Assemblages of mobility and violence: the shifting social worlds of Somali youth migration and the meanings of tahriib, 2005–2020

Drawing on two periods of fieldwork (2007–2008 and 2019–2020) conducted between Somaliland and Italy, this article traces, from a longitudinal perspective, the migratory journeys from Somalia to Libya and Europe of a new generation of young asylum-seekers. The underlying thread linking the two temporal frames is the transformations of the word tahriib. Travelling between Libya and Somalia, the word takes on new meanings: while in the emerging institutional language on migration, the word referred to growing dimensions of control and containment of mobility (in Arabic it refers to human smuggling), for the new generation of young Somali asylum-seekers it alluded initially to a dimension of danger, adventure, and generational rupture, and then became increasingly associated with violence and disruption. These transformations, I argue, reveal the shifting social worlds of Somali youth migration, where protracted crises in the country of origin and struggles for social inclusion in the new transnational Somali society had to adjust to increasingly restrictive forms of regulation of international migration. As the destructive transformations of tahriib unfold, their effects pervade not only the areas of origin and transit but also affect the attempts at integration in European countries, showing the deceitful and uncertain nature of diaspora.