The Elephant in the Room
I. The Meteor We Pretend Fell From the Sky
There is a comforting story circulating in Eritrean political discourse – a story repeated so often, and with such ritualistic conviction, that it has become less an argument than a reflex. It tells us that the dictatorship is an alien force, a meteor that crashed into Eritrean society from some distant, unknowable orbit, scorching everything in its path and leaving behind a landscape of devastation that no one could have foreseen or prevented. In this story, the regime is an aberration, a deviation from the natural order, a foreign intrusion into an otherwise harmonious national fabric. It is the villain that arrived from nowhere, and therefore the villain that belongs to no one.
This story is soothing precisely because it is false. It allows every constituency to claim innocence without the burden of introspection. It allows the dominant groups to distance themselves from the machinery that protects their historical advantages, as though the state’s architecture were built by ghosts rather than by human hands. It allows the marginalized to imagine that their grievances are the result of a cosmic accident rather than a structural design that has been decades in the making. And it allows the opposition to frame the struggle as a simple binary – “the people” versus an exogenous dictatorship – without confronting the uncomfortable truth that the people are not a singular entity but a mosaic of competing fears, interests, and historical memories.
But the meteor never fell. The regime did not descend from the sky. It grew from the soil, nourished by the anxieties, ambitions, and calculations of a real constituency that saw in its rise not a tragedy but a guarantee. To treat the dictatorship as exogenous is to misdiagnose the very nature of power in Eritrea. It is to pretend that the state is a detached predator rather than the political expression of a particular social base. It is to erase responsibility, distort strategy, and pressure the most vulnerable groups to silence their grievances in the name of a unity that has never been negotiated and may never exist without structural redesign.
Power, in political economy, is rarely an accident. It is almost always endogenous – an outcome of internal dynamics, not an interruption from the outside.
II. What Endogenous Power Actually Means
In political economy, endogenous power refers to forces that arise from within a society – its history, its hierarchies, its fears, its incentives, its dominant coalitions, and the bargains that hold them together. Endogenous power is not imposed; it is produced. It is not an interruption; it is a continuation of the social logic that preceded it. It is the political crystallization of a society’s unresolved disputes and entrenched asymmetries.
By contrast, exogenous power is external – colonial occupation, foreign invasion, natural disaster, or any force that disrupts a society from the outside and imposes a new order without organic roots.
Eritrea’s political discourse often treats the dictatorship as exogenous because the alternative is uncomfortable. Endogenous power implies complicity. It implies that the regime is not a foreign body but a political organism rooted in the interests, anxieties, and aspirations of a particular constituency. It implies that the state’s behavior – its land policies, its demographic engineering, its hostility to federalism, its suspicion of diversity, its approach to religion, its linguistic preferences, and even its geopolitical sympathies – are not arbitrary but reflective of a deeper social alignment.
And here the evidence is overwhelming. Nearly all Tigrignaspeaking Christian highlanders in the opposition adopt the regime’s positions almost verbatim on the most sensitive national questions – land ownership, religious politics, the political role of Islam, opposition to federalism, hostility to regional autonomy, suspicion toward ethnic diversity, antagonism toward the Arabic language and the Arab world, and even their relative sympathies in the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. These are not coincidences. They are continuities. They reveal a shared worldview that transcends the regimeopposition divide and exposes the endogenous character of the state.
Endogenous power forces us to ask: Who benefits? Who fears change? Who sees the current structure as protection rather than oppression? Who cares about a national sovereignty soaked in blood and tears? These are questions many prefer to avoid because they pierce the illusion of innocence that the exogenous narrative so conveniently provides.
III. The Strategic Cost of Misdiagnosis
When a political system is misdiagnosed as exogenous, the opposition inevitably adopts the wrong strategy. It begins to imagine that the dictatorship can be removed like a tumor – cleanly, surgically, without disturbing the underlying social anatomy. It imagines that once the dictator is gone, the country will naturally revert to harmony, as though the fractures that preceded the dictatorship will magically heal themselves.
But authoritarian systems built on endogenous power do not collapse through moral clarity or patriotic slogans. They collapse only when the equilibrium that sustains them is disrupted – when the constituencies that benefit from the status quo no longer see it as viable, or when the constituencies that suffer under it become powerful enough to renegotiate the terms of coexistence.
Consider Sudan in the late 1980s. The opposition treated the military regime as an exogenous distortion, assuming that once the dictator fell, the country would naturally revert to democratic harmony. Instead, the same structural forces – regional inequalities, ethnic hierarchies, competing constituencies – reproduced instability again and again, because the underlying disputes were never confronted.
Or take Iraq after 2003. The dictatorship was removed by an external force, but the endogenous fractures – sectarian divides, regional grievances, historical resentments – were untouched. The result was not unity but implosion, because the removal of the exogenous layer exposed the endogenous conflicts that had been suppressed but never resolved.
Misdiagnosis is not an academic error. It is a strategic catastrophe.
IV. The Exogenous Illusion and the Politics of Innocence
Treating the Eritrean regime as an equalopportunity oppressor is not simply inaccurate; it is politically convenient. It allows the dominant constituency to claim victimhood alongside the marginalized, erasing the asymmetries that define the Eritrean experience. It allows them to say, “We all suffered,” without acknowledging that suffering is not a synonym for equality and that oppression does not fall evenly across a stratified society.
This exogenous framing performs three political functions that are as subtle as they are destructive.
First, it absolves dominant groups of responsibility. If the regime is a meteor, then no one built it, no one benefits from it, and no one must answer for it. The state becomes a monster without parents, a machine without engineers.
Second, it pressures marginalized constituencies to silence their grievances. If oppression is equal, then particular grievances become divisive, inconvenient, even unpatriotic. The victims of structural inequality are told to wait their turn, to postpone their demands, to swallow their history for the sake of a unity that exists only in rhetoric.
Third, it forces the opposition to mimic the regime’s homogenizing narrative. If the dictatorship is exogenous, then the opposition must present itself as the universal antidote – flattening differences, suppressing disputes, and dissolving constituencies into a single national chorus. But a chorus is not a negotiation. And unity without negotiation is obedience.
V. The Regime as a Political Expression, Not a Phantom
Every authoritarian system has a constituency. The apartheid regime in South Africa was not an alien force; it was the political expression of a white minority determined to preserve its dominance. The Ba’ath regime in Syria did not fall from the sky; it was the expression of a sectarian elite protecting its survival in a hostile environment. The Lebanese civil war was not a clash of ideologies; it was the eruption of longsuppressed endogenous disputes that had been papered over by a fragile national myth.
Eritrea is no different.
The nearperfect alignment between the regime’s worldview and the worldview of many Tigrignaspeaking Christian highlanders in the opposition is not incidental. It is structural. Their shared positions on land ownership, on the political role of Islam, on federalism, on regional autonomy, on the meaning of diversity, on Arabic language, on the Arab world, and even on Middle Eastern geopolitics reveal a continuity of interests that cannot be dismissed as coincidence. These alignments are not the residue of propaganda; they are the expression of a deeper political logic that predates the regime and will outlast it unless confronted.
To say that the regime represents a constituency is not to moralize or demonize. It is to analyze. It is to recognize that power is rarely neutral and never accidental. It is to understand that the state’s behavior is not the whim of a single man but the structural manifestation of a collective fear of losing dominance.
Ignoring this reality does not make it disappear. It only blinds the opposition to the terrain on which it must operate.
VI. The Silence That Protects Power
When the opposition adopts the exogenous narrative, it inadvertently reinforces the very structure it seeks to dismantle. It tells marginalized groups to postpone their grievances “until after change,” as though justice were a luxury that can be deferred indefinitely. It tells them to adopt national slogans that erase their lived experiences, as though unity requires amnesia. It tells them that naming structural inequalities is divisive, that articulating historical grievances is dangerous, that demanding representation is premature.
But postponement is not neutrality. It is surrender.
In Lebanon, every attempt to suppress sectarian grievances in the name of national unity only deepened the fractures, because unity built on silence is unity built on sand. In Ethiopia, the refusal to acknowledge ethnic disparities under the Derg created the conditions for decades of conflict, because the state’s homogenizing ideology could not erase the realities of a plural society. In Sri Lanka, the insistence on a singular national identity fueled a civil war that lasted a generation, because the state’s refusal to recognize diversity turned difference into rebellion.
Silence is not unity. Silence is the soil in which domination grows.
VII. The Path Forward: Naming the Endogenous
If Eritrea is to move toward equilibrium, it must first abandon the meteor myth. It must recognize that the dictatorship is not an external force but an internal arrangement – a political settlement that privileges one constituency at the expense of others. It must accept that every constituency has its own fears, its own incentives, its own historical burdens, and its own vision of the future. And it must allow each constituency to articulate its grievances without being accused of fragmentation or disloyalty.
Only then can negotiation begin – not the theatrical negotiation of umbrella organizations that pretend to represent everyone while representing no one, but the structural negotiation of real constituencies confronting each other honestly, without euphemism, without moral anesthesia, without the illusion that unity can be declared into existence by decree.
Endogenous power cannot be defeated by pretending it is exogenous. It can only be transformed by confronting the structure that sustains it, by acknowledging the interests that animate it, and by designing a political system that makes domination impossible.
The meteor never fell. The fire came from within. And only by acknowledging its source can Eritrea begin the work of redesigning its political future.
Awate Forum