Entrapped: Making Sense of High-Risk Migration through Gambling

Chapter 5 brings together the findings and observations made in the previous chapters to develop an analytical framework of Eritrean refugees’ mobility. By borrowing the concept of entrapment from gambling studies, this chapter shows that in Eritreans’ migratory decisions, as a sequential process, each stage is marked by a cumulative set of psychological and social pressures to make a further move, even at the price of risking everything again. In fact, every stage makes interrupting the journey more difficult for both structural and symbolic reasons. The concept of entrapment can not only help understanding what immobility means from a cognitive point of view, but can also advance the analysis of high-risk stepwise migration. This analytical framework promises to feed into a more refined understanding of the motivations of high-risk migrants that have, until now, been studied without the sequential nature of their movements being considered.