Citizenship, Rights and Political Subjectivity in Eritrea

Abstract

A growing non-legal scholarship is engaging Eritrea’s contemporary. There is scant legal literature that interrogates the contemporary beyond formal discourses of law and legality, however. This article argues that formalistic and descriptive discourses, without doubting their validity, obscure Eritrea’s contemporary and limits issues that can be debated by collapsing the paradigm into binary good and bad absolutes. Eritrea contemporary, we argue, is more complex than it seems, and it has to be engaged within the existing political and legal processes that define it in order to develop coherent analytic and critique of the social and political relations they produce. Using this analytical framework, we analyze the discourse of citizenship and rights in Eritrea, which we claim is a product of a live politico-legal dynamic and explains significant part of Eritrea’s contemporary. We claim that the normative space of citizenship has 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 sphere of rights using formal and informal processes. The citizen, as such, is not a typical metaphysical subject endowed of rights but an entity that resides in an intensively contested and asymmetric ideological cosmos. The paper likewise engages in conversation with the dialect of ‘social citizenship’ – state narrative that refers to a collective and socially oriented project. We problematize the narrative on two accounts: First, the individualization of state-individual struggle that characterize the discourse contradicts the existence of a collective as a socio-juridical entity. Second, the formal and informal processes that we analyze in the paper establish highly differentiated and individualistic regime – creating tension between an individualistic and/or collectivist project. We likewise critically engage the value basis of the state’s project and highlight multiplicity of values and how these values fare towards social groups - the peasant citizenry for example. Our intention, in general, is two fold: first, to highlight methodological problems in legal scholarship related to Eritrea and second, to provoke 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 hopefully beyond.