The Refugee Abyss

by Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes

Overview

In defiance of the refugee abyss, this book presents the flesh of pained bodies and the breath of displaced voices, contributing to the thread of traces yet to be forged and the politics yet to emerge, in a world where Relation takes precedence.

The book unfolds in several traces. First, open wounds and scars represent the refugee abyss, revealing the onto-epistemic chains that silence displaced voices. These voices, through embodied subjects, recount their struggles in a world marked by violence. Second, the book questions the rights-based order, revealing how the human rights project is a new incarnation of the colonial civilising mission. It claims to elevate humanity, starting with those deemed uncivilised. Yet, its mask of benevolence, once upheld in the metropoles of empire, now appears hollow. Third, the book theorises the nation-state as a womb-abyss, a matrix that both births and consumes life. Fourth, it explores the refugee abyss as a realm of confinement and destitution, where lives are commodified, exploited, and destroyed. Fifth, it shifts from open wounds to the poetics of refuge, illustrating how life persists in the shadows of rights and laws, while death is inflicted through them. Finally, it reflects on untamed life, emerging from wounds and scars as a proclamation of the unfamiliar and enduring.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, and refugee studies. It will also appeal to political scientists and policymakers interested in issues of citizenship, human rights, and decoloniality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032567945
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/22/2025
Series:	Routledge Studies in Criminal Justice, Borders and Citizenship
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes, Lecturer in Forced Migration and Decolonial Education at the University of Glasgow, researches decoloniality, poetics, and political theory.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1 Open Wounds and Scars 2 The Right of the Rightless 3 The Nation-State as a Womb-Abyss 4 The Refugee Abyss 5 From Sea-camp to Metropole 6 Poetics of Refuge Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

The Refuge Abyss is a one of those rare books which come along and name the world with such exquisite precision, theoretical acumen and methodological discernment, that they are genuinely paradigm-shifting. In this necessarily painful articulation of the abyssal state to which people labelled ‘refugees’ are condemned, Hyab Teklehaimanot Yohannes offers a sublimely theoretical voice and a poetics of relation and decoloniality.”
Alison Phipps, UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts, University of Glasgow

“If you are interested in the refugee condition, this is the book you should read. Not only inspired by but also reminiscent of seminal contributions to postcolonial theory, its dark and gripping narrative draws its urgency from lived experience. Few scholars today have the courage to write so poetically, and few books manage to combine theoretical sophistication with emotional depth. In the myriad of academic publications on the subject, The Refugee Abyss stands out!”
Katja Franko, Professor of Criminology, University of Oslo

“This deeply moving book demands our commitment from the start. We learn from people who have experienced some of the worst that humans can inflict on one another. We are invited to listen, to see, and to feel. It is a profound and ultimately uplifting experience, despite the horrors described.”
Mary Bosworth, Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford

This book plumbs the depths of some of the darkest places in human experience. But rather than leaving us there, it offers to lift us from the pit by gathering the poetic traces through which we can find restoration and relation. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about human relationships.
Fergus McNeill, Professor of Criminology and Social Work, University of Glasgow

“In this powerful and timely intervention, Hyab Yohannes performs the urgent task of unsilencing voices, recovering stories buried deep in the ‘refugee abyss’. In the process, he counters the anonymising, dehumanising, depoliticising conditions of this oppressive necropolitical reality. The book deploys Edouard Glissant’s acentric, relational thought in pioneering ways that transcend geographies and histories. Challenging stubbornly oppressive grammars of coloniality, The Refugee Abyss ultimately asserts poetry and poetics as steadfast traces of an emergent political imaginary.”
Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French, University of Cambridge

From the Publisher