Biopolitics, militarism and development: Eritrea in the twenty-first century, edited by David O'Kane and Tricia Redeker Hepner, New York & Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2009, xxxvii +197 pp., £50.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781845455675
During its brief post-independence history, Eritrea has become an increasingly repressive state. The process of state formation and the post-2001 political crisis in Eritrea have been analysed by scholars using different theoretical formulations but few, if any, have employed the framework of biopolitics. The current volume is essentially about the phenomenon of biopolitics in the Eritrean context, thus introducing a new concept into the Eritrean academic discourse which, the editors explain, needs ‘new analytical tools and a recontextualisation of the roots of’ the political crisis in Eritrea (xxxii). The introduction of this approach to the literature on Eritrea is perhaps the most important strength of the book.
Building on the seminal work of Agamben (1998), the editors define biopolitics as the violent penetration of state power into ‘the most intimate spaces of human life and consciousness in the name of development, national security and sovereignty’, the end result being excessive perversions of governance and power (ix–xxxi, 161–162). The practices ensuing from the exercise of a particular abusive type of power – brute force – over human life itself have rendered the Eritrean person a mere subject reduced to ‘bare life’ (121). This is well captured throughout the book but most importantly in the introduction and conclusion, which establish a cogent relationship between the theoretical formulation of biopolitics and its relevance to the current political crisis in Eritrea. Most of the chapters are ethnographically nuanced, written by experts who have experience on Eritrea either as former university lecturers or field researchers.
In the introduction, the editors assert that the core of the political problem in Eritrea is the ‘valorisation of military life above all other potential ways of contributing to the nation’ (xxviii). The main conceptual framework of the book is further expounded in the first chapter, Woldemikael's ‘Pitfalls of nationalism in Eritrea’. Woldemikael also uses the concept of banality of power, borrowed from Mbembe (1992), in discussing the pervasive absolute state power under the hegemony of the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), the sole ruling party in Eritrea. Woldemikael's chapter discusses how major national events, festivities and celebrations, most notably the Independence Day of May 24, are manipulated with the objective of perpetuating a single national narrative, which in turn is aimed at bolstering the hegemony of the ruling party and its leader. The state and the ruling party, which are inseparable from each other, legitimise their access to power through a continuous and amplified reproduction of the liberation struggle experience. Any other voice that contradicts the official narrative is crushed ruthlessly, creating high levels of veneration and ‘fetishization’ of the Eritrean state (15).
Using spatiotemporal analysis, the chapter by Mahrt unravels two divergent perceptions of the liberation struggle: one that is aggressively propagated by the PFDJ, and another which is widely shared by the grassroots, particularly the farmers of the highlands. Mahrt's analysis hits hard the hegemonic hade libi hade hizbi (one heart one people) mantra of the PFDJ, thereby exposing apparent shortcomings in the PFDJ's political narrative which propagates the existence of uncontested national consensus on the understanding of the liberation struggle. Müller also touches on this same issue in the context of an epic failure in Eritrea's educational policy, by recognising the problem of a hegemonic narrative that portrays the state and the nation as one (55).
The way that militarisation has affected every aspect of Eritrean life is reflected in Poole's chapter, which discusses the challenges of refugee settlement and agrarian development in the lowland village of Hagaz. Education is the sector where the effect of excessive militarisation is more visible than in any other ‘civilian’ sector. The chapters by Müller and Riggan analyse this problem based on nuanced ethnographic data collected from Eritrean students and teachers. Riggan makes one of the most poignant observations in the book, when she says that in Eritrea the inevitable outcome for a student is becoming a soldier, simply because the conventional purpose of schooling has been transformed into that of preparing final year high school students for military conscription via compulsory enrolment at the Sawa Military Training Centre (73, 90). As noted by Hepner, the current unprecedented abuses in Eritrea are the outcomes of the government's obsessive impulse to homogeneity (123). The chapter by Treiber discusses this further by showing how the aspirations of ordinary citizens, as lived in ordinary experiences of local pubs and churches, are considerably at odds with those of the ruling elite. Excessive utilisation of militarised discipline and schemes of forced labour are to blame for this. Treiber's account has remarkable resonance with what Hirt and Mohammad (2013) call ‘anomie’ in another contribution.
Hepner's chapter provides a lucid continuation of her long-time research on Eritrea as one of the best examples of a transnational nation-state. Hepner is perhaps the principal authority on the phenomenon of transnationalism in the Eritrean context. Her chapter has aptly intertwined the contours of transnationalism and biopolitics by unravelling the challenges of a new wave of Eritrean asylum seekers in the United States. For many Eritreans, including this writer, asylum seeking is indeed a process of re-humanisation in which many Eritreans ‘think of themselves as rights-bearing individuals, often for the first time’ (128).1 Finally, Cameron examines the Eritrean state through a comparative prism, and concludes that the country has many similarities with other extremely repressive countries such as North Korea and Zimbabwe (153–154).
While many edited volumes suffer from lack of coherency and disjointedness, such problems are overcome here through the construction of a unifying theme and tight intellectual purpose clearly defined in the introduction, and neatly recaptured in the conclusion. Thus the reader finds that the core theme is comprehensively covered throughout the volume, albeit with a varying degree of depth in each chapter. Most of the contributors establish a very clear link with the main conceptual framework of the volume, biopolitics.
In a few instances, authors used expressions that are not culturally widespread in the Eritrean context. For example, Wazungu is a typical Swahili word for ‘white people’, sometimes used pejoratively, as Cameron notes. Cameron discusses ‘reference in the government press to bilateral donors as being “neo-colonialists” and “Wazungu”’ (145). Since Swahili is not a language spoken in Eritrea, the use of Wazungu in any context is not common in the country. In reference to a ‘white person’, Tigrinya speaking Eritreans would rather generically say tsaeda (literally meaning white). In another example, Cameron uses teff in reference to the most common staple food in the highlands of Eritrea and Ethiopia (144). Teff is Amharic; the most appropriate Tigrinya equivalent, albeit very similar to the Amharic version, is taff. Problems of transliteration, misspelling and incorrect usage are also detected in other parts of the book, which could have been avoided by consulting vernacular experts.
Some figures on the level of militarisation cited in the book seem rather conservative estimates. For example, Treiber puts the proportion of military conscription only at 10% (99), while Woldemikael cites the total number of Eritrean soldiers as being 200,000 (10). The impossibility of obtaining accurate military data from Eritrea is undeniable. However, at the time when the book was published (2009), there were publicly available higher estimates based on dependable sources. Moreover, the editors' observation that Isaias Afwerki's visit to South Africa in July 2002 was organised in response to the formation of the Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights (EMDHR) is incorrect, as the president's visit took place before the establishment of the EMDHR. On balance, however, the book is undoubtedly one of the most enthralling contributions I have read recently. At the very end of the book, the editors rightly note that the likelihood of Eritrea being seen as another ‘failed state’ is not far-fetched. There is overwhelming evidence to support this. The failed coup d’état of 21 January 2013 is just one such example.