The Anatomy of State Failure in Eritrea
I. The Origins of Authority
States do not fail in a single dramatic moment. They unravel slowly, beginning in the quiet spaces where no one imagines politics is taking place. The earliest fractures appear not in ministries or parliaments but in the daily negotiations of ordinary people. A fisherman trading his morning’s catch for a mechanic’s labor, a shopkeeper extending credit to a neighbor, a farmer negotiating grazing rights with a cousin, a dignitary bailing a felon, an elder redistributing leftover harvest, a sheikh mediating a feud, neighbors pooling resources to repair a communal well, a clan guaranteeing protection, a scribe recording debts, a caravan moving merchandise for reward – these small exchanges, repeated endlessly across a society, create the invisible architecture of political order. They determine who is trusted, who is respected, who is feared, and who is quietly dismissed. Long before a state imagines itself into existence, communities have already produced their own hierarchies, their own winners and losers, their own informal elites.
Political theorists such as James Scott and Pierre Bourdieu have shown that the most enduring forms of authority emerge from these everyday interactions. Scott describes them as the subterranean politics of survival, the subtle negotiations that shape power long before anyone calls it governance. Bourdieu calls them the silent grammar of social life, the habits and expectations that generate legitimacy. Eritrea, like every society, was governed by these invisible structures long before independence. The liberation struggle did not erase them; it merely layered a new political project on top of an older social architecture.
When Eritrea became independent in 1991, the new state inherited not a blank slate but a dense web of communityproduced elites. Some were fighters who had earned respect through sacrifice. Others were administrators who had managed local affairs during the war. Still others were elders whose authority came from lineage, wisdom, or the ability to mediate disputes. These individuals were not appointed by decree; they were elevated by performance. Communities trusted them because they delivered. They solved problems, negotiated conflicts, and mobilized resources. They were, in the purest sense, community entrepreneurs – individuals who accumulated influence by navigating the informal economy of trust.
II. The Rise of Community Entrepreneurs
The transition from community entrepreneur to national actor is one of the most delicate transformations in political life. It requires a shift in loyalty from the local constituency to the national coalition. In Eritrea, this shift occurred in the early years of independence, when the new government attempted to consolidate authority, build institutions, and define a national identity. For a brief moment, the interests of many communities aligned with the national project. Reconstruction was a shared goal. The promise of constitutionalism generated optimism. The memory of collective struggle created a sense of unity. In this environment, community entrepreneurs were celebrated as rational actors who could channel resources from the center to the periphery. They enforced national duties because the community believed in the national vision. The lists of the disappeared compiled by Ahmed Raji and others reveal how many of these individuals formed the connective tissue between state and society; their absence deprived the state of a critical wiring system through which the grassroots plugged into national institutions.
This period of convergence is not unique to Eritrea. Kenya experienced a similar moment after the 2002 transition, when communities briefly aligned behind a reformist agenda. Rwanda’s postgenocide reconstruction also relied on a convergence between local aspirations and national priorities, at least in the early years. In each case, the state appeared strong not because it was coercive but because it was synchronized with the communities that constituted it.
But convergence is by its nature fragile. It depends on a delicate balance between local expectations and national performance. When that balance shifts, the system begins to strain. In Eritrea, the strain emerged gradually as national service extended indefinitely, political participation narrowed, and the state increasingly relied on command rather than negotiation. Communities that had once felt included began to feel marginalized. Others felt overpoliced or ignored. Still others felt punished for historical alignments or geographic misfortune. The national project, once a shared aspiration, began to feel like an imposition.
This is where the concept of national unity as structural equilibrium becomes essential. Unity is not a moral achievement; it is a balance of forces. When community entrepreneurs remain rooted in their constituencies, they stabilize the system. When they drift upward and detach from their base, the equilibrium is disturbed. The state becomes vulnerable to capture by whichever coalition can exploit the vacuum.
III. The Drift Toward Divergence
Divergence between center and periphery is a common pattern in postliberation states. Ethiopia’s relationship with Tigray followed a similar trajectory: early convergence followed by deep divergence, culminating in open conflict. Nigeria’s Niger Delta communities experienced the state as a predatory force long before militant movements emerged. Sri Lanka’s Tamil communities lived under emergency laws for decades before the civil war erupted. In each case, the state’s failure to maintain a functioning feedback loop between local communities and national institutions produced a crisis of legitimacy.
The feedback loop is the most critical component of state stability. It is the mechanism through which communitiesarticulate needs, community entrepreneurs transmit those needs upward, and the state responds. When the loop functions, legitimacy flows downward and compliance flows upward. When it breaks, the state becomes blind and enters panic mode. In Eritrea, the feedback loop began to erode as local grievances went unaddressed and community entrepreneurs lost the ability to mediate between community and state. The state, deprived of accurate information, began to interpret silence as disloyalty. Communities, deprived of meaningful representation, began to interpret state actions as arbitrary or punitive.
Authoritarianism in Eritrea did not descend from the sky. It emerged from internal fears, anxieties, and bargains. A coalition of actors – not a single individual – gradually consolidated power in response to perceived threats. But contrary to the common narrative, this consolidation was not driven by a dominant community demanding protection. It was driven by predatory actors who recognized that weakened competitors created an opportunity. They did not pressure the state; they infiltrated it. They weaponized its institutions not to defend a threatened majority but to entrench their own advantage.
IV. The Emergence of the Exclusionary State
As divergence deepens, the state begins to treat certain communities as structural threats. This is the birth of the Exclusionary State – a state that no longer views all communities as equal partners in the national project. It begins to differentiate between insiders and outsiders, loyalists and suspects, core constituencies and peripheral ones. The Exclusionary State does not oppress uniformly; it targets selectively. Oppression in Eritrea is patterned, not random. It follows the logic of coalition survival, not universal malice.
This selective exclusion is not unique to Eritrea. Algeria’s “Black Decade” saw entire regions treated as suspect. Turkey’s relationship with its Kurdish population oscillated between negotiation and militarized control. Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya escalated from discrimination to expulsion once the state decided the community was beyond redemption. In each case, the state crossed a threshold where it no longer viewed certain communities as political partners but as structural threats.
Once exclusion becomes normalized, the state evolves into a DominantCoalition State – a state governed by a coalition that uses national institutions to protect its interests. The DominantCoalition State is not yet fully captured, but it is no longer neutral. It allocates resources unevenly, distributes burdens selectively, and interprets dissent through the lens of coalition survival. At this stage, the equilibrium collapses entirely. Community entrepreneurs lose their grounding. Constituencies withdraw. The state becomes increasingly reliant on coercion to maintain order.
V. The Captured State
The final stage is the Captured State – a state fully weaponized by a predatory coalition to advance its fears, anxieties, and interests. The Captured State no longer pretends to represent the entire nation. It governs through command, not negotiation. It treats political problems as administrative malfunctions. It replaces community entrepreneurs with administrators whose loyalty flows upward rather than downward. It no longer relies on feedback; it relies on surveillance. It no longer seeks legitimacy; it seeks compliance.
In Eritrea, this mutation manifested in the centralization of authority, the sidelining of local decisionmakers, and the militarization of administration. Local autonomy was gradually replaced by directives from the center. Community leaders who once mediated between citizens and state were replaced by actors who served the dominant coalition. The state no longer relied on community entrepreneurs to interpret local needs; it relied on command structures to enforce compliance.
The consequences of this shift are profound. When a state treats a community as a malfunctioning unit, the community responds by withdrawing from the political relationship. People retreat into silence. They avoid public expression. They rely on informal networks. They develop what James Scott calls “hidden transcripts” – private narratives of resistance that never surface in public. Eritrean communities, both inside the country and in the diaspora, exhibit this pattern. They speak in coded language, whisper grievances, and rely on trusted micronetworks for survival. This is not cowardice; it is rational adaptation to a system that no longer recognizes their voice.
VI. The Collapse of Shared Meaning
The erosion of the feedback loop also produces a crisis of identity. The state continues to promote the ideal of the national citizen – the individual who sacrifices local interests for the common good. But this figure is a myth. Political anthropology shows that citizens everywhere navigate politics through local identities. Lebanese citizens vote through sectarian networks. Kenyans mobilize through ethnic blocs. Indians negotiate through castebased patronage. Nigerians rely on regional power structures. Eritrea is not an exception to global patterns; it is an example of them. The attempt to erase local constituencies in favor of a singular national identity was structurally doomed, not because Eritreans lack patriotism, but because no political system can erase the community as the primary unit of political meaning.
When national politics becomes unresponsive, communities reassert themselves. This is happening across Africa. In Sudan, neighborhood resistance committees became the backbone of revolution. In Ethiopia, local militias filled governance vacuums. In Somalia, clan structures outlived the state. In South Sudan, local chiefs regained authority after national collapse. Eritrea’s communities, too, are reawakening – not through open rebellion, but through diaspora networks, cultural associations, informal economies, and quiet acts of solidarity. This is the early stage of what can be called reverse exclusion: the moment when communities decide the state is beyond redemption. Not through violence, but through withdrawal of belief.
The philosophical question that emerges from this analysis is simple but profound: what is a state without listening? A state is not a flag, a border, or a constitution. It is a relationship. When the relationship breaks, the state remains physically present but morally absent. Hannah Arendt warned that the greatest danger to political life is not tyranny but the collapse of shared meaning. When citizens and rulers no longer inhabit the same moral universe, the state becomes a shell – a structure without substance.
VII. Reimagining the Political Relationship
Eritrea today faces this philosophical dilemma. The state exists. The nation exists. But the relationship between them is strained. This is not irreversible. But it cannot be repaired through slogans or coercion. It requires rebuilding the feedback loop – from the individual upward. It requires recognizing that communities are the foundation of political life, not obstacles to national unity. It requires empowering community entrepreneurs who are accountable to real people, not to abstract ideologies. It requires a state that understands that legitimacy cannot be commanded; it must be earned.
The anatomy of state failure is not a story of sudden collapse. It is a story of gradual erosion, of broken relationships, of muted communities, of elites who drift away from their constituencies, and of a state that forgets how to listen. But the same architecture that breaks can be rebuilt. The same communities that were silenced can speak again. The same community entrepreneurs who lost their mandate can rediscover it. The same state that drifted into exclusion can return to governance.
The future of Eritrea will not be written by those who imitate the myth of the irrational citizen who sacrifices everything for an abstract nation. It will be written by rational citizens rooted in real communities, capable of rebuilding the political relationship from the ground up. Because in the end, a state is only as strong as the conversations it allows, and as fragile as the silences it imposes.
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Awate Forum