Intimate Relationships and Forced Migration Paths: Dangerous Liaisons in Refugees’ Lives from East Africa?

Abstract Intimate relationships are part of human life in all contexts. During forced migrations, those relationships and the emotions they entail, may prompt important decisions, may accompany difficult choices, and can be an opportunity for women to overcome extreme situations of poverty. In this article, I present a number of ethnographic cases describing options and opportunities related to intimate relationships women have undertaken during the exodus following the civil war in Somalia, which started in 1991. The way refugee women from a peasant background and allegedly descendant from enslaved people, have navigated intimate relationships in times of forced migrations, may be influenced by their poverty, or by the discriminatory legacy of their status as descendants from the formerly enslaved. Whatever the main factor determining their choices may be, intimate relationships represent major elements influencing decision making in migration paths.