The most secretive, repressive state in Africa is hemorrhaging its citizens. In some months as many Eritreans as Syrians arrive on European shores, yet the country is not convulsed by civil war. Young men and women risk all to escape. Many do not survive - their bones littering the Sahara; their bodies floating in the Mediterranean. Still they flee, to avoid permanent military service and a future without hope. As the United Nations reported: 'Thousands of conscripts are subjected to forced labor that effectively abuses, exploits and enslaves them for years.' Eritreans fought for their freedom from Ethiopia for thirty years, only to have their revered leader turn on his own people. Independent since 1993, the country has no constitution and no parliament. No budget has ever been published. Elections have never been held and opponents languish in jail. International organizations find it next to impossible to work in the country. Nor is it just a domestic issue. By supporting armed insurrection in neighboring states it has destabilized the Horn of Africa. Eritrea is involved in the Yemeni civil war, while the regime backs rebel movements in Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti. This book tells the untold story of how this tiny nation became a world pariah.

The most secretive, repressive state in Africa is hemorrhaging its citizens. In some months as many Eritreans as Syrians arrive on European shores, yet the country is not convulsed by civil war. Young men and women risk all to escape. Many do not survive - their bones littering the Sahara; their bodies floating in the Mediterranean. Still they flee, to avoid permanent military service and a future without hope. As the United Nations reported: 'Thousands of conscripts are subjected to forced labor that effectively abuses, exploits and enslaves them for years.' Eritreans fought for their freedom from Ethiopia for thirty years, only to have their revered leader turn on his own people. Independent since 1993, the country has no constitution and no parliament. No budget has ever been published. Elections have never been held and opponents languish in jail. International organizations find it next to impossible to work in the country. Nor is it just a domestic issue. By supporting armed insurrection in neighboring states it has destabilized the Horn of Africa. Eritrea is involved in the Yemeni civil war, while the regime backs rebel movements in Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti. This book tells the untold story of how this tiny nation became a world pariah.

The history of Eritrea is told in this reference through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Eritrea's history from the earliest times to the present. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Eritrea.

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.

This book explores foreign policy developments in post-colonial Africa. A continental foreign policy is a tenuous proposition, yet new African states emerged out of armed resistance and advocacy from regional allies such as the Bandung Conference and the League of Arab States. Ghana was the first Sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957. Fourteen more countries gained independence in 1960 alone, and by May 1963, when the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was formed, 30 countries were independent. An early OAU committee was the African Liberation Committee (ALC), tasked to work in the Frontline States (FLS) to support independence in Southern Africa. Pan-Africanists, in alliance with Brazzaville, Casablanca and Monrovia groups, approached continental unity differently, and regionalism continued to be a major feature. Africa’s challenges were often magnified by the capitalist-democratic versus communist-socialist bloc rivalry, but through Africa’s use and leveraging of IGOs – the UN, UNDP, UNECA, GATT, NIEO and others – to advance development, the formation of the African Economic Community, OAU’s evolution into the AU and other alliances belied collective actions, even as Africa implemented decisions that required cooperation: uti possidetis (maintaining colonial borders), containing secession, intra- and inter-state conflicts, rebellions and building RECs and a united Africa as envisioned by Pan Africanists worked better collectively.

This work traces the Eritrean response to,Ethiopian occupation of their land and the origins,of the war. The book provides a survey of Eritrean,history, with a special inside look at the,military and other developments in the last two,decades. Completely updated and revised to provide,readers with an insight into developments in the,last five years.

This is a personal account of the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, fought between May 1998 and June 2000, as well as of the periods immediately preceding and following the conflict. Shallow Graves traces shifting local perceptions of time, the nation and the region, beginning in the mid-1990s and concluding with the peace agreement signed between the two governments in 2018. Richard Reid is a historian who was based in Eritrea during the war, and who continued to visit both that country and Ethiopia for several years afterwards. This personal perspective offers a more vivid, intimate portrait of the experience of the war than can normally be offered by putatively objective academic accounts. As well as providing first-hand reportage and analysis, Reid problematises the role of the historian--and specifically the foreign historian--as the supposedly impartial observer of events. His eloquent narrative, constructed around conversations and interactions with a range of local witnesses, friends and colleagues, explores the impact of prolonged war and its aftermath--both on private and public memory, and on the nature of history itself.