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Eritrean politics is increasingly captured in competing narratives of nationalism. 'Official' narratives emphasize Eritrea's purported stability, orderliness, and uniqueness. This discourse defends and supports the current government's policies. In contrast, recent research challenges those policies, and contributes to a nationalist counter-narrative. This article seeks to investigate the discursive power of conventional narratives and the implications of new research for accounts of state and nation-building in Eritrea. The Eritrean case -one of the newest states in the worldintersects with and informs a number of broader debates on nationalism and nationbuilding: the impact of globalization, secessionism, and war as well as the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. The penetration of state and nation-building projects into every sector of Eritrean life means that all social research is deeply politicised. Journalists and researchers have long been key players in the contested process of conceptualising Eritrean nation-hood, and this continues in the postliberation period. Research thus both buttresses and challenges official discourses, even where it is not explicitly framed in terms of nationalism.

In May and June 2005, thousands of Zimbabweans were brutally displaced from urban areas. But 'Operation Murambatsvina' was not simply an unpredictable 'tsunami,' rather it provides a moment in which long-held prejudices and assumptions which shaped the developmental state became visible, reflecting not just the internalisation of the Rhodesian, modernist world-view, but also its imbrication with local understandings of home and home-ness. To see Murambatsvina as simply a politically expedient move is to miss the deep resonance of the political rhetoric, the ways it was embedded in the state, and how it is shaped by norms of citizenship.Contextualised against Harare's urban politics, the clearances reveal a long-standing set of policies designed to regulate and control urban life, forming part of a broader crisis of the post-colonial developmental state. (150 words)