One Year at Awate: What I Have Been Trying to Understand

From Self-Reliance to the Pledged Public

On June 7, 2025, Awate published my first article, “The Debt-Free Illusion: Rethinking Eritrea’s Economic Self-Reliance.” I did not realize when the first anniversary passed this June. I was already occupied with the next article, the next discussion, and the questions that had begun accumulating around what I was trying to say. Now, nearly fifteen months after that first contribution, I want to pause and look back at the work as a whole. This is not an attempt to measure my influence or evaluate the value of my own writing. Those judgments belong to readers. It is simply an effort to explain what I have been trying to understand, how the questions have changed, and what participation in this forum has taught me.

I came to Awate as a newcomer. Many of the writers and commenters here have participated in Eritrean political life for decades. Some were directly involved in political organizations, civic initiatives, conferences, and earlier attempts to unite the opposition. They know histories, relationships, institutional failures, and personal experiences that I do not. I have never attended an Eritrean opposition meeting, belonged to one of its organizations, or participated in the major conferences that continue to shape discussions here. Whatever academic credentials I possess cannot substitute for that experience. But sometimes distance also produces its own questions. A newcomer may not know all the answers, but he may notice that certain answers keep returning without resolving the problem.

My first articles were not consciously organized as a single project. “The Debt-Free Illusion” questioned the claim that Eritrea’s supposed freedom from foreign debt represented genuine economic independence. “The Unspoken Debt” examined the moral relationship created by the liberation struggle, especially the idea that sacrifice generates a political debt owed by the public to those who fought. “The Religion of Eritreanism in Exile” considered how national identity in the diaspora can acquire religious qualities, sustained through ritual, longing, sacred narratives, and taboos even when it no longer corresponds closely to life inside the country. Other articles examined Ethiopia’s demand for sea access, public responsibility during the Tigray war, portraits of political leaders in government offices, and the presentation of poverty as culture.

These pieces appeared to address different subjects, but I can now see that I was repeatedly asking the same underlying question: how does something acquire political authority over us without appearing to be political? Debt, sacrifice, patriotism, memory, identity, culture, leadership, and even the pictures placed on office walls can organize relationships of power while presenting themselves as natural, moral, or sacred. I became increasingly interested not only in what Eritreans believe, but in what those beliefs allow political actors to do.

That question eventually led me to “The Grammar of Promise.” By then, I was no longer satisfied with describing individual examples. I wanted to understand the structure connecting them. Eritrean political life, I argued, has been organized around a particular sequence: sacrifice produces moral debt; moral debt produces a promise to protect and build the nation; that promise becomes a source of political legitimacy; and the public extends trust to those understood as carrying the sacrifice. When the promise is broken, our criticism usually takes the form of betrayal. We conclude that the wrong people inherited the struggle, abandoned its principles, or proved unworthy of its martyrs.

The problem with this explanation is not that betrayal did not occur. It did. The problem is that a moral diagnosis tends to produce another moral solution. If dishonest or corrupt leaders betrayed the promise, we search for more sincere leaders who will finally honor it. Political thought becomes trapped in the search for better custodians of the same inheritance. We ask who deserves to govern before asking what should make unlimited government impossible, regardless of who governs.

I called this the grammar of promise because it operates beneath individual arguments. Government supporters and opposition activists may reach opposite conclusions while continuing to speak inside the same grammar. One side says the liberation movement earned the authority to govern through sacrifice. The other says the current rulers betrayed that sacrifice and therefore forfeited the authority they once deserved. Both continue to locate legitimacy in the moral character and historical credentials of political actors. The disagreement concerns who has remained faithful to the promise, not whether any promise should be permitted to substitute for institutions that constrain power.

“The Pledged Public” emerged from my attempt to imagine a different sequence. If the promise descends from political actors to the public, perhaps the pledge must move horizontally among citizens. Instead of waiting to discover who will replace the current government, citizens could agree in advance on minimum conditions that any future authority must satisfy before receiving their recognition. The public would not unite around a preferred leader, political organization, ideology, or complete vision of Eritrea. It would organize around the conditions beneath which legitimate political disagreement becomes possible.

This does not make the Pledged Public another opposition coalition. Coalitions organize actors seeking political power. The Pledged Public is intended to organize citizens who want to establish conditions upon power. It does not answer who should govern Eritrea. It asks what must already be true before anyone can legitimately claim the authority to govern. Its central idea is conditional recognition. The public should not give legitimacy in advance and then depend on the conscience of those who receive it. Citizens should retain recognition until enforceable conditions are accepted.

Readers correctly asked what this would mean in practice. What exactly are people pledging themselves to? Who writes the conditions? How would citizens inside Eritrea participate under repression? What does withholding recognition mean when an incoming authority possesses weapons, institutions, and territorial control? How does a dispersed public prevent its own fragmentation? These questions led me to write “How the Pledged Public Works.” They also made me recognize that conceptual distinctiveness is not the same as political feasibility. The proposal remains incomplete. A name is not an organization, and an argument is not political capacity.

My subsequent articles attempted to approach the same problem from different directions. “The Extraction of Heroic Capital” examined how the state converts the suffering of ordinary fighters and conscripts into symbolic resources that sustain the authority of elites. The category of tegadalay can conceal unequal wartime experiences by placing commanders and ordinary fighters inside one undifferentiated claim of sacrifice. Warsai-Yikealo then extends the same moral machinery into the post-independence generation. Material and political obligations are replaced with honor, titles, military burial, and permanent demands for sacrifice.

“The Citizen Before the Bloc” brought the argument into a discussion with Younis Omer’s politics of equilibrium. I agreed that Eritrean divisions cannot be overcome through sentimental appeals to unity. Historical grievances and communal fears are real. My concern was with making communal blocs the primary entrances into future politics. A citizen deprived of land, education, religious freedom, public investment, or legal protection should be able to present that injury directly as a citizen. When every injury must first be translated into a regional, religious, or ethnic grievance, the category acquires representatives, brokers, and guardians who may eventually possess more political visibility than the individual whose suffering authorized them.

This does not mean patterns of communal inequality should be ignored. If Muslims, lowland communities, linguistic minorities, or particular regions are disproportionately disadvantaged, the pattern must be measured, named, and corrected. But recognizing the distribution of an injury is different from making communal identity its permanent political owner. The political and administrative mechanism should remain visible: the budget that was unequally allocated, the school that was not built, the language excluded from public administration, the land taken without due process, or the religious institution denied equal protection. Otherwise, the injury can become a possession of the category while the citizen disappears inside it.

In “The Opposition Must Also Be Opposed,” I tried to clarify another implication of the Pledged Public. Eritrea needs an opposition capable of challenging an entrenched dictatorship. But citizens must remain politically independent from the organizations they support. To oppose the opposition in this sense does not mean attacking it on behalf of the existing government. It means refusing to allow any movement seeking to replace the government to become indistinguishable from the public itself. While opposition organizations accumulate political capacity, the public must accumulate its own capacity to impose limits. Otherwise, the organization best prepared at the moment of transition may acquire not only practical power but an unearned claim to represent the entire nation.

Most recently, “The Priced Alternative” asked whether the moral demand for political change has prevented us from separating the different questions contained within it. What would another Eritrean political order be worth? How uncertain is that alternative? What would the passage toward it cost? Most importantly, who would pay that cost? Diaspora Eritreans can help reduce uncertainty, develop institutional proposals, study previous transitions, and make the alternative more credible. But we cannot casually assign the immediate cost of producing change to people living inside Eritrea while reserving for ourselves the moral satisfaction of demanding it.

Looking back, I think my contribution has been less a collection of positions than a method of asking questions. I have tried to move from moral judgment toward mechanism, from the character of leaders toward the structure of authority, from calls for unity toward the particular purposes for which unity is needed, from communal labels toward identifiable injuries, and from the public as an audience toward the public as an independent source of political conditions. I have also tried to examine the sequence of political action. What must happen before transition, rather than after it? What should citizens possess before another organization acquires power? What should be made difficult or impossible before we begin debating who deserves to govern?

Awate has helped sharpen these questions. Commenters have corrected me, challenged my historical assumptions, pointed me toward documents I had not encountered, and forced me to explain ideas that initially existed only at a high level of abstraction. Established writers have responded with generosity even when we disagreed. Some have spent decades working on precisely the failures I am only beginning to study. Their comments have reminded me that an elegant framework can easily overlook the resistant texture of actual political history.

The forum has also shown me the limits of moralistic evaluation. Saying that opposition leaders are selfish, divided, immature, or insufficiently patriotic may express frustration, but it gives those leaders and the public very little power to act differently. If coalitions repeatedly fail, we need definitions, comparisons, institutional histories, incentive structures, and mechanisms. We must ask what organizations are trying to unite, what each actor risks losing, who possesses authority to negotiate, how decisions are enforced, and why leaving a coalition may be more rewarding than remaining inside it. Admonition names a disappointment. Explanation should make intervention possible.

I remain a newcomer. Fifteen months of writing cannot replace decades of political experience, and publication does not make an argument correct. I am still discovering how much I do not know about the opposition, Eritrea’s earlier civic initiatives, the federation period, the liberation movements, and the many failed attempts to establish common political platforms. I intend to approach that history with humility, but not with silence. Respecting experience should not require surrendering the right to question the frameworks through which experience is interpreted.

If there is one conviction connecting this first year of work, it is that Eritrea’s problem cannot be solved by finding the right people to inherit unconstrained authority. It requires a public capable of placing conditions upon everyone who seeks it. The government must be opposed. The opposition must remain open to public opposition. Communal injuries must be recognized without turning citizens into permanent possessions of communal blocs. Sacrifice must be honored without allowing it to become a transferable title to rule. Political change must be pursued without hiding its uncertainty or assigning its costs to people who had no voice in choosing them.

I do not yet know whether the Pledged Public is the right name or whether its proposed architecture can survive contact with political reality. But I remain convinced that the question from which it begins is unavoidable: before Eritrea discovers who will govern next, what must its public already have established among itself?

That is the question I brought, gradually and somewhat unknowingly, into my first year at Awate. It is also the question I hope to continue developing through research, disagreement, correction, and conversation.