Citizenship, rights, and political subjectivity in Eritrea

Abstract

Despite the growing non-legal scholarship emerging out of contemporary Eritrea, there is scant legal literature that interrogates the contemporary legal situation beyond the formal discourses of law and legality. This chapter argues that formalistic and descriptive discourses obscure Eritrea’s contemporary legal issues. It argues that the Eritrean legal landscape is more complex than it seems and to be understood, it has to be engaged with within the existing political and legal processes that define it. It is only then that one can develop a coherent understanding of the social and political relations it produces. Using this analytical framework, the chapter analyzes the discourse of citizenship and rights in Eritrea, which is a product of a live politico–legal dynamic and explains a significant part of Eritrea’s contemporary legal system. It reveals the ideological struggles that inebriate the idea of citizenship within the context of the Eritrean state and its citizens. The chapter also makes a critical contribution by highlighting the methodological problems in legal scholarship related to Eritrea, thereby inspiring a broader debate on what discourses of citizenship and rights might mean in the broader discourses of subjectivities across temporal and jurisdictional spaces within Eritrea and elsewhere. Growing legal scholarship on Eritrea provides an account of autocracy and violation of rights. In this chapter, we argue that such discourse is descriptive and formalistic and obscures Eritrea’s contemporary situation. Contemporary Eritrea, we argue, is complex, and it has to be situated within the political and legal context that define it in order to develop a coherent critique of the social and political relations it produces. Using this analytical framework, we analyze the discourse of citizenship and rights in Eritrea. Citizenship and rights, we claim, have been a site of ideological struggle between the state and the individual. The state constantly draws the political subjectivity of the individual by systematically mapping the sphere of rights using formal and informal processes. Our intention is twofold: first, to highlight methodological problems in legal scholarship related to Eritrea, and, second, to provoke broader debate on how rights and citizenship ought to be conceptualized across time and space in Eritrea, and hopefully beyond.