Tag: Identity Politics
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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
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OUR NATIONAL UNITY: Why Eritrea’s Political Imagination Fails Reality
I. The Illusion We Keep Rehearsing In recent weeks, I have been reading a series of essays on awate.on-forge.com – thoughtful pieces by Semere Habtemariam and Saleh Ghadi, attempting to stitch together a moral vision for Eritrea’s political future. They speak of unity, sacrifice, institutional maturity, historical awareness, and the enduring hope that principled action
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The Forgotten Blueprint: How Eritrea’s 2001 Party Proclamation Could Rebuild a Nation
Eritrea’s political crisis did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the cumulative product of abandoned institutions, unimplemented laws, and a governing elite that systematically dismantled even the limited frameworks it once claimed to uphold. I use the term elite loosely here, for in the Eritrean context it connotes power without the accompanying attributes of
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He and his objectives
The first decade of the Eritrean struggle for independence, which began on September 1, 1961, was a period of experimentation and growing pains. By the late 1960s, however, a convergence of factors—the military setbacks of the field, the draining of regional Arab support following the Six-Day War, and the reach of sustained Ethiopian propaganda—pushed the
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Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival (7)
Giants and Lilliputians of the HOA: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival Part Seven Introduction The central argument of this essay is simple: the Horn of Africa’s instability has never been caused by its diversity, but by leaders who repeatedly manipulate that diversity for political survival. Across Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Djibouti, rulers have taken
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Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki – Part Six
Giants and Lilliputians: Power, Image, and Machiavellian Survival Emperor Haile Selassie and President Isaias Afwerki – Part Six 1 — Introduction The Two Propaganda Campaigns The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) became the target of a sustained campaign of political defamation—first from Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, and later, far more powerfully, from the Isaias-led People’s Liberation
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What Memory Chooses, and What It Omits
A lyrical excavation of memory, empire, and resistance, Of Trains, Turkays, and Tongues explores how colonial infrastructures—both physical and linguistic—have been reimagined through song, story, and subversion. From the iron rails of foreign-built trains to the surnames inherited from Ottoman administrators, the essay challenges selective nostalgia and interrogates how power, identity, and language collide. This…