This book centres on the war that raged between Eritrea and Ethiopia from 1998 to 2000, a war that caused great loss of life and tremendous devastation. It analyses the war in great detail from an international legal perspective: the nature and the state of the boundary conflict preceding the actual armed conflict, the military actions themselves, the role of the UN peace-keeping mission, the responsibility for the multitude of explosive remnants of the war left behind. Ample attention is paid to the decisions of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission and the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission. This study is not limited to the war and the period immediately following it, it also examines its more extended aftermath prolonging the analysis as far as the more recent improvement in the relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia, away from a situation of ‘no war, no peace’ that prevailed after the armed conflict ended. The analysis of the war and its aftermath is not only in terms of international legal issues, it has been placed in a wider than strictly legal perspective. The book is a valuable work for academics and practitioners in international law, human rights and humanitarian law in particular, for political scientists, diplomats, civil servants, historians, and all those others seriously interested in the Horn of Africa. Andrea de Guttry is Full Professor of Public International Law at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy. Harry H.G. Post is Adjunct Professor in the Faculté Libre de Droit of the Université Catholique de Lille in Lille, France. Gabriella Venturini is Professor Emerita in the Dipartimento di Studi internazionali, giuridici e storico-politici of the Università degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy.

The war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which began in May 1998, took the world by surprise. During the war, both sides mobilized huge forces along their common borders and spent several hundred million dollars on military equipment. Outside observers found it difficult to evaluate the highly polarized official statements and proclamations issued by the two governments in conflict. Brothers at War presents important, contextual aspects to explain the growing discord between the two formerly friendly governments. It looks at the historical relations between the two countries since the late nineteenth century, the historical border issues from local perspectives, and the complicated relations between the former liberation fronts that subsequently formed the current governments of the two countries.

Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics - the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups - is assuming particular forms in the twenty-first century. Once hailed as the “African country that works,” Eritrea’s apparently successful post-independence development has since lapsed into economic crisis and severe human rights violations. This is due not only to the border war with Ethiopia that began in 1998, but is also the result of discernible tendencies in the “high modernist” style of social mobilization for development first adopted by the Eritrean government during the liberation struggle (1961–1991) and later carried into the post-independence era. The contributions to this volume reveal and interpret the links between development and developmentalist ideologies, intensifying militarism, and the controlling and disciplining of human lives and bodies by state institutions, policies, and discourses. Also assessed are the multiple consequences of these policies for the Eritrean people and the ways in which such policies are resisted or subverted. This insightful, comparative volume places the Eritrean case in a broader global and transnational context.

process of demarcation stalled. Later it was resumed, but since November 2008 the activities of the EEBC have stopped without a final solution. Since July 2003, the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission has issued a considerable number of de- sions on claims by either Party on a wide variety of subjects, e. g. , the treatment and exchange of prisoners of war, aerial bombardments, claims of civilians, liability issues, etc. In 2005 and 2007, the Commission issued further partial and final awards on issues of diplomatic law, economic relations during armed conflict (including on the taking and destruction of property) and on various claims regarding violations of International Humanitarian Law. These will be discussed and examined in Part V, in light of the current legal framework. Undoubtedly, the Commission has brought considerable innovations to the state of the law. Its decision on the jus ad bellum is particularly striking. The EECC found that in 1998 Eritrea had launched armed attacks on Ethiopia in violation of the prohibition on the threat and the use of force. In Part IV this ‘central’ decision is extensively discussed and commented upon. In the next and final phase of its activities the Claims Commission will assess damages and award compensation for the successful claims. In Part VI the fra- work of the law of state responsibility and of compensation and damages as it stands now is examined and explained taking into account important modern armed c- flicts such as the Gulf Wars.

A quarter of a century ago, Alemseged abandoned a promising academic career to join the fledgling Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front to fight for Eritrea's freedom. This book, a translation of an earlier account in Tigrinya of the Battle of Afabet, the most important battle in the Eritrean fight against its Ethiopian occupation, shares with readers a searing eyewitness account of bravery and valour in the face of death.