The migration of Ethiopians across international borders is a recent phenomenon because of the limited integration of the country and society to the global economy. Since it was never colonized – aside from the Italian occupation of 1936-1941 – Ethiopia’s economy and society were not directly impacted by the ebb and flow of the global economy, and thus never generated international migration. Beginning in the 1970s, due to factors such as famine, rural poverty, civil war, and political repression, an unprecedented number of Ethiopian migrants began to leave their country in search of better, more secure lives. Today, this diaspora constitutes a distinctive community dispersed across the world, but bound by a common feeling of collectiveness and a shared history of the homeland. The contributors to this volume draw their work from a wide variety of interdisciplinary fields and provide new critical insight on Ethiopian migrants and their diaspora communities. What has emerged from these scholarly works is the recognition that the Ethiopian diaspora – although separated by oceans and nations, by politics, ethnicity, class, gender and age – are carving out a social and material world born out of their particular circumstances both "here" and "there". This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

This publication is one of the results of a conference organised in Lisbon in 2011 on the theme of African borders and their relationships with migration and mobility. The selected papers are a sample of the diverse perspectives on the general theme presented at the meeting. The African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE) promoted this event, allowing a substantial number of its members to exchange results of ongoing and long-term research. The Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal) funded the research project Borders and Identity in Africa (PTDC/AFR/098339/2008) which prepared this publication.

Includes statistical tables and graphs.

In March 1896 a well-disciplined and massive Ethiopian army did the unthinkable-it routed an invading Italian force and brought Italy's war of conquest in Africa to an end. In an age of relentless European expansion, Ethiopia had successfully defended its independence and cast doubt upon an unshakable certainty of the age-that sooner or later all Africans would fall under the rule of Europeans. This event opened a breach that would lead, in the aftermath of world war fifty years later, to the continent's painful struggle for freedom from colonial rule. Raymond Jonas offers the first comprehensive account of this singular episode in modern world history. The narrative is peopled by the ambitious and vain, the creative and the coarse, across Africa, Europe, and the Americas-personalities like Menelik, a biblically inspired provincial monarch who consolidated Ethiopia's throne; Taytu, his quick-witted and aggressive wife; and the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, the emperor's close advisor. The Ethiopians' brilliant gamesmanship and savvy public relations campaign helped roll back the Europeanization of Africa. Figures throughout the African diaspora immediately grasped the significance of Adwa, Menelik, and an independent Ethiopia. Writing deftly from a transnational perspective, Jonas puts Adwa in the context of manifest destiny and Jim Crow, signaling a challenge to the very concept of white dominance. By reopening seemingly settled questions of race and empire, the Battle of Adwa was thus a harbinger of the global, unsettled century about to unfold.

This factbook presents numbers and facts behind the stories of international migration and remittances, drawing on authoritative, publicly available data. It provides a comprehensive picture of emigration, skilled emigration, immigration, and remittance flows for 210 countries and 15 country groups. Some interesting facts: More than 215 million people, or 3 percent of the world population, live outside their countries of birth. Current migration flows, relative to population, are weaker than those of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The volume of South-South migration (migration between developing countries) is larger than migration from the South to high-income OECD countries. International migration is dominated by voluntary migration, which is driven by economic factors. Refugees and asylum seekers made up 16.3 million, or 8 percent, of international migrants in 2010. Worldwide remittance flows are estimated to have exceeded $440 billion in 2010, of which developing countries received $325 billion. Remittances proved to be resilient during the recent global financial crisisùthey fell only 6 percent in 2009 and registered a quick recovery in 2010. The top migrant-destination country is the United States, followed by the Russian Federation, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Canada. The top immigration countries, relative to population, include Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Andorra, and the Cayman Islands.

Between 1977 and 1985, some 20,000 Ethiopian Jews left their homes in Ethiopia and embarked on a secret and highly traumatic exodus to Israel. Due to various political circumstances, they had to leave their homes in haste, go a long way on foot through unknown country, and stay for a period of one or two years in refugee camps, until they were brought to Israel. The difficult conditions of the journey included racial tensions, attacks by bandits, night travel over mountains, incarceration, illness, and death. This interdisciplinary, ground-breaking book focuses on the experience of this journey, its meaning for the people who made it, and its relation to the initial encounter with Israeli society. Book jacket.

"The heated Malthusian-Bosrupian debates still rage over consequences of high population growth, rapid urbanization, dense rural populations and young age structures in the face of drought, poverty, food insecurity, environmental degradation, climate change, instability and the global economic crisis. However, while facile generalizations about the lack of demographic change and lack of progress in meeting the MDGs in sub-Saharan Africa are commonplace, they are often misleading and belie the socio-cultural change that is occurring among a vanguard of more educated youth. Even within Ethiopia, the second largest country at the Crossroads of Africa and the Middle East, different narratives emerge from analysis of longitudinal, micro-level analysis as to how demographic change and responses are occurring, some more rapidly than others. The book compares Ethiopia with other Africa countries, and demonstrates the uniqueness of an African-type demographic transition: a combination of poverty-related negative factors (unemployment, disease, food insecurity) along with positive education, health and higher age-of-marriage trends that are pushing this ruggedly rural and land-locked population to accelerate the demographic transition and stay on track to meet most of the MDGs. This book takes great care with the challenges of inadequate data and weak analytical capacity to research this incipient transition, trying to unravel some of the complexities in this vulnerable Horn of Africa country: A slowly declining population growth rates with rapidly declining child mortality, very high chronic under-nutrition, already low urban fertility but still very high rural fertility; and high population-resource pressure along with rapidly growing small urban places”