Biopolitics, Militarism, and Development: Eritrea in the Twenty-first Century

Co-Author: Tricia Redeker Hepner

Co-Author info: Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Publication Date: March 2009

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Synopsis: Bringing together original, contemporary ethnographic research on the Northeast African state of Eritrea, this book shows how biopolitics – the state-led deployment of disciplinary technologies on individuals and population groups – is assuming particular forms in the 21st century. Once hailed as “the African country that works,” Eritrea’s apparently successful post-independence development has since lapsed into economic crisis and severe human rights violations. This is due not only to the border war with Ethiopia that began in 1998, but is also the result of discernible tendencies in the “high modernist” style of social mobilization for development first adopted by the Eritrean government during the liberation struggle (1961-1991) and later carried into the post-independence era. This insightful, comparative volume places the Eritrean case in a broader global and transnational context.