves and their surroundings.⁵

Adding to this growing body of works, we explore what OS-seeking looks like in situations where OS, rather than being ‘lost’, was never fully established to begin with. Taking as our starting point the premise that OS is neither absolute nor ever fully attainable, we investigate how the on-going quest for OS is played out by people who originate in states that do not supply, and often actively destroy, even the minimal benevolent holding environment which enables the establishment of Giddens’ cocoon of trust relations.⁶ These people live in endemic uncertainty under statist violence from early childhood, unable to predict when and how this violence will be used against them. Such actors often experience multiple marginalities – genderial, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, political and legal.

For this purpose, we rely on extensive fieldwork among Eritrean Tigrinya asylum-seeking women in southern Tel-Aviv in 2020–2021. Addressing these women as international actors, we track their diverse OS-seeking strategies as these emerge throughout the migrant route. These women grew up during the latter part of the thirty-year war waged by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) for independence from Ethiopia. They came of age under President Isaias Afwerki’s People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), the EPLF’s political successor. The PFDJ’s policy of indefinite military conscription since 2002 has caused the militarisation of Eritrean society, elicited large flows of out-migration to various destinations in the diaspora,⁷ and – alongside the effects of the protracted Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict – has been a continuous source of threat and instability in these women’s lives.

Additionally, as demonstrated by Hirt and Mohammed, this repressive political regime stands sharply opposed to local traditional norms of family and religious life in Eritrea, as it forces conscripts to leave their families and prevents them from providing for them financially. These political and structural circumstances broke the women’s families apart, created chronic economic deprivation, and eventually pushed them to flee their homeland in search of shelter.⁸

Indeed, some ethnic groups in Eritrea (such as the Kunama, Nara and Saho), which do not belong to the dominant ethnic, religious, and cultural Tigrinya group, suffer more extreme forms of marginalisation in Eritrea. However, the decision of these women to flee their homeland positioned them in a particularly vulnerable situation. First, since in the unprotected spaces of the migrant route, along the Sudanese and Sinai deserts, these women asylum seekers were exposed to physical, sexual and other forms of violence. Second, since they were marginalised in the Israeli host state.

Between 2006 and 2012, more than 30,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers arrived in Israel, from which approximately 7,000 were women. This community has shrunk, however, throughout the years, and currently consists of some 5,000 women asylum-seekers residing in Israel. Those who survived the harsh journey, then encountered discriminatory statist policies and educational segregation, raising their children in Israel under the continuous threat of deportation. This case, in which statist oppression is the norm and multiple intersecting marginalities are salient, thus provides a crystallised view of how OS is sought when the state does not supply, and actively destroys, even the minimal benevolent holding environment which enables the establishment of Giddens’ cocoon of trust relations.

The article consists of four sections. We begin by discussing the study’s contribution to the growing literature on trust in OS studies, highlighting the need to refocus scholarly attention on how the quest for OS emerges in the outermost margins of the international sphere. Rather than focusing on states, elites, and other powerful actors in global politics, we offer an approach that tracks the OS-seeking strategies of disempowered actors (e.g. women asylum seekers), who suffer multiple intersecting forms of marginalisation and discrimination. We then present the case of Eritrean asylum-seeking women in southern Tel-Aviv, discussing the context, method and scope of this study.

The third and major section of the article draws on ethnographic data to explore the multi-sited OS-seeking work these women perform: (1) negotiating their autonomy as young girls versus their own mothers, maternal lineages and home communities in the homeland; (2) navigating their genderial identity and dignity in the unprotected liminal spaces of the migrant route; and (3) struggling to safeguard the well-being of their offspring vis-à-vis the host state’s marginalising policies.

The findings reveal how even when statist violence is the norm, the quest for OS persists in unexpected ways. We track the foundational fracture the interviewees experienced in their relations with their environments from a very young age in their Eritrean homeland and throughout their process of migration, as they continuously seek the motherly holding environment they never had on both the individual and statist level. However, the findings also expose how they simultaneously use their positionality as women and mothers to carve out unexpected venues of OS-seeking throughout the process of migration and in the Israeli host state.

We conclude with a broader appraisal of the article’s contribution to the study of OS in international relations (IR) and security studies. By using ethnographic data gathered in the field, the article sheds new light on the gendered politics of migration, demonstrating how gendered and motherly identities can serve as sources of agency and OS-generation and regeneration in the conflicted developing spaces of global politics.

A cocoon of trust relations? Conflict, gender and ontological security-seeking in the developing spaces of global politics

Trust as a foundation of ontological security

Ontological security (OS) is a conceptual lens in IR and security studies which, building on RD Laing,⁹ Anthony Giddens,¹⁰ and a proliferating body of more recent studies,¹¹ investigates the ‘security of being’ as opposed to physical security. According to this lens, in a globalising modern world in which uncertainty lurks, humans strive to maintain a sense of themselves as whole, continuous persons with a stable sense of being and self-identity anchored in time and space. This foundational sense of being in the world – i.e. ontological security – is achieved via routinised relations of trust with others which enable a sense of biographical continuity.

Several foundational dimensions of OS thus derive from the Laing-Giddens framework.¹² The first is the individual’s sense of biographical continuity: ‘a coherent biographical story shared with others through everyday routine’. A second is self-integrity: the individual’s continuous ‘“reflexive monitoring” of what is appropriate and acceptable’.¹³ A third constitutive element of OS, which draws particularly on Laing’s The Divided Self,¹⁴ is that of dread. Laing conceived the ontologically insecure person, whose self disintegrates into its constituent elements, as experiencing ‘three forms of anxiety – engulfment, implosion and petrification’. These are ‘expressions of a deep-seated dread, in the Kierkegaardian sense, of the chaos and uncertainty that lie underneath our day-to-day life’. As Giddens¹⁵ later framed it, this type of all-encompassing dread ‘refers to the “prospect of being overwhelmed by anxieties that reach the very roots of our coherent sense of being in the world”’.¹⁶

For Giddens,¹⁷ however, in the version of OS that later took root in the social sciences, it is ‘the fourth element of trust in other people’¹⁸ – achieved in infancy and evolving throughout life – that serves as the most vital constitutive element of OS. Drawing on Erikson,¹⁹ Giddens argues that if parents are reliable and nurturing caretakers during the first year of their infant’s life, then their infants will ‘view the world as fair and dependable’ and ‘adopt a trusting orientation towards other people’.²⁰

Additionally, Winnicott’s²¹ notion of the infant’s primitive sense of trust most clearly captures Giddens’ view of trust as the foundation for OS. This trust is ‘achieved through recognition by the other, evolving via the attachment figure’s continuous reflection and mirroring’.²² Winnicott addresses ‘the infant’s experience of “being seen” through the mother’s face, and the mirror role of her face/gaze in the child’s development of selfhood’. The infant, who Winnicott conceives as ‘being constantly “on the brink of unthinkable anxiety”, uses this gaze to learn to manage anxiety, constantly articulating the boundaries of the self against this gaze within the “holding environment” created by the mother’.²³ This holding environment requires the mother to be attuned empathically to the needs of the infant. In a ‘good enough’ mother-child relationship, this attunement is internalised by the child, enabling the infant to ‘go on being’ – developing their spontaneous and creative ‘true self’.

Relying on both Erikson and Winnicott, Giddens²⁴ then develops his conception of trust as a ‘protective cocoon’. In ‘normal circumstances’, ‘the basic trust the child vests in its caretaker’²⁵ serves as a ‘bracketing’ device – an ‘emotional inoculation’ against existential anxieties and ‘future threats and dangers’, allowing the individual ‘to sustain hope and courage in the face of whatever debilitating circumstances she or he might later confront’.

This conception enabled a broad range of contemporary studies to analyse how states preserve and defend their OS, focusing on their willingness to compromise their physical security or other rational and material gains to avoid undesired emotions such as shame and guilt.²⁶ The major role of trust in contemporary OS theory (OST) is particularly evident in Kinnvall’s²⁷ foundational work. According to Kinnvall, trust in other people is a prerequisite for securitising subjectivity. It serves the individual to create a sense of cognitive-affective confidence that the world ‘is what it appears to be’, allowing the individual to ‘sustain hope and courage’ in the face of any ‘debilitating circumstances she or he might later confront’.

Trust also has a foundational role in Mitzen’s²⁸ basic formulation of OS. According to Mitzen, the role of Gidden’s ‘cocoon’ is first and foremost a cognitive one: a ‘basic trust system’ that imposes ‘cognitive order on the environment’ to ‘minimize hard uncertainty’ by the OS-seeking actor, who cannot respond to all dangers at once.²⁹ These foundational conceptions of trust receive ‘an affect-based version in the recent proliferating Lacanian-inspired works on OS’.³⁰ From a Lacanian perspective, trust is no more than an illusionary mask for desire – the ‘affective spark’ and ‘glue of social orders’ that keeps the subjects in constant search of OS despite the void and lack of essence that lies underneath. This void is created because the resources we rely upon for our constitution as subjects are fundamentally incomplete: socially given signifiers, scripts, and practices that are fundamentally foreign to us.³¹ Thus, whether it be an affective mask for desire or a cognitive cocoon, all contemporary brands of OST in IR and security studies are united in their assumption that in ‘normal circumstances’, the ontologically secure individual or state does not worry about the collapse of that trust.

Shattered trust: critical situations and the loss of OS

However, recent studies have shifted the focus from ‘normal circumstances’ to situations of societal crisis, focusing on the abrupt loss of OS in these extreme circumstances. Ejdus,³² for example, develops Giddens’ concept of ‘critical situations’ to explore various circumstances of ‘radical disjuncture’ in which the certitudes of institutional routines are threatened or destroyed.³³ These circumstances of societal crisis disrupt the ordinary routines of life, dissolve the actors’ feeling of autonomy and agency and trigger anxieties expressed in regressive modes of behaviour. Eventually, they puncture the cocoon of routinised trust relations on which people’s everyday sense of OS is based.

On the state level, Ejdus demonstrates, for example, how Serbia’s secession of Kosovo brought fundamental questions related to existence, finitude, relations and autobiography into its discursive consciousness. The study shows how Serbia’s anxiety over Kosovo’s secession led to a seemingly irrational foreign policy behaviour. However, this behaviour was in effect a form of ‘ontological self-help’ following the critical situation of Kosovo’s secession. Exploring ruptures in Serbia’s autobiographical narrative, the study further demonstrates the ‘reroutinization, resocialization, and identity transformation’ that followed.

Other studies move beyond the state level to focus on the broad range of OS-seeking strategies applied by diverse actors in response to such critical situations. Browning,³⁴ for example, demonstrates how several memes that spread across social media following the attack against the Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Paris attacks in 2015 were part of a broader quest of individuals and society to re-establish OS – or, in Tillich’s³⁵ words, ‘the courage to be’. These mechanisms included vicariously identifying with the victims of the attack and reasserting a sense of community and home via reinstating everyday routines.

In a different study, Browning³⁶ further illuminates the OS-seeking mechanisms applied by diverging groups of UK ‘remainers’ and foreign residents (EU nationals) following the critical situation of the Brexit referendum in 2016. The study tracks how these fractions within British society experienced the referendum as a source of ‘destabilisation, dread and ontological anxiety’, in turn eliciting the adoption of different OS-seeking mechanisms designed to ‘reassert a sense of order’ and basic trust in other persons and the nature of reality. New routines and ‘everyday narratives of self-identity’ were then carved out premised on ‘securitizing moves’ that attempted to ‘re-inscribe a new sense of order onto what is perceived to be a chaotic situation’.

Conflict, gender and ontological security-seeking in the developing spaces of global politics

Building on this proliferating body of recent OS works, which track the OS-seeking strategies applied by diverse actors (states, societies, groups, and individuals) in critical situations as part of their quest to reassert a sense of order, certitude and trust in themselves and their surroundings – we argue that it is pertinent to further explore situations in which the process of establishing the cocoon of trust relations was disrupted and distorted by the state to begin with. Put differently through Maslow’s³⁷ pyramid of needs, we analyse what OS-seeking looks like when Maslow’s first-tier needs (the physiological needs for, e.g. food, water, rest and warmth) and second-tier needs (the need for security and safety) are not abruptly lost following a ‘critical situation’, but remain chronically unanswered. We thus address the overlooked dimension of how the quest for OS may unfold together with, not separate from, the quest for physical security.³⁸

To address this key question, we turn our scholarly gaze to people who had never had even a minimal sense of a statist holding environment.³⁹ Moreover, their state, or homeland, has actively turned against its own citizens by creating a perpetual sense of both physical and ontological threat. Their home has thus not served as their protective environment. Kinnvall⁴⁰ sees home as the secure base on which identities are constructed, ‘linking together a material and spatial holding environment with a deeply emotional set of meanings related to permanence and continuity’.

Following this, we would expect that people who grow up without a perceived sense of a statist holding environment will be unable to trust in even the mere possibility of a mother-like statist ‘cushion’ able to mediate social reality, hold, reassure and soften their fall when in need.⁴¹ More broadly, we address a situation of a foundational rupture, in which the statist environment is not attuned to the basic needs of its citizens. In this context, despite its diverging point of reference, Michael Balint’s concept of ‘the basic fault’⁴² becomes relevant – that is, when a fracture is created in the earliest relations between the individual’s needs and the attunement of their environment.⁴³

Within this unattuned statist environment, this framework focuses particularly on asylum-seeking women. In this, we follow Rosemary Sayigh,⁴⁴ Sherene Razack,⁴⁵ and other more recent critical feminist studies⁴⁶ that bring forth the political experiences and narratives of ‘nonelite classes, women, localities, and the diaspora’.⁴⁷ We address specifically the neglected category of asylum-seeking mothers. While motherhood is an essentialist category associated with a woman who gives birth to an offspring, we focus here on motherliness. Motherliness pertains to qualities such as empathy, containment, holding, listening, nurturing and care of the other, which are not limited to biological motherhood and could be performed by varying actors across the genderial spectrum.⁴⁸ This critical gendered lens enables us to notice and analyse masculinised hierarchies of power on the one hand, and expressions of agency, acts of resistance to patriarchal orders, and the actors’ creative OS-seeking strategies constructed and reconstructed at the outermost margins of the global sphere, on the other.

Our gendered focus on marginalised actors in global politics joins an array of recent OS studies⁴⁹ which problematise the assumption that all OS-seeking agents are more or less alike: that is, that they react to crisis in a quest to recover OS through a set of relatively well-defined available mechanisms. Conversely, our framework enables to observe difference and diversity. It offers to extend the OS lens beyond the Western context in which the Laing-Giddens framework was originally conceived. This opens up the possibility to explore the emerging creative OS-seeking strategies utilised by an array of overlooked gendered – but also classed, raced, and other – disempowered actors in the ‘developing’ world (but also in seemingly ‘developed’ contexts), where political violence, patriarchal social orders, and discriminatory statist mechanisms thrive and prosper.

Research design and settings

From Eritrea to Tel Aviv: statist violence, forced migration and marginalisation

We focus on the case of Eritrean asylum-seeking mothers in southern Tel-Aviv. According to the most recent data, some 25,000 African asylum-seekers currently live in Israel. These include 19,142 Eritreans, 3,375 Sudanese, and some 2,000 asylum seekers from other countries.⁵⁰ Among the Eritrean asylum seekers are some 5,000 women, nearly a quarter of the total Eritrean community in Israel.⁵¹ The Eritrean asylum-seekers escaped the 30-year dictatorship of President Isaias Afewerki. In Eritrea, forced conscription into national service is prolonged indefinitely, political opponents are tortured and jailed without trial, and sexual violence and forced labour are common statist practices. Political parties, elections, and an independent judiciary are all prohibited. This occurs under the protracted Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, which takes a continuous toll on human life, burdens the economy and allows the regime to further oppress its population. This situation has led the UN Human Rights Council to determine that the Eritrean regime inflicts ‘systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations … in a climate of generalised impunity’.

Although leaving Eritrea is forbidden, more than 500,000 people have fled the country in recent years.⁵² Among these, nearly 36,000 Eritreans arrived in Israel between 2006–2013, most of them young Tigrinya adults. In search of asylum, they passed through Ethiopia and Sudan, crossing the Sinai-peninsula and the Egyptian-Israeli border on its north-western end.⁵³ The path to Israel became increasingly gruelling in these years, with an unknown number of Eritreans who died along the way.

Additionally, since 2008 thousands of asylum-seekers have been kidnapped and held captive by Bedouin networks of human traffickers in torture camps in Northern Sinai. These traffickers blackmailed the asylum-seekers’ family members for their release. Eritrean women held in these camps, in addition to being tortured, suffered sexual assault and rape.⁵⁴ The survivors of these camps, experiencing acute trauma and PTSD, still had to face the threat of Egyptian soldiers who indiscriminately shot those attempting to cross the Egyptian-Israeli border.⁵⁵

In Israel, the asylum-seekers were briefly detained and then brought in busses to southern Tel-Aviv, where they were abandoned to their fates. Required to renew their permit every three months, the Eritreans are automatically granted a temporary protection group status by the Israeli state. This prevents their deportation and enables temporary residence (i.e. the nonrefoulement principle). However, seen as infiltrators by statist authorities, they are systematically refused a refugee status according to the 1951 refugee (Geneva) convention. Additionally, since 2011 the Israeli high court of justice has compelled the government to avoid prosecuting employers of asylum-seekers. However, asylum-seekers are not legally granted the right to work in Israel. This undecided policy places the Eritrean community in constant risk of economic exploitation and sentences them to a life of poverty.⁵⁶

Geographically, the southern Tel-Aviv neighbourhoods are municipal spaces characterised by systemic governmental neglect, high levels of poverty and overcrowding.⁵⁷ In addition to the relatively new asylum-seekers’ community, these neighbourhoods are populated mostly by first and later generations of Jews who immigrated to Israel from Middle-Eastern countries in the 1950s. Some segments of the local population argue that the asylum-seekers jeopardise the safety of the neighbourhood, damage its economic worth, and demographically threaten the Jewish State. The fact that the majority of the migrants are Christians in a Jewish state further adds to these anti-migrant sentiments. Thus, in addition to discriminatory statist policies, the Eritrean community faces daily hostile social interactions and instances of overt racism and violence.

By the end of 2013, Israel finalised the construction of a physical barrier – a fence along the Israeli-Egyptian border. Together with other restrictive policies, this reduced the number of existing asylum-seekers and sealed out further arrivals. However, this also sealed in the remaining Eritrean community, cementing their legal, socio-economic and political state of limbo.

Within this marginalised position, women asylum-seekers are particularly vulnerable.⁵⁸ First, many of the women were exposed to gender-based violence along the migrant route. Later, they suffered higher levels of economic marginalisation in Israel compared to Eritrean men.⁵⁹ This often led to various forms of coercion by their own community, including forced marriage.

No less significantly, Eritrean mothers face a discriminatory educational system. First, some of the facilities for infants – infamously labelled by pro-refugee activists as ‘children warehouses’ – endanger the physical safety and well-being of their children. Additionally, despite ongoing struggles of NGOs and pro-refugee sectors in the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa municipality – an educational separation policy has been implemented in southern Tel-Aviv.⁶⁰ According to this policy, some 7,000 children of asylum-seekers and migrant workers, mostly Israeli-born, are enrolled in a separate educational system from kindergarten and onward.⁶¹

Method and scope

We draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in southern Tel-Aviv in 2020–2021. Fieldwork included participant observations carried out in homes, public spaces in southern Tel-Aviv, and in the Eritrean Women’s Community Centre (EWCC) – a grassroots community-based organisation run by and for asylum-seeking women. This centre provides Eritrean women a safe space where they can interact with each other, receive mental and physical support, learn English, Hebrew and computer skills, collect books and toys for their children, and obtain assistance with their refugee status application. Fieldwork further consisted of 13 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with Eritrean mothers residing in southern Tel-Aviv. The interviewees were reached via snowball sampling.

We conducted interviews of 1 to 2.5 hours in length in Tigrinya with the help of a translator or in Hebrew. The interviews, translated simultaneously into English and recorded with the consent of the interviewees, were later transcribed in English. The interviews included an open question (‘tell me your migration story’), followed by a set of structured questions which were continuously scrutinised and updated throughout the fieldwork. These questions focused on the interviewees’ gendered and motherly experiences throughout the process of migration; their relations with their children, and with their own mothers, families and communities in the Eritrean homeland; and their sense of identity and experiences of security/insecurity throughout the migrant route, as well as in the Eritrean homeland and the Israeli host state. We used pseudonyms to protect the interviewees’ privacy.

All the interviewees reside in the southern Tel-Aviv neighbourhoods of Shapira, Neve Sha’anan, Kiryat Shalom and Kfar Shalem. The majority were 25–39 years old having an average of three children each (a minimum of two and a maximum of five). All the women were born in Eritrea and migrated to Israel between 2006 and 2012. Consistent with the demographics of the Eritrean asylum-seeking community that lives in Israel, nearly all women in the study were of Tigrinya ethnicity and grew up in or around the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The women came from diverse educational backgrounds: some had completed secondary school, while others were raised in rural areas or spent a significant time in refugee camps outside of Eritrea, and therefore were unable to obtain consistent formal education.

Eight women interviewees gave birth for the first time in Israel, while five have older children who were born in Eritrea as well as younger children born in Israel. Of these five, only one woman brought her child to Israel with her, while the remaining four had left at least one older child behind in Eritrea. While nearly all the interviewees reported being held in camps in Sinai, for some – particularly those who migrated after 2008 – this stage was marked by torture, violence and trauma.

Four of the interviewees are single mothers, and the others live with their husband. Most interviewees switch often between temporary jobs in cleaning, cooking and housekeeping, and some do not work at all. As fieldwork was undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the interviewees were unable to work, further jeopardising their already fragile economic status in Israel.

We analysed the data using narrative analysis.⁶² Rooted in a constructionist-interpretivist logic, we build on Charmaz⁶³ in our focus on the narratives’ ambiguities, silences and contradictions, as well as the actions and practices of the interviewees, to grasp the nuanced meanings they assign to their OS-seeking strategies throughout their journeys from Eritrea to Israel.

Data was analysed in three phases. First, we identified, sorted and coded relevant themes focusing on the interviewees’ perceptions of their life in the homeland, the journey to Israel, and their lives in the Israeli host state. Second, we connected and re-assembled these emerging themes. We then re-examined the initial materials for confirmation of evidence. All the themes recurred in all the interviews through diverse subjective experiences. Through this interpretive analysis of the meanings asylum-seeking women assigned to their situation and to the OS-seeking strategies they applied throughout the migratory process, the study sets to expose what the quest for trust looks like in the margins of the global sphere, under chronic statist violence, political oppression and material lack.

State oppression, broken families and absent motherliness in the Eritrean homeland

A cocoon of trust relations? Broken state, broken families

We begin by exploring the interviewees’ narratives of their experiences as young girls in the Eritrean homeland. The first evident theme pertains to their experiences of motherliness. Semret explained,

She [her mother] didn’t have any time to talk to us about anything [or] about motherhood, about the future, about life, she was so busy … only looking after us in the moment … Our mothers are not educated mothers. There are some extraordinary mothers who, even though they are not educated, can guide their children for the future, how to be confident, how to behave in a good manner, to care about others, and a lot of things in life … when I grew up and realised what my mother had gone through – I’d heard how hard it was for a mother without a husband – there were a lot of rumours … I wanted to help her raise my brothers and sisters.

This broken familial structure is a theme that recurs in all the interviewees’ narratives. Most fathers either died in the Ethiopian-Eritrean war, returned home traumatised by their experiences in this war, or were incarcerated by Afwerki’s regime, while mothers were left alone to provide for the family. Beyond the economic hardship, this exposed the mothers and their daughters to social stigma in their communities, making them vulnerable to social denunciation and exclusion.

Within this context of statist violence and social marginalisation, time is a key currency that Semret’s mother lacked. Working from dusk to dawn, her mother did not have the time for the care and guidance – a time of being rather than doing. This lack unfolds in Semret’s narrative together with another theme: the fluidity of motherly holding functions. Semret saw herself as a ‘little mother’, joining others who carried motherly functions: siblings who served as mothers, mothers who served as fathers, and girls who were required to undertake a motherly role from a very early stage.

As Sesuna clarified, ‘[My mom] started to work – difficult work, because she wasn’t educated … My sister would look after the younger ones, like a mother. So my sister was like our mother, and our mother was like our father’. The interviewees connect this fluidity of familial roles, together with a lack of a time for being, to the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict. Bisrat explained,

My father died fighting in the conflict when I was young, so I was raised by a single mother … My mother had to be both a father and a mother to us. It’s very hard to describe my mother in words. She had to provide a father’s love, a father’s job – farming – and so she was very busy. She wasn’t much able to be around.

Semret, Sesuna and Bisrat, then, clearly link Afwerki’s policies, the breaking of their families and the fluid movement of familial roles between members of the family. This elasticity of roles in the extreme structural circumstances in their homeland peaks in Semret’s narrative:

When I was young, when my mother would give birth, I would help my mother. Even though it is not such a normal thing for a young girl to do, there weren’t really any other options … The thing I most remember from my mother’s delivery of my younger brother—my mother was in a very painful situation, and she asked me to prepare the mat on the floor where she would give birth, the clamp to tie the umbilical cord, the blade to cut it. So I helped prepare the space and the things she needs. I was around 15 at the time. I became very clear-headed in the moment—when you see something very hard and scary, instead of becoming sympathetic and soft, I became clear and sharp, focused on getting things done …

Semret’s functioning as a ‘little mother’ takes the form of assisting her own mother in giving birth. In her experience, this encounter made her both resilient, trusting herself and her abilities, and detached from certain aspects of her emotional world.

Absent motherliness

In other narratives, these fluid familial structures were coloured by absent mothers and orphanhood. Awate, who was born during the long Eritrean War of Independence, fled to Sudan with her family as a young girl. She lost her father in an accident only six months later, and her mother a few years after that. As a result of these circumstances, Awate was raised by her elder brother from the age of nine. While Awate was one of seven siblings, her brothers and sisters were scattered on either side of the Sudanese-Eritrean border. In 1998, a severe famine had broken out in Sudan due to the ongoing Sudanese Civil War, and Awate’s older brother decided they should return to Eritrea, where they had a more extensive kin network. In Eritrea, however, they encountered further difficulties, as the Eritrean – Ethiopian War erupted soon after their return. Awate’s eldest brother quickly attempted to shepherd his siblings back to Sudan:

When we went back to Sudan, the Eritrean government arrested my eldest brother because they assumed that he had sent me and my brother and other siblings to Sudan to avoid military service. When he was arrested, he was punished and tortured to the point that they paralyzed his legs.

Thus, living most of her childhood as an orphan in the care of siblings, and awash in inescapable political instability, Awate portrayed the absence of a stable maternal presence as a foundational fracture of the self, especially as she entered adolescence:

Since my mom died when I was a young girl, no one was beside me to tell me things about womanhood, about the period, about motherhood … Anything like that. My elder sister wasn’t in Sudan with us, she was still in Eritrea – so she wasn’t around to tell me what to expect, either … It’s a very hard thing not to have anyone elder than you to tell you what is happening. It was very scary when I became a woman, and it left a scar on my mind – it influences me until today. You don’t have a peaceful mind – everything you face brings you back to those earlier memories … you have a distorted mind … Growing up without a mother or a father is a very hard thing.

Here, Awate’s recounts the painful absence of a holding environment to reassure and support her as she grew up, particularly through puberty and into womanhood.

Awate recollects a basic sense of lack, what she describes as a ‘distorted mind’ and ‘a scar on my mind’. She sums up the effects of these experiences on her later life: ‘You don’t have a peaceful mind – everything you face brings you back to those earlier memories’. She thus depicts a deep, basic fracture in the development of a motherly holding environment.

Leaving the homeland: OS-seeking, agency and the negotiation of autonomy

It is only in the context of the interviewees’ sense of a partial, fluid or absent motherly holding environment, on both the statist and familial level, that we can fully understand the unfolding of their quest for OS. Actively escaping the fate of their own mothers (and often also the threat of forced marriage), the first OS-seeking strategy evident in their narratives pertains to negotiating their autonomy through the mere decision to leave their Eritrean homeland. Semret explained:

I was around 15 when I decided to leave. My family was supposed to marry me off to someone, so one reason I wanted to leave was to avoid marriage … the other was to find work so I could help my mother. The third reason was the dictatorship. If I wouldn’t be married, I would have to go to the national service. Which would be endless … We lived in the border region [between Eritrea and Ethiopia] … Sometimes, you don’t even have a plate on the table. So you make a choice that will get you free of these problems … Oh, goodness … I was so emotional. I cried the whole day … It was very hard to leave your family … My mother was upset and afraid. While you’re crossing the border, there are two possible outcomes: either you will get to Ethiopia safely, or you will be shot. So when I got to Sudan and was able to call my mother … she thanked God that I was still alive.

Semret’s narrative portrays the debilitating conditions of a capricious regime with arbitrary policies, the physical dangers of protracted conflict and the endemic conditions of extreme poverty. At the same time, it reveals her autonomy in overcoming her (realistic) fears of these circumstances and making a choice that gave her the chance for a different future.

However, the pain of separating from the homeland, community, family and familiar surroundings was accentuated for women whose choice to migrate further included leaving their young children behind. This inter-generational reproduction of the absent motherly holding environment is seen clearly in Helen’s narrative. Like Asmarina and other interviewees, Helen left her son behind to escape the persecution of Afwerki’s soldiers:

It’s still hard. When I’m feeding my [three] children here [in Israel], I think about my son back in Eritrea. I tell them, you are eating. You have clothes. My son back in Eritrea, he doesn’t. I am still not very strong when it comes to this fact. It is still very hard for me today.

Helen conveys how this traumatic experience affected her basic trust in herself and her surroundings. Acting against an oppressive regime, their family and community, and in some cases their motherly care for their offspring, the interviewees thus demonstrate how OS is sought even when basic trust is absent – when statist endemic violence does not enable the development of a cocoon of trust relations to begin with.

Negotiating genderial identity and dignity: OS-seeking along the migrant route

Anxiety and resilience: debilitating circumstances/resourceful self-help

A second OS-seeking strategy evident in the narratives pertains to how the women navigated their genderial identity and dignity in the unprotected spaces of the migrant route. Gabriel recalled,

I decided to move from Eritrea to Ethiopia in 2011, alone. I was 16 back then. I cried all the way. I was all alone. I arrived at a refugee camp of Eritreans there but could not find my brothers. So I called another brother and sister of mine who were here in Israel, said I don’t have anywhere to go … We left for Sinai overnight by car. They [the traffickers] took us … At night all the sand was in our eyes and on our body, and during the day it was so hot … The Bedouin traffickers separated us into two groups, men and women … We were supposed to cross [the border fence] nearby, in a very dangerous spot. We were afraid the Egyptian soldiers will hear us and start shooting at us … One man held us, and I asked him for help. Somehow, he helped me to cross over. The person behind me … was shot and died on the spot. We were 30 people in this group, but only 21 entered … the rest … until now we are looking for them … I don’t know how I did it.

Along with physical and ontological insecurity, then, the latter expressed in her anxiety and traumatic losses in the Sudanese and Sinai deserts, Gabriel also experienced resourcefulness, persistence, self-help and agency. While not overlooking her difficulties, she also gives space in her narrative to the OS-seeking strategies she used to overcome these circumstances. The act of crossing the border fence, despite the many losses, is thus portrayed here as a double act, holding both anxiety and resilience, ontological insecurity and agency.⁶⁴

Torture camps, violence and ontological insecurity: trauma on the migrant route

The most painful part of this journey was experienced by the interviewees in the Sinai torture camps. Some 5,000–7,000 asylum-seekers in Israel went through these camps up to their dissolution by the Egyptian army in 2014. The camps, run by Bedouin traffickers, were placed in the liminal space of the Sinai border area, far from the Israeli and Egyptian states’ central control. The survivors were documented by Physicians for Human Rights and other NGOs as being burned, beaten with chains and having their ‘hands and feet beaten so badly the patients could barely move them’. Within this group, some people were sexually abused but refused to talk about it. In the documentary Sounds of Torture, Israeli filmmaker Keren Shayo documents how the Bedouin smugglers sexually abused Eritrean women while they were on the phone with their families begging for money.⁶⁵ Sister Azezet Kidane, a member of the Comboni Missionary Sisters from Eritrea who worked with local NGOs in documenting the survivors of these camps in Israel, explains that the code in their testimonies was ‘other people in my group were sexually abused, but not me’.⁶⁶

The interviewees in our study also did not speak directly of sexual abuse. Almaz recalled:

I was in the camps in Sinai for two weeks. They were beating us up all the time. Until they received the money, they were all the time beating me in a closed small room. We were waiting, when will the money come, when will it come … this was very hard, really … at the end, when they received the money, we left for Israel by foot during the night … [later] When I was working in an organisation here in Israel … there were many women who passed through the camps. They were raped, they got beaten … until now they are in stress … even when they built a life here in Israel, trauma is in their heads.

Almaz conveys the dread of being held captive, and the unbearable physical and mental suffering of torture. All of these were amplified by the uncertainty of not knowing when their families would raise the money for their release. Gabriel explained,

My husband’s brother was also in the camps. He paid $35,000 ransom to leave and reach Israel … and many woman friends of mine too. One was all filled with bruises from the [torture] camps, she was crying all the time … another had broken fingers … others went through rape. It’s very, very hard. And it’s all around us.

These experiences portray the communal trauma on the migrant route. Along with the individuals Gabriel described, who carried the physical and mental scars of the Sinai torture camps on their bodies, these trauma and existential dread were thus also experienced by the Eritrean community as such.⁶⁷

OS-seeking amidst the state: marginalisation, trust and motherliness in Israel

Becoming a mother: the quest for a cocoon of trust in Israel

In Israel, the most evident theme recurring in the interviewees’ narratives is the experience of being a ‘motherless mother’. Semret recalled:

It was not easy … to be pregnant for the first time. But for us, it’s even more difficult. You’re not with your family. You’re not with your mother, so she can’t help you, tell you what’s going to happen, tell you what’s going on … Even though I didn’t feel very sick during my pregnancy, I felt very tired and stressed … I even regretted it … I thought to myself, why did I do this? At this age, with none of my family or siblings around me, without my mother? Emotionally, I needed help.

The absence of maternal emotional support during Semret’s pregnancy in a foreign land thus triggered constant self-doubt together with a continuous quest for a cocoon of trust relations in the form of motherly support and feminine guidance.

Motherliness, marginalisation and OS-seeking strategies in Israel

Within this context, however, a no less evident theme which emerged from the interviews is that of motherly agency. First, the interviewees’ motherly identity emerges as the sole place within their overall narratives where a detailed discourse containing strong emotions and a sense of agency is manifest. Second, it is in this motherly context that various novel OS-seeking strategies unfold.

‘Islands of being’ as an OS-seeking strategy

One such OS-seeking strategy is consciously creating ‘islands of being’ for their children: a time and space where they listen, see and nurture them despite the economic and social struggles to survive. As Sesuna explained,

We only have time to do things for them: feed them, give them baths, and that’s it. They’re in bed. How was it at school? We don’t know. So I talk with them on the way home. Because I don’t have time. I have to fix them food, fix food for my husband, so I ask them on the way how it was at school, how it was at gan [kindergarten]. It was like this, like that … You need to give them time. As much time as you can. I can say, I’m proud of myself. I don’t just walk and ask them to follow me. I walk side by side with them, hold their hand, and talk to them. It’s the most important thing a mother can give her kids. To give them attention and try to understand what he’s trying to tell you.

In contrast to her own mother, Sesuna indicates she practices motherliness as creating a safe haven that does not require a set time or a fixed space. These islands of being – in many respects equivalent to Mitzen’s⁶⁸ concept of homespace as a metaphorical fireplace, a space of ‘being with becoming’ understood in terms of self-centring – allow Sesuna to listen to her children, acknowledge and validate their inner worlds.

Put differently, this OS-seeking strategy could be seen as an enactment of Winnicott’s ‘good enough mother’ in the context of migration under endemic statist violence. The asylum-seeking mothers actively secure the time and space to give their children what they can, despite the discriminatory structural circumstances in which they function.

OS-seeking via legal resistance

Another agentful OS-seeking strategy consists of utilising formal legal measures to challenge the educational separation system. Zehra explained,

When they start to go to the gan iriya [municipal kindergarten] for preschool, they are isolated. They are not with Israeli children their age. When my daughter started school, I hated this. I got a lawyer and fought to allow her in the Israeli school. We won, but there was another point that challenged me after that. Because now, my daughter asks me things that I can’t answer – I can only cry … ’Why don’t we have a car? Why isn’t your family here? … Why don’t we go on vacation?’ She asks us a lot of things like this … The day before yesterday, my son told me he loves me, but he would like a big house, a big TV – he doesn’t want to be in such a small house anymore. It hurt me so much to hear.

Here, OS-seeking unfolds in Zehra’s active resistance to the educational discrimination of her children through legal means. But as evident in this quote, this agentful OS-seeking strategy has another face – while legally resisting separation in search for contact, Zehra struggles to protect her children from the emotional consequences of this contact. These same encounters that break the cycle of isolation in an effort to create a cocoon of trust thus also highlight the difference between her children and the ‘rest’ under circumstances of systemic discrimination.

OS-seeking through religion: faith as a protective shield

Another OS-seeking strategy the interviewees use to sustain a nourishing holding environment for their children consists of turning to religion and Christian practices.⁶⁹ Semret explained how turning to faith, as a dowry she received from her own mother, enables her to maintain hope, educate and motivate her children in Israel:

The most important thing a mother can give to her kids is a fear of God, to teach them to have respect for others, and to be well-behaved. The best thing I can do is to help motivate them towards their dreams when they are getting older … I read some short stories to them about the saints, I take them to Church sometimes. Later on, they can understand.

Semret’s narrative thus conveys a third OS-seeking strategy that draws on faith as a generator of strength, a motivator and an inner resource in her encounters with her children in Israel. In the Eritrean homeland, Tigrinya Christian families had a family priest (abbat naf’se in Tigrinya) – the ‘soul father’, who represented the family in all matters throughout their lifespan (e.g. baptism, marriage, divorce, death, holidays, and other cultural and religious festivities). This religious and cultural anchor in the homeland persisted despite the challenges of extreme poverty, political repression and marginalisation. In turn, an internalised religious anchor, though in a different form, continues to serve as an inner source of strength for the interviewees vis-à-vis their coping with the policies of the Israeli host state. This central role of religion in the host state is further aligned with research on the African diaspora in Israel, which demonstrates how the African churches served ‘a central place in their members’ lives compared to migrant churches in other western diasporas’, while ‘taking on roles of other traditional social, economic, political and civil actors in Africa’.⁷⁰ Most significantly, on the individual subjective level, their faith enabled the interviewees to envision hope for a better future. Sarah elaborated,

It’s hard to have dreams about the future, especially in this situation. It doesn’t mean that you can get all your dreams or all you have dreamt. You can’t expect everything will be a certain way. But you should have to be always thankful and be positive about the future and pray to God. Everything is from God. That’s my opinion. So, be thankful today, and tomorrow will be another day.

In her experience, then, Sarah’s turn to God enables her to hold on – to maintain courage and hope for her future despite the systemic marginalisation in her present. More broadly, the interviewees highlight how religion allows them to trust themselves and their surroundings, creating a benign, welcoming homespace within themselves. Helen summed up this experience: ‘In the situation we are in, we can’t talk about the future. But if God will do so, my hope is to be reunited with my child back home and to be reunited with my family – whenever that happens’.

OS-seeking through lack: rupture as resilience

Finally, the interviewees’ utilise their foundational chronic experiences of inner rupture and lack as an OS-seeking strategy in itself. Senait explained,

Motherhood is challenging, especially in Israel. It’s not easy. The situation is very unstable and uncertain. But I have been through so much, and the confidence I have and the satisfaction I have from having moved through all of these things … I try to use this and to not think too much about the future. We cannot have dreams or hopes for the future really, we need to focus on the situation we are in right now.

Senait thus leverages her accumulated traumas and the hardships she encountered to sustain an inner nurturing homespace for herself and her children in the Israeli host state. The weakness becomes a source of strength. Helen articulated this point further: ‘The thing I’m most proud of myself for is that I passed through all of those things. I survived, and now I am a very strong mother because of it’. Helen hence portrays the direct interconnection between her positionality as an asylum-seeking woman, her resilience and her motherly practices.

Moreover, the quest for trust in themselves and their surroundings unfolds here precisely through the interviewees’ positionality as asylum-seeking women and mothers: the statist violent context in which they grew up, the violence they experienced throughout the migrant route and the discriminatory policies in the Israeli host state. Despite the evident statist violence and systemic discrimination, the interviewees see these subjective experiences not just as an agent-less fate. As they clearly explain, these experiences also hold potential to serve as a source of motherly resilience, allowing them to weave a cocoon of trust vis-à-vis themselves and their children in their current lives in Israel.

Conclusion

In this article, we demonstrated how despite the experience of a deep foundational fracture in their early relations with their environments in the Eritrean homeland, these Eritrean women carve out novel niches of OS-seeking in their quest for trust throughout the migratory journey and in the Israeli host state, particularly through their positionality as women and mothers.

These OS-seeking strategies consist of negotiating their autonomy through the decision to leave the Eritrean homeland and of managing their genderial identity and dignity in the unprotected, violent spaces of the migrant route. In Israel, their OS-seeking work unfolds further in several ways. First, they create ‘islands of being’ for their children: a good enough time and space, in the Winnicotian sense, to listen, see and nurture their children despite debilitating systemic circumstances. Second, they seek OS through legal resistance to their children’s educational discrimination. Third, they establish an alternative motherly protective shield through religion. And finally, they utilise their foundational experiences of inner rupture as an OS-seeking strategy in itself, turning it into a source of motherly resilience.

The most salient theme in the findings is thus the duality in their quest for OS. On the one hand, we see the evident failure of every statist, communal and familial system these women encountered to protect them, accompanied by their manifest emotions of mistrust, futility and emptiness. But on the other hand, we see their agentful OS-seeking work unfolding together with (not separate from) their experiences of futility and emptiness.

The findings further expose the role of motherliness in generating a cocoon of trust relations by facilitating OS-seeking work in contexts of endemic statist violence. It is precisely in the spaces where motherly practices and emotions unfold that the interviewees display strong lively emotions, agency and active OS-seeking work. Thus, while the findings reinforce the observation that such an early foundational rupture of the self cannot be completely solved, removed or undone, they nonetheless single out motherliness as an area of relative openness, movement, creativity and transformation. In sum, while motherly practice perhaps cannot amend or heal their scar, it nonetheless holds the potential for agency and resilience. This creative motherly potential is dynamic: it changes continuously throughout the migrant route and acquires new layers in the Israeli host state.

This highlights the article’s broader contribution to the proliferating research on trust in OS studies in several ways. First, it offers OS scholarship a clear and crystallised view of how OS-seeking is played out not by states, elites and other powerful actors, but by people who originate in states that do not supply even the minimal holding environment which enables the establishment of Giddens’ cocoon of trust relations. We further highlight how in circumstances of endemic statist violence, the quest for OS may unfold together with the quest for physical security (i.e. survival), demonstrating how these quests are intertwined throughout the migrant route and often reinforce each other.

Second, this study offers a gendered perspective of OS-seeking under endemic statist violence. Through this lens, we broaden the scope of OS studies to explore how the agents’ quest for OS is shaped by masculinised power structures and hierarchies along the migrant route, which emerge on diverging scales (global, national and local). These forces shape the journeys of disempowered individuals, social groups, and communities – not only women or men, but diverse actors who are marginalised on genderial, ethnic, religious, political and other intersecting grounds. Similar to the Eritrean women in this study, who utilise agentful motherly practices as OS-seeking mechanisms throughout the migrant route, these actors often navigate their way vis-à-vis broken families, economic deprivation, and statist violence in the neglected ‘developing’ spaces of global politics.

Geographically, culturally and politically, these practices thus thrive far beyond the original Western context in which the Laing-Giddens framework was conceived. Moreover, in these outermost margins of the international sphere, political oppression and statist violence are not an extreme critical situation of radical disjuncture, they are often the norm. In turn, this requires a different set of conceptual tools to grasp how the quest for OS emerges under continual endemic statist violence. The framework offered in this article serves as one step within this much needed effort.

Finally, we have focused here on the Eritrean state, the in-between spaces of the Sudanese and Sinai deserts, and the marginalised spaces of southern Tel-Aviv. We thus highlight the liminal spaces of the migrant route, and the ongoing movement through and between these spaces, as crucial elements for unravelling how OS – and security more generally – is contested, sorted and played out beyond the state, in spaces of exception positioned outside its reach. Moreover, by deconstructing the unitary image of the OS-seeking actor who passes through these liminal spaces, this article opens up the possibility for future studies of global security to expose the emerging creative OS-seeking work which unfolds among diverse actors on the move, en route through the ‘developing’ spaces of global politics in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Orit Gazit

Orit Gazit is an assistant professor in the department of international relations and the program in international development studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of the program’s Migration & Development Track. With academic grounding in both international relations (IR) and sociology, her work focuses on global migration and refugees, space and borders, security and emotions. Her studies have appeared in journals such as International Studies Review, International Theory, Security Dialogue and Political Psychology.

Skyler Inman

Skyler Inman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis University. She holds an MA in International Development from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is interested in identity, belonging, and selfhood, and how these concepts are shaped by migration, religious belief, ethnicity, nationalism and familial relationships.

Notes

1. Kinnvall and Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security and Conflict’; Kinnvall, ‘Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Hindutva’; Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’; Mitzen, ‘Feeling at Home in Europe’; Ku and Mitzen, ‘The Dark Matter of World Politics’; Subotic and Steele, ‘Moral Injury in International Relations’.

2. Giddens, The Constitution of Society, 61–63.

3. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 36–40.

4. Ejdus, ‘Critical Situations, Fundamental Questions and Ontological Insecurity’, 884, 893.

5. Browning, ‘Political Violence, Civilizational Politics, and the Everyday Courage to Be’; Browning, ‘Brexit, Existential Anxiety and Ontological (In)Security’; Mitzen, ‘Feeling at Home in Europe’.

6. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 36–40; Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism’; Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’; Mitzen, ‘Feeling at Home in Europe’.

7. Al-Ali et al., ‘Refugees and Transnationalism’; Belloni, ‘Refugees and Citizen’; Matsuoka and Sorenson, Ghosts and Shadows.

8. Hirt and Mohammad, ‘Dreams Don’t Come True in Eritrea’, 142.

9. Laing, The Divided Self.

10. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.

11. Huysmans, Security! What do you mean?; McSweeney, Security, Identity and Interests; Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism’; Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’; Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations; Lupovici, Ontological Dissonance, Clashing Identities, and Israel’s Unilateral Steps Towards the Palestinians; Rumelili, Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security: Peace Anxieties; Kinnvall and Mitzen, Anxiety, Fear, and Ontological Security in World Politics; Cash, Psychoanalysis, Cultures of Anarchy, and Ontological Insecurity; Kinnvall and Svensson, Trauma, Home, and Geopolitical Bordering.

12. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 40; Laing, The Divided Self, 109–110; Croft, Securitizing Islam, 229.

13. Gazit, What it Means to Mistrust, 391.

14. Laing, The Divided Self, 39, 109–114, 142, 152.

15. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 37.

16. Gazit, What it Means to Mistrust, 391.

17. Ibid., 38–40

18. Ibid., 391.

19. Erikson, Growth and Crises of the Healthy Personality.

20. Gazit, What it Means to Mistrust, 391.

21. Winnicott, Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development.

22. Gazit, What it Means to Mistrust, 392.

23. Ibid.

24. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 39–40.

25. Gazit, What it Means to Mistrust, 392.

26. Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’; Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations; Zarakol, ‘Ontological (In)Security and State Denial of Historical Crimes’; Subotić, ‘Narrative, Ontological Security, and Foreign Policy Change’.

27. Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism’, 746.

28. Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, 346.

29. Mitzen, ‘Anchoring Europe’s Civilizing Identity’, 273–275.

30. Eberle, ‘Narrative, Desire, Ontological Security, Transgression’, 245–246; Gazit, What it Means to Mistrust, 392.

31. Solomon, Time and Subjectivity in World Politics, 674.

32. Ejdus, Crisis and Ontological Insecurity; Ejdus, ‘Critical Situations, Fundamental Questions and Ontological Insecurity’.

33. See also: Kinnvall, ‘Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Hindutva’, 285.

34. Browning, ‘Political Violence, Civilizational Politics, and the Everyday Courage to Be’.

35. Tillich, The Courage to Be.

36. Browning, ‘Brexit, Existential Anxiety and Ontological (In)Security’.

37. Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation.

38. Rumelili, ‘Identity and Desecuritisation’.

39. Mitzen, ‘Feeling at Home in Europe’, 1376–1377.

40. Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism’, 747.

41. Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’, 346.

42. Balint, The Basic Fault.

43. This creates a foundational sense of fracture and lack, in which individuals may experience, together with extreme anxiety, emotions such as emptiness, deadness and futility.

44. Sayigh, ‘Palestinian Camp Women as Tellers of History’.

45. Razack, Looking White People in the Eye.

46. Ghebrezghiabher and Motzafi-Haller, Eritrean Women Asylum Seekers in Israel; Harel-Shalev and Kook, ‘Ontological Security, Trauma and Violence’; Aharoni et al., ‘Security as Care’, Kinnvall, ‘Borders and Fear’.

47. Sayigh, ‘Palestinian Camp Women as Tellers of History’, 42.

48. Peroni, Mothers: A View from Psychoanalysis and Other Disciplines; see also: Brown-Guillory, Disrupted Motherlines.

49. Browning, ‘Brexit, Existential Anxiety and Ontological (In)Security’; Ejdus and Rečević, ‘Ontological Insecurity as an Emergent Phenomenon’; Rumelili and Strömbom, Agonistic Recognition as a Remedy for Identity Backlash.

50. The Population and Immigration Authority, Statistics on Foreigners in Israel 2022 (Hebrew).

51. Müller, Realising Rights within the Israeli Asylum Regime.

52. Connell, ‘Eritrean Refugees at Risk’.

53. Ben-Ze’ev and Gazit, Juggling Logics on the Egyptian – Israeli Borderland.

54. Connell, ‘Eritrean Refugees at Risk’.

55. Van Reisen and Rijken, Sinai Trafficking.

56. Berman, Until Our Hearts are Completely Hardened.

57. Jaradat, The Unchosen.

58. Ghebrezghiabher and Motzafi-Haller, Eritrean Women Asylum Seekers in Israel.

59. Drori-Avraham, Single Mother Asylum Seekers.

60. As a result of these policies, some asylum-seekers’ families have recently moved out of Tel Aviv to nearby cities in which the educational system enables their children equal participation. Additionally, as opposed to Tel Aviv, the Eilat municipality, which hosts a relatively large Eritrean community, does not apply segregation policies in education.

61. Orr and Ajzenstadt, Beyond Control; Kritzman-Amir and Schumacher, Refugees and Asylum Seekers.

62. Holstein and Gubrium, Animating Interview Narratives.

63. Charmaz, Premises, Principles, and Practices in Qualitative Research.

64. Johnson, ‘The Other Side of the Fence’, 75–91.

65. See also: Ghebrezghiabher and Motzafi-Haller, Eritrean Women Asylum Seekers in Israel, 584–585.

66. Lidman, ‘Healing and Trust for Tortured Women’.

67. Richlen, ‘Representation, Trust and Ethnicity within Refugee Communities’.

68. Mitzen, ‘Feeling at Home in Europe’.

69. See also: Sabar, The Religio-Political Discourse of Rights; Hepner, Religion, nationalism, and transnational civil society in the Eritrean diaspora.

70. Sabar, ‘African Christianity in the Jewish State’.