Eritrean Diaspora Research Articles

Diaspora, Digital Media, and Death Counts: Eritreans and the Politics of Memorialisation

This article analyses a war memorial established on a website by Eritreans in diaspora as an example of how diasporas are transforming the ways national politics are conducted and understood. Establishing a war memorial is normally the prerogative and responsibility of the state. In performing this task the Eritrean diaspora makes visible the failure of the state to make public important national information and to hold itself accountable to the Eritrean people. The establishment of the memorial online by the diaspora, furthermore, works to de-centre the state, symbolically at least, as the embodiment of the nation and creates an opening for alternative visions of the nation and state-citizen relations. The Internet is making possible innovative forms of diaspora political engagement and activism that challenge conventional relations of citizenship and sovereignty.

‘We have a Common Past, a Common Present and a Common Future’. Postcolonial Gendered Memories of the Eritrean Diaspora

Questo articolo si basa su di un’intervista condotta da Sabrina Marchetti e Barbara De Vivo con Domenica Ghidei Biidu e Elisabetta Hagos nel 2009. In quanto componenti della diaspora eritrea in Europa, Ghidei Biidu e Hagos contribuiscono con questa intervista alla memoria della dominazione coloniale italiana nel Corno d’Africa sulla base del patrimonio di conoscenze che entrambe hanno ereditato dalle proprie famiglie. L’intervista si sviluppa lungo delle linee di analisi e riflessione che rendono con efficacia l’importanza della dimensione di genere nel movimento nazionalista eritreo e nelle migrazioni di tipo postcoloniale e diasporico, cosi come nel processo di memorizzazione che le ha accompagnate. S’illustrano inoltre la dimensione culturale e quella simbolica della relazione attuale fra popolazioni ex colonizzate ed ex colonizzatrici. Infine, quest’intervista rappresenta un contributo originale nell’ottica del ‘fare storia’ rispetto al ruolo particolare che hanno avuto le donne eritree nei periodi di transizione politica e nelle connessioni fra Eritrea, Etiopia e Italia.

Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora (review)

Reviewed by: Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora David Bozzini (bio) Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora, by Tricia Redeker Hepner Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; pp. 249. $55 cloth/$22.50 paper. Over the last decade, the Eritrean police state has practiced blatant repression, even to the extent of eating "its own children," as the famous expression sadly goes. In short, government purges sweep national heroes and loyalists from the party-state leadership, and ordinary citizens and National Service members are subjected to arbitrary violence. Tricia Redeker Hepner witnessed such events while carrying out fieldwork research in Eritrea in 2001; thereafter, she followed the echoes and reverberations of the government's increasingly repressive politics within the Eritrean diaspora in the United States. [End Page 141] The result of her research is an impressive study of the social history of Eritrean political dynamics that roots the current Eritrean political situation in the transnational history of the country's nation-building process over the last four decades. Hepner's book revolves particularly around the various contributions made by the Eritrean diaspora to the struggle for independence and its attempts to participate in postindependence governance and reconstruction (xii). Hepner builds her arguments around the extensive contemporary debates and the conceptual framework of political transnationalism, reminding us that Eritrea comprises an exemplary case of the transnational nation-state. The author's objective in exploring the complexity of Eritrean political transnationalism is to elucidate its ambivalent dimensions. Along these lines, Hepner convincingly demonstrates "the contradictory nature of transnationalism as both an emancipating and repressive force" (104). This represents a major contribution to the theory of transnational political processes. The author skillfully traces the uncertainties, the mistrust, and the conflicts that shape the rugged terrain of Eritrean politics. As she puts it at the beginning of the book, "The contemporary dilemmas associated with transnational political struggle and the encounter between territorial nationalism and globally constructed models of political and social power" (xiii) represent her main concern. More precisely, she recounts the major conflicts and tensions over identity, nationalism, and the various political agendas of the armed movements, particularly the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPFL), and the different groups scattered across Eritrea and the United States during the historical evolution of the struggle for independence and the building of the independent state. In highlighting the significant internal heterogeneity of these organizations, Hepner also provides a timely analysis of the unceasing cycles of consolidation and disintegration of the major historical political factions, including the current ruling party. Based on a variety of sources, including ethnographic accounts and the fruits of archival research, this study navigates a sophisticated blend of microhistories and global processes. Here, multisited research perspectives truly reveal the heuristic potential of transnational studies to explain long-lasting sociopolitical processes. This well-written and touching book clarifies historical legacies, continuities, and transformations, as well as the emergence of new processes. But at the same time, Hepner avoids the [End Page 142] common trap of overemphasizing connections at the expense of the ruptures and cracks also present in these processes. Hepner's narrative is chronological: the six chapters of her book provide an analysis of crucial political events that occurred between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. The author, thus, takes up the challenge of drawing continuities and ruptures across four discrete periods: the various stages of the armed struggle for Eritrean independence; the immediate postindependence period, marked by euphoric state-building processes, the EPLF's accession to power, and its transformation into the Peoples Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ); the Ethio-Eritrean War (1998-2000); and finally the current postwar political descent into repression and violence. The chapters are extensively documented with rich ethnographic and archival materials that pull the reader close to the reality that is being analyzed. The author's careful and well-balanced analyses of these materials allow her to explain the various subjective political positions and "different interpretations of the past and present" (xiii) that are necessary to unveil the multifarious and ceaseless tensions occurring among...

Tourism and the Eritrean Diaspora

Eritrean Diasporictourism is a striking example of how Diasporas are not only victims of the nation state, but also play a great role in wider transnational cultural and economic dynamics of change. The present economic and political situation in Eritrea and the stability reached in Milan has diminished the probability that Eritreans in the Diaspora will return to Eritrea to live. Nevertheless, many people in this Diaspora community return to Eritrea for holidays at least every two years. The Eritrean summer returnees invest in Eritrea by becoming its tourists. This paper explores the narratives of Eritreans in Milan around going to Eritrea on holiday and returning from their vacation, and questions the impact of their imaginary of Eritrea as a place for leisure and tourism. The returnee is much more than a simple tourist as she/he also performs a wider Diasporic identity, which acts as a separate but influential collective category.

The Networked Diaspora: Bulgarian Migrants on Facebook

The Networked Diaspora: Bulgarian Migrants on Facebook

The Mosaic of Violence – An Introduction

Bakonyi, J., Bliesemann DeGuevara, B. (2011). The Mosaic of Violence: An Introduction. In B. Bliesemann de Guevara, & J. Bakonyi (Eds.), A Micro-Sociology of Violence: Deciphering patterns and dynamics of collective violence. (pp. 1-17). Routledge.

Diaspora, cyberspace and political imagination: the Eritrean diaspora online

Abstract In this article I analyse the Eritrean diaspora and its use of cyberspace to theorize the ways transnationalism and new media are associated with the rise of new forms of community, public spheres and sites of cultural production. The struggle for national independence coincided with the rise of the Internet and the Eritrean diaspora has been actively involved in the new state. Eritreans abroad use the Internet as a transnational public sphere where they produce and debate narratives of history, culture, democracy and identity. Through the web the diaspora has mobilized demonstrators, amassed funds for war, debated the formulation of the constitution, and influenced the government of Eritrea. Through their web postings, ‘Internet intellectuals’ interpret national crises, rearticulate values and construct community. Thus, the Internet is not simply about information but is also an emotion‐laden and creative space. More than simply refugees or struggling workers, diasporas online may invent new forms of citizenship, community and political practices.

Religion, Nationalism, and Transnational Civil Society in the Eritrean Diaspora

Religion, Nationalism, and Transnational Civil Society in the Eritrean Diaspora

Religion, Nationalism, and Transnational Civil Society in the Eritrean Diaspora

This article examines the emergence and significance of religion among Eritreans in the United States as a basis for building community in diaspora, reconfiguring nationalist identity, and constituting transnational civil society. It argues three related points: that religious identity and gatherings help mitigate against fractured political identities that have weakened secular diaspora associations; that practicing Eritrean identity through religion challenges the hegemonic power of the Eritrean state to transnationally control diaspora communities and dictate national identity; and that the very incipience of religious bodies as transnational avenues provides Eritreans in diaspora with an autonomous space to resist the state's totalizing demands. Through a critical ethnographic investigation of religious identity and church bodies in Eritrea and one United States diaspora community, the article shows that uneven transnational networks between the United States and Eritrea create new spaces for political action. Specifically, the relative autonomy of churches and the incipience of their transnationalism allow diaspora Eritreans to use religion in the constitution of an emergent transnational civil society.