There is a persistent tendency in some academic and advocacy circles to treat Eritrea’s national unity as a contrivance rather than a lived political achievement. A recent article by Mahder Nesibu, published by Horn Review—a state-affiliated propaganda platform masquerading as an independent research and publication think tank—follows this familiar path. It presents Eritrea’s cohesion as a surface narrative masking deeper fractures allegedly produced by the political philosophy of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and its successor, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice.
What is striking is not the article’s criticism of authoritarian governance—an area where Eritreans themselves have long raised serious concerns—but its deeper implication: that Eritrea’s foundational choice of unity over identity-based politics was misguided, suppressive, and historically illegitimate. From an Eritrean perspective, this is not simply an analytical error. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how states are born, how sovereignty is defended, and how diverse societies survive in hostile regions.
An African proverb reminds us: When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. Eritrea’s unity was never about denying difference. It was about binding fragile strands into something strong enough to resist annihilation.
Liberation as State Formation, Not a Social Experiment
Eritrea’s armed struggle was not a seminar on pluralism. It was a protracted war against an imperial state that denied Eritreans legal personality, political voice, and even historical existence. The early fragmentation of the liberation movement—particularly during the dominance and subsequent crisis of the Eritrean Liberation Front—was not evidence of healthy diversity. It was a lesson in strategic vulnerability. Factionalism, regionalism, and identity-based mobilization weakened military coordination and exposed the struggle to external manipulation.
The emergence of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front was a corrective to that failure. Its insistence on discipline, ideological coherence, and a supra-ethnic national identity was not accidental authoritarianism. It was a conscious doctrine of survival rooted in an understanding of Eritrean reality. The EPLF grasped what many theorists prefer to ignore: societies confronting existential threats do not first negotiate identity accommodation. They first secure collective existence.
To judge that choice retroactively by peacetime liberal standards is to misunderstand the nature of liberation movements as proto-states operating under siege.
Unity as a Civic, Not Sectarian, Principle
A central flaw in Mahder’s argument is the conflation of unity with homogenization. Eritrean unity was never racial, religious, or ethnic. It was civic and political. Muslims and Christians fought, bled, and governed together. Highlanders and lowlanders shared trenches and command structures. Languages, customs, and faiths persisted—not erased, but politically subordinated to a common national purpose.
This distinction matters. Eritrea did not deny diversity; it denied the right of diversity to become a competing sovereign claim. It rejected religious or ethnic supremacy and paved the way for a citizenship-based Eritrean national identity.
That choice stands in sharp contrast to Ethiopia’s post-1991 political order, where ethnicity was constitutionalized as the primary axis of political legitimacy. The results are no longer theoretical. Ethiopia today faces chronic internal conflict, mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, and the progressive erosion of state authority. Ethnic conflicts are widespread. Afars distrust Oromos. Oromos distrust Amharas, Amharas do not trust Tigrayans vise versa and etc. Identity was meant to manage diversity; instead, it institutionalized grievance and normalized political violence.
Eritrea, for all its profound governance deficiencies, has not experienced ethnic civil war or sectarian militias. That is not because diversity does not exist, but because it was never weaponized as the organizing principle of the state. Eritreans understand a simple truth: a house divided against itself cannot stand. The Horn of Africa offers daily proof.
Governance Failure Is Not a Philosophical Failure
None of this absolves the Eritrean state of responsibility for its current condition. The absence of a constitution, the lack of an elected legislature, the subordination of law to executive discretion, indefinite national service, and restrictions on civil liberties constitute serious violations of political and legal norms. These are failures of constitutionalism, accountability, and institutional development—and they are concerns for Eritreans to confront, not for Ethiopian imperialists to instrumentalize.
They are also not evidence that Eritrea’s foundational philosophy of unity was inherently flawed.
Legally speaking, Eritrea suffers from a deficit of the rule of law, not from an excess of national identity. The problem is not that the state rejected ethnic federalism. It is that it failed to transition from revolutionary legitimacy to constitutional legitimacy. Power remained centralized without being legalized. Authority endured without being institutionalized.
By collapsing governance shortcomings into an identity critique, Mahder’s analysis shifts responsibility away from reform and accountability and toward a far more dangerous conclusion: that Eritrea must revisit the very basis of its statehood. That is not reformist analysis. It is structural delegitimization.
Religion, Regulation, and Regional Reality
The regulation of religious institutions in Eritrea has rightly drawn criticism, particularly where it violates freedom of belief and association. Yet critique must be grounded in comparative and empirical reality. Eritrea has not experienced religious civil war, sectarian insurgency, or faith-based political fragmentation. Churches and mosques coexist without organized communal violence.
This is not incidental. It reflects a deliberate legal posture that treats religion as a social institution rather than a political constituency. One may dispute the excesses of this approach, but to ignore its stabilizing effects in a volatile region is intellectually dishonest.
In Ethiopia, by contrast, religion increasingly intersects with ethnic politics and armed mobilization. Faith becomes identity. Identity becomes territory. Territory becomes bloodshed. Eritrea consciously chose a different legal and political trajectory.
As elders say, The one who has not crossed the river calls the crocodile a log. Eritreans know what they avoided.
On Positionality and Perspective
It is necessary to acknowledge positionality—not to dismiss arguments, but to contextualize them. Mahder Nesibu writes as an Ethiopian researcher operating within an Ethiopian policy ecosystem. Eritrea’s rejection of identity-based governance is not a neutral subject in that context. It is a direct critique of Ethiopia’s own state model.
Eritreans speak from lived consequence, not abstract preference. Unity was not chosen to silence difference. It was chosen to prevent national disintegration. That historical memory cannot be edited out through academic framing.
The Way Forward: Reform Without Fragmentation
Eritrea’s future does not lie in dismantling its national cohesion. It lies in completing the unfinished transition from liberation movement to constitutional state. Unity must be anchored in law. Citizenship must be protected by rights. Authority must be constrained by institutions.
The task is the democratization of unity, not its abandonment.
No matter how long the night, the day will surely come. Eritrea’s night has been long. But its dawn will not come through importing the politics of division that have devastated others. It will come through reform rooted in sovereignty, accountability, and the hard-earned lesson that unity—however imperfect—was Eritrea’s shield, not its curse.
That truth deserves to be defended with clarity, not surrendered to fashionable but dangerous narratives.
