ERITREA: THE POLITICS OF ENDURANCE

by Ahmed Ibrahim

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A People, a History, and the Discipline of Resilience

Some nations have histories told primarily through empires, treaties, wars, borders, and diplomatic agreements. Others possess another history beneath these visible events, one written in the character, collective memory, and persistence of their people. Eritrea belongs to the latter category.

Eritrea’s history cannot be understood solely through the powers that ruled it, the wars fought on its soil, the international decisions made about it, or the sanctions imposed upon it. To understand Eritrea is also to understand a people who, across generations, learned to live with uncertainty without surrendering their identity, to work with limited resources without abandoning aspiration, to endure foreign domination without losing historical consciousness, and to rebuild ordinary life after extraordinary disruption.

For this reason, Eritrea’s story is more than a history of resistance. It is a history of endurance, the capacity to work, adapt, remember, rebuild, and continue even when the outcome remains uncertain.

Long before the emergence of modern geopolitics, the territory of present-day Eritrea was connected to the wider Red Sea, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds. The ancient port of Adulis linked northeastern Africa to commercial and cultural networks extending across the Red Sea and beyond. Far from existing on the margins of history, the region participated in trade, political exchange, cultural contact, and the movement of people, goods, and ideas.

This deeper history matters because it establishes an important continuity. Eritrean communities developed across highlands and lowlands, mountains and coastlines, regions of drought and rainfall, agricultural settlements and maritime trading routes. Living within such varied environments required continual adaptation to geography, climate, economic circumstances, and changing political conditions. Over time, adaptation became more than a temporary response to hardship; it developed into a durable social capacity.

Survival required patience and sustained labor, while community life depended upon cooperation and memory. These qualities would repeatedly become important as Eritreans confronted the political upheavals of later centuries.

Political history naturally emphasizes battles, revolutions, treaties, independence movements, sanctions, and diplomatic crises. Yet nations are not sustained by dramatic events alone. They survive through millions of ordinary days: a farmer rising before sunrise, a fisherman going to sea, a mother preparing food for her family, a teacher entering a classroom, a worker repairing a machine, a merchant opening a shop, or a young person studying for a future whose possibilities remain uncertain.

Repeated across generations, particularly under difficult circumstances, such ordinary acts acquire extraordinary significance. Eritrea’s resilience has therefore never rested solely upon political leadership, military strength, or diplomatic argument. Beneath all of these has been something more fundamental: the daily labor through which ordinary Eritreans sustained families, communities, and society itself.

That capacity to preserve continuity while adapting to change would become particularly important when Eritrea entered the age of European colonialism.

Colonialism, Identity, and the Preservation of Memory

Italian colonial rule profoundly reshaped Eritrea’s political, economic, and urban landscape. Asmara developed into an important colonial center, and its modernist architecture remains among the most visible legacies of that era. UNESCO’s recognition of Asmara’s exceptional modernist urban heritage reflects the architectural importance of the city while also locating that heritage within the broader history of colonial rule, Eritrean society, and the country’s subsequent struggle for self-determination.

Architecture, however, tells only part of the story. Behind the buildings, roads, railways, industries, and commercial activity were Eritrean workers and communities adapting to a political system in which sovereignty ultimately belonged to a foreign power. Colonialism consequently left a complicated inheritance. It brought infrastructure, urban development, and institutional transformation, but it also imposed foreign rule, political power anchored in racism, and exclusion from meaningful sovereign authority.

However, Eritrean society did not disappear into the colonial system. Despite decades of foreign rule and the profound transformations it brought, Eritreans preserved their languages, cultural values, traditions, and social institutions. Communities adjusted to changing political and economic circumstances without surrendering the social bonds, cultural practices, and historical consciousness that sustained their identities.

Asmara itself eventually came to embody this paradox. A city extensively shaped by Italian colonial planning was gradually appropriated and transformed by the people who inhabited it, becoming one of the most recognizable symbols of modern Eritrean national identity. The architecture remained, but its ownership, purpose, and meaning changed. What had been constructed partly as an expression of colonial power ultimately became part of the cultural landscape through which Eritreans expressed their own identity and historical continuity.

After Italy’s defeat during the Second World War, Eritrea came under British administration, followed in 1952 by federation with Ethiopia. As the federal arrangement was progressively dismantled and Eritrea was ultimately annexed and occupied by Ethiopia in 1962, questions of political representation, cultural autonomy, and language became increasingly inseparable from the larger question of national existence and self-determination.

Ethiopian rule brought sustained pressure upon Eritrea’s autonomous institutions and linguistic and cultural life. Measures aimed at integrating Eritrea into the Ethiopian state included expanding the official use of Amharic while restricting the institutional space previously available to Eritrean languages. Yet these pressures did not result in the disappearance of Eritrea’s linguistic or cultural identity. Tigrinya, Tigre, and the country’s other languages continued to be spoken and transmitted within families and communities even when their use in education, administration, publication, and other formal settings was prohibited. Cultural practices, social institutions, oral traditions, and collective memory likewise remained deeply rooted in everyday life.

Attempts to assimilate Eritrea more fully into an Ethiopian national framework consequently encountered persistent resistance. Amharic could be imposed or promoted through state institutions, but language and identity could not simply be transformed by administrative decree. For many students and young Eritreans in particular, resistance to linguistic and cultural assimilation became intertwined with the broader political struggle. What could no longer be expressed freely through official institutions survived within households, communities, churches and mosques, social networks, oral traditions, and eventually within institutions created by the liberation movement itself.

The persistence of Eritrean languages and cultural traditions was therefore not accidental. It reflected both the resilience of the population and the increasingly organized struggle for national self-determination. As political space narrowed, cultural preservation itself acquired political significance, while the liberation movement provided an institutional framework through which language, education, national history, and identity could be consciously maintained and developed.

This helps explain why the independence struggle could never have been sustained by battlefield organization alone. Behind the fighters stood a much larger society of farmers, workers, women, students, merchants, families, religious communities, and ordinary citizens whose labor, sacrifice, organization, and material support sustained the national movement across generations.

The battlefield, in other words, had an entire society behind it. And it was the endurance of that society that made a prolonged struggle possible.

Thirty Years of Armed Struggle and the Achievement of Independence

Eritrea’s political struggle for self-determination extended across decades, while the armed struggle itself lasted approximately thirty years, long enough for children to become adults, adults to become parents, and parents to become grandparents. Many who participated in its earliest years did not live to witness its conclusion.

Independence consequently represented more than a political event. For many Eritreans, it marked the fulfillment of a commitment carried from one generation to another. The struggle required persistence through years when victory remained uncertain and sacrifice appeared endless. Its endurance depended not only upon those who fought, but upon communities that fed and sheltered the fighters, educated children, cared for the wounded, maintained livelihoods, and somehow continued with ordinary life amid extraordinary circumstances.

Women were central to this history. They participated directly in the liberation struggle while simultaneously sustaining families and communities, enduring displacement and loss, caring for children, maintaining livelihoods, actively participating in underground political networks, and assuming responsibilities that became heavier when others departed for the battlefield.

Any serious account of Eritrean resilience must therefore recognize that the country’s history is not simply the history of men carrying rifles. It is equally the history of women fighting along side their male compatriots, sustaining the intelligence networks, carrying families, communities, memory, responsibility, hope and encouraging their sons and daughters to join the struggle. Their courage was indispensable.

When Eritrean liberation forces entered Asmara in 1991, one historic chapter closed. The 1993 referendum subsequently formalized Eritrea’s independence. Yet liberation could not by itself eliminate the consequences of decades of conflict. A society devastated by prolonged war still had to establish a functioning state, rehabilitate infrastructure, develop institutions, revive economic life, and create conditions in which peace could become sustainable.

Liberation and nation-building are therefore different achievements. The first may demand extraordinary courage during moments of confrontation; the second requires sustained work, institutional discipline, patience, and the ability to transform political independence into functioning social and economic life.

The expectation that independence would inaugurate an uninterrupted period of reconstruction and peace, however, proved short-lived. Within only seven years, Eritrea again found itself confronting war and, later, a prolonged period of international diplomatic and economic pressure.

War, UN Sanctions, and Western Diplomatic Pressure

The 1998–2000 Eritrea–Ethiopia war subjected the population to another period of profound hardship. Families were separated, communities were displaced, and Young people faced military mobilization, while the devastating conflict inflicted lasting economic and social consequences on communities. More than 76,000 people of Eritrean origin were expelled from Ethiopia, many losing homes, businesses, property, and wealth accumulated over a lifetime in the process. All of it taken by people close to the TPLF-regime, their close relatives and friends.

Against this historical background, concepts such as sovereignty, territorial integrity, national security, and self-reliance were never merely theoretical questions for many Eritreans. They were connected to lived experiences of war, displacement, military service, family separation, loss, and uncertainty.

This history helps explain Eritrea’s strong emphasis on sovereignty, territorial integrity, self-reliance, and caution toward external pressure. People may reasonably disagree about particular policies pursued in the name of those principles, but any serious discussion of Eritrean policy must also recognize the historical experiences from which such concerns emerged.

On December 23, 2009, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1907, establishing sanctions concerning Eritrea, including an arms embargo. US and its allies supporting the measures presented them as responses to regional-security concerns. Eritrea, by contrast, regarded the sanctions as part of a broader pattern of political pressure that constrained its sovereign choices. Eritrea was being punished for not toeing the US line in the region in general and Somalia in particular. These positions should be distinguished clearly when examining the period.

The sanctions regime was reinforced on December 5, 2011, when the Security Council adopted Resolution 2023. The resolution expanded the Council’s measures and called for greater vigilance regarding Eritrea’s mining sector and financial activities. Ethiopia was among the governments strongly advocating continued international pressure on Eritrea.

U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks also provide evidence of Washington’s active role in building diplomatic support for sanctions. The cables document U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice’s consultations with regional governments, discussions with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, efforts to address both the Somalia and Djibouti issues within the proposed framework, and U.S. attempts to secure support from reluctant Security Council members. Taken together, these records show that the United States played an active diplomatic role in assembling support for, choreographing and directing the sanctions charade.

Eritrea, for its part, consistently rejected the allegations underlying the measures and argued that the sanctions reflected a politicized regional campaign rather than an impartial assessment of the evidence.

As the sanctions remained in place, an important discrepancy emerged between some of the original allegations and the findings of the UN’s own monitoring mechanism. For four consecutive mandates, the Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group reported that it had been unable to find conclusive evidence of Eritrean support for Al-Shabaab. The Group consequently recommended that the Security Council consider separating the sanctions regimes concerning Eritrea and Somalia. This was significant because it was not merely Eritrea disputing the accusations against it; the monitoring body established by the Security Council itself was repeatedly reporting that it could not substantiate one of the allegations most closely associated with the sanctions regime. The US-dominated Security Council position nevertheless did not change immediately. In fact at one instance, all fourteen members of the UN Security Council were in favor of lifting the sanction but the US threatened a veto and they couldn’t be lifted.

Sanctions, moreover, are never experienced solely in government ministries, diplomatic chambers, or the meeting rooms of international institutions. Their wider consequences can reach commercial relationships, banking and financial transactions, investment decisions, educational opportunities, remittance channels, and the broader economic environment in which ordinary people live. Throughout this period, Eritreans continued to cultivate land, educate their children, maintain family networks, establish livelihoods, conserve scarce resources, and sustain their communities. The history of sanctions is therefore not merely a history of relations among governments; it is also part of the history of how societies adapt to external pressure while attempting to preserve economic and social continuity.

By 2018, however, the political landscape of the Horn of Africa had changed dramatically. Ethiopia was undergoing a political transition, relations between Eritrea and Ethiopia were restored, regional diplomacy accelerated, the Obama Administration and Susan Rice were out of Office, and assumptions that had shaped international policy toward Eritrea were being reconsidered.

On November 14, 2018, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2444 and terminated the sanctions imposed on Eritrea. Significantly, the resolution recognized that, over the course of the Monitoring Group’s current and four previous mandates, it had found no conclusive evidence that Eritrea supported Al-Shabaab.

The sanctions were therefore removed almost nine years after their original imposition, but without the kind of retrospective reckoning many Eritreans believed the experience warranted. There was no formal apology, nor did the Security Council declare that every allegation previously made against Eritrea had been false. Instead, Resolution 2444 reflected both the accumulated findings of the Monitoring Group and a transformed regional political environment, including the rapprochement between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

For many Eritreans, that sequence left an enduring question: if the international community’s own monitoring mechanism had repeatedly been unable to establish conclusive evidence of Eritrean support for Al-Shabaab, why did the sanctions remain in place for so long, and why was there so little public accounting when they were finally removed?

Whatever answer one gives, the episode illustrates how slowly international policy can sometimes respond when the evidentiary basis and political circumstances surrounding an established sanctions regime begin to change.

The end of UN sanctions in 2018, however, did not mark the end of Eritrea’s experience with US sanctions. Only three years later, another sanctions framework emerged—this time imposed unilaterally by the United States under the pretext of the war in northern Ethiopia.

The 2021–2026 U.S. Sanctions and the Question of Self-Reliance

In 2021, the United States established a sanctions framework through Executive Order 14046 in connection with the humanitarian and human-rights crisis in Ethiopia. Under that authority, the U.S. Treasury designated several Eritrean entities and individuals. The United States described these measures as part of its response to the conflict in Ethiopia and the war in Ethiopia was declared by the Biden Administration “onstitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

On September 18, 2026, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control announced that the national emergency declared under Executive Order 14046 had expired. OFAC subsequently removed the Eritrean entities and individuals designated under that authority from the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. Once again, however, there was no statement of regret or acknowledgment of wrongdoing toward Eritrea. The conflict in Ethiopia had begun as a struggle between the Tigrayan forces and Ethiopia’s federal government over political power. Eritrea was subsequently drawn into the conflict after Tigrayan forces repeatedly launched missiles at population centers inside Eritrea. When Eritrea responded, invoking its right of self-defense under the UN Charter, it was Eritrea—not the Tigrayan authorities or the Ethiopian government—that was subjected to U.S. sanctions. From the Eritrean perspective, this echoed an older historical grievance: the United States had opposed Eritrean independence in the international deliberations of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and decades later Washington was once again seen as denying Eritrea the right to defend its sovereignty and population.

Eritrea’s emphasis on self-reliance cannot easily be separated from its experiences of foreign domination, war, diplomatic pressure, and sanctions. A country shaped by such experiences is likely to place considerable importance on limiting dependency and preserving political agency.

When patience is joined to purposeful work, it becomes endurance. And it is here, beyond governments and diplomatic institutions, that the deeper meaning of Eritrean resilience becomes most visible.

The Country That Kept Going: People, Diaspora, and Resilience

Governments change. So do foreign policies, international institutions, alliances, sanctions, wars, and diplomatic relationships. Throughout these changes, however, ordinary people provide continuity.

Farmers, fishermen, teachers, engineers, construction workers, mothers, students, shopkeepers, elders, and families within Eritrea and abroad continue to sustain Eritrean society. Their continuity helps explain why diplomatic isolation cannot make a people historically invisible. A state may become politically isolated, but its people do not cease to exist, work, remember, create, or hope.

That continuity now extends far beyond Eritrea’s geographical borders. Migration has created Eritrean communities across Africa, the Middle East, Europe, North America, Australia, and elsewhere. For many members of these communities, the homeland remains present through language, family relationships, cultural traditions, remittances, community organizations, music, food, celebrations, mourning, and shared memory.

A child born thousands of miles from Asmara may still know the names of grandparents’ villages, learn a family language, hear stories of the independence struggle, recognize national symbols, and understand that the history of the homeland forms part of the family’s own history. Eritrean identity has consequently become transnational without becoming detached from Eritrea itself. Indeed, children of Eritrean origin born and raised in the diaspora have increasingly placed themselves at the forefront of efforts to articulate and defend what they see as Eritrea’s interests. In their view, external pressure—particularly policies they regard as unjust or discriminatory on the part of the United States and its Western allies—has often strengthened rather than weakened their determination to remain connected to the country. This sense of defiance and perseverance links many Eritreans abroad with those inside the country. The phrase “Never Kneel Down” has come to encapsulate that spirit: an insistence on maintaining dignity, identity, and national agency in the face of adversity.

International measures can restrict transactions, institutions, individuals, and diplomatic relationships, but collective memory is much more difficult to regulate. A family can preserve a story; a grandmother can teach a song; parents can tell children where their family came from; communities can preserve language and culture; and students can continue to study the history that shaped earlier generations. Through these seemingly modest acts, Eritrean identity persists. Eritrean resilience therefore cannot be understood solely in economic or political terms. It is also cultural, social, and generational.

This does not mean that Eritrea’s history should be romanticized. War, displacement, poverty, isolation, sanctions, and the loss of loved ones are lived experiences, not symbols to be celebrated. Remembering resilience should never become a way of glorifying suffering. Its purpose should instead be to understand how people survived difficult periods and to consider what kind of future might reduce the need for such extraordinary endurance.

A society that has endured much consequently inherits a responsibility to future generations: that is why Eritreans are determined to transform sacrifice into opportunity, memory into education, independence into development, sovereignty into productive international relationships, and the experience of suffering into a durable commitment to peace. Future Eritrean children should inherit not only stories of what earlier generations endured, but opportunities those generations could only imagine. That is where resilience would ultimately lead.

The Eritrean experience also contains lessons for international diplomacy. Sanctions should not become automatic substitutes for failed diplomacy, and should never be based on false premises and fabricated evidence.

The expiration of the U.S. national emergency established under Executive Order 14046 and the removal of the related Eritrean designations do not resolve every disagreement. They do, however, create an opportunity for a different diplomatic conversation—one grounded in realism, mutual respect, regional stability, and recognition that sustained engagement may accomplish things that permanent estrangement cannot.

From ancient Adulis to modern Asmara, from colonial rule to independence, from war to reconstruction, and from periods of sanctions to their eventual termination, Eritrean history contains a persistent thread: communities living beside the Red Sea and across the highlands and lowlands, cultivating difficult land, trading across borders, adapting to external power, preserving social bonds, working, remembering, rebuilding, and refusing to disappear.

Political systems changed. Empires changed. Occupying powers changed. The international order changed, as did the instruments through which external pressure was applied. Through those transformations, the people continued. They are not merely footnotes to Eritrean history. They are central participants in that history.

Conclusion: From Endurance to Possibility

Perhaps the most revealing way to understand Eritrea is not to count how many times the country has been tested, but to examine how often its people continued afterward.

Colonial rule was followed by political transition and continued social adaptation. The dismantling of federation and annexation were followed by a prolonged struggle for self-determination. Independence brought the enormous task of nation-building, while another devastating war again demanded reconstruction. Western diplomatic isolation and sanctions created new forms of pressure, yet the government, families and communities continued to adapt and sustain themselves. The United Nations sanctions regime eventually ended in 2018, and in September 2026 the national emergency underlying the 2021 U.S. sanctions framework expired, followed by the removal of related Eritrean designations. The story, however, continues.

Eritrean resilience should therefore be understood as something larger than the capacity to withstand suffering. It is the ability to preserve identity while adapting to changing circumstances; to work when results remain distant; to rebuild after destruction; to remember the past without becoming imprisoned by it; and to protect national agency while remaining capable of diplomacy and international cooperation. Above all, Eritrean resilience is a refusal to allow difficult history to become the final definition of the future.

Seen in this way, Eritrea’s story is not only a history of resistance, but of continuity; not only of sacrifice, but of work; not only of war, but of patience; and not only of isolation, but of human connection. It is the history of generations who continued building even when circumstances gave them little reason to expect immediate reward.

History tested them, and they endured. As circumstances changed around them, they adapted. When the road became difficult, they continued along it.

Perhaps that is the most enduring lesson in Eritrea’s political history: a people and government may be subjected to enormous historical pressures without allowing those pressures alone to define them. Their history is also shaped by what they preserve, what they rebuild, what they learn, and what they choose to do afterward.