Eritrea is one of the world's newest countries and, proportionally to its population, one of the most militarised. Inheriting a socioeconomic situation devastated by 30 years of guerrilla warfare, the current government organised reconstruction efforts around the "Warsay Ykäạlo Development Campaign" including National Service conscription. Over the past decade, the Eritrean state has developed techniques of surveillance of conscripts through the production and distribution of documents (IDs, laissez-passer) that must be presented at hundreds of checkpoints deployed throughout the national territory. Since the duration of National Service has been extended to an unlimited period of time, these surveillance mechanisms have mainly focused on cracking down, identifying and preventing defection. Despite important limitations to its surveillance of conscripts, the Eritrean state successfully keep hundreds of thousand of conscripts working in the National Service for many years. I argue that the surveillance apparatus itself, in both its bureaucratic and its military formulations contributes almost on a daily basis to (re)producing various uncertainties, fears, beliefs and expectations that are the core of relative coercion in the National Service. Moreover, bureaucratic procedures and police interventions contribute to the perpetuation and actualisation of a despotic modality of governance, inducing in conscripts the perception of the existence of a highly authoritarian police state that is effectively omniscient despite their experiences of the low-tech surveillance.
Since 2005, the Eritrean state has implemented measures against the increasing desertion of conscripts by retaliating against deserters' families. This article explores the fears spread by this measure in Eritrea and analyzes how people have interpreted its erratic enforcement, including in those countries to which deserters have fled in massive numbers to seek political asylum. The retaliation has served to 'export' fears about the Eritrean state's surveillance abroad and has reshaped political imagination concerning the power of the Eritrean authoritarian state in the diaspora. I argue that imaginings about the state play a crucial role by curbing the political dissidence of new exiles and by giving rise to new fault lines in the diaspora communities in ways that are beneficial to the current Eritrean leadership.
Cet article aborde la question de la production de l’insécurité ressentie par les conscrits en Érythrée ainsi que les stratégies que ces derniers développent pour évaluer les risques qu’ils encourent. Au-delà des dysfonctionnements institutionnels de la surveillance et de la répression policière, les stratégies pour décrypter l’arbitraire étatique renforcent le sentiment d’insécurité et forgent la représentation d’un État omniscient. Ces logiques, qui catalysent les peurs, la suspicion, et favorisent la délation, représentent le modus operandi despotique qui caractérise un État policier en Afrique, imposant des limites aux relations de confiance entre les individus.
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