Addressing the Public as Power

Abstract

Eritrean political discourse assigns the public several familiar roles: victims whose suffering condemns the government, a population to administer, a force to mobilize, and a constituency to represent. Each relationship leaves a further question: how do citizens acquire the capacity to place conditions on those who govern them? Building on earlier Eritrean work on civic power, education, and transition planning, this essay develops an argument for a sustained campaign of civic preparedness addressed directly to the public. Beginning with uncertainty about Eritrea’s political future, it examines how knowledge about preserving services and maintaining accountable cooperation could help citizens participate in a transition without surrendering their authority to its strongest actors. It then connects this practical capacity to the Pledged Public and considers how widely shared knowledge might support cooperation before formal organization becomes possible. The proposal is a research and communication project that prepares people for disruption while helping them establish expectations of any authority that follows.

I. Introduction: The People in the Third Person

There is a familiar presence in Eritrean political discussion: the Eritrean people. They appear in government speeches, opposition statements, arguments about national survival, and appeals for international attention. Their suffering is described. Their interests are asserted. Their wishes are interpreted. Nearly everyone claims to speak on their behalf.

Yet the frequency with which the public is mentioned can conceal the position it occupies. In a recurring pattern of this discourse, the people are the ones about whom something is being said. They need freedom. They deserve peace. They have sacrificed enough. These statements may be entirely true. But they leave a further question unanswered: through what means do the people themselves acquire authority over the decisions being made in their name?

This is the question I want to examine. It continues a concern developed in “The Grammar of Promise” and the essays on the Pledged Public: the position assigned to citizens before a political organization acquires power helps determine what they can demand afterward. A public invited to trust, support, and wait may discover that the conditions of its participation have already been settled by others.

There are important Eritrean efforts that already challenge this relationship, and I will acknowledge them before developing the proposal. My concern is with a recurring limitation in our discourse, rather than an absence of all alternatives. The problem begins earlier than the question of who will govern next. It begins with how we address the people who will be governed. To see why this matters, we need to look carefully at the relationships our political discourse already establishes.

II. The Roles We Have Given the Public

The most familiar is the public as victim. We describe imprisonment, deprivation, displacement, and the destruction of ordinary possibilities. Public suffering establishes the moral case against the government. Documentation and denunciation serve indispensable purposes, particularly where those responsible seek to conceal what they have done.

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But notice the political relationship this language can leave intact. The citizen supplies the injury; someone else interprets it and claims authority to remedy it. The public becomes the moral reason for a political project without necessarily becoming the author of its conditions. Both the government and its opponents can invoke the same people because invoking them does not require demonstrating how actual citizens can authorize, correct, or withdraw that claim.

A second relationship appears when citizens are called upon to act. Freedom Friday, or Arbi Harnet, reached people inside Eritrea through telephone calls, including automated messages from abroad. Its organizers explained in a 2012 Awate interview that the project sought to strengthen communication, solidarity, empowerment, and the capacity for coordinated action.[1] It would therefore be inaccurate to describe its participants merely as a crowd summoned to protest. My proposal shares its concern with public capacity while concentrating on a particular task: helping citizens sustain accountable governance through disruption and retain independence from whoever subsequently claims power.

The government establishes another relationship. It addresses citizens through commands, obligations, administrative requirements, and appeals to national duty. The population is something to manage and mobilize. Its independent authority to determine the terms of that management remains excluded.

Efforts to create a citizen-based national force introduce an important development. The proposal for an Eritrean National Force envisages elections among diaspora citizens on a one-person, one-vote basis.[2] Such an approach seeks an identifiable constituency for representation, diplomatic work, and an eventual transition. It attempts to answer a legitimate challenge to opposition politics: who authorized you to speak for us?

That question deserves an answer. But answering it does not settle another: what capacity do citizens retain to constrain those they have authorized? Electing representatives can establish a mandate. It does not, by itself, ensure that the represented public remains capable of limiting its use.

These approaches differ substantially, and the distinction matters. Criticism of their limits should not erase their achievements. These are overlapping patterns, rather than an exhaustive classification of Eritrean initiatives. Some efforts already combine education, civic independence, and transition planning. The question is how to strengthen the particular capacity that concerns this essay: the ability of citizens to sustain public life and impose conditions upon whoever claims authority over it.

Calling the people sovereign does not produce that capacity. Sovereignty names a democratic principle. Its exercise requires knowledge, relationships, organization, and institutions. The political task lies in the distance between the principle and the means of making it effective.

III. What Has Already Been Argued

Before proceeding, I should locate this argument within work Eritreans have already done. In preparing this essay, I searched accessible Eritrean publications and examined relevant essays, interviews, organizational statements, and transition documents. That review makes several broad claims of novelty untenable. Citizen sovereignty, independent civic power, public education, and preparation for transition all have identifiable precedents.

The Citizen’s Initiative for the Salvation of Eritrea placed ordinary citizens at the center of political change in its 2002 statement, later republished on Awate.[7] Amanuel Hidrat’s “Civic Society Beyond Our Entrenched Thinking,” written in 2007 and reproduced in his 2011 Awate essay on Eritrean Global Solidarity, defended citizen sovereignty and civic institutions capable of restraining the state.[8] Seyoum Tesfaye likewise challenged the assumption that political organizations should automatically dominate civic actors in a 2011 Asmarino article.[9] Independent public power is therefore an existing Eritrean argument.

Preparation and communication also have a history. In “How To Defeat Isaias Afwerki” in 2011, Daniel G. Mikael called for preparing citizens and institutions for transition and explaining those preparations more clearly to people inside the country.[10] Hidrat’s 2015 essay on the Tunisian model proposed advance planning led by civic organizations.[11] More recently, Semere T. Habtemariam’s “The Day After” urged preparation for succession, particularly by veterans and regime insiders.[12] These texts differ in their proposed actors and mechanisms, but they rule out any suggestion that preparation itself has been neglected by everyone.

There are also organized educational efforts. The Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights lists civic education among its programs.[13] Eritrea Focus’s report on its 2020 conference connects transition research with public lectures on television and planned educational films, while recording arguments for an assertive civil society during transition.[14] Most directly, the Eritrean Research Institute for Policy and Strategy (ERIPS), in its January 2025 transition plan, addresses public education, emergency preparation before regime change, safeguards against the monopolization of power, and the provision of essential services by an interim government.[15] This is substantial overlap, not merely similarity in vocabulary.

The question I add is consequently narrower. How could this existing work be developed into a sustained conversation with people inside Eritrea about preserving essential functions while retaining independent authority over those coordinating them? My emphasis is on connecting practical preparedness to conditional recognition: the possibility that citizens who are less dependent on an incoming ruler to sustain their common life may be better placed to insist on limits upon that ruler.

I did not identify a source in this review that develops that precise connection in the same way. That is a bounded finding, not proof of priority. I offer the essay as a proposed extension and synthesis of an existing conversation. Its value must rest on whether the connection is useful and can be made workable, rather than on a claim that Eritreans have never thought about public power before.

IV. Why the Government Remains the Addressee

Alongside the citizen-oriented work just acknowledged, another influential stream of our political imagination continues to pass through the government. We ask it to release prisoners, implement constitutional government, end indefinite service, and reconcile with its people. These demands are justified. But when the imagined route to change depends primarily on its accepting them, initiative remains with the authority whose refusal created the problem.

The 2018 rapprochement with Ethiopia exposed this dependence. Peace appeared to offer an opportunity to change course domestically. Yet the diplomatic opening did not bring the corresponding improvements in human rights that many hoped for.[3] Renewed discussion of engagement with the United States returns us to a similar expectation: perhaps another external opportunity will encourage the government to reconsider its relationship with its people.[4]

What makes an opportunity desirable for the public does not necessarily make it desirable for those who would have to surrender power. A government may alter its calculations, but a political strategy cannot remain suspended until its interests coincide with ours.

Even criticism can become dependent in this way. The government acts; we explain the wrongness of its action. It speaks; we expose the contradiction. This work may be necessary, yet its agenda remains largely supplied by the institution being opposed.

Bypassing the government in discourse means developing a line of political work whose immediate addressee is the citizen. It means asking what people can understand, preserve, and prepare without first waiting for the government to become receptive. This cannot remove the obstacles imposed by repression. It can change what we use the available space for communication to accomplish.

The next question, then, is what such a conversation should be about.

V. Why Uncertainty Creates a Responsibility to Prepare

I consider Eritrea’s present political arrangement unsustainable as a foundation for a secure national future. But that judgment should not be confused with knowledge of when or how it will end. Dictatorships can survive severe deterioration. Succession can reproduce authoritarianism. Change can arrive through negotiation, an internal reorganization, a sudden rupture, or a prolonged weakening of administrative control.

The argument for preparation does not require choosing one of these outcomes and announcing it as inevitable. It requires recognizing that disruption is possible and that its consequences will partly depend on what people already understand when it occurs.

We accept this reasoning in other areas of life. Preparing for an earthquake does not require knowing its date. The purpose of preparation is to reduce the harm produced by an event whose timing remains uncertain. Political uncertainty creates a comparable responsibility, particularly when failure would affect people who had little influence over the decisions that exposed them to it.

We should also distinguish the failure of a governing authority from the collapse of public life. A government can lose control while clinics, schools, water systems, administrative records, and relationships of cooperation still exist. Preserving those capacities may be essential to preventing a political rupture from becoming a wider social catastrophe.

Existing transition plans already assign responsibilities for services and emergency response. I want to examine how those responsibilities can also become practical knowledge held by citizens before a transitional authority is functioning. A national plan and a public able to use it are different achievements. The latter requires explanation directed to the people who may have to act when ordinary instructions stop arriving.

Who keeps a clinic functioning? Who protects records on which a person’s property, education, or employment depends? How do neighbors address an urgent dispute? If someone assumes responsibility, who authorizes that person, and how can the responsibility be withdrawn?

These are political questions because they concern the exercise and limitation of authority. They are also practical questions that cannot wait indefinitely for a national agreement. The people living through disruption will have to respond, whether or not anyone has helped them think about their options beforehand.

VI. How Preserving Public Life Can Become Political Capacity

Consider a community facing an interruption in water supply while the usual administrative chain is unavailable. Some form of cooperation becomes necessary. People must identify the problem, draw on relevant skills, decide how limited resources will be used, and communicate decisions to those affected.

The political issue appears within that practical work. Who makes the decision? Does the person coordinating the response report to anyone? Can residents question how resources are distributed? Does an emergency responsibility expire, or does it become a permanent claim to command?

The example matters because it shows that governance and accountability do not begin only when a constitution is completed. They arise wherever people undertake responsibilities that affect others. A public familiar with these questions may be better positioned to recognize the moment when necessary coordination begins turning into unaccountable rule.

This is where preparedness acquires a democratic significance. Knowledge about maintaining services can be accompanied by knowledge about limiting the authority exercised in maintaining them. Public employees can consider continuity of work and preservation of records. Students can consider how their skills might assist communication and community needs. Health workers, teachers, engineers, and other professionals can examine what their responsibilities would require when normal support weakens. Communities can discuss temporary representation, transparent decisions, and procedures for replacing those entrusted with responsibilities.

The starting point is not an empty society waiting for instruction from abroad. Eritreans already possess practical knowledge and relationships through which they sustain life under difficult conditions. Any serious project must learn from these capacities. Public education should make relevant options more accessible while allowing the people who would use them to correct the assumptions behind them.

Nor does preparation require asking everyone to become an activist. People can learn how to recognize accountable temporary authority without adopting an entire political philosophy. They can consider what they might do during disruption without being instructed to produce that disruption themselves.

This distinction also matters for the distribution of responsibility. Those of us outside Eritrea should be particularly careful about assigning immediate risks to people inside it. A preparedness project gives the diaspora work it can undertake directly: research, explanation, translation, and the development of material whose value does not depend on others first agreeing to endanger themselves.

VII. What Other Experiences Can Teach Us

Such material would have to be researched. A plausible idea is insufficient grounds for prescribing how communities should respond to a crisis. We would need to examine what has worked elsewhere, what failed, and which conditions explain the difference.

Sweden’s “In case of crisis or war” material provides one example of communicating with residents as participants in emergency preparedness.[5] Its relevance lies in making preparation an ordinary public responsibility before a crisis arrives. Eritrea lacks the institutional setting within which Swedish guidance operates, so its instructions cannot simply be transferred. What can be studied is how a public is addressed as possessing responsibilities and practical capacities of its own.

The Russian councils of 1917 pose a different problem. Workers’ and soldiers’ councils, or soviets, exercised substantial authority alongside the Provisional Government after the fall of the tsar. The Bolsheviks subsequently gained influence in major soviets and seized national power.[6] These councils were contested political institutions, not simply neutral arrangements for neighborhood administration.

Their experience raises two questions that should remain connected: how can people develop governing capacity during upheaval, and how can that capacity retain independence from a party seeking to consolidate power? The emergence of public organization does not guarantee its survival as an independent constraint.

A comparative project should therefore study failure as carefully as success. It should examine how communities maintained services, how temporary authority was limited, what protected vulnerable groups, and how local cooperation related to wider institutions. Historical examples should help us identify problems to solve, including problems our initial enthusiasm may overlook.

VIII. The Pledged Public and the Substance of Refusal

The discussion now returns to the question that has followed the Pledged Public from the beginning. Citizens may agree that any incoming authority must accept limits before receiving their recognition. But what makes those conditions more than another statement of what ought to happen?

The objection is serious. An authority with weapons, resources, and control over institutions may disregard a public declaration. Calling recognition a form of power does not establish the circumstances under which withholding it becomes effective.

Preparedness offers a possible contribution to this problem. People whose survival depends entirely on a new claimant’s ability to restore order may find themselves under enormous pressure to accept its terms. Where some capacity to sustain services and coordinate public responsibilities remains outside that claimant’s exclusive control, the relationship may be less one-sided.

This is the connection between practical capacity and what I mean by negative power: the capacity to refuse an unlimited claim to rule. It does not require the public to become a competing government. It requires citizens to retain some organized ability to judge, condition, and challenge those seeking governmental authority.

The distinction is important. A professional association, an accountable local body, or a network of cooperating communities can perform useful functions without transferring its political judgment to a party. The more such bodies become mere extensions of a claimant to national power, the weaker their ability to insist on conditions afterward.

None of this guarantees success against coercion. Information cannot equalize armed power, and local institutions can themselves become exclusionary or abusive. The claim is narrower: public conditions become more credible when citizens possess relationships and capacities through which those conditions can be expressed and defended.

A preparedness campaign could help develop the understanding from which such capacities emerge. It would therefore give the Pledged Public a possible practical foundation within the country, alongside efforts to establish shared conditions among Eritreans elsewhere.

IX. What Happens When People Know That Others Know

There remains an obvious difficulty. Much of the organization just described may be impossible under present conditions. If effective public power requires organization, and independent organization is suppressed, what can communication accomplish now?

It can begin by changing what people expect to find in one another.

Suppose one person believes that anyone assuming emergency responsibility should have a limited mandate and an obligation to explain decisions. That belief provides a private standard. Now suppose the same principle has been widely discussed, and the person has reason to believe that others have encountered it too. The principle becomes a possible starting point for a conversation that would otherwise have to begin from nothing.

The difference concerns shared expectations. People may still disagree about who should govern, what economic policies they prefer, or how authority should be distributed nationally. Yet they can recognize a common question when someone claims an indefinite right to command: under what conditions was this authority granted?

This is the organizing potential of information. Repeated public explanation can give people a language through which they recognize concerns they may already share. It can make an alternative imaginable before the circumstances for acting on it exist.

There is a limited resemblance here to the distributed quality of a blockchain: a common reference need not belong to a single office or depend on one leader’s continued presence. But the resemblance ends there. Public communication does not verify agreement. Knowing that others have heard a principle does not prove that they accept it, trust one another, or will defend it. Those questions still require relationships and, eventually, institutions.

My earlier Pledged Public essay already discussed private commitment and readiness before visible organization becomes possible.[16] The present argument develops that point by connecting shared expectations to practical preparedness. The Pledged Public should therefore not be reduced to a collection of signatures. Registration can document support, and documented commitments may become valuable. But the idea can circulate before enrollment is possible. Citizens can begin to understand conditional recognition as a relationship they establish with one another, rather than a promise they receive from an aspiring ruler.

This would not entitle the campaign’s organizers to announce that a silent population had pledged itself. Its significance would lie in making the concept available for people to consider, revise, and adopt. A public acquires political authorship through that process; it cannot have authorship assigned to it by those claiming to educate it.

X. The Proposal: A Sustained Conversation Before the Transition

The argument leads to a concrete proposal. Building on existing civic education and transition work, Eritrean researchers, professionals, civic participants, and media platforms should develop a sustained project of public preparedness, addressed directly to citizens inside the country. Its subject would be the preservation of public life during political disruption and the conditions under which temporary authority should be exercised.

The work could begin with a manageable set of questions: continuity of essential services, protection of public records and resources, accountable temporary representation, cooperation across communities, and protection against exclusion and retaliation. Research would examine relevant experiences and the assumptions each lesson requires. Eritreans familiar with local conditions would help assess what is useful, unrealistic, or missing.

That work should then become material people can actually use: clear explanations, concrete scenarios, short broadcasts, discussions, and accessible audio or written resources in the languages through which communities communicate. Television, radio, and internet platforms offer possible routes, but their actual reach must be assessed. The project succeeds only to the extent that people can encounter and understand its content. Feedback and correction must shape its development.

Its educational purpose would give it a political agenda of its own. Citizens would be addressed through questions about what they could do and what authority they should retain. The government would no longer supply the subject of every broadcast through its latest statement or abuse. Existing opposition efforts could continue, while this work develops a public capacity that no particular opposition organization is entitled to own.

The proposal does not depend on first curing the public of political disinterest. Nor does it assume that Eritreans lack awareness of what they endure. Its purpose is more specific: to make knowledge relevant to a possible transition available before the need for it becomes urgent, and to connect that knowledge to the continuing right of citizens to set terms.

This is a direction for work whose feasibility must be investigated. The precedents acknowledged here establish that it belongs within an existing Eritrean conversation. Its proposed contribution is to connect the preservation of public life with citizens’ continuing capacity to condition power, and to make that connection the organizing purpose of accessible public education. The campaign itself should remain open to the scrutiny it recommends for others. Those who produce material would have no authority to speak for everyone who encounters it.

The question running through this essay has concerned what the public should possess before another authority consolidates itself. Preparedness supplies one possible answer: practical knowledge, shared expectations, and an understanding that cooperation need not entail the surrender of political judgment. These cannot ensure a democratic transition. They may help prevent the next transition from beginning with citizens once again asked to grant everything in advance.

If we believe the Eritrean public is the source of legitimate authority, our political work should help make that principle usable. We can begin now by addressing people as citizens who may have to preserve their common life, organize necessary responsibilities, and decide the terms on which anyone is permitted to govern them.

Source notes

1. Awate Team, “Interview With Eritrea’s ‘Freedom Friday’ Organizers”, February 10, 2012. See also Freedom Friday accounts: 2014 automated calls and 2016 messages of hope and solidarity.
2. The Need for a National Force for Democratic Change in Eritrea.
3. Human Rights Watch: 2018 hopes for reform and World Report 2019: Eritrea.
4. Eritrea’s Red Sea moment, Deutsche Welle, September 25, 2026.
5. Swedish Government: This is civil defence.
6. World History Encyclopedia: Russia’s Provisional Government of 1917 and Bolshevik Revolution.
7. Citizen’s Initiative for the Salvation of Eritrea, “National Salvation: A Citizen’s Approach”, statement dated September 25, 2002; republished by Awate, December 6, 2014.
8. Amanuel Hidrat, “EGS On The Verge: Seeking Civic Identity & Stature”, Awate, October 23, 2011. Reproduces his December 29, 2007 essay, “Civic Society Beyond Our Entrenched Thinking.”
9. Seyoum Tesfaye, “Eritrean Civic Societies and Political Organization: Synergy or Paranoia”, Asmarino, October 12, 2011.
10. Daniel G. Mikael, “How To Defeat Isaias Afwerki”, Awate, June 10, 2011, especially “Mission 8: Plan for the Transitional Period.”
11. Amanuel Hidrat, “Tunisian Model: Analogical Reasoning for Eritrea’s Democratic Transition”, Awate, December 29, 2015.
12. Semere T. Habtemariam, “The Day After: Preparing Eritrea for its Most Dangerous Transition”, Awate, April 5, 2026.
13. Eritrean Movement for Democracy and Human Rights, current programs, undated page, accessed September 27, 2026.
14. Eritrea Focus, “Building Democracy in Eritrea: Second Conference Outcome Document”, reporting the June–July 2020 conference; the accessible webpage carries a June 4, 2024 posting date. See the executive summary and the transition discussion.
15. Eritrean Research Institute for Policy and Strategy, “Initial Plan for Democratic Transition and Transformative Change in Eritrea”, January 2025, particularly printed pages 7–10 and 13–14.
16. Filmon Wolde, “The Pledged Public: Toward an answer to ‘The Grammar of Promise’”, Awate, May 16, 2026, especially “Latency Is Part of the Power”; and “How the Pledged Public Works”, May 27, 2026.