The Struggling State: Nationalism, Mass Militarization, and the Education of Eritrea by Jennifer Riggan (review)

Eritrea all too often seems to get caught up in myths and stereotypes that prevent observers from getting beyond simplistic accounts. Thankfully, Jennifer Riggan’s book, The Struggling State, falls prey to none of the usual tropes, but portrays a complex and detailed picture of this young country. An anthropologist, Riggan’s focus is on schools and teacher training, which gives her a privileged look at the crucial areas of youth and education, but also enables her to explore meatier issues of the state, citizens, and nation. She sheds light on the Eritrean state’s remarkable efforts to control bodies and movement with digestible analysis informed by Foucault, Mbembe, and Agamben as well as more applied scholars such as Katherine Verdery and Lisa Wedeen. This gives us insights into how the younger generation experienced life in post-2001 Eritrea without falling into the same old, same old rhetoric of Eritrea as either “sleepy” or “conflict-filled.” Instead, informants speak clearly and effectively from these pages. Riggan’s handling of much-discussed tropes such as “sacrifice,” “fighters,” and “the struggle” feels fresh and insightful, drawing on both her ethnographic observations and nuggets culled from curricular materials and classroom practice.

The introductory chapter plunges us deeply into the life of an Eritrean teacher caught up in the uncertainties of the 1998–2000 war with Ethiopia. Riggan then sets out her theoretical and analytical position, as well as discusses her positionality and methodology, in a far more readable fashion than is common in books based on PhD projects. The succeeding chapters take up related, but distinct, aspects of how teachers and students experienced schooling and the state in the years after 2001, when Eritrea’s authoritarian crackdown was manifested most clearly, with the arrest of senior political figures and journalists.

Chapter 2 explores themes around punishment and, in particular, the gifa, in which young people were indiscriminately rounded up on the streets of Eritrea’s towns. Much of this chapter describes the summer of 2002, when I too was in Asmara, and I both recognize much of what she describes and realize how limited my understanding was at the time. This chapter also reveals a key paradox of the post-2001 state, with its endless national service. As she notes, “national service…set up to manage the population and transform the entire populace into a particular kind of national subject, made it impossible to discipline and hold individual teachers accountable” (p. 75). They could not dock the teachers’ salaries, since they had received no salary to speak of.

Chapter 3 turns the focus to the classroom and the curriculum, examining the competing ideas held by teachers and the state about the type of citizens they sought to produce: educated citizens who deserved rewards or military citizens prepared for sacrifice (p. 107). Intriguingly, not all the teacher-informants are Eritrean nationals; the perspectives of Indian teachers, such as “Teacher Vijay,” are included alongside those of Eritreans, such as “Teachers Fitwi and Erob.” This chapter further explores the transformation of the Eritrean education system from a competitive way of producing elite students who progressed to university with high rates of failure to a system of “mass promotion,” which permitted no failure, as it was designed to transmit students onwards to Sawa, the military training camp, where they began National Service. Riggan draws on Foucault’s distinction between the individual process of “disciplining” and “biopolitics,” the latter concerned with the attributes of the population and not the individual to illustrate this fundamental shift in the role of the educational system and the contradictions it generated.

Chapter 4 explores the tensions inherent in the teachers’ liminal position—unable to marry or acquire housing, yet supposedly in positions of authority. Riggan’s accounts of classroom experiences are evocative and neatly linked to her analysis. Bakhtin and Mbembe are invoked...