The Struggling State: Teachers, Mass Militarization and the Reeducation of Eritrea

Following independence from Ethiopia, Eritrea?s leaders were praised for their success at building a coherent nation, but over the last two decades the government has increasingly turned to coercion particularly by forcing citizens into endless military service. The Struggling State: Teachers, Mass Militarization and the Reeducation of Eritrea is an ethnographic exploration of how citizens? redefined their relationship with the nation in response to the state?s increased authoritarianism and use of force. Extremes of coercion and control led Eritreans? to imagine the once-heroic ruling party as turning against them, which, in turn unraveled the legitimacy of state-produced imaginaries of the nation. The book focuses on teachers, who were situated to do the work of hyphenating, or gluing, nation to state but instead had to navigate between their devotion to educating the nation and their discontent with their role in the government program of mass militarization. As teachers confronted their own conflicted imaginaries of the state and questioned what it meant to be Eritrean, they reeducated the nation, but not necessarily in the way the government wanted them to. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched

A 2003 law in Eritrea—a notoriously closed-off, heavily militarized, and authoritarian country—mandated an additional year of school for all children and stipulated that the classes be held at Sawa, the nation's military training center. As a result, educational institutions were directly implicated in the making of soldiers, putting Eritrean teachers in the untenable position of having to navigate between their devotion to educating the nation and their discontent with their role in the government program of mass militarization.In her provocative ethnography, The Struggling State, Jennifer Riggan examines the contradictions of state power as simultaneously oppressive to and enacted by teachers. Riggan, who conducted participant observation with teachers in and out of schools, explores the tenuous hyphen between nation and state under lived conditions of everyday authoritarianism. The Struggling State shows how the hopes of Eritrean teachers and students for the future of their nation have turned to a hopelessness in which they cannot imagine a future at all.

A 2003 law in Eritrea—a notoriously closed-off, heavily militarized, and authoritarian country—mandated an additional year of school for all children and stipulated that the classes be held at Sawa, the nation's military training center. As a result, educational institutions were directly implicated in the making of soldiers, putting Eritrean teachers in the untenable position of having to navigate between their devotion to educating the nation and their discontent with their role in the government program of mass militarization. In her provocative ethnography, The Struggling State, Jennifer Riggan examines the contradictions of state power as simultaneously oppressive to and enacted by teachers. Riggan, who conducted participant observation with teachers in and out of schools, explores the tenuous hyphen between nation and state under lived conditions of everyday authoritarianism. The Struggling State shows how the hopes of Eritrean teachers and students for the future of their nation have turned to a hopelessness in which they cannot imagine a future at all.