Biopolitics, Militarism, and Development: Eritrea in the Twenty-First Century

Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics - the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups - is assuming particular forms in the twenty-first century. Once hailed as the "African country that works," Eritrea's apparently successful post-independence development has since lapsed into economic crisis and severe human rights violations. This is due not only to the border war with Ethiopia that began in 1998, but is also the result of discernible tendencies in the "high modernist" style of social mobilization for development first adopted by the Eritrean government during the liberation struggle (1961-1991) and later carried into the post-independence era. The contributions to this volume reveal and interpret the links between development and developmentalist ideologies, intensifying militarism, and the controlling and disciplining of human lives and bodies by state institutions, policies, and discourses. Also assessed are the multiple consequences of these policies for the Eritrean people and the ways in which such policies are resisted or subverted. This insightful, comparative volume places the Eritrean case in a broader global and transnational context.

David O’Kane is a Senior Tutor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. His doctoral research was carried out on the topics of land reform and nationalism among a peasant community in a highland Eritrea. He received his doctorate from Queen’s University Belfast in 2004.

Tricia Redeker Hepner is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her PhD in anthropology from Michigan State University (2004), where she was a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow. Her research on Eritrea was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Her published work includes a co-edited volume of the Eritrean Studies Review (4:2, 2005) and articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Her forthcoming book is titled, Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors and Exiles: Transnational Political Struggle in Eritrea and Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press).