Eritrea at 35: A Profile of Stability and a Gradual Transformation 

NCEA

At Eritrea’s thirty-fifth anniversary, the moment matters not only for the country’s endurance, but also for the way it has gradually transformed itself and achieved stability in a fractured region linking the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. What began in 1991 as Africa’s youngest nation with an economy ruined by successive Ethiopian rulers has evolved into a regional bulwark against forces of destabilization. Few postcolonial African states, facing unremitting contiguous hostility and many other external distractions, have so decisively reshaped their geopolitical position.           

Today, Eritrea occupies an unusual position in one of the world’s most unstable geopolitical environments. While much of the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea region is engulfed by war, fragmentation, and intensifying external rivalries, Eritrea increasingly presents itself as a profile of continuity, sovereignty, and stability. The significance of this moment lies not simply in commemoration, but in geopolitics. In a region defined by turbulence, Eritrea has emerged—quietly, patiently, and cautiously—as a stabilizing force in the Horn region and beyond..

The contrast is striking. Across the surrounding region, instability has deepened dramatically. Sudan is suffering from a devastating civil war in which neighboring Ethiopia and other external forces are playing a significant role. Somalia continues to struggle with fragmentation and insecurity. Wars in the Middle East have widened tensions across the region while accelerating the militarization of the Red Sea, one of the world’s most critical maritime corridors. Meanwhile, the Horn of Africa has become an increasingly contested geopolitical arena shaped by Gulf rivalries, great-power competition, and proxy struggles.

Djibouti, Eritrea’s southern coastal neighbor, illustrates this transformation vividly. Over the past two decades, it has evolved into a dense geopolitical “military camp,” hosting bases for the United States, China, France, Japan, Italy, and others. Its coastline has become an arena where global powers monitor, deter, and balance one another. While this has generated revenue and strategic attention, it also symbolizes the growing externalization of security in the Red Sea basin.

Ethiopia, by contrast, increasingly reflects a different form of instability: fragmentation from within. Ethnic tensions, economic strain, political polarization, and recurring internal conflict have weakened the cohesion of the Ethiopian state. At the same time, Addis Ababa’s increasingly vocal rhetoric regarding Red Sea access has injected additional uncertainty into the region. For many observers, these pressures reflect a broader pattern in Ethiopian political history—one in which internal crises often generate outward geopolitical ambitions and tensions with neighboring states.

Against this backdrop, Eritrea’s trajectory stands apart. Long portrayed by successive occupants of Ethiopia’s Menelik Palace, along with their paid local and foreign operatives and lobbyists, as a destabilizing nation or “spoiler,” Eritrea is now comparatively stable amid a widening arc of regional disorder. This stability is not accidental. It is rooted in a particular historical experience and security doctrine shaped by decades of war, external pressure, and contiguous aggression. The long liberation struggle against Ethiopian rule, followed by the devastating border war of 1998–2000, profoundly shaped Eritrea’s governing outlook. The result was the emergence of a state defined by vigilance, strategic patience, and an enduring emphasis on sovereignty.

            What is also an equally notable development in this Red Sea coastal state is the gradual economic transformation now underway at a slow but steady pace. At independence, Eritrea inherited not the promise of its earlier modern base, but the wreckage produced by decades of Ethiopian occupation, war, and deliberate economic destruction in an effort to curb Eritrean nationalism. The country that had entered federation with Ethiopia as one of Africa’s more developed territories emerged from imperial Ethiopian rule with infrastructure damaged, industries crippled, towns and villages devastated, and its human resources scattered across the region and beyond.

Independence therefore began not from a blank slate, but from the ruins of a modern society whose earlier trajectory had been violently interrupted. Writing about the Eritrean economy just before the British administration handed the territory over to Emperor Haile Selassie under the guise of a United Nations-sponsored federation, a British commissioner observed that Eritrea “was converted into [Africa’s] most modern and go-ahead country outside Algeria, Egypt and the Union [of South Africa].”^[1] The contrast with Ethiopia was so stark that he wondered in his later work on Eritrea whether it was “really conceivable that the Allies would be mad enough to hand neat, well-ordered Eritrea over to the medieval bear garden that was Ethiopia.”^[2]

This observation is important because it establishes where Eritrea’s economy started. Eritrea was not a marginal or undeveloped territory awaiting modernization from Ethiopia. Eritrea’s story, therefore, did not begin in poverty, institutional weakness, or economic backwardness. It had ports, roads, railways, factories, commercial networks, skilled workers, urban centers, legal institutions, and administrative structures that compared favorably with many independent African and Middle Eastern states of the period, including Egypt and South Africa. Its incorporation into Ethiopia therefore did not represent development or integration into a more advanced state. It represented the forced absorption of a relatively modern and well-ordered territory into an imperial system far less developed economically, administratively, and institutionally.

This made Eritrea’s later devastation all the more tragic. The problem was not that Eritrea lacked the foundations of modern statehood. Rather, those foundations were systematically undermined after federation and then more aggressively dismantled following Ethiopia’s illegal annexation of the former Italian colony in 1962. Successive Ethiopian rulers treated Eritrea not as a federated partner with its own constitution, parliament, flag, languages, institutions, and political identity, but as a territory to be absorbed, stripped, and subdued. Its industries were weakened, dismantled, or relocated to Ethiopia; its political institutions were dissolved; its ports were subordinated to imperial and later military priorities; and its people were subjected to repression intended to erase their national consciousness.

Yet Eritrea’s post-independence achievements cannot be measured only by conventional economic indicators or by the expectations imposed on newly independent states by outside observers. Its central achievement lies in social cohesion, institutional discipline, and the preservation of sovereignty in a turbulent region. In a neighborhood repeatedly destabilized by civil wars, foreign interventions, ethnic fragmentation, religious extremism, and proxy conflicts, Eritrea has maintained a remarkable degree of internal order. This stability did not arise by accident. It was rooted in the political culture forged during the liberation struggle: self-reliance, sacrifice, national unity across ethnic and religious lines, and a deep suspicion of dependency on external patrons.

            In sum, although Eritrea began its independent life amid ruins, with little external support and against the expectations of many outside observers, it has steadily transformed itself into a disciplined regional actor, a strategic maritime presence, and one of the most stable and efficient states in the Horn of Africa.  

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^[1] Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, The Deluge: A Personal View of the End of Empire in the Middle East (London: IB Tauris Publishers, 2019), 52.

^[2] Ibid, 69.