Misinformation in Academic Robes: Intellectual Malpractice Disguised as Scholarship

by Ghidewon Abay Asmerom

Response to William Gourlay “Another war in the Horn of Africa would be disastrous for one of the world’s most repressive nations” in The Conversation

Not all propaganda shouts; some whispers in footnotes. When territorial ambition is softened into “concern,” and sovereignty is recast as psychological defect, the danger lies not in ignorance but in authority misused. William Gourlay’s article in The Conversation presents itself as a warning against war in the Horn of Africa, yet its real function is to legitimize Ethiopian revisionism while pathologizing Eritrean statehood. Explicit claims on Eritrean territory are reframed as understandable anxieties, while Eritrea is reduced to a caricature, “repressive,” “hermit-like,” and inherently deficient. This is not balanced analysis; it is narrative construction under the cover of expertise. The asymmetry is deliberate, not incidental, and it reveals a deeper refusal to treat Eritrea as a normal sovereign state protected by international law. When commentary grants empathy to ambition but suspicion to legality, it does not prevent war, it helps make it thinkable.

Mischaracterization Begins with Basic Facts

The article’s intent is revealed less by what it argues than by how it frames its subject. This is not an attempt to report on a distant or complex conflict; it is an exercise in disparagement. The title: “the world’s most repressive nations”, betrays that purpose from the outset. By what standard, and according to whose metrics, is Eritrea deemed among the most repressive on earth? The article offers none. There is not a single verifiable benchmark, comparative dataset, or rigorous methodology presented to sustain such a claim. Instead, the designation reads as a rhetorical flourish, an unearned superlative deployed to provoke rather than to inform. For an author relying on cursory online searches rather than serious research, such shortcuts may pass as analysis. They do not withstand scrutiny.

The framing deteriorates further in the opening paragraph, where Eritrea is casually described as Ethiopia’s “diminutive neighbour.” This adjective has no relevance to the subject under discussion, nor does it carry any analytical weight. International law does not scale with land area, and geopolitical legitimacy is not measured in square kilometers. More importantly, the description is factually wrong. Eritrea covers approximately 125,000 square kilometers, larger than more than one hundred UN member states worldwide. Within Africa alone, at least seventeen countries are smaller. In Europe, more than a dozen states, including Portugal, Ireland, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, the Baltic states, Albania, and the successor states of the former Yugoslavia—occupy less territory than Eritrea. In Asia, countries such as South Korea, Jordan, Israel, the Gulf states, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, and Taiwan are likewise smaller.

To label Eritrea “diminutive” is therefore not merely careless; it is misleading. One is left to ask whether the author would apply the same descriptor to Switzerland or Israel, or whether the term is reserved for African states deemed convenient to belittle. The answer appears implicit in the article’s tone. What masquerades as neutral reporting is, in fact, a narrative shaped by condescension, unsupported assertions, and a troubling indifference to basic factual accuracy.

This lack of care continues when the article refers to Abiy Ahmed as “Ethiopian President.” Ethiopia’s president is Taye Atske-Selassie; Abiy Ahmed is prime minister. Such an elementary error in an academic outlet raises doubts about the rigor applied elsewhere in the piece.

Normalizing Irredentism through Language

Gourlay reports that Abiy Ahmed has described Ethiopia’s loss of Red Sea access as a “historical mistake” and an “existential question.” These words are not benign metaphors. In parliamentary and public remarks since 2023, Abiy has repeatedly framed access to the Red Sea as inevitable and tied to Ethiopia’s survival. Language of inevitability and correction, when applied to a neighbor’s sovereign territory, is a classic marker of irredentist thinking.

The article treats such statements as reasonable expressions of economic necessity. International law, however, is unequivocal: economic inconvenience does not confer territorial entitlement. The port of Assab has never been Ethiopian territory. In the nineteenth century, it formed the nucleus of Italian Eritrea, later becoming one of the two principal ports of the Eritrean state federated with Ethiopia in 1950, and it has remained part of an independent Eritrea since 1991. Its legal status was reaffirmed through the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission established under the Algiers Agreement, a treaty Ethiopia voluntarily signed and whose terms it formally accepted. To speak of “regaining” Assab is therefore not an argument grounded in law or history; it is a repudiation of a binding legal settlement and an endorsement of territorial revisionism.

The Fiction of Eritreans’ Ignorance

Perhaps the most revealing passage in Gourlay’s article is the claim that public responses in Asmara were “muted,” followed by the speculation that “few Asmarinos were aware of these developments” because “the media is entirely government controlled.” This is not evidence-based reporting; it is inference built on ignorance of local realities.

The article’s insinuation that Eritreans were somehow “unaware” of Ethiopia’s Red Sea rhetoric is not merely incorrect; it is either a symptom of remarkable ignorance or an exercise in intentional disinformation. Eritrea operates daily television, radio, and print media in multiple languages. National radio broadcasts in at least nine Eritrean languages, while newspapers are published regularly in Tigrinya, Tigre, Arabic, and English. Ethiopian statements regarding Red Sea access have been widely reported and discussed across these platforms.

Beyond domestic media, satellite television is ubiquitous, enabling Eritreans to follow Ethiopian, Arab, and international news directly and in real time. The notion that a population embedded in a multilingual, multi-platform media environment was oblivious to rhetoric that dominated regional discourse defies credibility. It reveals far more about the author’s failure to observe, listen, or engage meaningfully with Eritrean society than it does about the public’s awareness. What is presented as insight is, in reality, projection, substituting the author’s own informational blind spots for empirical reality.

Rewriting Eritrea’s Security Choices

Gourlay further claims that after the 1998 border war, President Isaias Afwerki “reinstated compulsory military service”. This is factually incorrect. Eritrea’s National Service was introduced in summer of 1994 and codified in Proclamation No. 82/1995, well before the 1998–2000 war. What changed after 1998 was not the existence of national service but its extension in response to renewed hostilities and Ethiopia’s refusal to implement the boundary ruling. One would expect a serious “scholar” to tell the difference.

More fundamentally, the article reduces Eritrea’s political trajectory to an inward-looking tale of authoritarian impulse, as though it unfolded in a vacuum. This framing is not merely incomplete; it is analytically indefensible. It ignores a decisive external reality: for nearly two decades, Ethiopia refused to implement the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission ruling, maintaining a deliberate “no-war, no-peace” posture while continuing to occupy sovereign Eritrean territory in open violation of international law. To abstract Eritrea’s security policies from this context is to erase cause and elevate consequence. Under conditions of unresolved borders, sustained military threat, and legal noncompliance by thorny neighbor, securitization is not aberrant, it is the predictable response of any state intent on survival. What distinguishes Eritrea is not exceptional repression, but the persistence with which its legal rights were denied while its reactions were selectively pathologized.

Selective History and Exotic Fillers

While Gourlay correctly notes Eritrea’s forced federation with Ethiopia in 1952 and annexation in 1962, he omits the crucial implication: Eritrea’s independence completed a decolonization process interrupted by a UN-sanctioned injustice, rather than constituting secession from a legitimate sovereign. This legal lineage is essential to understanding Eritrean political culture, yet it is quickly displaced by psychologized explanations borrowed almost entirely from Michela Wrong’s partly tabloid and apocryphal book “I Didn’t Do It for You“, a work that is neither archival nor scholarly.

The same lack of seriousness surfaces in the article’s references to “highland camel markets” and a “visible military presence across the country.” Camels are central to Eritrea’s lowland pastoral economies; they are not features of the central highland plateau around Asmara, Dekemhare, or Mendefera. At most, the author may have glimpsed a camel caravan passing through the highlands—hardly unusual in a country with integrated trade routes, but that is categorically different from a camel market. “Highland camel markets” do not exist in the highlands. The phrase is pure invention.

Such a claim betrays either a fundamental misunderstanding of Eritrea’s geography and economic life or a willingness to manufacture exotic imagery for narrative effect. In either case, it underscores the article’s broader problem: observation mistaken for knowledge, impression elevated to analysis, and fiction smuggled in under the guise of reportage These descriptions function as orientalist color rather than verifiable observation.

Likewise, his statement “there is a visible military presence across the country” is simply false. Eritrea’s defense forces are largely invisible in the cities. Visitors in Asmara, Massawa, Keren, or Barentu rarely encounter armed soldiers or police. There are no military checkpoints in cities, and police are typically unarmed. Seeing individuals in fatigues (common among civil-service trainees) is not evidence of “military presence.”

The Danger of the Closing Frame

The article closes with the claim that Eritrea is “ill-equipped to respond” to another war and that its people would suffer most. This final move is not merely careless; it is the most revealing and irresponsible passage in the entire piece. It sidesteps the only question that matters, who is making territorial claims, and on what legal basis, and replaces it with speculation about Eritrea’s presumed weakness. In doing so, it accomplishes three things at once: it normalizes Ethiopian irredentism, preemptively assigns blame to Eritrea for a conflict it has neither sought nor threatened, and signals to Addis Ababa that escalation will be met with moralizing commentary rather than legal accountability or strategic consequence.

What this framing betrays is a profound ignorance of Eritrean history, society, and military reality. Eritrea has no interest in war. War is not abstract in Eritrea; it is lived memory. It consumes people, families, and futures. Eritreans understand the cost of war more intimately than most, and for that very reason, the loss of even a single Eritrean life is regarded as one too many. Eritrea does not view its children as expendable, as cannon fodder, or as mine sweepers for geopolitical fantasy. This is not rhetoric, it is a principle forged through decades of sacrifice and struggle.

At the same time, restraint should not be mistaken for incapacity. Eritrea does not flaunt its military capabilities, nor does it traffic in theatrical displays of force. But it is more than capable of defending its territory, as history has repeatedly demonstrated. To suggest otherwise is to confuse quiet determination with weakness, a mistake that has been made before, always at great cost to those who made it.

If the author were genuinely concerned with preventing war, he would interrogate the ambitions of the party making territorial demands rather than speculate about the vulnerability of the party defending its internationally recognized borders. By fixating on Eritrea’s supposed fragility, the article reveals its true posture: not analysis, but projection. Those eager to lecture Eritrea about preparedness would do better to reflect on the consequences of throwing stones while standing in a glass house.

Eritrea is not a humanitarian experiment, a Western disappointment, or a cautionary tale. It is a sovereign state with internationally recognized borders, affirmed by treaty and arbitration. The real question raised by Gourlay’s article is not whether Eritrea is repressive or resilient, but why African borders are treated as inviolable everywhere except when Ethiopian ambitions are involved.

Until commentators confront that double standard, such articles will continue to function not as warnings against war, but as soft enablers of it.

Intellectual Malpractice Disguised as Scholarship

The Conversation claims to occupy a higher ground in public discourse, assuring readers that its articles are written by university scholars with “deep expertise,” that they do not oversimplify complex issues, and that they serve democracy by elevating informed voices. William Gourlay’s article makes a mockery of those claims.

What is presented as scholarly analysis is, in reality, an exercise in intellectual negligence. The piece is not merely weak; it is fundamentally unserious. It displays the hallmarks of shallow sophomoric commentary, careless with facts, indifferent to history, and oblivious to legal context, while trading on the authority of an academic affiliation it does not merit.

The article betrays no sustained engagement with Eritrea’s history, languages, legal foundations, or political evolution. Instead, it relies on anecdote, recycled clichés, and voyeuristic “on-the-ground” impressions that substitute observation for understanding. Errors that should have been caught in the most basic editorial review, misidentifying political offices, mangling timelines, misrepresenting institutions, and exoticizing everyday life, are allowed to stand. This is not rigorous scholarship; it is malpractice.

Even more troubling is the article’s ideological posture. Ethiopian territorial claims are laundered as reasonable anxieties, while Eritrean sovereignty is treated as an aberration to be explained away. Aggressive rhetoric is normalized; legal facts are marginalized. The result is not analysis but narrative alignment, an alignment that echoes decades-old propaganda frameworks hostile to Eritrea, now repackaged in the language of concern and humanitarian alarm.

If this is what The Conversation now considers “expert knowledge,” then its claim to enrich democratic debate collapses under its own weight. Democracy is not strengthened by misinformation wearing academic robes, nor by commentary that flatters power while caricaturing those who insist on the rule of law.

This article does not merely fail Eritrea; it fails scholarship itself. And by publishing it under the banner of academic authority, The Conversation compromises its credibility and insults the very scholars it purports to represent.

In the end, this article does not merely misrepresent Eritrea; it exposes a deeper failure of intellectual responsibility. What is passed off as “expert analysis” is little more than ideological storytelling fortified by academic branding. By publishing a piece so riddled with factual errors, historical illiteracy, and legal amnesia, The Conversation abandons its own professed standards and invites readers to mistake prejudice for insight. This is not scholarship in the service of democracy; it is the corrosion of scholarship itself. When advocacy is laundered through the language of expertise, truth becomes collateral damage, and that is precisely what has occurred here.

References 

• Abiy Ahmed. 2023. Remarks to the Ethiopian House of Peoples’ Representatives, October.
• EEBC (Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission). 2002. Decision Regarding Delimitation of the Border. The Hague.
• Government of Eritrea. 1995. National Service Proclamation No. 82/1995. Asmara.
• Shaw, Malcolm N. 2017. International Law. 8th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• UN General Assembly. 1950. Resolution 390A(V), December 2.
• UN Security Council. 2002–2008. Reports of the Secretary-General on UNMEE. New York.
• UN Statistics Division. 2024. Demographic Yearbook. New York.