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MIGRATION,
DIASPORAS AND
CITIZENSHIP
Tahriib – Journeys
into the Unknown
An Ethnography of
Uncertainty in Migration
Anja Simonsen
Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship
Series Editors
Olga Jubany
Department of Social Anthropology
Universitat de Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain
Saskia Sassen
Department of Sociology and Committee on Global Thought
Columbia University
New York, NY, USA
For over twenty years, the Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship series
has contributed to cross-disciplinary empirical and theoretical debates on
migration processes, serving as a critical forum for and problematising
the main issues around the global movement and circulation of people.
Grounded in both local and global accounts, the Series firstly focuses on
the conceptualisation and dynamics of complex contemporary national
and transnational drivers behind movements and forced displacements.
Secondly, it explores the nexus of migration, diversity and identity,
incorporating considerations of intersectionality, super-diversity, social
polarization and identification processes to examine migration through
the various intersections of racialized identities, ethnicity, class, gender,
age, disability and other oppressions. Thirdly, the Series critically engages
the emerging challenges presented by reconfigured borders and
boundaries: state politicization of migration, sovereignty, security,
transborder regulations, human trade and ecology, and other imperatives
that transgress geopolitical territorial borders to raise dilemmas about
contemporary movements and social drivers.
Editorial Board
Brenda Yeoh Saw Ai (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Fabio Perocco (Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Italy)
Rita Segato (Universidade de Brasília, Brazil)
Carlos Vargas (University of Oxford, UK)
Ajmal Hussain (University of Warwick, UK).
Anja Simonsen
Tahriib – Journeys
into the Unknown
An Ethnography of Uncertainty
in Migration
Anja Simonsen
Department of Anthropology
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
ISSN 2662-2602 ISSN 2662-2610 (electronic)

Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship
ISBN 978-3-031-27820-4 ISBN 978-3-031-27821-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27821-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to all the women, children and men
who venture out on hazardous journeys every single day, risking
their lives while encountering increased border control
and ever stricter rules for obtaining asylum.
Preface
This book is a result of a 13-year-long journey that began in 2010, as I

worked with and conducted research among young Somalis born and
raised in refugee camps in Ethiopia. In 2010, the world had not yet
framed movement from the Global South as a ‘migration crisis’. Though
borders were very much part of the landscape, they had not yet taken the
spotlight in what Nicholas de Genova calls the ‘border spectacle’ that
would soon arise. It was not until 2013, as I was conducting fieldwork for
my PhD on youth migration by moving through Somaliland, Turkey and
Greece, that the narratives of the ‘migration crisis’ started to surface.
Politicians and journalists in a number of European countries began
labelling migration flows from Africa, the Middle East and Asia as the
‘migration crises’, which called for various new political initiatives to be
implemented. One was the so-called hotspot approach, which the EU
implemented at five different locations in Italy and Greece in 2015. This
approach enforced biometric registration of all refugees arriving in the
two countries without regular documents in an attempt to put a stop to
the continued flows of people into northern Europe. Along with the rest
of the world, I witnessed how millions of Euros were invested in strength-
ening the southern borders of the EU. This was done through the imple-
mentation of biometric technologies like fingerprint registration and
operations at sea like Triton, which had the double task of saving people
at sea and securing the borders of the EU.
vii
viii Preface
The material in this book builds on and is a result of my own journey

throughout the past decade of following people on the move as well as
the changing political structures surrounding them. While describing
and discussing the political structures and initiatives that refugees encoun-
ter is part of the story of youth migration from the Global South, it does
not answer the question of why young people from relatively stable or
peaceful countries in Africa, Asia or the Middle East risk their lives on the
dangerous irregular routes of migration. In this book, I seek to provide
such answers not only by exploring the negative aspects of the uncer-
tainty of migration but by also approaching uncertainty as a driver of
hope and opportunity. Although certain historic and contemporary pat-
terns of movement explored in the book may be specifically Somali, the
hopes and dreams of youth and the innate uncertainties of migration and
movement are human and global in nature.
The personal and intimate details of the book make the reader join the
complex and unpredictable movements of tahriib and capture the young
Somalis’ own perspectives on and engagements with the uncertainties of
lives en route. This is desperately needed in a world where migrants are
usually given one of two roles: as helpless victims caught between unfair
regimes and opportunistic smugglers, or as anonymous and unknown
bodies, counted and listed in statistics whether dead or alive.
Copenhagen, Denmark Anja Simonsen

Names, Places, Transliterations and
Illustrations
While the majority of places in the book are real, all the names of people
presented in the book are pseudonyms. All the included pictures have
been taken by me during my fieldwork, except for two that have been
sent to me by people I encountered en route.
For city names and Somali given names, I use the standard English
spelling such as Hargeisa, Burao and Abdirahman (rather than Hargeysa,
Burco and Cabdiraxmaan). When I make use of Somali words, I spell
them in Somali such as hooyo [mother], aabo [father], xog (information),
etc. Here, ‘x’ is equivalent to the Arabic letter ‫ ح‬and ‘c’ is equivalent to ‫ع‬.
ix
Acknowledgements
Gratitude! This is what I feel towards all the people who have worked
with me through the process of conducting fieldwork, collecting and ana-
lysing data, and writing this book. The final result is a product of short-
and longer-term collaborations, different academic project constellations,
(inter)national colleagues and friendships. Without any one of you, this
book would never have seen the light of day. Thank you! I also want to
extend my gratitude to Det Frie Forskningsråd (FKK), the Velux
Foundation and the Carlsberg Foundation for funding past and present
projects.
To all the young Somali women and men that I have met during my
time in Ethiopia, Somaliland, Turkey, Greece, Italy and beyond: We have
laughed and cried together, seen and done things we never thought we
would; we have lost people that we knew and cared about along the way.
It has been a tough and painful journey, but it has also been a rewarding
one. I will be forever grateful for your warmth, hospitality and kindness.
I am especially grateful to Hooyo and Aabo, their children and grandchil-
dren. You opened your home and your family to me in Somaliland to an
extent that I will never forget: getting up early to eat before sunrise dur-
ing Ramadan, participating in family gatherings and everyday life, and
never being left to the loneliness that new and strange places may hold. It
all made a world of difference to me and provided me with an insight into
xi
xii Acknowledgements
life in Somaliland across generations that I would never have achieved

living elsewhere. I also owe immense gratitude to Mohamed, Ahmed,
Dahir, Jama, Abdikarim, Sahal, Zayid, Abdifatah, Abdiqani, Ali, Hodan
and Abdulfatah who helped me through setting up and conducting inter-
views, spending endless hours discussing tahriib, analysing my data and
reading through my chapters. Thank you! Those of you who play a main
role in the book: I have chosen to thank you by your pseudonyms to
protect you and your individual life journeys: Abdirahman, Abdullahi,
Nadifa, Ubah, Habaane, Taban, Aden, Feysal, Halaane, Subeer, Riyaan,
Wiilka Nololsha, Ladan and many more—you are the true experts [xog-
ogaal], and I hope this book provides a forum for you to speak, now and
in the future. Ali, my taxi driver and go-to-guy in Somaliland. Thank you
for always being there.
MAHAD-NAQ: Waxa aan halkan uga mahad naqayaa guud ahaan sha-
cabka Somaliland, haday tahay rag, dumar iyo qaybaha kala duwan ee bul-
shada. Gaar ahaan dhalinyaradii aan waqtiga kula qaatay safaradaydii
Somaliland, Turkiga, Giriigga iyo meelo fara badan oo dunida dacaladeeda
ahba. Waxa aan marna ii suurto gasheen inaan la’aantiin dhamaystiro
buuggan. Waxaynu isla soo qaadanay waqtiyo farxad iyo murugo leh, wax-
aynu usoo wada joognay dhacdooyin lama filaan ah. Intii aan waday
qoraalka buuggan waxaynu wayney asxaab qaali ahayd oo aynu wada
jeclayn. Sidaas darteed waxaay ahayd waayo-aragnimo xanuun badan,
laakiin hadana waxay ii ahayd mid aan ka bartay wax badan. Waxaan abaal
aan go’ayn idiin ka hayn doonaa soo dhawayntii, kal-gacalkii iyo diira-
naantii aad ii muujiseen. Waxa aan si gaar ah ugu mahad naqayaa Hooyo,
Aabo, ubadkooda iyo ubadka ay dhaleenba. Waxa aan uga mahad ceelinaya
sidii quruxda badnayd ee ay iigu martiqaadeen gurigooda intii aan joogay
Somaliland. Waligay ma hilmaami doono sidii wanaagga iyo sharfta
badnayd ee aynu aqalkiina ugu wada afuri jirnay waqtigii ramadaanka.
Sidii aad qoys-ahaan ii soo dhowayseen iyo ka mid noqoshadii qoyskiina
waxay iga badbaadisay cidladii iyo kelinimadii, waxayna iigu fadhiday
waxtar wayn. Sidoo kale waxay ii ahayd fursad aan wax badan kaga bartay
hab-nololeedka shacabka Somaliland, run ahaantii arintani la’aantiin
marnaba iima suurtowdeen. Waxaan sidoo kale abaal iyo mahad-celin
wayn u hayaa Mohamed, Ahmed, Dahir, Jama, Abdikarim, Sahal, Zayid,
Acknowledgements xiii
Adifatah, Abdiqani, Ali, Hodan iyo Abdulfatah oo dhammaantood iga

caawiyey in aan qaado waraysiyada ku jira buuggan. Waxaanu saacado
badan munaaqashayn ka yeelanay tahriibka. Sidoo kale waxaanu isla falan-
qaynay macluumaadka ku qoran buuggan iyo weliba akhrinta cutubyo ka
tirsan buugga. Waad mahadsantihiin dhammaantiin. Sidoo kale waxaan
aniga oo aan shaacinayn magacyadooda runta ah u mahad celinayaa dadka
qaarkiis ee ku jira buuggan. Waxaan doortay in aanan shaacin maga-
cyadooda runta ah si aysan u soo gaarin waxyeelo nooc ay doontoba ha
ahaatee. Abdirahman, Abdullahi, Nadifa, Ubah, Habaane, Taban, Aden,
Feysal, Halaane, Subeer, Riyaan, Wiilka Nolosha, Ladan iyo dad intaa ka
fara badan. Waxaad tihin xogogalaadii garabkayga taagnaa la’aantiina iima
ay suurta gasheen daabacaada buugani. Mahadsanidin. Ugu dambayntii
waxaan u mahadcelinayaa Cali oo ah tagsiile ka shaqeeya Somaliland igana
caawiyey isu socdka meelkasta oo dalka gudihiisa ah intaaan ku sugnaa
Somaliland.
Sahro and Abdirahman, thank you for facilitating my stay in

Somaliland. Yusra Osman and Abdirisak Ali Omar, I am forever grateful
for your contributions to my analysis. Going through chapters, specific
Somali sayings or words with you have helped me to develop my insights
and understanding.
To my colleagues from the two previous projects I took part in—the
Invisible Lives funded by FKK and the Biometric Border World funded
by the Velux Foundation; to the two research groups that I have been part
of over the last 10 years (the Migration and Society & the Culture,
Mobility and Power researcher groups); to all my colleagues who have
read single chapters and provided feedback; to Bjarke Oxlund, previous
Head of Department of Anthropology, and Ayo Wahlberg, current Head
of Department of Anthropology for your constant support in making
this book come to life; to Karen Fog Olwig, Susan Reynolds Whyte and
Henrik Vigh, who all read through and provided constructive feedback
on the book in its entirety; and to Kirstine Varming, my copy-editor and
dear friend, who spent endless days and nights on this book—thank you
all for your explorative, insightful and supportive contributions. You are
all great sources of inspiration for me, professionally as well as personally.
To my family: Soheil, Ava and Elina—thank you for your endless
support, encouragement and love.
Contents
1 Introduction: Uncertainties of Migration 1
2 A History of Lives on the Move 25
3 ‘If
I Die, I have Already Died’: Entanglements of Social
Death 55
4 Walking the Road of Hope 85
5 Uncertainty of Information in Unknown Terrain113
6 T
empo(S) of Time En Route139
7 B
iometric Ambiguities159
8 M
aking Home183
9 C
onclusion: Universal Uncertainties207
I ndex219
xv
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Family tree—(only the family members mentioned in the

book are represented, all by pseudonym) 37
Fig. 3.1 Sabaayad [Somali flatbread] cooking in Hooyo and Aabo’s
kitchen, Hargeisa, Summer of 2013 (photo by the author) 71
Fig. 4.1 Beach in Berbera, Somaliland, August 2013 (photo by the
author)86
Fig. 4.2 Footprint in the sand, Berbera, Somaliland, August 2013
(photo by the author) 88
Fig. 5.1 Transit house, Greece, May 2014 (photo by the author) 125
Fig. 7.1 Abandoned building occupied by refugees and undocumented
migrants, Italy, March 2018 (photo by the author) 171
Fig. 9.1 A boat used by migrants to cross the Mediterranean Sea
confiscated by Italian authorities in Lampedusa, July 2022
Fig. 9.2 A boat used by men, women and children to reach
Lampedusa without regular documents, Italy, July 2022
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 9.3 Pictures of Amran’s tent in a refugee camp in Cyprus

(photos by Amran, spring 2021) 215
Fig. 9.4 Pictures of Amran’s tent in a refugee camp in Cyprus
(photos by Amran, spring 2021) 216
1
Introduction: Uncertainties of Migration
‘It does happen, but I’m prepared to die’.

Gacal’s words made me hesitate for a moment. I did not know what to
say to him. Here we were, in Hargeisa, sitting in his aunt’s café. She
served us tea, and Gacal, a young university student in his early 20s, told
me that he was willing to risk his life by venturing on tahriib, youth
migration, a journey into unknown terrain. Gacal saw the unknown as an
attractive alternative to the stasis he and his fellows experienced in
Somaliland. While I hesitated, he continued, ‘There are three options: (1)
I stay here, (2) I die in the middle and (3) I make it to the end’.
Millions of thoughts and questions came up while listening to Gacal.
Why would he, along with an increasing number of young Somali women
and men, want to leave his country in times of peace? Why leave at a time
when millions of Euros were being invested in border controls and bio-
metric technologies, like fingerprint registration and iris scans, to keep
migrants out of Europe? Why were the young people willing to risk
their lives?
Gacal reasoned: ‘Everybody in the world will die one day. If I die, I die;
if I succeed, I succeed, but mostly I wish that I succeed’. As a young uni-
versity student, one would think that Gacal had every opportunity to
succeed and secure a future in Somaliland. But he felt that staying in
Somaliland would make him unable to achieve any of the goals he had set
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

A. Simonsen, Tahriib – Journeys into the Unknown, Migration, Diasporas and
Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27821-1_1
2 A. Simonsen
for himself. Therefore, he found his answers in exploring the uncertain

experience of tahriib. The uncertainty of the journey produced the hope
of succeeding and making it to the end.
In this book, I seek to capture the complex questions and intimate
details of the lives of young Somalis as they venture out on hazardous and
dangerous journeys because life at home is considered unbearable. They
are searching for opportunities to create a better livelihood for themselves
and their families by getting access to education, jobs and networks that
are unavailable to them at home. An important aspect of these liveli-
hoods is also the dream of social mobility and of contributing to and
caring for the extended family networks left behind in Somalia. Finally,
the young Somalis dream of adventure and a life without restrictions and
parental control. I shed light on the multifaceted reasons and reasonings
behind the decision to go on tahriib, as well as the many considerations
and strategies employed to ensure success before and during migration. I
do this by following a number of young Somalis on their journey from
the Horn of Africa1 towards the destination of their dreams in Europe.
For many young Africans, such journeys into the unknown become
reasons to be hopeful and they constitute a form of education in them-
selves. The certainty of facing an insecure future if one stays behind gives
rise to the dream of a new uncertainty: the promises of unknown futures
beyond the confines of home. These dreams are constantly kept alive by
the homecomings of others: investments, remittances and family holi-
days spent at home in luxury all paint beautiful pictures of life abroad.
Successful homecomings—and displays of wealth and happiness on
social media—give life to new generations on the move and breed increas-
ing feelings of despair and hopelessness among the youth left behind.
The particular migration experiences of young Somalis are used as a
lens through which to grasp broader contemporary migration processes.
Through in-depth ethnography of young Somalis’ journeys into unknown
terrain, the tahriib, we gain intimate details of a growing transnational
phenomenon of lives en route. Here, en route refers to a double connota-
tion of tahriib, first as physical movement and being underway, and sec-
ond as socio-cultural movement or social mobility—of movement
towards adulthood. Not just any kind of adulthood but successful
adulthood, where one is able to lift the burden of economic responsibili-

ties and be well-respected and visible within society. For many, this means
getting a university degree, marrying the man/woman of their dreams
and fulfilling personal goals ranging from being the next president to
becoming a famous journalist. Although certain historic and contempo-
rary patterns of movement may be specifically Somali, the hopes and
dreams of young women and men and the innate uncertainties and inse-
curities of migration and movement are human and global in nature. My
objective is therefore to emphasise these human emotions and create a
deeper understanding of the motives and reasonings behind decisions to
migrate. Thus, it is my hope to provide individual faces and voices to the
many young men and women risking their lives en route to unknown
futures and fragile hopes of adventure and success.
Although not necessarily fleeing from a country at war or escaping
personal persecution, these young people describe themselves as being
already dead. What characterises the lives of the Somali youth is the idea
of ‘social death’, referring to ‘the inability to dream a meaningful life’
(Hage 2004, 79). As an analytical term, ‘social death’ depicts the disap-
pointments of the young Somalis, as they fail to provide for their families
and move forward in their lives. ‘The absence of the possibility of a wor-
thy life’ (Hage 2004, 132 in Vigh 2006, 45) makes their dreams wander
elsewhere in the hope that they can create such a life for themselves.
Drawing on the analytical gaze of ‘social death’, the stories presented here
seek to convey the universal human experience of uncertainty and inse-
curity, and how this experience shapes not only the decision to move but
the process of movement; and how experiences of uncertainty and inse-
curity similarly shape the practices of security introduced by European
state and border agencies in response to bodies on the move.
I wish to focus on the universal human responses to uncertainty and
the consequences of those responses. I do so by adopting a pragmatic
approach to uncertainty in a migration context by including past social
and moral worlds of Somali communities in the exploration of the most
contemporary ones. Susan R. Whyte’s work on uncertainty, through the
focus on misfortunes (like disease or unexpected accidents) and practices
of questioning such misfortunes, has contributed tremendously to social
sciences by showing that ‘uncertainty has to do with the outcomes of
4 A. Simonsen
events and actions. It is not a vague existential angst, but an aspect of

specific experience and practice’ (Whyte [1997] 2004, 19). I build on the
analytical work of Whyte by exploring how people in migration contexts
question and respond to experiences of uncertainty. Showing how the
uncertainty of movement into the unknown becomes a cure when life
itself feels sick or broken, I move away from focusing on uncertainty only
in relation to misfortunes. Uncertainty instead becomes a way to revive
lives, recreate hopes and explore new futures.
Often, the connotations of the word ‘uncertainty’ have been negative.
The word has been used to describe a lack of knowledge and ability to
foresee future events (Cooper and Pratten 2015, 2). Following more
recent anthropological work, however, I introduce uncertainty as a more
productive and positive mode of existence (Johnson-Hanks 2002; Cooper
and Pratten 2015). Within this approach, uncertainty becomes ‘a struc-
ture of feeling—the lived experience of a pervasive sense of vulnerability,
anxiety, hope, and possibility mediated through material assemblages
that underpin, saturate, and sustain everyday life’ (Cooper and Pratten
2015, 1). Hence, while acknowledging the vulnerability and anxiety that
uncertainty produces, I wish to highlight the pragmatism, possibility and
hope it also creates (Whyte 2004, 24).
In addition, critics of such approaches have argued that there is a need
to link individualised human beings and their attempts to manage uncer-
tainty with the overall structural and economic composition of society
(Steffen et al. 2005, 10). To accommodate this critique, I seek to under-
stand the broader social and moral worlds in which human beings act by
exploring in depth how young Somalis en route, on the one hand, and
European policymakers, on the other, question and respond to the expe-
riences of uncertainty and security in light of recent waves of migration.
For European policymakers, the movement of people without regular
travel documents represents a security threat. This association has been
prominent since 9/11 (Goldstein 2010; Besteman 2017).
The theoretical body of literature on security can be said to take two
different approaches. One, known as the Copenhagen School originating
in political science, focuses on the way security actors (e.g. national or
European politicians) socially construct a certain topic, like migration, as
an exceptional threat to be managed through security measures, so-called
securitisation (Karyotis and Patrikios 2010, 43; Léonard 2011, 8). Such
studies often take as point of departure the top-down policies drawn up
by those in power within nation states. The other approach to security,
the PARIS approach, takes the existential condition of the individual as
its empirical vantage point. This approach, with roots in anthropology
and development studies, operates on the micro-scale and often focuses
on the people who experience the security practices and policies discussed
by the Copenhagen School.2
In this book, I show how the ‘security moment’, which has been traced
back to 9/11 and which has seen a revival during the so-called migrant
crisis, is best understood if we approach security as a sense of achieving a
set of normative goals (Sulovic 2010). The goal is always to eliminate
insecurity, whether represented by the physical presence of people with-
out regular travel documents in Europe or by the lack of food and
employment opportunities among families in Somaliland. These insecu-
rities and the strategies to eliminate them are created, utilised and socially
understood by people representing the state, as well as by ‘actors and
groups outside of the state and its official institutions’ (Goldstein 2010,
492–493).
Security can thus be seen not as a universal thing out there to achieve
but as an expression of the various local experiences and categorisations
that can be socially and politically manipulated. This turns the fight to
decide what is and should be defined as security into a fight for power. As
Buur et al. argue (2007, 12), ‘Security is about real questions of safety
and violence, but it is also a way of representing particular problems in a
manner that makes them exceptional and a question of survival’. Security,
in other words, is about a physical condition as well as a political con-
struction surrounded by struggles for its definition.
The encounters between the young Somalis and European law enforce-
ment at border sites, explored in this book, show how socio-culturally
and politically constructed perceptions of security can be experienced in
a very real and physical manner. They further show how such encounters
between different definitions of security result in new uncertainties, con-
taining existential conditions of both fear and hope.
6 A. Simonsen
History/ies of Migration
Generations of Somalis have sought greener pastures, both literally and
figuratively, as nomads, students and businessmen have moved across
clan territories, state borders and continental divides. They have responded
not only to the insecurity of rainfall but to existential uncertainties simi-
lar to those described by the young generation of today: the hopes and
dreams of youth and the aspiration of spending one’s time wisely and
making the most of life. Tahriib, however, is not only a history of Somalis.
It is, as argued by a young Somali scholar,3 ‘a history of humankind’:
Tahriib starts with the history of humankind. Even the Europeans did tah-
riib. Columbus, he sailed away from Europe to America facing the danger-
ous sea looking for a good place. It is human beings’ nature to leave a place
without any life to a place where you can live.
Migration is not only a risky endeavour but essentially a way to engage

and respond to greater and more existential uncertainties. The stories told
about Somali historical movements demonstrate continuities and differ-
ences between past and present migratory practices among the Somalis.
The differences are found in the directions and modes of movement, as
discussed in Chap. 2. The continuities lie in the uncertainties: the uncer-
tainties of existence and the uncertainties of migration.
Despite the long history of positive connotations ascribed to move-
ment among the Somalis, the forced mass-migration that began follow-
ing the onset of the civil war in the late 1980s has received by far the most
attention by scholars, with a few exceptions (such as Lewis [1965]2002;
Abdi 2005; Horst 2006; Steinberg 2015; Weitzberg 2017). Amid a schol-
arly focus on structural constraints, the negative associations of war, pov-
erty, terrorism and piracy attached to the Somalis by Western media, and
the general framing of movement as a ‘migration crisis’, we lose sight of
the culturally informed understanding of migration. This is a trend not
only within studies centred on Somali migration but in migration studies
in general, which Karen Fog Olwig has called ‘the weak spot in migration
studies’ (2018, 157). By turning the attention to migration practices and
motivations not solely centred on structural constraints, it becomes clear
that the uncertainty of migration may produce hopes of social mobility,
new opportunities and adventure more generally (Bredeloup 1994, 2007,

2013, 2014, 2016; Honwana 2012; Dalgas 2015; Kleinman 2019; Olwig
2018).4 As stated by a young Somali during an interview in Italy:
‘Travelling is like taking a master’, and is thus seen as producing experi-
ence and knowledge. Taking past forms of travel seriously and seeing
them as ‘a continuation in the experiences of people’ currently engaging
in irregular migration (Horst 2006, 37–38) adds an important perspec-
tive to the literature on migration. Centring around human practices in
response to uncertainty, this book adds new layers of understanding to
more structural studies of migration.
Engaging the topic of uncertainty in migration from another angle, I
also explore recent responses to migration represented by European border
controls and migration policies. They represent another aspect of the
uncertainty of movement: the existential insecurity experienced by com-
munities receiving migrants from across geographical and cultural divides.
We see a close connection between the securitisation discourse of the
‘migration crisis’, growing anti-migration sentiments and right-wing
movements in Europe, and the increased border controls and implementa-
tion of new technologies aiming to limit migration (cf. Allsopp, Vosyliūtė,
and Smialowski 2020). In many European countries, migration from the
Global South has been framed as insecure and dangerous for the existing
order of society. The implementation of biometric technologies at border
sites represents the most recent attempt to manage such insecurity by con-
trolling and regulating people from the Global South moving across bor-
ders without regular travel documents (Olwig et al. 2020).
For young women and men en route, the practices of biometric regis-
tration add to the negative uncertainty of movement by introducing new
modes of fear and hopelessness. The implementation of biometric tech-
nology at border sites restricts the right to cross national and supra-
national borders. When crossing European borders, the young Somalis
always ask each other, ‘Have you had your fingers taken?’ Having their
fingerprints registered at the border sites means that the people en route
can be prevented from moving elsewhere, as they will be returned to the
first country of registration. The implementation of biometric technol-
ogy thus turns the bodies of people en route into borders of their own
(Simonsen 2020a, 124, see also Van der Ploeg 2005, Amoore 2006). This
8 A. Simonsen
creates a new fear of getting stuck in a location where hopes of providing

for families at home and live out their individual dreams are unlikely to
be realised.
To the young Somalis on tahriib, stories from Italy of sleeping in parks
and subsisting on free meals from the churches are well known, and
therefore, Italy is not considered a desirable destination. Rather, they
hope to move on with their fingers intact and unregistered to a location
where they can turn ‘social death’ into ‘social hope’. As a result, biometric
registration is described, among the young Somalis, as a form of
Judgement Day on earth. Nevertheless, as will be illustrated later in the
book, some have managed to negotiate the encounters with biometric
technologies at unwanted locations and imbue them with new meaning.
The practices of tahriib and the responses to the youth en route, which
I explore in this book, highlight the incongruence between the rich his-
torical traditions of movement and the current biometric border practices
that treat migration as a recent and dangerous phenomenon. Connecting
practices of tahriib with their historical roots shows how the world and its
opportunities for movement have changed. The next section describes
the historical developments that marked the beginning of the interna-
tional diasporisation of Somalis and laid the foundations of current prac-
tices of cross-border movements in the Horn of Africa and beyond.
Colonialism and Beyond

Prior to colonial occupation, vast territories in the Horn of Africa were
inhabited by ‘the people who self-identified as members of the Somali
genealogy traced to common ancestors’ (Besteman 1999, 11). In 1839,
the British occupied the Yemeni port of Aden and soon thereafter began
exploring the coastal area across the Red Sea. This led to an interest in
especially the northwestern part of Somalia, known today as Somaliland
(Touval 1963, 31). The initial interest in Somaliland grew out of a wish
to uphold security and communication with India (Touval 1963, 32). In
addition, Somaliland was one of the only suppliers of meat in the region
and hence became a strategically important location for the British to
control (Lewis 2002, 40). In 1884–1885, the USA and 13 European
countries met in Berlin to colonise and divide the African continent

between them—what is today referred to as ‘the scramble for Africa’.5 The
strategic location of Somalia resulted in a division of the territories
between Britain, France, Italy and Ethiopia.6
Two processes of outward migration emerged due to the colonial occu-
pation of Somalia. First, migration from Somalia to Europe started dur-
ing colonialism when Somalis started working as soldiers and sailors for
the British. This led to the establishment of Somali communities in
Cardiff, London and Marseilles (Kleist 2004, 1–4; Hansen 2006, 66;
Diiriye et al. 2015). Others migrated to Italy as students or military train-
ees during the 1950s (Fagioli-Ndlovu 2015, 7). Furthermore, some
Somalis worked in the merchant navy in America, Russia and the Arab
countries (Kleist 2004, 1–4; Hansen 2006, 55; Diiriye et al. 2015). This
process of emigration was the beginning of the diasporisation of the
Somalis.
Second, many Somalis left Somalia and became a minority in another
country, not because they actively migrated but because political borders
established during colonialism were upheld after the official end of the
colonial era. After Somalia’s independence on 26 June 1960, many
Somalis wished for the reunification of what is referred to as Soomaaliweyn
or Greater Somalia: Djibouti, formerly colonised by the French;
Somaliland, a former British colony; the Somali Regional State in eastern
Ethiopia; the Northern Frontier District (now North Eastern Province)
in the northern part of Kenya; and the remaining areas of northeastern
and south-central Somalia that were under Italian colonial rule.
The reunification was never actualised, and colonial borders are still in
place. As these borders were drawn as a result of conflicts and competi-
tion between colonial powers rather than attention to local conditions,
they continue to be a source of conflict (Touval [2014] 1963, 155).
Ethiopia and Britain, for example, established the border across the cus-
tomary grazing areas of Somali clans, which has resulted in continuous
disagreements and scrutiny of several differing treaties stating the exact
location of the borders (ibid., 156).7
Throughout the Horn of Africa, colonial borders have left family net-
works and important pastoral resources, like grazing areas, separated.
This has had severe consequences for families and their abilities to make
10 A. Simonsen
a living for themselves (Besteman 1999, 12). The colonial border draw-
ing also had consequences on a larger scale. By one stroke, Somalis found
themselves living as minorities and outsiders in territories that their fami-
lies had occupied long before the colonial era. In Kenya’s Northern
Frontier District, for example, Somalis went from being majority inhab-
itants of a vast Somali territory to being seen as ‘quasi-foreign elements in
the colony, later as undesirable members of a postcolonial nation, and
more recently as national and international security threats’ (Weitzberg
2017, 177). The categorisation of Somalis as outsiders and potential
security threats has led to an increase in young Somali Kenyans consider-
ing tahriib as a solution.
Following independence, the colonial legacy continued to affect many
Somalis through experiences of insecurity and displacement, as discussed
above. Concomitantly, the early 1960s saw ‘a growing feeling of national-
ism inspired by nationalist movements in their struggle against colonial-
ism’ (Ismail 2016, 2). The Somali Republic was born, implementing a
parliamentary democracy with two major goals: ‘socio-political unifica-
tion of the Somalis in the Horn of Africa and socio-economic develop-
ment of the new nation’ (ibid., 1).
In 1969, the newborn state of Somalia saw a military coup led by
Mohamed Siyad Barre, whose initial aim was to fight poverty, disease and
ignorance (Lewis [1965]2002, 208). During his 30 years of rule in
Somalia, he attempted to implement ‘scientific socialism’, inspired by the
Soviet Union and referring to ‘wealth-sharing based on wisdom’, includ-
ing urban and rural mass literacy campaigns in Somalia in 1973 and
1975. According to Siyad Barre and his followers, the success of ‘scientific
socialism’ included dismantling clannism. The official state slogan at the
time argued that ‘tribalism divides, socialism unites’ (ibid, 209). This spe-
cific part of the national campaign was met with demonstrations and
later accusations against Siyad Barre himself of favourising his own clan.
In addition to the growing dissatisfaction in the population, the unsuc-
cessful war initiated by Siyad Barre against Ethiopia in 1977, which led
to the displacement of many Somalis, played an important role in the
eventual demise of the regime. In 1991, civil war broke out, the post-
colonial state collapsed, and Somalis started to flee across the borders in
very high numbers.8
The two major cities of Somaliland, Burao and Hargeisa, were bombed
in 1988 when Siyad Barre was still in power. The war between south and
north Somalia resulted in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the
north, rendering the capital, Hargeisa, a ghost town (Hansen 2006, 20,
56). In south-central Somalia, ethnic cleansing, violent conflicts and
famine broke out (Lewis 2002, 262–265).9 The capital Mogadishu
became ‘the centre of waves of destruction and terror’ (ibid., 264). In the
years after 1991, when the rule of Siyad Barre came to an end, 250,000
Somalis died due to civil war and famine (Menkhaus 2007, 81).
The international community attempted to create stability in Somalia
through formal state-building and national reconciliation initiatives, like
the United Nations Operations in Somalia (UNOSOM) between 1993
and 1995. Most of these initiatives failed (ibid.). Local stakeholders like
businessmen, professionals and former military officers have also worked
through informal channels to secure rules and regulations in Somalia.
But the numerous competing internal and external interests have pro-
longed conflicts and undermined local processes of stabilisation, thus
contributing to militant Islamism and warlordism (Hagmann 2016).
In 2012, the Somali Republic went from a transitional to a federal
government, marking a more permanent and stabilised state and result-
ing in increased optimism after 22 years of civil war and 12 years of con-
stantly changing transitional governments (Ismail 2016, 2). Despite
positive developments, the country continues to experience major inter-
nal insecurities and ongoing conflicts between the government and the
militant group al-Shabaab [‘the Youth’].10 Insecurity and hardship con-
tinues to make everyday life difficult for the Somali population and leads
to ongoing displacement. Out of a population of approximately 16.8
million people in Somalia (United Nations Population Fund 2022),11
more than 2.6 million Somalis have become part of the mixed migration
flows within the Horn of Africa, living as internally displaced persons or
in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, Ethiopia and Kenya (Human
Rights Watch 2022). Another estimated two million people of Somali
descent have settled as refugees in Europe and North America as part of
the diaspora (Kleist and Abdi 2022).
Thus, decades of instability in Somalia have led to a continued existen-
tial insecurity for many young Somalis growing up in the country.
12 A. Simonsen
n Route: Flows of Information, Hope

E
and Temporality
Migration studies tend to focus on what people move away from, what
they move through and what they move towards (Abdi 2005; Schapendonk
2011; Lucht 2012; De León 2015; Steinberg 2015). I take a different
approach. Instead of dividing the field into distinct geographical sites of
‘home’, ‘transit’ and ‘destination’, the journey undertaken in this book
follows the practices and experiences of young Somalis’ lives en route. The
site of this study is the movement itself, as it is given substance by the
mobile people who construct it. This multi-sited ethnography of move-
ment is about ‘shifting perspectives, and exploring positions that are
somehow connected, related to a certain issue or problem’ (Hansen 2006,
41). Thus, I show how dreams of the future are closely linked to ideas of
movement, and how young Somalis gather information, create hope and
manage their time throughout the imaginative and physical movements
of tahriib, conceptualised as one field site.
In line with recent literature within migration studies, I thus argue
that social processes occur beyond ‘the imaginary of “terrains” as fixed
geographical containers’ (Schapendonk 2011, 10). Bringing to the fore
the three major themes of information, hope and temporality, I demon-
strate how ‘home’, ‘transit’ and ‘destination’ are interwoven and make up
social rather than geographical spaces. The search for (reliable) informa-
tion, the creation and shattering of hopes and dreams, and the experience
of wasting or making the most of time all take place before, during and
after actual physical movement.
Taking an en route approach, where both ‘home’ and ‘destination’ are
integral parts of the social space of lives en route, the ethnographic site
and object of study becomes ongoing movement. Such movement rarely
takes place in a predictable or linear fashion. Rather than simply taking a
person from ‘home’ through ‘transit’ to a predetermined ‘destination’,
tahriib makes twists and turns, stops and reversals. Transitional spaces
may become permanent, and perceived ‘final destinations’ may prove
‘transitional’. Similarly, ‘home’ may become the ‘destination’ if not physi-
cally or permanently then socially and imaginatively. Taking movement
and uncertainty as the structuring issue, I take the reader through

‘regional differences, historical processes, social ties … and imagined
places and spaces’ (Vigh 2009, 93).
Bringing to the fore the complexities of human responses to uncer-
tainty, I hope to inspire academics, students, policymakers and general
readers alike to see uncertainty as a positive striving for betterment while
respecting the existential fear it also encompasses.
Ethnographic Footsteps
The first time I set foot in the Horn of Africa was in 2010 as an intern for
a Danish NGO as part of my master’s degree in anthropology. I spent 10
months in the Somali Regional State in Ethiopia making friends among
young Somalis born in refugee camps in the region. They taught me that
despite living in safety away from the ongoing conflicts in Somalia, being
labelled a refugee in the eyes of the law did not provide a life in which
they could fulfil their hopes and dreams. In fact, many of my interlocu-
tors attended interviews with the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) in the hope of being resettled in countries like
the USA.
Three years later, in May 2013, I found myself in Somaliland living in
a household of three generations. This was made possible by connections
made through my friends in Ethiopia and my participation in the com-
parative research project, Invisible Lives.12 Here, in Hargeisa, the young
people I encountered expressed dreams of moving away from a secure but
difficult or hopeless situation. While my friends in the Ethiopian refugee
camps would leave through regular and legal means of travel, my new
friends in Somaliland did not have that opportunity. Instead, they risked
their lives on journeys into the unknown, as Gacal told us in the begin-
ning of this book.
What struck me about the young Somalis in Hargeisa was that so
many shared the dream of doing tahriib, across clan affiliations and eco-
nomic differences. Most of my new friends, who shared their thoughts
and dreams with me, belonged to the lower middle class and middle
class. The majority were in the middle of or had just finalised their
14 A. Simonsen
university education, which they were paying for. Some received the
tuition fees from their immediate family; others had collected the money
from family members living outside of Somalia, the diaspora. The young
Somalis all had very high aspirations in life. What continued to puzzle
me was that although these high aspirations did not allow them to com-
promise with their hopes for the future, so many of them made the big-
gest compromise of all as they chose to risk their lives to journey into the
unknown. This book is the result of ongoing reflections upon this puzzle.
As part of my PhD project, I conducted 11 months of fieldwork in
three different landscapes: Somaliland, Turkey and Greece. Originally,
the three geopolitical spaces were divided into three parts: Somaliland as
the country of origin, Turkey defined as a transit country and Greece as
the destination country. Departing on this journey myself, reality quickly
hit me. Although I travelled to these three countries and thus constructed
a linear journey, for most of my Somali friends, tahriib did not entail any
clear sense of direction. A destination country like Greece was never really
the destination, as the young Somalis tended to ‘live in mobility’ meaning
that ‘their experiences were marked by an ongoing mobility that con-
sisted of a multiplicity of potential routes’ and often changes in status
(Schrooten et al. 2016, 1199; see also Schuster 2005). Movement was
never linear or certain, neither for them nor for me. Instead, it was what
Vertovec has defined as ‘circular migration’ characterised by a continuous
and non-linear movement (2007).
I travelled along these paths and felt as a part of the network con-
structed from footsteps taken long before me, along with me and con-
tinuing after me. A central component of my methodology was making
friends, which allowed me to build long-lasting relations and actively
participate in the networks of travellers. My new friends would always
bring me along and introduce me to others, like when I landed in Hargeisa
and was introduced to Abdullahi through another international scholar
conducting research there. Abdullahi introduced me to a family member,
Taban, whose perspectives on life and migration are introduced in the
book. Through Taban I was introduced to Abdirahman, who was a friend
of Taban’s younger brother and considering tahriib at the time.
Abdirahman’s social network and thoughts on migration, as he gathered
information and slowly changed his mind and decided to stay in Hargeisa,
have been an invaluable foundation for this book.
My methodological approach to studying circular migration depended
heavily on border-crossing social networks. Just like my new friends,
when they ventured on tahriib, I also ‘utilized, extended and established
social connections spanning places of origin and places abroad’ (Vertovec
2007, 2). The modern technological solutions and the reduced costs of
being online have intensified this and helped me and my friends obtain,
maintain and develop border-crossing social networks. Now, almost 10
years later, I still exchange online messages with the people I befriended
back in 2013, who are now scattered throughout the globe. The same
technology has allowed my friends to make online introductions to other
friends through social media. These introductions have helped me develop
my network in Italy in 2016, 2017 and 2018, where I conducted my
postdoctoral research in the collaborative project, The Biometric Border
World.13 Here, I set out to explore how young Somalis en route experi-
enced and negotiated the increased European border control, including
the implementation of biometric technologies.
I was initially surprised to see how some made use of biometric regis-
tration to negotiate family relations or socio-cultural positions at home
(Simonsen 2020b). At the same time, I found some of my earlier puzzles
re-emerging, as so many young Somalis chose to continue their journey
into the unknown despite being provided with temporary security in
Italy. This showed me that the young Somalis experienced life in Italy as
very similar to life at home—except now, many had no place to live and
lacked the stable food supply that most had enjoyed in Somaliland.
However, for Somalis in Italy, continuing into the unknown had become
more difficult, as the European authorities’ security measures against
irregular migration started to include biometric registration at bor-
der sites.
Throughout the various stages of fieldwork, I have made use of research
assistants to set up meetings, to entertain endless discussions on tahriib
and other themes and to translate interviews conducted in Somali. All
my research assistants were either considering tahriib, were in the process
of doing tahriib or were living among their peers doing so. This gave me
unique access to the community of young Somalis doing tahriib. This
16 A. Simonsen
environment was characterised by the uncertainty of never knowing who

would be present the following day. My research assistants would do tah-
riib whenever the opportunity arose, which meant that I would often
have to find new assistants to help me. This gave me an intimate insight
into the existential feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing in which direc-
tion I would be going and with whom.
Moving Boundaries: Ethical Considerations

Ethical dilemmas have followed me throughout my fieldwork, from the
beginning continuing into the present. Before arriving in Somaliland, I
had created an ethical code for myself. I did not want to know when my
new friends would depart on tahriib, a trip that could (and for some did)
lead to their deaths. This knowledge would put me in the ethical dilemma
of whether to share this information with their parents who were usually
opposed to their children venturing out on tahriib. Not knowing exactly
when they would leave Somaliland did not change the fact that I had
information that most of the parents did not, namely that they were
planning to leave. This situation, as so many others during fieldwork,
meant that I was often faced with the difficult ethical dilemma of being
in possession of very intimate information that others desperately wanted.
This also included various authorities. In each situation, my loyalty was
to my friends, who shared this information with me in confidence.
Emerging myself among the young Somalis in Somaliland, Turkey,
Greece and Italy, my own life-world changed along with theirs. The more
time I spent in the field, the more information they shared with me,
including information that I had initially refused to be in possession of.
My boundaries were constantly challenged and extended regarding the
information passed on to me, such as details on when and how specific
individuals would attempt to leave Turkey or Greece. In other instances,
I would come across information that I was hesitant to share with my
friends, particularly, when I received information about Somalis succeed-
ing in obtaining refugee status in various countries. I was wary of sharing
information that could create false expectations. As my own, my friends’
ethical dilemmas were omnipresent, and their boundaries were constantly
pushed and expanded. They found themselves keeping secrets, avoiding

police, negotiating with brokers and some experienced having to leave
people behind in the jungle to ensure their own survival.
While conducting fieldwork in Turkey, my friends were able to move
freely, while my movements were limited. The houses that the brokers
rented from locals, and where the Somalis paid for a mattress on the floor
to sleep on, were practically off limits to me. In Greece, the roles were
almost reversed. I visited many of the houses, and there was one in par-
ticular that I visited daily. My friends, on the other hand, had very lim-
ited space for movement, as they were in constant fear of being arrested.
On several occasions, we decided to end interviews or informal conversa-
tions as undercover police were seen working in the area.
By minimising the number of places where I met up with my friends
and by staying in at night, I tried to reduce the risk of drawing attention
to them. I was very aware of the ethical dilemma of jeopardising my
interlocutors’ security when entering their landscape(s) with my research
project (see Donnan and Wilson 2010, 14). Thus, I did not want to risk
them having to defend me in case of fighting or in other ways attracting
police attention in my eagerness to conduct fieldwork in the area.
Studying people moving through highly politicised landscapes of
criminality and violence means that one is constantly surrounded by eth-
ical dilemmas like those mentioned above. This could easily lead to a
portrayal of life en route centred around conflict and danger. Following
Robben and Nordstrom (1995) in their approach to violence, however, I
show how people create everyday lives amid hardship and death. Going
to the Bengali shops to have Somali dresses sewn in Greece, buying gro-
ceries in the local supermarkets in Turkey or visiting the local churches to
receive free food in Italy was as much part of the field as avoiding the
police, getting out of prison and moving through hazardous landscapes.
As Robben and Nordstrom argue (1995, 6), ‘what is at stake is not simply
deconstruction but reconstruction, not just death but also survival’.
18 A. Simonsen
The Journey into the Unknown

The journey into the unknown takes you along on the adventurous and
risky voyage of tahriib, a voyage undertaken every single day by people
from many parts of the Global South, who lack the travel documents
required to enter Europe through safe and regulated travel. Along the
journey, I explore the perceptions, practices and positions of young Somalis
en route. Through this lens, it becomes clear how the uncertainty of
undertaking this journey into the unknown is turned into a ‘subjunctive
mode’ (Whyte 2004, 24) of positive striving towards a better future while
also entailing existential fear and insecurity.
Tahriib is a modern expression of a traditional Somali practice of
movement highlighted in the Somali proverb, ‘happiness is two feet’.
Somali socio-cultural perceptions of physical movement in the past,
through the present and towards the future (Chap. 2) and society and the
youths’ own expectations of social mobility as they come of age (Chap.
3), cast tahriib as a solution, sometimes the only solution imaginable, to
the existential insecurities prevalent at home. The effects of such percep-
tions, that is the practices of tahriib, are explored through practices of
hope (Chap. 4), the search for information (Chap. 5) and engagements
with time (Chap. 6). This part of the journey illustrates the contours of
hope and the narratives of promising futures and shows how lives at
home are already en route, anticipating and awaiting opportunities to
move. It illuminates how the hopes and imaginary travels are replaced by
physical movement, how the need for information intensifies and how
time spent, with whom and in which tempo, becomes essential in turn-
ing uncertainty into the hope of success.
The positions that young Somalis and the European border guards take,
negotiate and are being given, as the bodies en route engage with the
European Unions’ security policies and practices at border sites, are
another important part of this book (Chap. 7). The border encounters
show how the use of biometric registration brings about new forms of
insecurity as well as new ways of negotiating movement and new ways of
getting stuck. In lives en route, the traditional understandings of ‘home’,
‘transit’ and ‘destination’ are challenged, as the perceptions, practices and
positions of human bodies on the move cut across these divides. Often
‘home’ is recast as the ultimate ‘destination’ through the dream of home-

coming (Chap. 8).
The journey ends by drawing up the lessons from the seven chapters to
capture a more nuanced view of contemporary global migration pro-
cesses. These lessons show that rather than continually looking for new
technologies, taller fences and stricter policies to regulate and control
bodies on the move, policies and practices need to address the underlying
universally human experiences of and responses to uncertainty and inse-
curity. In order to address the root causes of migration and of the increas-
ingly nationalist responses seen throughout Europe, we need to recognise
practices of mobility, as well as the increasing demand for security mea-
sures and control, as human responses to uncertainty and insecurity.
Notes
1. My interlocutors originate in different parts of the Horn of Africa:
Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, and the majority come from the self-
pronounced republic of Somaliland.
2. For an in-depth discussion of the two main approaches within security
studies—the Copenhagen School and the PARIS approach—see Bigo
and McCluskey 2018.
3. Semi-structured interview, 04.03.2015, with one of the authors of the
book Magafe: Tahriibka iyo Dhallinta Sibiq-dhaqaaqday.
4. Of course being aware of national, regional and local differences
(Pelican 2013).
5. https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/library/library_exhibitions/schoolresources/
exploration/scramble_for_africa/
6. See the work of Touval (1963) for an in-depth exploration of the parti-
tion of the Horn.
7. The latest fights in Las Anod, the capital of the Sool region in Somaliland
bordering Puntland, which erupted in December 2022, also has its roots
in the colonial division of Somalia along with ‘the changing relationship
between clan and state in the context of a recent flurry of international
investment’ (Norman 9 March 2023). https://africanarguments.
org/2023/03/conflict-in-lasanod-and-crisis-in-somaliland-external-
investment-intensifying-internal-competition-and-the-struggle-for-
narrative/
20 A. Simonsen
8. With the Gulf War in the Middle East and the larger historical context
taken into consideration, one could argue that almost every Somali per-
son has been displaced in one way or the other (Hansen 2006, 58).
9. This is an updated version of the book, which was originally published
in 1965.
10. Al-Shabaab was created by former members of the Islamic Court Union
after its dissolution in 2006, which occurred after fights with Ethiopia
and the Somali government.
11. https://www.unfpa.org/data/world-population/SO
12. The project was funded by The FKK [Det Frie forskningsråd].
13. This project was funded by the Velux Foundation.
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2
A History of Lives on the Move
Somali proverb:
‘Calaf waa labo cagood’.
(Happiness is two feet)(Varming 2010)
The Somalis have a long history of various forms of regional and global
movement as nomads, labour migrants, students, seamen and business
entrepreneurs (Weitzberg 2017, 2). We know from the literature that
these proud traditions of movement are essential to the self-perception of
Somali society. We also know that thousands of Somalis have had to flee
their country since the outbreak of civil war in 1988 and, consequently,
have engaged in newer forms of migration practices. Within Western
social sciences, the long history of varied forms of mobility among
Somalis and other communities across the globe have been explored
through different analytical optics (Olwig and Sørensen 2002, 5). I begin
this book by introducing the major trends in migration- and refugee
studies within sociology and anthropology, and how these trends have
influenced the way migration practices are presented and analysed, focus-
sing on the three main classifications of ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’ and ‘inter-
nally displaced persons’ (IDPs). I view these categorisations as problematic
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 25

A. Simonsen, Tahriib – Journeys into the Unknown, Migration, Diasporas and
Citizenship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27821-1_2
26 A. Simonsen
when analysing actual migration practices, where categories often overlap

and change over time (Olwig and Sørensen 2002, 7). Additionally, migra-
tion research has often left out great numbers of mobile populations,
such as nomads and IDPs. Therefore, I argue that such categorisations are
inadequate in capturing empirical realities of movement and mobility.
During my fieldwork it became clear, through dialogue with Somalis,
young and old, women and men, that they had their own classifications,
which framed and captured past and present ways of moving in the world.
This emic approach allows me to view historical patterns of migration
as layers of movement overlapping, intertwining and substituting each
other. This will contribute to addressing one of the major problems of
migration studies, namely that of conceptualising migration as a recent
historical phenomenon (Olwig and Sørensen 2002, 1).
napshots: Histories of Migration-

S
and Refugee Studies
Migration studies emerged first as ‘a fairly small and specialised subfield
within the social sciences’ (Olwig and Sørensen 2002, 1). It was not until
the last decades of the twentieth century that migration studies devel-
oped and took the central position that it has within academia today
(ibid., Horevitz 2009, 745). Building on a general interest in quantitative
data, like statistics on movement between nation states (see, e.g.
Ravenstein’s work 1885, Greenwood 2019, 270), E.S. Lee proposed to
view migration through a bimodal model now known as push-pull the-
ory. Lee’s intention was to explain not only how migration took place but
also why (Schapendonk 2011, 2). Lee (1966) used the push-pull model
to argue that some people migrate due to so-called plus factors at the
destination (pull-factors), whereas others leave due to minus factors at
the place they occupy (push-factors). Despite the valuable contribution
of adding a ‘why’ to the ‘how’ in mid-1960s’ migration studies, the push-
pull model portrayed migration as ‘a static point-to-point movement’
(Ernste et al. 2012, 509) motivated solely by economic factors.
It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that the push-pull approach was
overshadowed by approaches favouring ‘movement and the formation
and sustaining of long-distance ties in human life and society’ (Olwig and
Sørensen 2002, 1). Key to this new trend within migration studies was
the transnational approach within sociology that focused on the ‘multiple
ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of
nation-states’ (Vertovec 1999, 447; see for instance: Schiller et al. 1995;
Portes 2001; Vertovec 2001; Wimmer and Schiller 2002; Levitt and
Schiller 2004). Transnational scholars, focusing mainly on migration
towards the USA, paved the way for migration researchers to focus on
social fields rather than geographical ones.
The discipline of anthropology opened up similar avenues of research
but focused primarily on movement towards the metropoles, especially in
Latin America and on the African continent. The increased interest in
migration issues in the 1950s and 1960s led to the establishment of
migration research as a central topic within the anthropological field
(Horevitz 2009). This led to the Manchester school of thought,1 which
framed migration studies by focusing on migrants themselves, move-
ment, processes, links, changes and simultaneous processes, approaching
spaces as social places. The world, in other words, was now understood to
be interconnected. Connectedness is a key word for ‘the mobility turn’,
which sharpened the focus on movement, exploring human and non-
human mobilities (Kleist 2019, 73; Hannam et al. 2006; Sheller and
Urry 2006) defined by ‘flows, fluids and deterritorialisations’
(Schapendonk 2011, 9). Olwig and Sørensen, for example, in the early
beginnings of the mobility turn, advocated for ‘shifting the analytical
focus from place to mobility, and from “place of origin” and “place of
destination” to the movements involved in sustaining a livelihood’ (2002,
2). Now, more than 20 years later, I use ‘livelihood’ as a conceptual
approach to carve out the connections between movement and social
obligations and explore the interesting tension between the negative sta-
tus assigned to international movement through irregular paths and the
positive associations that tahriib holds for the Somali youth and other
mobile populations (see Vigh 2017, 479). For the Somali youth, the
irregular modes and paths of movement represent a way to show care,
28 A. Simonsen
take responsibility and as a result, ‘gain a positive social presence within

kin and family networks’ (Vigh 2017, 479).
Practices of migration are more contested than ever in a world where
‘access to safe and legal mobility’ is unevenly distributed (Kleist 2019, 73;
Ferguson 2003; Lucht 2012) and where millions of Euros are invested in
human, material and technological borders in order to stop what is
described as illegal movement. Throughout this book, I show how the
ethics of care is relational and situational and how ‘the moral evaluation
and ascription’ of irregular migration ‘is defined inter-subjectively and
understood in relation to social responsibility, care and accountability’
(Vigh 2017, 495). Hence, I explore livelihood practices by viewing irreg-
ular migration as deeply entangled with local social dynamics. Livelihood
practices are about becoming socially visible as one that cares for the fam-
ily. In the case of tahriib, the youth take on the hardships of migration, as
they seek to escape the disappointments of not being able to live up to
their responsibility of showing care, as they come of age. I conceptualise
this as ‘social death’.
The nuances introduced to discussions of migration by the livelihood
approach are still not widely accepted. Among politicians and the
European public opinion, there is still a strict divide between a migrant’s
movements, referred to as voluntary and undertaken for economic rea-
sons, and a refugee’s movements, seen as involuntary conflict-related dis-
placement (Horst 2006, 33; Black 2001, 63, Hamlin 2021). This divide
represents a historical split between two fields of research. But despite
recent developments in migration studies, opinions and policies still
show that a rather static representation of migration practices has pre-
vailed, and primary attention continues to be given to international
migration, ignoring other important forms of movement (Olwig and
Sørensen 2002, 7).
Refugee studies emerged, as people who were forcibly uprooted due to
conflict caught increased interest from academics and politicians in the
aftermath of the Second World War. During that time it was becoming
clear that uprooted people, defined as refugees, were a permanent phe-
nomenon. The Association for the Study of the World Refugee Problem
was the first international organisation exploring the study of refugees,
initiated in 1950 (Black 2001, 58). Soon followed the 1951 Refugee
Convention and the 1967 Protocol, defining a refugee as ‘someone who

is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-
founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality,
membership of a particular social group, or political opinion’ (UNHCR
2022). In fact, the development of refugee studies as an academic field
has since the beginning ‘been intimately connected with policy develop-
ments’ (Black 2001, 58) and contributions are often said to be more
policy-oriented than academic (Horst 2006, 201–202; Davis 1993;
Hein 1993).
This ‘problem-centered approach and openness to dialogue with prac-
titioners’ can be a strength in some cases (Black 2001, 67). For instance,
scholarly engagements with non-academic actors within humanitarian
and development aid strengthened the distinction between refugees and
IDPs. Thus, such engagements raised attention to the category of IDPs at
the political level and resulted in the introduction of certain types of
humanitarian assistance for IDPs in Somalia and elsewhere (Black 2001).
When researchers work so closely with non-academic actors, there is a
risk that they end up producing what Black defines as ‘work that is […]
undertheorized and orientated towards particular bureaucratic interests’
(ibid, 67). But scholars within refugee studies have also made important
academic contributions to the study of the conflicts that produce dis-
placement as well as the categorisation of people in various situations of
displacement, like ‘minorities’ and ‘refugees’ (Shacknove 1985; Zolberg
et al. 1989; Adelman 1999). Important contributions have also been
made to the understanding of the consequences of such displacement
and categorisations (Arendt 1951; Harrell-Bond 1986; Malkki 1995;
O’Neill 2008). Refugee studies thereby ‘form part of and contribute to
mainstream academic debate within both disciplinary and interdisciplin-
ary scholarly journals’ (Black 2001, 62).
Both academics and politicians have used the term displacement when
conceptualising and responding to people fleeing conflict. In the early
days of refugee studies, such analyses reflected ‘sedentarist metaphysics’
that ‘naturalize people’s connections to place, and view mobility as some-
what anomalous and suspect’ (Lindley 2013, 293). Within this concep-
tualisation, refugees are viewed as uprooted people in a state of betwixt
and between (Malkki 1992, 1995) helplessly exposed in what Hannah
Arendt famously called ‘the abstract nakedness of being human and
30 A. Simonsen
nothing but human’ (1951, 297). These displacement framings uncriti-

cally use a political category like ‘refugee’ as an analytical concept (Black
2001, 65–66), and they often present displacement itself as the problem
rather than the socio-political context that has defined displacement as
the problem (Lindley 2013, 293).
The term displacement refers to an approach, where the nation state is
the main institution through which migration is defined. Many policies,
even today, continue to frame movement across national state borders as
a problem. As a result, many political initiatives focus on returning peo-
ple to their states of origin. In 2019, the Danish government changed the
laws on migration, introducing the so-called paradigme-skifte (paradigm
shift) (Rytter et al. 2023). This meant shifting the focus away from poli-
cies promoting integration of refugees into Danish society to promoting
and encouraging the eventual return of migrants, including the Somalis
(Støjberg 2019).
Despite both the academic and political legacy of viewing displace-
ment as problematic in itself, more recent work explores ‘the political
causes of displacement’ (Lindley 2013, 292), seeking to understand the
root causes of refugee movements. In addition, this work not only views
displaced refugees in terms of passive suffering but introduces an analyti-
cal gaze of agency (ibid.). However, terms such as ‘migrants’, ‘refugees’
and ‘IDPs’ are still used within many of these studies, hence running the
risk of uncritically reproducing political categorisations.
People’s historical particularities and their different practices and social
understandings of mobility are lost when explored solely through legal
frameworks and analytical concepts. Where would the long history of
Somali nomadic movements fit within such categories? Rather than try-
ing to put the local understandings into standardised boxes, I propose to
focus on practices of mobility and the emic terms that people have used
to describe these practices through generations (see, for instance, the
work of Kleinman 2019 on West Africans’ adventure capital in France).
For the Somali people, migration and mobility have been seen a defining
feature of being Somali (Kleist 2004, 2). It is essential to know the close
historical relationship between mobility and the Somali people if one is
to understand the young Somalis and their ways of moving in the world.
The following section explores the Somali nomadic heritage, referred to
as reer guuraa [family of moving], through the story of Yusra and her fam-
ily. This nomadic heritage and the approach to life inherent in it are
generally seen as a central part of Somali identity.
mic Notions of Movement: Nomads, Camels

E
and Coping Strategies
‘Hello, I’m dying, help me!’ These were the first words that Yusra heard
from her 19-year-old brother, after he went on tahriib. Not informing his
family that he was migrating, he did not make contact until he reached
Libya. Here, he was caught and taken hostage by the Magafe, an umbre-
ally network of smugglers spanning from Somaliland through Sudan to
Libya, who wanted to extract money out of him. He called his family
because he desperately needed them to pay the ransom, as he would oth-
erwise be tortured or killed.
As Yusra and I, in the summer of 2013, sit comfortably on the couch
in the home of what I consider to be my Somali family in Hargeisa, she
tells me her story. Yusra and her older brother were brought up in a fam-
ily of ten sisters and brothers, a mother and father. Before the death of
their father in 2007, the family lived a nomadic lifestyle caring for the
camels and goats that were their primary source of income. They lived in
a typical family based grazing camp, consisting of a married man and his
wife, children, sheep, goats and a small number of milk camels (Lewis
1993, 51).2 ‘It was a normal life when my father was alive’, Yusra explains
and continues: ‘We were living outside the city in a house and my father
took good care of our goats and camels. We sold the milk from the goats
and camels’. And, Yusra adds, ‘All the children were physically well
because they drank the milk from the animals’. Camel milk, like many
other aspects of the nomadic heritage, is highly regarded in Somali soci-
ety, and people often mentioned its health benefits to me. It is widely
believed that camel milk secures good health into old age and that it cures
a variety of even serious illnesses. In addition to these health benefits, the
nomadic lifestyle forms the backbone of Somali economy by exporting
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least in the Avranchin and the Mont-St.-Michel, and entrusted with
the keeping of Rouen itself against the traitors stirred up by the Red
King. William, while his young brother was safe in prison, had
resumed the Gloucestershire estates and made them over to his
favourite Robert Fitz-Hamon. Henry in his natural resentment threw
himself with all his energies into the cause of the duke of Normandy,
acted as his trustiest and bravest supporter throughout the war with
Rufus which followed, and at the close of the year crowned his
services by the promptitude and valour with which he defeated a
conspiracy for betraying the Norman capital to the king of England.[8]
The struggle ended in a treaty between the elder brothers, in which
neither of them forgot the youngest. Their remembrance of him took
the shape of an agreement to drive him out of all his territories and
divide the spoil between themselves. Their joint attack soon brought
him to bay in his mightiest stronghold, the rock crowned by the
abbey of S. Michael-in-Peril-of-the-Sea, commonly called Mont-
Saint-Michel. Henry threw himself into the place with as many
knights as were willing to share the adventure; the brethren of the
abbey did their utmost to help, and for fifteen days the little garrison,
perched on their inaccessible rock, held out against their besiegers.
[9] Then hunger began to thin their ranks; nothing but the
inconsistent generosity of Robert saved them from the worse
agonies of thirst;[10] one by one they dropped away, till Henry saw
that he must yield to fate, abide by his father’s counsel, and wait
patiently for better days. He surrendered; he came down from the
Mount, once again a landless and homeless man; and save for one
strange momentary appearance in England as a guest at the Red
King’s court,[11] he spent the greater part of the next two years in
France and the Vexin, wandering from one refuge to another with a
lowly train of one knight, three squires, and one chaplain.[12] He was
at length recalled by the townsmen of Domfront, who, goaded to
desperation by the oppressions of their lord Robert of Bellême, threw
off his yoke and besought Henry to come and take upon himself the
duty of defending them, their town and castle, against their former
tyrant. “By the help of God and the suffrages of his friends,” as his
admiring historian says,[13] Henry was thus placed in command of
his father’s earliest conquest, the key of Normandy and Maine, a
fortress scarcely less mighty and of far greater political importance
than that from which he had been driven. He naturally used his
opportunity for reprisals, not only upon Robert of Bellême, but also
upon his own brothers;[14] and by the end of two years he had made
himself of so much consequence in the duchy that William Rufus,
again at war with the duke, thought it time to secure his alliance. The
two younger brothers met in England, and when Henry returned in
the spring of 1095 he came as the liegeman of the English king,
sworn to fight his battles and further his interests in Normandy by
every means in his power.[15]
[6] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 665.
[7] Ib. p. 672. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 392 (Hardy, pp.
616, 617).
[8] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 690. Will.

Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 392 (Hardy, pp. 617, 618).
[10] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. iv. c. 310 (Hardy, pp. 491, 492).
[11] See Freeman, William Rufus, vol. i. pp. 293, 295, 305; vol.
ii. pp. 535, 536.
[13] Ib. p. 698.
[14] Ib. pp. 698, 706, 722.
[15] Eng. Chron. a. 1095.
William and Henry had both learned by experience that to work

with Robert for any political purpose was hopeless, and that their
true interest was to support each other—William’s, to enlist for his
own service Henry’s clear cool head and steady hand; Henry’s, to
secure for himself some kind of footing in the land where his ultimate
ambitions could not fail to be centred. He had learned in his
wanderings to adapt himself to all circumstances and all kinds of
society; personally, he and Rufus can have had little in common
except their passion for the chase. Lanfranc’s teaching, moral and
intellectual, had been all alike thrown away upon his pupil William
the Red. Henry, carefully educated according to his father’s special
desire, had early shown a remarkable aptitude for study, was a
scholar of very fair attainments as scholarship went among laymen
in his day, and retained his literary tastes not only through all his
youthful trials but also through the crowd of political and domestic
cares which pressed upon his later life. Yet such tastes seem almost
as strange in Henry as they would in William Rufus. The one prosaic
element in the story of Henry’s youth is the personality of its hero. No
man had ever less of the romantic or poetic temperament; if he had
none of the follies or the faults of chivalry, he had just as little of its
nobler idealism. From his first bargain with Robert for the purchase
of the Cotentin to his last bargain with Fulk of Anjou for the marriage
of his heir, life was to him simply a matter of business. The strongest
points in his character were precisely the two qualities which both his
brothers utterly lacked—self-control, and that “capacity for taking
trouble” which is sometimes said to be the chief element of genius.
But of the higher kind of genius, of the fire which kindles in the soul
rather than merely in the brain, Henry had not a spark. He was
essentially a man of business, in the widest and loftiest sense of the
words. His self-control was not, like his father’s, the curb forcibly put
by a noble mind upon its own natural impetuosity; it was the more
easily-practised calmness of a perfectly cold nature which could
always be reasonable because it had to fight with no impulse of
passion, which was never tempted to “follow wandering fires”
because they lit in it no responsive flame; a nature in which the head
had complete mastery over the heart, and that head was one which
no misfortunes could disturb, no successes turn, and no perplexities
confuse.
The sudden vacancy of the English throne found every one else
quite unprepared for such an emergency. Henry was never
unprepared. His quickness and decision secured him the keys of the
treasury and the formal election of those barons and prelates who
had been members of the fatal hunting-party, or who hurried to
Winchester at the tidings of its tragic issue; and before opposition
had time to come to a head, it was checked by the coronation and
unction which turned the king-elect into full king.[16] Henry knew well,
however, that opposition there was certain to be. Robert of
Normandy, just returned from the Crusade and covered with glory,
was sure to assert his claim, and as sure to be upheld by a strong
party among the barons, to whom a fresh severance of England and
Normandy was clearly not desirable. In anticipation of the coming
struggle, Henry threw himself at once on the support of his subjects.
In addition to the pledges of his coronation-oath—taken almost in the
words of Æthelred to Dunstan[17]—he issued on the same day a
charter in which he solemnly and specifically promised the abolition
of his brother’s evil customs in Church and state, and a return to just
government according to the law of the land. The details were drawn
up so as to touch all classes. The Church, as including them all, of
course stood first; its freedom was restored and all sale or farming of
benefices renounced by the king. The next clause appealed specially
to the feudal vassals: those who held their lands “by the hauberk”—
the tenants by knight-service—were exempted from all other imposts
on their demesne lands, that they might be the better able to fulfil
their own particular obligation. The tenants-in-chief were exempted
from all the unjust exactions with regard to wardships, marriages,
reliefs and forfeitures, which had been practised in the last reign; but
the redress was not confined to them; they were distinctly required to
exercise the same justice towards their own under-tenants. The last
clause covered all the rest: by it Henry gave back to his people “the
laws of King Eadward as amended by King William.”[18] Like Cnut’s
renewal of the law of Eadgar—like Eadward’s own renewal of the
law of Cnut—the charter was a proclamation of general reunion and
goodwill. As a pledge of its sincerity, the Red King’s minister, Ralf
Flambard, in popular estimation the author of all the late misdoings,
was at once cast into the Tower;[19] the exiled primate was fetched
home as speedily as possible; and in November the king identified
himself still more closely with the land of his birth by taking to wife a
maiden of the old English blood-royal, Eadgyth of Scotland, great-
granddaughter of Eadmund Ironside.[20]
[16] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.
[17] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 99 (3d ed.).
[18] Charter of Henry I., ib. pp. 100–102.
[19] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.
[20] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.
His precautions were soon justified. Robert had refused the thorny
crown of Jerusalem, but the crown of England had far other charms;
and his movements were quickened by Ralf Flambard, who early in
the spring made his escape to Normandy.[21] It was probably through
Ralf’s management that the duke won over some of the sailors who
guarded the English coast and thus got ashore unexpectedly at
Portsmouth while the king was keeping watch for him at the old
landing-place, Pevensey.[22] At the first tidings of the intended
invasion Henry, like Rufus in the same case thirteen years before,
had appealed to Witan and people, and by a renewal of his charter
gained a renewal of their fealty. No sooner, however, was Robert
actually in England than the great majority of the barons prepared to
go over to him in a body. But the king born on English soil, married to
a lady of the old kingly house, had a stronger hold than ever Rufus
could have had upon the English people; and they, headed by their
natural leader and representative, the restored archbishop of
Canterbury, clave to him with unswerving loyalty.[23] The two armies
met near Alton;[24] at the last moment, the wisdom either of Anselm,
of the few loyal barons, or of Henry himself, turned the meeting into
a peaceful one. The brothers came to terms: Robert renounced his
claim to the crown in consideration of a yearly pension from England;
Henry gave up all his Norman possessions except Domfront, whose
people he refused to forsake;[25] and, as in the treaty made at Caen
ten years before between Robert and William, it was arranged that
whichever brother lived longest should inherit the other’s dominions,
if the deceased left no lawful heirs.[26]
[21] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), pp. 786, 787.
[22] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.
[23] Eadmer, Hist. Novorum (Rule), p. 127.
[24] See Freeman, William Rufus, vol. ii. p. 408.
[26] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.
The treaty was ratified at Winchester in the first days of August;[27]

and thus, almost on the anniversary of the Red King’s death, ended
the last Norman invasion of England. But the treaty of Winchester,
like that of Caen, failed to settle the real difficulty. That difficulty was,
how to control the barons. According to one version of the treaty, it
was stipulated that those who had incurred forfeiture in England by
their adherence to Robert and those who had done the same in
Normandy in Henry’s behalf should alike go unpunished;[28]
according to another, perhaps a more probable account, the brothers
agreed to co-operate in punishing traitors on both sides.[29] Henry
set to work to do his part methodically. One after another, at different
times, in various ways, by regular process of law, the offenders were
brought to justice in England: some heavily fined, some deprived of
their honours and exiled. It was treason not so much against himself
as against the peace and order of the realm that Henry was bent
upon avenging; Ivo of Grantmesnil was fined to the verge of ruin for
the crime of making war not upon the king in behalf of the duke, but
upon his own neighbours for his own personal gratification—a crime
which was part of the daily life of every baron in Normandy, but
which had never been seen in England before,[30] and never was
seen there again as long as King Henry lived. The most formidable
of all the troublers of the land was Henry’s old enemy at Domfront—
Robert, lord of Bellême in the border-land of Perche, earl of
Shrewsbury and Arundel in England, count of Alençon and lord of
Montgomery in Normandy, and now by his marriage count of
Ponthieu. Robert was actually fortifying his castles of Bridgenorth
and Arundel in preparation for open revolt when he was summoned
to take his trial on forty-five charges of treason against the king of
England and the duke of Normandy. As he failed to answer, Henry
led his troops to the siege of Bridgenorth. In three weeks it
surrendered; Shrewsbury and Arundel did the same, and Robert of
Bellême was glad to purchase safety for life and limb at the cost of
all his English possessions.[31]
[27] Sim. Durh. Gesta Reg. a. 1101.
[28] Eng. Chron. a. 1101.
[30] Ib. p. 805.
[31] Ib. pp. 807, 808. Eng. Chron. a. 1102.
From that moment Henry’s position in England was secured; but

all his remonstrances failed to make his indolent elder brother fulfil
his part of their compact. The traitors whom Henry expelled from
England only carried their treason over sea to a more congenial
climate, and the helpless, heedless duke looked passively on while
Robert of Bellême, William of Mortain the banished earl of Cornwall,
and their fellows slaked their thirst for vengeance upon King Henry
by ravaging the Norman lands of those who were faithful to him in
England.[32] Their victims, as well as Henry himself, began to see
that his personal intervention alone could re-establish order in the
duchy. On his appearance there in 1104 he was joined by all the
more reasonable among the barons. For the moment he was
pacified by fresh promises of amendment on Robert’s part, and by
the cession of the county of Evreux; but he knew that all compromise
had become vain; and in the last week of Lent 1105 he landed again
at Barfleur in the full determination of making himself master of
Normandy. His Norman partisans rallied round him at once,[33] and
he was soon joined by two valuable allies, Elias count of Maine and
his intended son-in-law, the young count Geoffrey of Anjou.[34] It was
they who won for Henry his first success, the capture of Bayeux.[35]
Warned by the fate of this unhappy city, which was burnt down,
churches and all, Caen surrendered at once, and Henry thus came
into possession of the Norman treasury. A siege of Falaise failed
through the unexplained departure of Count Elias,[36] and the war
dragged slowly on till Henry, now busy in another quarter with
negotiations for the return of S. Anselm, went back at Michaelmas to
England. Thither he was followed first by Robert of Bellême, then by
Robert of Normandy,[37] both seeking for peace; but peace had
become impossible now. Next summer Henry was again in
Normandy, reconciled to S. Anselm, released from anxieties at
home, free to concentrate all his energies upon the final struggle. It
was decided with one blow. As he was besieging the castle of
Tinchebray on Michaelmas Eve Duke Robert at the head of all his
forces approached and summoned him to raise the siege. He
refused, “preferring,” as he said, “to take the blame of a more than
civil war for the sake of future peace.” But when the two hosts were
drawn up face to face, the prospect of a battle seemed too horrible to
be endured, composed as they were of kinsmen and brothers,
fathers and sons, arrayed against each other. The clergy besought
Henry to stay his hand; he listened, pondered, and at length sent a
final message to his brother. He came, he said, not wishing to
deprive Robert of his duchy or to win territories for himself, but to
answer the cry of the distressed and deliver Normandy from the
misrule of one who was duke only in name. Here then was his last
proposition: “Give up to me half the land of Normandy, the castles
and the administration of justice and government throughout the
whole, and receive the value of the other half annually from my
treasury in England. Thus you may enjoy pleasure and feasting to
your heart’s content, while I will take upon me the labours of
government, and guarantee the fulfilment of my pledge, if you will but
keep quiet.” Foolish to the last, Robert declined the offer; and the
two armies made themselves ready for battle.[38] In point of numbers
they seem to have been not unequally matched, but they differed
greatly in character. Robert was stronger in footsoldiers, Henry in
knights; the flower of the Norman nobility was on his side now,
besides his Angevin, Cenomannian and Breton allies;[39] while of
those who followed Robert some, as the issue proved, were only
half-hearted. Of Henry’s genuine English troops there is no account,
but the men of his own day looked upon his whole host as English in
contradistinction to Robert’s Normans, and the tactics adopted in the
battle were thoroughly English. The king of England fought on foot
with his whole army, and it seems that the duke of Normandy
followed his example.[40]
[32] Eng. Chron. a. 1104. Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 397

(Hardy, p. 623).
[34] Chron. S. Albin. a. 1105 (Marchegay, Eglises d’Anjou, p.

30).
[35] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 818. Chron.

S. Albin. a. 1105 (Marchegay, Eglises d’Anjou, p. 30).
[36] “Helias a Normannis rogatus discessit,” says Orderic (as

above). What can this mean?
[37] Eng. Chron. a. 1106.
[39] Ib. p. 820. Hen. Huntingdon, l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).
[40] Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).
The first line of the Norman or ducal host under William of Mortain
charged the English front under Ralf of Bayeux, and by the fury of
their onset compelled them to fall back, though without breaking their
ranks. The issue was still doubtful, when the only mounted division
of Henry’s troops, the Bretons and Cenomannians under Count
Elias, came up to the rescue, took the duke’s army in flank, and cut
down two hundred men in a single charge. Those Cenomannian
swords which William the Conqueror was so proud to have
overcome now carried the day for his youngest son. Robert of
Bellême, as soon as he saw how matters were going, fled with all his
followers, and the duke’s army at once dissolved.[41] In Henry’s own
words, “the Divine Mercy gave into my hands, without much
slaughter on our side, the duke of Normandy, the count of Mortain,
William Crispin, William Ferrers, Robert of Estouteville, some four
hundred knights, ten thousand foot—and the duchy of
Normandy.”[42]
[41] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 821. Eng.

Chron. a. 1106. Hen. Hunt., l. vii. c. 25 (Arnold, p. 235).
[42] Letter of Henry to S. Anselm in Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule),

p. 184.
Forty years before, on the very same day, William the Conqueror
had landed at Pevensey to bring the English kingdom under the
Norman yoke. The work of Michaelmas Eve, 1066, was reversed on
Michaelmas Eve, 1106; the victory of Tinchebray made Normandy a
dependency of England.[43] Such was the view taken by one of the
most clear-sighted and unprejudiced historians of the time, a man of
mingled Norman and English blood. Such was evidently the view
instinctively taken by all parties, and the instinct was a true one,
although at first glance it seems somewhat hard to account for. The
reign of Henry I., if judged merely by the facts which strike the eye in
the chronicles of the time, looks like one continued course of foreign
policy and foreign warfare pursued by the king for his own personal
ends at the expense of his English subjects. But the real meaning of
the facts lies deeper. The comment of the archbishop of Rouen upon
Henry’s death—“Peace be to his soul, for he ever loved peace”[44]—
was neither sarcasm nor flattery. Henry did love peace, so well that
he spent his life in fighting for it. His early Norman campaigns are
enough to prove that without being a master of the art of war like his
father, he was yet a brave soldier and a skilful commander; and the
complicated wars of his later years, when over and over again he
had to struggle almost single-handed against France, Flanders and
Anjou, amid the endless treasons of his own barons, show still more
clearly his superiority to nearly all the other generals of his time. But
his ambitions were not those of the warrior. Some gleam of the old
northman’s joy of battle may have flashed across the wandering
knight as he defied his besiegers from the summit of his rock “in Peril
of the Sea,” or swooped down upon the turbulent lords of the
Cenomannian border, like an eagle upon lesser birds of prey, from
his eyrie on the crest of Domfront; but the victor of Tinchebray looked
at his campaigns in another light. To him they were simply a part of
his general business as a king; they were means to an end, and that
end was not glory, nor even gain, but the establishment of peace and
order. In his thirteen years of wandering to and fro between England,
Normandy and France he had probably studied all the phases of
tyranny and anarchy which the three countries amply displayed, and
matured his own theory of government, which he practised steadily
to the end of his reign. That theory was not a very lofty or noble one;
the principle from which it started and the end at which it aimed was
the interest of the ruler rather than of the ruled; but the form in which
Henry conceived that end and the means whereby he sought to
compass it were at any rate more enlightened than those of his
predecessor. The Red King had reigned wholly by terror; Henry did
not aspire to rule by love; but he saw that, in a merely selfish point of
view, a sovereign gains nothing by making himself a terror to any
except evil-doers, that the surest basis for his authority is the
preservation of order, justice and peace, and that so far at least the
interests of king and people must be one. It is difficult to get rid of a
feeling that Henry enforced justice and order from motives of
expediency rather than of abstract righteousness. But, as a matter of
fact, he did enforce them all round, on earl and churl, clerk and
layman, Norman and Englishman, without distinction. And this
steady, equal government was rendered possible only by the
determined struggle which he waged with the Norman barons and
their French allies. His home policy and his foreign policy were
inseparably connected; and the lifelong battle which he fought with
his continental foes was really the battle of England’s freedom.
[43] Will. Malm. Gesta Reg., l. v. c. 398 (Hardy, p. 625).
[44] Will. Malm. Hist. Nov., l. i. c. 9 (Hardy, p. 702).
From the year 1103 onward the battle was fought wholly on the
other side of the Channel. In England Henry, as his English subjects
joyfully told him, became a free king on the day when he drove out
Robert of Bellême.[45] One great hindrance indeed still remained,
hanging upon him like a dead weight throughout his early struggles
in Normandy; the controversy concerning ecclesiastical investitures,
with which the rest of Europe had been aflame for a quarter of a
century before it touched England at all. The decree of the Lateran
Council of 1075 forbidding lay sovereigns to grant the investiture of
any spiritual office with ring and staff was completely ignored in
practice by William the Conqueror and Lanfranc. Their position on
this and all other matters of Church policy was summed up in their
reply to Pope Gregory’s demand of fealty: William would do what the
English kings who went before him had done, neither more nor less.
[46] But the king and the primate were not without perceiving that, as
a necessary consequence of their own acts, the English Church had
entered upon a new and more complicated relation both to the state
and to the Apostolic see, and that the day must shortly come when
she would be dragged from her quiet anchorage into the whirlpool of
European controversies and strifes. Their forebodings found
expression in the three famous rules of ecclesiastical policy which
William laid down for the guidance of his successors rather than
himself:—that no Pope should be acknowledged in England and no
letter from him received there by any one without the king’s consent;
—that no Church council should put forth decrees without his
permission and approval;—and that no baron or servant of the crown
should be laid under ecclesiastical censure save at the king’s own
command.[47] These rules, famous in the two succeeding reigns
under the name of “paternal customs,” were never put to the test of
practice as long as William and Lanfranc lived. The Red King’s
abuse of the two first, by precipitating the crisis and driving S.
Anselm to throw himself into the arms of Rome, showed not so much
their inadequacy as the justice of the misgivings from which they had
sprung. Henry at his accession took his stand upon them in the true
spirit of their author; but the time was gone by; Anselm too had taken
his stand upon ground whence in honour and conscience he could
not recede, and the very first interview between king and primate
threw open the whole question of the investitures. But in England
and in the Empire the question wore two very different aspects. In
England it never became a matter of active interest or violent
partisanship in the Church and the nation at large. Only a few deep
thinkers on either side—men such as Count Robert of Meulan
among the advisers of the king, perhaps such as the devoted
English secretary Eadmer among the intimate associates of Anselm
—ever understood or considered the principles involved in the case,
or its bearing upon the general system of Church and state. Anselm
himself stood throughout not upon the abstract wrongfulness of lay
investiture, but upon his own duty of obedience to the decree of the
Lateran Council; he strove not for the privileges of his order, but for
the duties of his conscience. The bishops who refused investiture at
Henry’s hands clearly acted in the same spirit; what held them back
was not so much loyalty to the Pope as loyalty to their own
metropolitan. The great mass of both clergy and laity cared nothing
at all how the investitures were given, and very little for papal
decrees; all they cared about was that they should not be again
deprived of their archbishop, and left, as they had already been left
too long, like sheep without a shepherd. In their eyes the dispute
was a personal one between king and primate, stirred up by Satan to
keep the English Church in misery.
[46] Lanfranc. Ep. x. (Giles, vol. i. p. 32).
[47] Eadmer, Hist. Nov. (Rule), p. 10.

In the manner in which it was conducted on both sides, the case
compares no less favourably with its continental parallel and with the
later contest in England of which it was the forerunner, and for which,
in some respects, it unquestionably furnished a model, though that
model was very ill followed. For two years the dispute made
absolutely no difference in the general working of the Church;
Anselm was in full enjoyment of his canonical and constitutional
rights as primate of all Britain; he ruled his suffragans, held his
councils, superintended the restoration of his cathedral church, and
laboured at the reform of discipline, with Henry’s full concurrence;
and the clergy, with the archbishop at their head, were the life and
soul of the party whose loyalty saved the king in his struggle with the
barons. Even when Anselm’s position in England had become
untenable, he went over sea in full possession of his property, as the
king’s honoured friend and spiritual father. Not till Henry was
provoked by a papal excommunication of all the upholders of the
obnoxious “paternal customs” except himself, did he seize the
temporalities of the archbishopric; and even then Anselm, from his
Burgundian retreat, continued in active and unrestrained
correspondence with his chapter and suffragans, and in friendly
communication not only with Queen Matilda, but even with the king
himself. And when at last the archbishop who had gone down on his
knees to the Pope to save William Rufus from excommunication
threatened to put forth that very sentence against William’s far less
guilty brother, he was only, like Henry himself in Normandy at the
same moment, preparing his most terrible weapon of war as the
surest means of obtaining peace. Henry’s tact warned him, too, that
the time for a settlement was come, and the sincerity of his motives
enabled him to strike out a line of compromise which both parties
could accept without sacrificing their own dignity or the principles for
which they were contending. The English king and primate managed
to attain in seven years of quiet decorous negotiation, without
disturbing the peace or tarnishing the honour of either Church or
crown, the end to which Pope and Emperor only came after half a
century of tumult, bloodshed and disgrace; the island-pontiff who
“loved righteousness and hated iniquity,” instead of “dying in exile”
like his Roman brother, came home to end his days in triumph on the
chair of S. Augustine. The settlement made little or no practical
difference as far as its immediate object was concerned. Henry
ceased to confer the spiritual insignia; but the elections, held as of
old in the royal court, were as much under his control as before. He
yielded the form and kept the substance; the definite concession of
the bishops’ homage for their temporalities fully compensated for the
renunciation of the ceremonial investiture. But the other side, too,
had gained something more than a mere form. It had won a great
victory for freedom by bringing Henry to admit that there were
departments of national life which lay beyond the sphere of his kingly
despotism. It had, moreover, gained a distinct practical
acknowledgement of the right of the Apostolic Curia to act as the
supreme court of appeal in ecclesiastical causes, like the Curia
Regis in secular matters. In a word, the settlement indicated plainly
that the system of William and Lanfranc was doomed to break down
before long. It broke down utterly when Anselm and Henry were
gone; the complications of legatine intervention, avoided only by
careful management in Henry’s later years, led to the most important
results in the next reign; and when the slumbering feud of sceptre
and crozier broke out again, the difference between the cool Norman
temper and the fiery blood of Anjou, between the saintly self-
effacement of Anselm and the lofty self-assertion of Thomas, was
only one of the causes which gave it such an increase of virulence
as brought to nought the endeavours of king and primate to tread in
the steps of those whom they professed to have taken for their
examples.
Of more direct and wide-reaching importance, but less easy to
trace, is the working of Henry’s policy in the temporal government of
England. Like his Church policy, with which it was in strict accord, it
was grounded upon definite and consistent principles. At the outset
of his reign circumstances had at once compelled the king to throw
himself upon the support of his English subjects and enabled him to
find in them his surest source of strength. Personally, his sympathies
were not a whit more English or less despotic than those of his
predecessor; but, unlike Rufus, he fairly accepted his position with all
its consequences so far as he understood them, and throughout his
reign he never altogether forsook the standpoint which he had taken
at its beginning. That standpoint, as expressed in his coronation-
charter, was “the law of King Eadward as amended by King William.”
In other words, Henry pledged himself to carry out his father’s
system of compromise and amalgamation, to take up and continue
his father’s work; and as soon as his hands were free he set himself
to fulfil the pledge. But the scheme whose first outlines had been
sketched by the Conqueror’s master-hand had to be wrought out
under conditions which had changed considerably since his death
and were changing yet farther every day. The great ecclesiastical
question was only the first and most prominent among a crowd of
social and political problems whose shadows William had at the
utmost only seen dimly looming in the future, but which confronted
Henry as present facts that he must grapple with as best he could. At
their theoretical, systematic solution he made little or no attempt; the
time was not yet ripe, nor was he the man for such work. He was
neither a great legislator nor an original political thinker, but a clear-
headed, sagacious, practical man of business. Such a man was
precisely the ruler needed at the moment. His reign is not one of the
marked eras of English history; compared with the age which had
gone before and that which came after it, the age of Henry I. looks
almost like a “day of small things.” That very phrase, which seems so
aptly to describe its outward aspect, warns us not to despise or pass
it over lightly. It is just one of those periods of transition without which
the marked eras would never be. Henry’s mission was to prepare the
way for the work of his grandson by completing that of his father.
The work was no longer where his father had left it. When the
secular side of the Norman government in England, somewhat
obscured for a while by the ecclesiastical conflict, comes into distinct
view again after the settlement of 1107, one is almost startled at the
amount of developement which has taken place in the twenty years
since the Conqueror’s death—a developement whose steps lie
hidden beneath the shadows of the Red King’s tyranny and of
Henry’s early struggles. The power of the crown had outgrown even
the nominal restraints preserved from the older system: the king’s
authority was almost unlimited, even in theory; the Great Council, the
successor and representative of the Witenagemot, had lost all share
in the real work of legislation and government; of the old formula
—“counsel and consent”—the first half had become an empty phrase
and the second a mere matter of course. The assembly was a court
rather than a council, the qualification of its members, whether earls,
barons, or knights, being all alike dependent on their position as
tenants-in-chief of the crown; the bishops alone kept their unaltered
dignity as lineal successors of the older spiritual Witan; but even the
bishops had been compelled by the compromise of 1107 to hold their
temporalities on the baronial tenure of homage and fealty to the king,
a step which involved the strict application of the same rule to the lay
members of the assembly. Moreover, the Witenagemot was being
gradually supplanted in all its more important functions by an inner
circle of counsellors, forming a permanent ministerial body which
gathered into its own hands the entire management of the financial
and judicial administration of the state. In one aspect it was the
“Curia Regis” or King’s Court, the supreme court of judicature which
appropriated alike the judicial powers of the Witenagemot, of the old
court of the king’s thegns or theningmanna-gemot, and of the feudal
court of the Norman tenants-in-chief. In another aspect it was the
Exchequer, the court which received the royal revenues from the
sheriffs of the counties, arranged and reviewed the taxation,
transacted the whole fiscal business of the crown, and in short had
the supreme control and management of the “ways and means” of
the realm. The judicial, military and social organization under the
Norman kings rests so completely on a fiscal basis that the working
of the Exchequer furnishes the principal means of studying that of
the whole system; while the connexion between the functions of the
Exchequer and those of the Curia Regis is so close that it is often
difficult to draw a line accurately between them, and all the more so,
that they were made up of nearly the same constituent elements.
These were the great officers of the royal household:—the justiciar,
the treasurer, the chancellor, the constable, the marshal, and their
subordinates:—titles of various origin, some, as for example the
chancellor, being of comparatively recent origin, while others seem
to have existed almost from time immemorial;—but all titles whose
holders, from being mere personal attendants upon the sovereign,
had now become important officials of the state. Like a crowd of
other matters which first come distinctly to light under Henry, the
system seems to have grown up as it were in the dark during the
reign of William Rufus, no doubt under the hands of Ralf Flambard.
At its head stood the justiciar;—second in authority to the king in his
presence, his representative and vicegerent in his absence, officially
as well as actually his chief minister and the unquestioned executor
of his will. This office, of which the germs may perhaps be traced as
far back as the time of Ælfred, who acted as “secundarius” under his
brother Æthelred I., was directly derived from that which Æthelred II.
had instituted under the title of high-thegn or high-reeve, and which
grew into a permanent vice-royalty in the persons of Godwine and
Harold under Cnut and Eadward, and of Ralf Flambard under
William Rufus. Ralf himself, a clerk from Bayeux, who from the
position of an obscure dependent in the Conqueror’s household had
made his way by the intriguing, pushing, unscrupulous temper which
had earned him his nickname of the “Firebrand,” was an upstart
whom the barons of the Conquest may well have despised as much
as the native English feared and hated him. After an interval during
which his office was held by Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln—a
former chancellor of the Red King—it passed to a man who from
beginnings almost as lowly as those of Ralf rose to yet loftier and, it
is but fair to add, purer fame. Henry in his wandering youth, as he
rode out from Caen one morning with a few young companions,
stopped to hear mass at a little wayside chapel. The poor priest who
served it, guessing by their looks the temper of his unexpected
congregation, rattled through the office with a speed which delighted
them; they all pronounced him just the man for a soldier’s chaplain;
Henry enlisted him as such, and soon found that he had picked up a
treasure. Roger became his steward, and discharged his functions
with such care, fidelity and good management as earned him the
entire confidence of his master.[48] Soon after Henry’s accession he
was appointed chancellor, a post whose duties involved, besides the
official custody of the royal seal, the superintendence of the clerks of
the king’s chapel or chancery, who were charged with the keeping of
the royal accounts, the conducting of the royal correspondence, the
drawing up of writs and other legal documents and records, and who
were now formed into a trained and organized body serving as
secretaries for all departments of state business. From 1101 to 1106
this office seems to have been held successively by Roger, William
Giffard, and Waldric; Roger probably resumed it in 1106 on Waldric’s
elevation to the bishopric of Laon, but if so he resigned it again next
year, to become bishop of Salisbury and justiciar.[49]
[48] Will. Newburgh, l. i. c. 6 (Howlett, vol. i. p. 36).
[49] Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), vol. ii. p. 56.
Henry’s justiciar-bishop was the type of a class. The impossibility

of governing England securely by means of feudal machinery, even
with all the checks and safeguards which could be drawn from the
old English administrative system, had by this time become self-
evident. The conduct of the barons had at once proved to Henry the
necessity and given him the justification for superseding them in all
the more important functions of government, by carrying out, with a
free and strong hand, the scheme which Æthelred II. had originated
under less favourable circumstances—the organization of a distinct
ministerial body, directly dependent upon the crown. Of this body the
model, as well as the head, was the bishop of Salisbury. Under his
direction there grew up a trained body of administrators, most of
them clerks like himself, several being his own near relatives, and
almost all upstarts—novi homines, “new men” in the phrase of the
time—compared with the nobles whose fathers had come over with
the Conqueror; forming a sort of official caste, separate alike from
the feudal nobility and from the mass of the people, and no doubt
equally obnoxious to both, but very much better fitted than any
instruments which either could have furnished for managing the
business of the state at that particular crisis. Over and above the
obloquy which naturally fell upon them as the instruments of royal
justice or royal extortion, there was, however, another cause for the
jealousy with which they were generally regarded. Henry is charged
with showing, more especially in his later years, a preference for
foreigners which was equally galling to all his native subjects,
whatever their descent might be.[50] It was not that he set Normans
over Englishmen, but that he set men of continental birth over both
alike. The words “Norman” and “English” had in fact acquired a new
meaning since the days of the Conquest. The sons and grandsons of
the men who had come over with Duke William never lost one spark
of their Norman pride of race; but the land of their fathers was no
longer their home; most of them were born in England, some had
English wives, and even English mothers; to nearly all, the chief
territorial, political and personal interests of their lives were centred
in the island. The constant wars between the Conqueror’s
successors tended still further to sever the Normans of the duchy
from those of the kingdom, and to drive the latter to unite
themselves, at least politically, with their English fellow-subjects.
Already in the wars of Rufus and Robert the change of feeling shows
itself in the altered use of names; the appellations “Norman” and
“French” are reserved exclusively for the duke and his allies, and the
supporters of the king of England are all counted together
indiscriminately as English. Tinchebray is distinctly reckoned as an
English victory. From that moment Normandy was regarded, both by
its conquerors and by its French neighbours, as a foreign
dependency of the English crown. Historians on both sides of the
sea, as they narrate the wars between Henry and Louis of France
which arose out of that conquest, unconsciously shadow forth the
truth that the reunion of England and Normandy really tended to
widen the gulf between them. The greatest French statesman of the
day, Suger, abbot of S. Denis, sets the relation between the two
nationalities in the most striking light when he justifies the efforts of
his own sovereign Louis to drive Henry out of the duchy on the
express ground that “Englishmen ought not to rule over Frenchmen,
nor French over English.”[51] One of our best authorities on the other
side, the son of a Frenchman from Orléans who had come in the
train of Roger of Montgomery and married an English wife—though
he spent his whole life, from the age of ten years, in the Norman
monastery of Saint-Evroul, never ceased to regard his mother’s
country as his own, showed his love for it in the most touching
expressions of remembrance, and took care to send forth his history
to the world under the name of Orderic the Englishman. This last
was no doubt a somewhat extreme case. Still the fusion between the
two races had clearly begun; it was helped on directly by Henry’s

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Tahriib – Journeys into the Unknown:

Dead in Banaras: An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling

The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior: An Autobiography

The Importance of Work in an Age of Uncertainty: The

The remnants of the Rechtsstaat : an ethnography of

Reimagining Industry Growth: Strategic Partnership

Challenging Economic Journalism: Covering Business and

An Ethnography of Urban Exploration: Unpacking

Decision Sprint: The New Way to Innovate Into the

ISSN 2662-2602 ISSN 2662-2610 (electronic)

This book is a result of a 13-year-long journey that began in 2010, as I

The material in this book builds on and is a result of my own journey

Copenhagen, Denmark Anja Simonsen

life in Somaliland across generations that I would never have achieved

Adifatah, Abdiqani, Ali, Hodan iyo Abdulfatah oo dhammaantood iga

Sahro and Abdirahman, thank you for facilitating my stay in

1 Introduction: Uncertainties of Migration 1

2 A History of Lives on the Move 25

4 Walking the Road of Hope 85

5 Uncertainty of Information in Unknown Terrain113

Fig. 2.1 Family tree—(only the family members mentioned in the

Fig. 9.3 Pictures of Amran’s tent in a refugee camp in Cyprus

‘It does happen, but I’m prepared to die’.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

for himself. Therefore, he found his answers in exploring the uncertain

adulthood, where one is able to lift the burden of economic responsibili-

events and actions. It is not a vague existential angst, but an aspect of

Migration is not only a risky endeavour but essentially a way to engage

new opportunities and adventure more generally (Bredeloup 1994, 2007,

creates a new fear of getting stuck in a location where hopes of providing

Colonialism and Beyond

countries met in Berlin to colonise and divide the African continent

 n Route: Flows of Information, Hope

and uncertainty as the structuring issue, I take the reader through

environment was characterised by the uncertainty of never knowing who

Moving Boundaries: Ethical Considerations

pushed and expanded. They found themselves keeping secrets, avoiding

The Journey into the Unknown

‘home’ is recast as the ultimate ‘destination’ through the dream of home-

———. 2007. La Diams’pora du fleuve Sénégal: Sociologie des migrations afric-

Robben, Antonius C.G.M., and Carolyn Nordstrom. 1995. The anthropology

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 25

when analysing actual migration practices, where categories often overlap

 napshots: Histories of Migration-

take responsibility and as a result, ‘gain a positive social presence within

Convention and the 1967 Protocol, defining a refugee as ‘someone who

nothing but human’ (1951, 297). These displacement framings uncriti-

 mic Notions of Movement: Nomads, Camels

[6] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 665.

[8] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 690. Will.

[9] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 697.

[12] Ord. Vit. (Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), p. 697.

[13] Ib. p. 698.

[14] Ib. pp. 698, 706, 722.

[15] Eng. Chron. a. 1095.

William and Henry had both learned by experience that to work

[16] Eng. Chron. a. 1100.

[17] Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 99 (3d ed.).

[18] Charter of Henry I., ib. pp. 100–102.

Copenhagen, Denmark Anja Simonsen

1 Introduction: Uncertainties of Migration 1

2 A History of Lives on the Move 25

4 Walking the Road of Hope 85

5 Uncertainty of Information in Unknown Terrain113

Colonialism and Beyond

n Route: Flows of Information, Hope

Moving Boundaries: Ethical Considerations

The Journey into the Unknown

napshots: Histories of Migration-

mic Notions of Movement: Nomads, Camels