“We Are Here Because You Are Still There” Coloniality of British Soft Power and Eritrean Forced Migrants in the UK

This PhD thesis examines how Eritrean forced migrants in the UK form outside imaginaries about destinations and inquires into the formation process for their destination preferences and post-arrival lived experiences. Methodologically, this doctoral dissertation adopts an interpretive-constructivist epistemological standpoint and draws on postcolonial and decolonial scholarship. Qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions are employed with 45 Eritrean participants aged 18 to 52, including asylum seekers, refugees, and naturalised citizens across the UK. Additionally, eight key stakeholders and more specifically practitioners working in the UK refugee sector are also interviewed. The findings indicate that the participants' destination preferences for UK are shaped by factors such as familiarity with the English language, hopes for high-quality education, and expectations of democracy and respect for human rights in the UK. The doctoral research demonstrates that Eritrean forced migrants form outside imaginaries of the UK based on perceptions of high-quality education, the global status of the English language, Pound Sterling as a mythical and "gold" currency, democracy, human rights, and a love for the English Premier League and narratives of British colonial remains in Eritrea. In turn these outside imaginaries offer the resources for constructing the UK as a postcolonial site of economic opportunity, freedom, and multiracial "cosmobility". In this dissertation, I argue that it is these imaginaries, transmitted by Britain’s colonial history, imperial reach, and projection of its soft power that influence the destination preferences of the participants, while they are met in the metropole by technologies of geopolitical (b)ordering to which the forced migrants are subjected in the UK asylum system. I then move on to uncover the polymorphous forms of violence participants experience under the UK asylum system: asylum waiting, enforced idleness, involuntary asylum dispersals, and abandonment during the 28-day refugee move-on period. These forms of violences, I theorise, are used as "necropolitical" tools of violence against racialised migrants in the metropole. Theoretically, the study contributes to a greater understanding of the global (post)colonial entanglements of destination factors and refugees' destination patterns. It reveals how Britain has used and continues to use these factors, through the branding of its soft power, as tools of (post)colonial/imperial domination and absorbing its role in shaping refugees' destination preferences in current debates on destinations specificity. Grounded in post- and de-colonial thinking, the study demonstrates that the post-arrival experiences of participants in the postcolonial present bear remarkable similarities to the experiences of colonised peoples under direct colonialism.