Eritrea’s Road Towards an Organic State and its Institutional Reality

By Mihreteab Medhanie

Introduction

One of the laziest accusations repeated against Eritrea is the claim that the country has “no institutions” because it has not implemented the 1997 Constitution in the manner demanded by Western liberal orthodoxy, has no conventional multiparty parliament, and has not held national elections according to the timetable preferred by foreign critics. This is a political slogan dressed up as scholarship. It is the old colonial gaze wearing a modern human-rights suit.

At the heart of the accusation lies a crude assumption: Africans are not expected to build institutions from their own history, struggle, culture, security realities, social needs, and developmental priorities. They are expected to imitate. They are expected to copy. They are expected to import ready-made political furniture from Europe and North America, arrange it neatly in their capitals, and call that “institution building,” even if the result is hollow, fragile, externally financed, and socially rootless. In this worldview, imitation becomes legitimacy, while originality is treated as suspicion.

The Western double standard is breathtaking. The same political tradition that took centuries to produce its current constitutional systems now demands that a newly independent African country, born from a thirty-year liberation war and immediately confronted by regional hostility, produce instant liberal perfection on command. The same powers that imposed colonial administrations designed for extraction and control now pretend to be neutral judges of institutional maturity in the societies they helped deform.

This article strips that myth bare.

The question is not whether Eritrea has institutions. The real question is who gets to define what institutions are. Are institutions merely parliaments, parties, election rituals, and paper procedures performed for external approval? Or are they the organized capacity of a society to preserve order, administer justice, defend sovereignty, sustain cohesion, mobilize labor, deliver public goods, and protect national dignity under pressure? By the first definition, many failed states can be dressed up as democracies. By the second, Eritrea’s institutional reality becomes impossible to deny.

The accusation survives because Eritrea refuses to perform dependency. It refuses to build institutions for the comfort of foreign observers. It refuses to turn sovereignty into a decorative phrase while outsourcing policy to donors, creditors, intelligence agencies, NGOs, and geopolitical patrons. That refusal is precisely what makes Eritrea intolerable to those who believe African legitimacy must be certified from outside.

Eritrea’s institutions are not absent. They are inconvenient. They are not theatrical. They are functional. They are not imitations. They are organic. They do not exist to impress the West. They exist to serve, defend, organize, and sustain the Eritrean people.

That is the institutional reality this article sets out to examine.

The Western Checklist and the Myth of Institutional Vacuum

When Eritrea gained its independence in 1991 the first public proclamation (Pro.1/vol-1/N-1/1991) made was the proclamation on the transitional institutions for the administration of Justice’ (ኣዋጅ-1፡ መሰጋገሪ ትካላት ምምሕዳር ፍትሒ ኤርትራ። ቅ-1/1991/ቁ-1). The issuance of this foundational legal decree, signaled a deliberate trajectory. This act demonstrated the extent to which the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), later the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), was committed to internal peace, security, and social harmony through homegrown institutions. Since this inception, the State of Eritrea has promulgated over 312 legal decrees, comprising 181 proclamations, 123 legal notices, seven amendments, and one directive (Ministry of Justice, 2021).

Yet, external critiques almost invariably deploy a standardized checklist of procedural shortcomings: the unfulfilled implementation of the 1997 Constitution, the absence of an active parliament, and the deferral of national multiparty elections. To the mainstream observer trained in the Western liberal tradition, these omissions are reflexively equated with an absolute institutional vacuum.

This critique suffers from a profound, Eurocentric reductionism that conflates the superficial machinery of governance with the deeper essence of institutional capacity. It presumes that political institutions can only achieve validity if they mimic the historical evolutionary path of Western Europe and North America. By evaluating the Global South through a rigid, purely procedural matrix, this orthodox view ignores the complex realities of homegrown nation-building experiences. Consequently, it fails to recognize alternative frameworks of governance that prioritize collective cohesion, infrastructural resilience, and sovereign survival over procedural theater. Worse, it glosses over the immense historical roadblocks inherited from a predatory colonial past, alongside the existential security threats that continue to shape Eritrea’s modern trajectory.

To understand why this “vacuum of institutions” argument is fundamentally flawed, one must untangle the relationship between state-building and formal legal instruments. On matters of state formation, the Eritrean leadership has consistently reiterated that emphasis must remain on what institutions deliver rather than what they look like, prioritizing substantive outcomes over procedural aesthetics. As a young nation, Eritrea is navigating an evolutionary path common to all sovereign states. Strong, stable institutions are not born instantly by political decree; they evolve incrementally through historical experience, trials, and generational consolidation. Historically, building efficient state systems required centuries of maturation across different civilizations. In Europe and North America, the institutional frameworks of Great Britain and France survived centuries of civil war, monarchical collapses, and social upheavals before regularizing into current state apparatuses, while the United States spent nearly a century after its independence reconciling state and federal authorities through intense political crises and a devastating civil war. Similarly, across Asia and Latin America, highly organized technocracies underwent decades of post-colonial structural redesign, shifting from fragmented regional authorities to consolidated centralized systems capable of steering nationwide development. Across Africa and the Middle East, nations continue to grapple with the generational task of harmonizing customary traditions of governance with inherited architectures. Eritrea is no exception to this historical rule, facing its own unique institutional hurdles that the national leadership has consistently been transparent in addressing.

This long-term perspective echoes through classical political philosophy and history, revealing an evolutionary trajectory that contradicts the modern liberal consensus. We learn from ancient Greek philosophers and from history that a state is sustained not by mechanical laws, but by the internal harmony (arete) of citizens. In the early experiences of human organization, a constitution was required barely for formal ordering of a city-state’s offices. The true foundation of a political community (koinonia) rested in organic social bonds, shared customs, and a common orientation toward the good life. Writing laws before cultivating a shared civic disposition is, in essence, an exercise in futility.

This understanding is equally prominent in early modern thought, where true laws are neither engraved on marble nor brass, but in the hearts of the citizens, which forms the true constitution of the State. If this internal, organic consensus dissolves, formal political architecture collapses into irrelevance. The historical experience of the United States during its early state formation underscores this philosophical reality. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison observed that “in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in first enabling the government to control the governed, and in the next place obliging it to control itself”. Madison understood that before a state can regulate its internal mechanics via constitutional jurisprudence, it must first establish an underlying social authority capable of binding a disparate society together. The state, as an effective administrative unit, must exist de facto through a shared national consciousness and organized social power before it can operate de jure through a paper text. Constitutions and parliaments are important instruments of checks and balances, but they are not the source of institutional stability; rather, they are the fragile products of it.

The assumption that holding rapid, multi-party elections automatically generates a stable polity is therefore historically naïve. Absent strong, consolidated political institutions, states cannot endure and will likely suffer from precipitating political decay and chaos. Without an organic, shared vision and deep sense of mutual obligation, no formal legal codes or administrative structures can endure. The formal laws of a state are only as strong as the underlying social cohesion  (asabiyyah to use Ibn Khaldun’s words) that binds its people.

Institutions are Built Through History, not Imported by Formula

These deep historical patterns explain why Eritrea’s contemporary state structures are uniquely homegrown, forged in the crucible of a brutal thirty-year armed struggle for national liberation. This historical origin renders them fundamentally inward-looking, community based, participatory, and stringently delivery oriented. They are fully owned, engineered, and operated by the Eritrean people. Unlike many post-colonial nations, no foreign actors or external consultants have ever been involved in managing public institutions, whether at the strategic policy level or the operational tier. This absolute sovereignty in institutional design possesses immense merit, as it ensures that the cultivation of administrative expertise remains local, self-reliant, and closely aligned with the population’s immediate needs. Throughout its post-independence history, these institutions have undergone calculated transitions in response to objective domestic and international realities.

Crucially, the Eritrean state has successfully institutionalized public safety, territorial security, and administrative governance. Despite its geographic position within the Horn of Africa (historically one of the most volatile regions globally) Eritrea maintains complete public safety and internal stability across its territory. This total security environment is a direct manifestation of functioning state institutions. Governance frameworks and public structures are operational in every corridor of the country, leading many objective regional observers to categorize Eritrea as one of the most structurally resilient states in the region. The historical reality remains that the Eritrean population has been subjected to relentless colonial and neo-colonial pressures for over eight decades, operating on a war footing or under active existential threats for nearly sixty years. Withstanding such concentrated, prolonged geopolitical pressure is a monumental task that would be structurally impossible in the absence of an organized, deeply embedded, and functional institutional core.

Therefore, any serious analytical focus on the Eritrean experience must center on the substantive and functional aspects of what institutions actually deliver to the populace. While the procedural dimension remains a point of critique for external observers, a purely Western procedural approach fails to grasp the nature of a state that has been solely responsible for writing its own social, economic, political, and security programs. This stands in sharp contrast to the prevailing trends across much of sub-Saharan Africa, where national development agendas, structural adjustments, and fiscal policies were heavily drafted or dictated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, or bilateral Western partners.

While the Western liberal model insists that democracy is a singular formula driven by multi-party competition and periodic voting, contemporary political theory increasingly recognizes alternative paths to legitimate governance. Many resilient states utilize a meritocratic, technocratic system at the apex, balanced by robust substantive and procedural democracy at the grassroots level. The Eritrean experience demonstrates that the institutional cultivation of highly competent, corruption-free leadership anchored by participatory mechanisms at the local level, can provide immense stability and developmental success without relying on volatile electoral cycles. Uncritical adoption of liberal proceduralism masks deep-seated structural inequalities, leaving the population politically marginalized and economically disempowered. Eritrea advocates for a substantive democracy that prioritizes popular participation, social justice, and concrete economic development over hollow voting rituals. The export of Western institutional forms to populations whose basic material needs remain unfulfilled represents a form of Eurocentric culturalism that artificially separates political procedures from their economic and geostrategic realities.

The 1994 National Charter explicitly commits the country to a democratic future, embracing both pluralism and substantive democracy. The core issue has never been an ideological rejection of democratic principles, but rather a pragmatic, procedural question of timing and context. At the grassroots level, Eritrea hosts a vibrant procedural democracy: local village assemblies (Baito) are elected through popular, direct, and transparent processes. These local bodies exercise tangible authority over land allocation, community resource management, and regional judicial administration. By anchoring democracy in the immediate material life of the community, Eritrea avoids the political polarization and predatory elite capture that frequently occur when multi-party elections are prematurely forced onto post-colonial nations.

A primary blind spot in this Eurocentric critique is its complete disregard for the structural baseline from which the newly independent nation emerged. In 1991, Eritrea inherited state structures thoroughly infected with the deep-seated corruption, systemic nepotism, and bureaucratic decay left behind by the Ethiopian Derg regime, alongside over a century of cumulative colonial rule spanning Italian colonization and the deeply divisive British administrative period. Colonial institutions are, by definition, extractive and coercive; they are built to fragment societies, alienate populations, and centralize rent-seeking opportunities rather than foster unified national development. To expect a newly liberated nation to instantly operate a governance model using an apparatus designed for colonial subjection is historically illogical. Reflecting on these systemic challenges, President Isaias Afwerki has noted that building durable, native institutions in Eritrea is a complex, generational task. He has emphasized that true institution building requires time, immense resources, and localized capacity building, particularly when operating within a volatile and fragile region. The government’s focus has consistently been on dismantling the fraudulent, inherited colonial framework and replacing it with homegrown systems tailored to the social, historical, and political experiences of the nation.

Homegrown State Capacity: Security, Stability, and Development Outcomes

The narrative that Eritrea lacks functional institutions collapses entirely when confronted with empirical markers of state capacity, prompting a series of critical questions regarding actual state functionality. If Eritrea truly lacks cohesive institutions, one must ask how it successfully endured the sweeping UN sanctions regime imposed between 2009 and 2018, or how it has continued to withstand the intensive, unilateral US and EU sanctions deployed since 2021 without structural economic or administrative collapse. Furthermore, the state manifested a highly synchronized institutional capacity during the global pandemic, maintaining absolute public order, logistical distribution, and strict preventative protocols at a time when much wealthier, industrialized Western nations suffered severe social fractures and governance breakdowns. This resilience is further illuminated by concrete development milestones. If its institutions are weak, it remains unexplained how Eritrea became one of the few African nations to fully meet its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) targets in healthcare and education. Specifically, the nation successfully achieved MDG 4 by reducing child mortality by two-thirds, met MDG 5 by improving maternal health and reducing maternal mortality by over 75%, and made monumental strides under MDG 6 by halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. This momentum continues into the modern era, as the state maintains structural progress to meet key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets, showing documented advancement in SDG 3 regarding neonatal and maternal survival, SDG 4 regarding quality education access, and SDGs 13 and 15 through massive national soil and water conservation programs.

On a regional scale, this institutional capacity is demonstrated by how the state manages to structurally absorb and support massive displacement from neighboring conflicts. Today, thousands of Sudanese brothers and sisters live in Eritrea, an integration that has occurred smoothly, safely, and without large-scale external appeals or the structural intervention of international aid agencies. The state has absorbed this humanitarian influx cleanly through its own domestic network, demonstrating that external critiques are not objective assessments of functionality, but are designed to target the very self-reliant, homegrown institutions Eritrea has built to preserve its independence.

A prime example of these targeted structures is the National Service Program, which serves as the foundational bedrock of Eritrea’s development and security architecture. By instilling collective civic responsibility, driving infrastructural development, and securing territorial integrity, it functions effectively to insulate the nation from external manipulation, making it a frequent target for negative portrayal by adversarial geopolitical actors. Similarly, the highly organized Eritrean Diaspora Networks represent an essential instrument of soft power and transnational institution building. Eritrean embassies and consulates worldwide routinely interact with hundreds of citizens daily. This robust engagement underpins the structural bond between the state and its global diaspora, visible in voluntary compliance with national obligations, such as the 2% diaspora development contribution enacted under national law. To counter this unique cohesion, adversarial actors routinely attempt to intimidate diaspora communities and frame these routine administrative interactions as coercive, seeking to mischaracterize a highly functional mechanism of transnational solidarity as a sign of transnational intimidation.

Constitutionalism, Democracy, and the Question of Timing

The narrative that Eritrea has completely abandoned or failed to implement its constitution is similarly inaccurate. This claim isolates a single component of the document, specifically the articles regulating national multiparty parliamentary elections, and ignores the widespread implementation of its foundational social, economic, and civic principles. Furthermore, it misunderstands constitutionalism itself. Not all stable states possess a single, written constitutional text, as countries like Great Britain, New Zealand, and Israel rely instead on unwritten or statutory constitutional frameworks that evolve through regular experience. Eritrea, conversely, has meticulously prepared two homegrown legal pillars that are essential in safeguarding adherence to the rule of law: the Civil and Penal Codes of the State of Eritrea and the Civil and Criminal Procedures of the State of Eritrea. These comprehensive legal instruments serve as the actual operational core of Eritrean institutionalism and constitutionalism.

The fact that certain macro-political aspects of the constitution remain unfulfilled should not be misconstrued as an abandonment of the document. Following its ratification in May 1997, Eritrea launched a highly pragmatic political process. By early 1998, the government was actively drafting specific laws to govern political parties and regulate national elections, which were scheduled for 2001. However, this natural, evolutionary trajectory of national institutionalization was violently interrupted in May 1998 when Ethiopia launched a massive war that posed a direct, existential threat to Eritrea’s newly won sovereignty. Facing an aggressive neighbor that openly sought to dismantle its statehood, a crisis exacerbated by two decades of subsequent diplomatic and military encirclement, the Eritrean state was forced to pivot to survival mode. In the dialectic of statehood, sovereign survival must always precede electoral competition. Nearly three decades after its ratification, a cogent argument can be made that the 1997 Constitution needs to be revisited, as a document frozen in time by twenty years of no-war, no-peace conflict may no longer fully reflect the contemporary socio-economic realities, regional dynamics, and institutional developments of modern Eritrea. However, any such revisit must remain an internal, organic process, free from the dictates of external actors.

Against Post-Colonial Mimicry: Institutions Built for Sovereignty and Social Welfare

Eritrea’s external capacity and state functionality are further reflected in its expansive global diplomatic footprint. The state maintains more than 30 active diplomatic missions and embassies worldwide, representing a high per-capita diplomatic presence relative to its population size within the African continent. Eritrean diplomats are deeply integrated into the global diplomatic corps, with several senior ambassadors serving as deans of the diplomatic community in key capitals. Despite systemic external efforts to isolate the country, Eritrea is consistently elected by the international community to crucial multilateral bodies, including its election to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) for a three-year term running from 2027 to 2029, its selection as a Vice-President of the 81st Session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), and its prior membership on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Within the African Union (AU), Eritrean representatives continue to be appointed to vital continental bodies, validating the structural standing of its diplomatic corps and demonstrating that the nation is viewed as highly influential in the peace and security architecture of the region.

Ultimately, Eritrea has engineered domestic institutions that systematically prioritize the material welfare of its population. Operationally, the state acts within an institutional framework akin to what political economists term an Employer of Last Resort (ELR). By absorbing and deploying human capital across essential state, structural, and infrastructural sectors, the Eritrean government guarantees wide-scale livelihood security, ensuring that public institutions do not function merely as performative bureaucratic entities, but act as active welfare agents mitigating macroeconomic and social vulnerabilities. This unique institutional reality is tailored specifically to the historical conditions of the country.

Overall, Eritrea’s institutional path is an evolving response to its unique geopolitical and historical realities. It represents a deliberate rejection of the post-colonial mimicry that Frantz Fanon warned against when he implored the Global South to not try to imitate Europe, but rather to invent, discover, and step forward. Today, many African nations are increasingly aware that the institutional frameworks bequeathed by their former colonizers are ill-suited to solving contemporary crises. To the contrary, neo-colonial structural dependency, which Eritrea has spent decades striving to avoid, remains the primary engine of developmental paralysis across the continent. This neo-colonial failure manifests clearly through the export of raw commodities, the import of manufactured goods, a chronic reliance on external financing, and the surrender of sovereign policy space to creditors and international financial institutions.

From the Eritrean perspective, genuine liberation requires building institutions and redesigning the rules of the system from within, promoting a distinctly African focus on how societal institutions are harnessed and run. Consequently, Eritrea has consciously avoided creating institutions that reproduce neo-colonial structural dependency or sow internal social division. Instead, it has focused on evolving structures designed to harness national unity and promote social justice. The absolute insistence that a state possesses no institutions unless it hosts a conventional multi-party national parliament is a form of analytical blindness. It ignores a complex machinery of resource management, the total eradication of structural neo-colonial institutional practices, the resilience of public networks under decades of intense external hostility, and the deep national consensus that has preserved sovereign integrity against formidable odds. Eritrea’s performance in expanding literacy, securing basic material infrastructure, and maintaining internal peace under adverse conditions provides definitive proof that its institutions are not absent. They are simply built for the welfare and survival of its people, rather than for the political posturing and applause required by external actors.

This ethos is captured precisely by President Isaias Afwerki’s reflections on the necessity of engineering national institutions that genuinely reflect the social composition, historical experience, and material conditions of the Eritrean people:

Over the past 35 years, Eritrea has built modest institutions and institutional framework that reflect its own conditions. It has trained and educated its people to ensure intergenerational continuity. There are established institutions that are specifically mandated to ensure organizational excellence, combat corruption, address public grievances and above all protect the nation from predatory spoilers. Eritrea isn’t alone in this journey. It has trusted partners and friends which it collaborates with based on mutual respect and complementarity. Today Eritrea has also signed or acceded to approximately 50 to 60 major international and regional/continental conventions, treaties, and agreements. Within the UN system, Eritrea has deposited instruments of ratification or accession for about 30 major global treaties and conventions, prioritizing core human rights, humanitarian protection, transnational security, and environmental coordination. At the continental and sub-regional level, it is bound by about 20 agreements and charters, shaped heavily by its status as a member of the modern African Union (AU) and its engagement with regional blocs. Eritrea’s signing or accession to these treaties and agreements attests to its strong emphasis on being bound by institutional frameworks that fit to its realities as a member of the global community of sovereign states.

Conclusion: Institutions That Serve a People, Not a Performance

The record shows that Eritrea’s institutions cannot be dismissed simply because they do not conform to a narrow external template. A state that preserves internal peace, maintains territorial security, administers justice, delivers public services, mobilizes national labor, sustains diplomatic representation, and endures war, sanctions, isolation, and regional instability is not operating from an institutional vacuum. These outcomes require structure, discipline, coordination, and legitimacy rooted in society.

Eritrea’s institutional path is neither complete nor perfect. No serious state-building project is. Institutions mature through experience, correction, training, generational renewal, and internal debate. Questions concerning national political structures, and broader forms of participation remain important. But these are questions of evolution, not evidence of absence. To confuse an unfinished institutional journey with institutional nonexistence is intellectually dishonest.

The deeper issue is that Eritrea has refused the post-colonial and neocolonial script. It has refused to inherit colonial structures, decorate them with imported democratic language, and outsource national policy to donors, creditors, consultants, and foreign agencies. It has chosen instead to build from within, according to its own historical experience and sovereign priorities. That choice irritates those who believe African legitimacy must be certified from outside.

The accusation that Eritrea has “no institutions” therefore reveals more about the accuser than about Eritrea. It is not a measurement of capacity; it is a demand for conformity. It does not ask whether Eritrea’s systems serve Eritreans. It asks why Eritrea does not perform for external approval.

Eritrea’s institutions are real because they are rooted in the country’s own struggle, conditions, and national purpose. They are instruments of survival, welfare, cohesion, dignity and sovereignty. They may not wear the costume preferred by Western observers, but they have carried a nation through extraordinary pressure without surrendering its independence. That is not institutional absence. That is institutional reality.