ትንሳኤ ሃገር

This book examines precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial Eritrea, navigating the social fabric, economic systems, cultural and juridico-political structures, and historico-political trajectories that shaped contemporary national identity. While the book highlights the people's civilization and the struggle against European colonization and regional aggression, it provides an in-depth look at their contemporary trials and tribulations under one of postcolonial Africa's most closed and repressive states. Shaped and influenced by war, colonization, Western-enabled regional occupation, and a pervasive sense of betrayal stemming from transhistorical injustice and international juridico-political distortion, post-independent Eritrea instituted a perpetual state of emergency and a precaritized life in which the state operates outside the law. This created an absolute sovereign power unrestrained by law under the guise of "state sovereignty" and "national security," which gave the state the "moral alibi" to kill and imprison without due process of law. This has enabled the state to inflate or manufacture imaginary threats, influencing and shaping public perceptions and evoking fear of "external enemies", while posing an existential threat to its citizens more than any other threat. Eritrea's security discourse, imbued with a permanent war narrative that focused on the primacy of state security and human sacrifice for the sake of the country, has evidently legitimized and normalized a state of exception, incorporating emergencies into the psychosocial, economic, and political fabric of everyday existence. The suspension of law under the guise of a temporary state of exception has become the permanent rule of the state. Governed by threat, fear, and control over life and livelihoods, the state has repressed public voices and deprived citizens of fundamental rights, reducing the population to a bare existence devoid of security, protection, rights, debate, recourse, or appeal against sovereign decisions and biopolitical control. While the authorities hide behind the force of law with no regard for the law or legal practice, the public hides from the authorities without leaving or crosses international borders rejecting the bare life minimum existence in search of security and protection somewhere else. The state of exception provided the state with unrestrained sovereign power to monopolize the voice and the state of rightlessness and to revoke the law and produce a space of lawlessness that weaponizes power to rob the national resources and wealth while terrorizing and reducing its citizens to a bare life minimum biopolitical existence.

Therefore, in light of the real and perceived regional security threat discourses that reduced the nation to its current state of pervasive sense of insecurity, precarity, unpredictability, and institutionalized lawlessness, the book offers a retrospective assessment of the historico-political journey and a comprehensive circumspective analysis of contemporary challenges, and outlines a prospective strategic framework necessary for national renaissance and the transition from a state of exception to a state of normalcy. Although the book highlights the challenges, opportunities, and possibilities that arise from the fall of dictatorship, it presents a cautionary narrative that underscores the fragility and dangers of a post-dictatorial sociopolitical environment.