AMECO AFRICA \/ ADDIS ABABA<\/p>\n
Researchers argue that repression at home and belligerence abroad are not separate policies but a single strategy for keeping one-man rule alive.<\/em><\/p>\n Eritrea’s war with Ethiopia officially ran from 1998 to 2000. The state of emergency it created never ended.<\/p>\n What followed was a prolonged “no war, no peace” standoff, and scholars say it did more than shape Eritrea’s foreign policy. It became the foundation of how the country is governed: indefinite national service, suspended normal politics and a population kept permanently on alert.<\/p>\n A growing body of research argues that this is no accident. Domestic repression, indefinite national service and confrontation with outside powers are best understood as mutually reinforcing parts of one regime-survival system, rather than as two separate policy domains. External crisis, the literature suggests, does not merely accompany one-man rule. It helps justify the militarization, the suspended politics and the coercive national service on which that rule depends.<\/p>\n Three themes recur across the evidence: a “siege mentality” used as a governing narrative, foreign confrontation as both distraction and justification, and permanent tension as the institutional basis of personalized rule.<\/p>\n The Eritrean leadership appears to govern through a constructed condition of emergency anchored in insecurity, territorial threat and social militarization, according to studies by Gebrewahd and De Wilde (2025). Since the 1998\u20132000 war, the tense relationship with Ethiopia has turned militarization into a lasting order rather than a temporary wartime response, researchers including Riggan (2020) argue.<\/p>\n Several Eritrea-focused studies add that the postwar period was repeatedly presented as exceptional. That framing allowed the leadership to normalize indefinite mobilization without ever formally declaring an emergency.<\/p>\n The political payoff is significant. De Wilde (2025) argues that a siege mentality reduces scrutiny of leaders and excuses abusive rule in the name of perceived external threat.<\/p>\n Media coverage has played a part. Studies by Bozzini (2011), Hjalmarsson (2018) and Hepner (2012) find that media-reproduced tension with Ethiopia helped legitimate mobilization, even as public disillusionment with the leadership deepened.<\/p>\n At the center of this system sits national service. Hassan (2026), Bozzini and Riggan describe indefinite national service as the regime’s main coercive institution after 1998, one that embeds repression inside routine state structures.<\/p>\n Riggan’s work shows how the transformation happened. National service was introduced as a bounded duty, but the border war and its aftermath turned it into open-ended labor extraction, surveillance and punishment.<\/p>\n The militarized order did not stay in the barracks. It penetrated schools, the civil service, checkpoints and everyday life. Several authors describe the result as mass militarization and coercive governance, locked in what Bozzini and Hjalmarsson call a vicious cycle of force and evasion.<\/p>\n The broader literature on authoritarian states offers a caution: embattled regimes do not always start wars. But, according to Haynes (2017) and Chubb (2023), they often use external threats, propaganda and diplomatic confrontation to redirect attention from domestic weakness.<\/p>\n Diversion, Chubb notes, does not require full-scale war. Sustained external crisis, scapegoating and propaganda can play down domestic failures while strengthening internal cohesion.<\/p>\n Syria offers a comparative example. Alrababa’h (2020) finds that state discourse there long emphasized external enemies, then shifted to foreign plots when domestic unrest intensified, showing how autocracies recalibrate threat narratives to preserve their rule.<\/p>\n Eritrea’s record fits the pattern, researchers say. Its foreign policy since independence has been widely described as conflictual and confrontational, marked by violent disputes with neighbors and strained ties with outside powers (M\u00fcller, 2017; Nur, 2013). Some scholars, including Hassan, Reilly (2021) and Nur, argue this belligerence reflects personalized, weakly institutionalized rule, in which foreign policy lacks checks and becomes an extension of domestic political culture.<\/p>\n The evidence is mixed on whether such diversion reliably produces a rally-around-the-leader effect. Even so, authoritarian propaganda can suppress discussion of economic distress, poverty and internal failure by saturating public discourse with external threat (Haynes; Chubb; Gebrewahd).<\/p>\n The picture is not purely cynical. M\u00fcller (2019) stresses that Eritrea’s insistence on territorial integrity and legal vindication in its dispute with Ethiopia complicates any reading of its foreign policy as mere theater. In this view, security concerns are genuine and sovereignty is ideologically central.<\/p>\n Yet even this reading converges with the domestic-governance literature on a key point. The unresolved border conflict had severe internal consequences, including economic decline, unlimited national service and mass out-migration (M\u00fcller, 2019; Riggan, 2020; Hepner, 2012).<\/p>\n Scholars have used several theoretical lenses to explain how domestic repression and external conflict interact in Eritrea:<\/p>\n Taken together, the research points to a structural rather than episodic explanation. External tension helps sustain the institutions and narratives that personalized rule depends on.<\/p>\n In that reading, the Eritrean regime’s repression at home and belligerence abroad are less parallel traits than a single political strategy. The crisis is not a problem the system is trying to solve. It is part of what holds the system together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AMECO AFRICA \/ ADDIS ABABA Researchers argue that repression at home and belligerence abroad are not separate policies but a single strategy for keeping one-man rule alive. Eritrea’s war with Ethiopia officially ran from 1998 to 2000. The state of emergency it created never ended. What followed was a prolonged “no war, no peace” standoff, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":3349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"amp_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,494],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-3347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-featured","category-world-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3350,"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347\/revisions\/3350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3347"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ameco.et\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=3347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Governing by emergency<\/h2>\n
National service: from bounded duty to open-ended control<\/h2>\n
Foreign confrontation as a tool<\/h2>\n
Not merely theater<\/h2>\n
Five lenses, one conclusion<\/h2>\n
\n
The bottom line<\/h2>\n