AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

African refugees are confronted with constantly changing structures of power and border-regimes in different geographical and political contexts during their journey to Israel. This thesis focuses on the expressions of experiences of violence of Eritrean refugees who were held hostage in the borderlands of the Northern Sinai desert by human traffickers for indefinite periods of time. Eritrean refugees bear witness to torture, extortion, rape, and organ removal. Both actual and experiential borders and borderlands crossed by African refugees can be seen as ‘frontiers of violence’ that contest the boundaries between legal and illegal and reflect lawlessness, insecurity, and physical and psychological violence. This thesis discusses frontiers of violence and experiences of being held hostage from three different perspectives; discursive, bodily, and collective frontiers of violence. Discursive frontiers of violence focus on the limits of everyday language in constituting meaning to experiences of violence. These discursive frontiers are not only experienced by narrators, but also by anthropologists who represent victims of torture in an ethnographic text. Discursive frontiers reflect, on the one hand, the methodological problems, insecurities, and empirical frontiers of representation of the anthropologist and on the other hand the ambiguous relation between violence, text, and the body experienced by the interlocutors of this thesis. Human suffering is lived and re-lived through the body. Bodily frontiers of violence focus on the limits of expressions of suffering and represent experiences of the body in alternative idioms. Alternative idioms dissolve the limits of bodily expressions of frontiers of violence. The protagonists of this thesis strategically situate their bodies in the narratives and use metaphors with an emphasis on the body to express experiences of torture. Through the use of bodily metaphors and poetry Eritrean refugees try to create continuity between past and present experiences of violence. Scars – embodied expressions of violence serve as an alternative idiom through which otherwise unspeakable suffering becomes expressible. Some violations to the body cannot be expressed through one’s own body and pain resides in another body. Eritrean women strategically narrate their own experiences of sexual torture through other bodies. Alternatively, graves are a symbol of the anonymous, silenced witnesses of power structures encountered during the journey and represent the ultimate bodily frontier of violence: death. Collective frontiers of violence focus on the collective experiences and expressions of suffering. Individual expressions of violence are part of a larger collective discourse of suffering and flight that dominates the social and political lives of Eritreans in Eritrea, Israel, and abroad. Both publically and privately Eritreans perform communal and political acts of commemoration. In public events of mourning, gatherings of ‘survivors’, and demonstrations for global intervention the…