Few nationalist projects in modern African history carry the weight of contradiction that the Eritrean one does. The emergence of the Eritrean state was among the most consequential political developments in the Horn of Africa across the twentieth century, a territory that passed through successive colonial and Ethiopian administrations, sustained a thirty-year armed struggle, and arrived at internationally recognised statehood in 1993. The making of the Eritrean state invites its own kind of retrospection. The standard framework applied to African nationalism, rooted in the shared experience of colonial subjugation and the collective aspiration for self-determination, does remarkably little to explain how Eritrean nationalism came to be, what it was built from, and what continues to hold it together. To take that framework at face value is to miss the more revealing story beneath it.

That story begins with a society whose internal divisions ran far deeper than any shared political consciousness. Italian colonialism established the material boundaries of the Eritrean territory but contributed almost nothing toward the social or political foundations of a nation within them. The society the Italians governed remained defined by a division that predated their arrival and that their administration did little to change. Christian peasant communities settled across the highland plateau and Muslim pastoralist communities spread across the lowlands, separated by religion, language, and the fundamentally different logics of their economic lives. What Italian rule produced, beyond the territorial boundary itself, was a particular political perception among lowland Muslim communities, a framing of Ethiopia as the embodiment of external domination, represented through the figure of the Christian Tigrigna highlander. The earliest secessionist sentiment that emerged from Eritrean society was rooted in this framing, pointing toward religious and ethnic solidarity rather than toward any territorial nationalism that statehood would eventually require.

The British Military Administration inherited this pre-national reality and made political calculations from it according to its own imperial priorities. Haggai Rich describes the British period as one of rapid and intensive politicization, and what drove that politicization was a convergence of pressures. These were British imperial interests, Ethiopia’s determined campaign to recover territory it regarded as historically its own and to resolve its landlocked condition, and the lived social divisions the British encountered on the ground. The partition plan that emerged envisioned absorbing Eritrea’s Muslim lowlands into British-controlled Sudan while delivering the Christian highlands and much of the coastline to Ethiopia. In pursuing this, the British encouraged Islam and the learning of Arabic among lowland communities and simultaneously cultivated “Tigreanism” among highlanders through the promotion of Tigrinya and ties with the neighbouring Ethiopian province of Tigre. The fault lines the British worked with were products of the territory’s own social history, but their intervention sharpened pre-existing tendencies into organised and antagonistic political forces. The Unionist Party, drawing from highland Christian communities, pursued reunification with Ethiopia. The Muslim League, rooted in the lowlands and oriented toward the Arab world for both ideology and political support, pursued independence. These two poles defined Eritrean political life through the British period and carried their antagonism directly into the federation.

The federation that followed did nothing to resolve this antagonism and, in several respects, deepened it. The Muslim League brought its cause into the arrangement with sustained energy, and the sectarian character of the independence movement remained explicit. When armed insurgency against Ethiopian rule ignited in 1961, the same features defined it. Tekeste Negash states that the main objective of the ELF was the liberation of Eritrea from the “oppressive rule of Christian Ethiopia”, and that the organisation perceived itself as a Muslim body engaged in freeing a territory it consistently described as predominantly Muslim and Arab. The ELF’s affiliations with the Arab world reinforced this self-understanding, situating the Eritrean struggle within a register of Arab and Islamic solidarity.

The emergence of an armed movement was a watershed moment for the development of Eritrean nationalism. Addis Ababa’s behaviour simultaneously reinforced the insurgency’s reach beyond this base. The earlier dismantling of Eritrean autonomy, and the Derg’s eventual complete resort to military force all hardened sentiment across communities that had acquired grievances of their own. The “Ethiopian problem” became the most reliable engine of a solidarity that internal politics had failed to produce.

The EPLF’s 1971 manifesto, “Our Struggle and Its Goals”, was the ideological act that attempted to redirect this solidarity into a national project. The document made a radical claim of the existence of an Eritrean nation defined by a clearly delimited national boundary, a separate history, and a separate culture and tradition. It dismissed the Christian-Muslim framing of the struggle and, by extension, the ELF itself, whose religious and Arab-oriented positioning the EPLF regarded as a misrepresentation of what the Eritrean cause actually was. Struggle, extracted from its sectarian context, became the common inheritance of the whole territory, a thread that could hold together communities with otherwise divergent identities. The EPLF’s subsequent military defeat of the ELF translated this ideological position into organisational reality, removing sectarianism as the governing logic of the movement and establishing a territorial conception of Eritrean identity in its place. Alongside this, the EPLF constructed a historical narrative that severed Eritrea from the Ethiopian past Addis Ababa had relied upon to justify reunification. The official interpretation framed Ethiopian sovereignty as one episode in a long sequence of external incursions, reaching back through Ottoman and Egyptian interventions to establish a lineage of resistance that predated European colonialism and cast the federation itself as the latest phase of colonial imposition. Internationally, a diaspora base and organisations like Eritreans for Liberation in North America coupled with a significant number of western intellectuals worked to frame the Eritrean question as an “African struggle” for liberation, lending the movement a credibility that proved instrumental when statehood arrived in 1993.

The achievement was considerable. A nationalism was constructed from a territory that had entered the twentieth century without the social or political foundations such a project requires, and it was constructed well enough to win a war and secure a state. What the decades since statehood have revealed, however, is how much of that nationalism’s coherence rests on the enforcement capacity of the state that built it. The PFDJ governs Eritrea through an authoritarian grip it presents as the continuation of the liberation struggle, the maintenance of a what is deemed to hard-won sovereignty against persistent external threat. The theme of resistance and resilience runs through every register of official Eritrean public life and commands sentiment amongst a large portion of Eritrean society. Yet the structure of the state that enforces this nationalism carries within it the tensions the EPLF sought to overcome. The organisation remains dominated by Tigrigna-speaking Christian highlanders, a continuity from the movement’s own composition that sits uneasily against the official ideology of Eritrean unity. Muslim political consciousness has retained its own current beneath the enforced surface. The Greater Tigray vision, originating from the early Tigrayan movements and sustained among segments of the Tigrayan diaspora and within Tigray itself, continues to exert a pull on identity boundaries the PFDJ cannot fully contain. Among the Red Sea Afars of the Dankalia region, antagonism toward the regime’s conception of Eritrean unity is open and longstanding, and the state’s treatment of the Afar population has been among its most repressive.

These are pressures that predate the EPLF’s construction project and that the liberation period suppressed rather than resolved. The PFDJ’s authoritarian character is, in this light, inseparable from the nationalism it enforces. A state that emerged from the logic of permanent struggle has found in that logic a justification for permanent control, and the question of whether Eritrean national identity would hold its present shape without that control remains, by the nature of the system, unanswerable. That answerability may itself be the most accurate reflection of where the project of Eritrean nationalism actually stands.

By Mahder Nesibu, Researcher, Horn Review