Introduction: Eritrea’s Uneasy Futures and their Historical Contingencies

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Published: 2022-08-25
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26806/modafr.v10i1.417
Keywords:
rethinking transition, state-making, developmental democracy, sociality, Horn of Africa

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David O’Kane
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
Sabine Mohamed
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, United States of America
Magnus Treiber
LMU Munich, Germany

Abstract

To introduce this special issue of Modern Africa, the editors review Eritrea’s current condition and consider its historical roots: they place this Horn of Africa state in a broader historical context, one where neither relevant comparative cases nor past precedents are limited to its region. Hopes that were once invested in Eritrea as a model developmental state have now, thirty years since its independence, been thoroughly disappointed. The human rights violations and persistent underdevelopment that make an Eritrean transition necessary are very real: equally real are the risks and dangers that would be involved in any such transition. Recent cases of failed transition are discussed here: so too are the possible routes Eritrea might take to a “developmental democracy.” This issue’s various contributions are then introduced and summarised.


 

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How to Cite
O’Kane, D., Mohamed, S., & Treiber, M. (2022). Introduction: Eritrea’s Uneasy Futures and their Historical Contingencies. Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society, 10(1), 5–32. https://doi.org/10.26806/modafr.v10i1.417
Issue
Vol. 10 No. 1 (2022): Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society
Section
Articles
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Author Biographies

David O’Kane, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany

He is an Irish anthropologist, a graduate of the National University of Ireland and the Queen’s University Belfast. He has researched widely on issues of land reform, nationalism, language and education policy in Eritrea and Sierra Leone. His most recent publications include the monograph An Eritrean Village Reacts to Land Reform, and (as co-editor) the edited volumes Middle Classes in Africa and The Palgrave Handbook of Blue Heritage.

Sabine Mohamed, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, United States of America

She is is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany (2021). Her current book project, “Losing Ground: Emergent Black Empire and Counter-Futures in Urban Ethiopia,” ethnographically explores how categories of blackness and race, as well as experiences of urban and national dispossession, are attached to an infrastructure of emergent empire in East Africa. She is convenor of the Network for Contemporary Anthropological Theory (http://www.anthrotheory.net) and also works on Afrofuturism, Eritrean-Ethiopian relations, and aff ect.

Magnus Treiber, LMU Munich, Germany

He is is an anthropologist at LMU Munich, who has presented his PhD on young urban life in Asmara (2005) and his professorial thesis (Habilitation) on migration from Eritrea (2017). Among his latest publications are “Tentative lifeworlds in Art Deco: Young people’s milieus in postwar Asmara, Eritrea, 2001-2005” in the Journal of Eastern African Studies (2021) and, together with Tricia Redeker Hepner, “The Immediate, the Exceptional, and the Historical: Eritrean Migration and Research since the 1960s” in the Canadian Journal of African Studies (2021).