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This article analyses contemporary Eritrea's acute crisis within the framework of the theory of anomie. It is based on the hypothesis that militarisation, forced labour, mass exodus and family disintegration can be interpreted as the consequences of two incompatible norm and value systems: the collectivist, nationalistic and militaristic worldview of the former liberation front and ruling party People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), and the traditional cultural system of Eritrea's society. In 2002 the regime introduced an unlimited ‘development campaign’, thereby forcing large parts of the society to live as conscripts and perform unpaid labour. This has caused a mass exodus of young people and a rapid process of family disintegration. The article is based on empirical fieldwork and evaluates the ongoing developments which have led to rapid economic decline and the destabilisation of the entire fabric of society.

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This article explores the role of remittances in Eritrea’s transnational authoritarian system. The government exercises a policy of active control over Eritrean citizens living abroad, and the country’s economy relies heavily on private remittances to ensure the subsistence of the population. This stands in stark contrast to the official doctrine of economic self-reliance, which has been hampered by an open-ended national service that can last for decades and deprives Eritrean citizens in productive age from making a living. The government also puts extreme restraints on the private sector. As a result, the livelihoods of Eritreans depend mostly on diaspora remittances. The authors take a historically contextualised approach based on empirical fieldwork in Eritrea from the 1990s to 2010 and among Eritrean diaspora communities in Europe between 2013 and 2019. We demonstrate how the government’s self-reliance approach has shifted from developing Eritrea’s human capital to securing financial support through transnational diaspora control. We conclude that in the case of Eritrea, the process of diasporisation has not triggered development and political transformation but has cemented a political and economic status quo that forces ever-growing parts of the population to leave.

This article explores processes of identity formation in Eritrean diaspora communities that have reverted to subnational patterns of identification grounded in the historical-political crises of their homeland. Refugees from Eritrea’s open-ended national service have ambivalent feelings towards their national identity: on the surface, they stress the cohesiveness of the Eritrean people, but in their daily lives they embrace ethnic or religious communities. I elaborate the dilemmas of identity formation in the transnational space between religious and ethnic affiliations and Eritrean nationalism. I analyse the expansion of ethnolinguistic and regional associations among diaspora communities and discuss their impact on identity formation. I link cleavages along ethnic and religious lines to collective memories and the government’s attempts to eradicate subnational identities. The study is based on long-term participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Eritreans in exile, and engages with relevant bodies of literature discussing identity formation in African and diaspora contexts.