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

The Struggling State sets out to investigate "how citizens imagine their state and nation when they experience the state as turning against them" (3) or, put in a different way, the book "explores the tenuous hyphen between nation and state under lived conditions of everyday authoritarianism" (32). Its case study is the country of Eritrea in the Horn of Africa, and the above dynamics are being investigated mainly through the eyes of a group of secondary school teachers, a group that Riggan herself belonged to as a Peace Corps volunteer a number of years before embarking on this study. Riggan thus has detailed knowledge about her setting from an insider's perspective and over a prolonged period of time, which is a great strength of the book.

The focus on teachers is well chosen as education more generally and secondary education in particular are vital arenas in relation to "producing" or educating citizens that uphold national futures. In Eritrea, education has, from the time of the War for Independence onwards, been central to the state-making project and as such has always been linked in various ways to the military struggle for independent statehood. This link between education and militarization was re-enforced in concrete terms in 2003 through profound and important changes in Eritrean education policies and practices. There was the introduction of a policy of automatic (instead of merit-based) promotion in upper secondary schools and the introduction of an additional grade 12 that could only be completed in Sawa, the military training facility for national service recruits in a remote location in Eritrea's western lowlands. Riggan's empirical fieldwork coincided with those changes that saw academic secondary education merged with and in many ways subsumed under military service requirements. These changes can, as Riggan demonstrates, be usefully analyzed in relation to the government's version of what it means to be Eritrean. The discontents and evasions this version produced results in various often contradictory forms of compliance and resistance. Important actors here are who Riggan refers to as middle actors, those like the teachers at the center of her work who are agents of the state but do not necessarily have the power to contest state orders.

The book thus provides a detailed investigation into the everyday challenges teachers face in an environment where they are asked to educate youth for the future of the nation, but where that future seems to inevitably imply unlimited national service with little opportunity for personal betterment and the fulfilment of aspirations of any kind—both widely recognized core features of a "normal" education system. Thus whereas one might expect the cultivation of self-improvement through secondary education that as a by-product contributes to national development, in Eritrea Riggan finds the cultivation of disciplined subjects being "oriented towards sacrificing the self for…the nation" (21). From this, Riggan concludes that in the minds of its subjects the state has turned from benevolent to punishing, which in turn makes those subjects reject and undermine state policies. It might be debatable if the post-liberation Eritrean state ever was or even aspired to be benevolent—after all, national duty however defined was always at the core of what being Eritrean entailed in the eyes of the ruling People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ). Keeping that caveat in mind, Riggan successfully captures in vivid detail the politicization of everyday life, and how anybody, and often for arbitrary reasons, could become suspected of avoiding national service or one's duties to the state, and thus become subject to differing forms of punishment.

The book consists of five chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. Chapters 1 and 2 provide the framework for the subsequent empirical chapters by taking up some of the concepts of the introduction and showing how coercive state policies undermine the actual state-building project. Based on a selective discussion of the available literature on...