Eritrea and exile: Trans /nationalism in the Horn of Africa and the United States

Since the late 1960s, Eritreans in the United States have been active participants in ongoing efforts to define the Eritrean nation. They have also contributed extensively to the political-economic viability of the emergent state. During the nationalist revolution war of independence from Ethiopia (1961–1991), the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF) likewise reached out to Eritreans living abroad for material and ideological support. Following independence, the state under the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) has continued these efforts to administer and control its exiles, their identities, and the communities, civic organizations, and political institutions that link them to the nation-state and local Eritrean society.;This dissertation draws together critical approaches to nationalism, transnationalism, and civil society in the context of globalization to examine how Eritreans in the United States form a component of trans/national civil society for the Eritrean state. Through a detailed ethnographic and historical study carried out in both the urban United States and Eritrea, it examines the bi-directional flows connecting the two locations and assesses the impacts and consequences of these on the Eritrean nation-state, local Eritrean society, and exile communities in the US. More specifically, it critically examines transnational social field as arenas of power in which a deterritorialized state and society struggle with one another for meaning and authority. The concepts of trans/nationalism and trans/national civil society are developed to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the ways that transnational processes can limit and repress as well as emancipate and enable, and to reveal how Eritreans in the US both support and contest the state and its hegemonic definitions of national identity and belonging. Finally, this study details how and why Eritreans have culturally appropriated western and globally-constructed ideas associated with democracy, civil society, citizenship and constitutionalism and applied them to Eritrea's nationalist past and present.