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.

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.

Introduction: Biopolitics, Militarism and Development in Contemporary Eritrea
Tricia Redeker Hepner and David O’Kane

Chapter 1. Pitfalls of Nationalism in Eritrea
Tekle M. Woldemikael

Chapter 2. War, Spatio-temporal Perception, and the Nation: Fighters and Farmers in the Highlands
Michael Mahrt

Chapter 3. The Youth Has Gone From Our Soil: Place and Politics in Refugee Resettlement and Agrarian Development
Amanda Poole

Chapter 4. Human Resource Development and the State: Higher Education in Post-Revolutionary Eritrea
Tanja R. Müller

Chapter 5. Avoiding Wastage by Making Soldiers: Technologies of the State and the Imagination of the Educated Nation
Jennifer Riggan

Chapter 6. Trapped in Adolescence: The Post-War Urban Generation
Magnus Treiber

Chapter 7. Seeking Asylum in a Transnational Social Field: New Refugees and Struggles for Autonomy and Human Rights
Tricia Redeker Hepner

Chapter 8. The Eritrean State in Comparative Perspective
Greg Cameron

Conclusion: Biopolitics and Dilemmas of Development in Eritrea and Elsewhere
Tricia Redeker Hepner and David O’Kane

Bibliography
Index