Eritrea’s relations with the United States have been fraught from the outset—shaped through and overshadowed by those with Ethiopia, almost always to Eritrea’s disadvantage. The arrival of a new U.S. administration under President Barack Obama offers both sides an opportunity for a fresh start, but it must build on—and overcome—a weighty legacy.
Articles
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A chapter from "Eritrea's Foreign Relations: Understanding its Regional Role" (2009)
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A chapter from "Eritrea's Foreign Relations: Understanding its Regional Role" (2009)
Eritrea’s relations with the United States have been fraught from the outset—shaped through and overshadowed by those with Ethiopia, almost always to Eritrea’s disadvantage. The arrival of a new U.S. administration under President Barack Obama offers both sides an opportunity for a fresh start, but it must build on—and overcome—a weighty legacy.
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A chapter from "Eritrea's Foreign Relations: Understanding its Regional Role" (2009)
Power in Eritrea is exercised through layers that are increasingly opaque as one approaches the center, like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls, nesting one inside the other. An exploration of this as it developed within the circle that now rules Eritrea sheds light on the way former guerrilla commander Isaias Afwerki governs and how he and his circle act to extend Eritrea’s influence across the Horn of Africa.
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A chapter from "Countries at the Crossroads," Freedom House, New York (2007)
Eritrea showed considerable promise upon winning its independence in the early 1990s, but its renewed confrontation with Ethiopia since war broke out in 1998 not only dominates political discourse to the extent that all dissent is branded as treason; it also provides cover for militarizing the new state and exporting instability to Eritrea's neighbors.
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A review in "Middle East Report," Washington, D.C. (2006)
Eritrea's experience with the outside world certainly fostered a politics with attitude, but it did not create those politics out of whole cloth. The liberation front's leaders bear a large share of the responsibility for inculcating, from the outset, an ideology of extreme nationalism with a strongly paternalistic bent that set the stage for dictatorship later.
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An entry in "Encyclopedia of Global Perspectives on the United States," Berkshire, Great Barrington, Mass. (2005)
The checkered history of United States-Eritrea relations since the former Italian colony was linked to Ethiopia in a federation promoted by Washington has fed a deep distrust of the U.S. within Eritrea that remains much in force today. An apparent American tilt toward Ethiopia since the two neighbors went back to war in 1998 has only deepened this divide.
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An op-ed in "The Gloucester Daily Times," Gloucester, Mass. (2005)
One day more than 400 armed members of Sudan's janjaweed militia attacked the village of Donki Dereisa. They killed 150 civilians, including six children, aged 3 to 14, who were captured and burned alive. Afterward, government sources denied any involvement and downplayed the incident — a response that typifies the ongoing crisis in the Darfur.
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An article in "Race & Class," London (2005)
The struggle for freedom and democracy waged by the people of Eritrea has been a long and complicated on. It now suffers corrosion from within through a power grab that seeks to reverse the nation’s otherwise impressive strides toward openness, inclusion and equality.
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A chapter from "Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa," Brookings, Washington, D.C. (2005)
Eritrea’s diverse society has long rendered it vulnerable to centrifugal political forces, while its strategic location has made it the target of outside powers. Today, these fault lines threaten to reassert themselves, opening the country to increased ethnic and religious extremism that could spill over Eritrea’s borders, even as it draws support from hostile neighbors.
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An entry in "The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures," Brill, Amsterdam (2004)
Women played a central role in Eritrea’s thirty-year war for independence from Ethiopia, but their post-independence participation in public life presents a mixed record.