Systemic ambivalence in authoritarian contexts: The case of opinion formation in Eritrea

Political Geography 73 (2019) 28–37

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Systemic ambivalence in authoritarian contexts: The case of opinion formation in Eritrea

T

Dr Georgia Cole Research Fellow at the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, CB3 9DF, UK

A B S T R A C T

This article details the perspectives of individuals within Eritrea towards migrants who have left the country. In part, it corroborates the work of other authors on the topic of migration in this context, who note Eritreans' deep ambivalence when discussing this politically and emotionally charged topic. Whilst citizens opposed to Eritrea's ruling regime repeat its explanations for this phenomenon, and regularly downplay or dismiss the state violence that contributes towards this mass exodus, they simultaneously express empathy towards those who have left, acknowledging the reasons that compelled them to leave and the hardships they have faced in doing so. Unlike these previous contributions, however, this article is concerned to explore not only how government narratives affect personal experience, but also with how these critical citizens end up co-constituting authoritarian power. In detailing citizens' contradictory, concurrent views, it makes a case for understanding ambivalence in authoritarian spaces as a systemic feature of political and social life, which assists in perpetuating authoritarian rule in a context of political and economic atrophy. It substantiates this by describing mechanisms through which authoritarian rule extends beyond points of contact and moments of direct coercion. Namely, it explores how government-sanctioned vocabularies and interpretations may affect intimate relationships conducted in and through private spaces. Alongside revealing the political importance of ambivalence in authoritarian environments, the article thus aims to highlight key avenues for thinking about the spatiality and endurance of these regimes of control.

1. Introduction In early November 2017, I was on the phone to an Eritrean friend, Sami,1 and he was clearly agitated. Earlier that day, writing up my field diary, I had come across a conversation with a close friend of his from six months earlier, a man he worked alongside and employed. My notes recounted the friend, Tekle, stating emphatically that he would never leave Asmara: his friends were there, life was simple and communityoriented, the weather was great, his national service was far from onerous, and the dangers and unknowns of moving elsewhere meant that ‘exit’ was firmly off his radar. Five days before that phone call, however, Tekle had left for Sudan and Sami, along with several other friends in Asmara, was left disappointed and upset. They felt angry at Tekle for leaving with no plan and almost no money, and from a situation that they did not consider that bad. His national service was relatively relaxed, they reasoned; he was receiving adequate remittances, he was able to supplement these from a second job, and he had little reason to fear the government. Tekle's brother in North America was already struggling to support him when he was in Asmara, and people worried about how the brother, and Tekle's extended family, would respond to this additional demand of financing his journey. It was not that Sami did not sympathise with his friend's desire to leave: he recognised that leaving was the only real form of mobility available

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to most Eritreans in the country's highly restrictive and unpredictable environment. But he was disappointed by what he thought was his friend's selfish, poorly-conceived, naïve and seemingly unnecessary departure, driven by what he felt was the bewitching allure of an easier, more exciting life elsewhere. Much of the literature on migration, including from Eritrea, has focused on those in Tekle's position; exploring their motivations for leaving (Kibreab, 2013; Røsberg & Tronvoll, 2017), the dangers of the journey (Tubiana, Warin, & Saeneen, 2018), and their experiences upon arrival in countries of asylum (Al-Ali, Black, & Koser, 2001; Hirt, 2014; Müller, 2015). This article takes a different focus, instead exploring the experiences and views of those who, like Sami, stay. Drawing on material collected over the course of 2017 in Eritrea's capital, Asmara, it documents how these individuals felt about those who had left, and how they made sense of this mass migration. At its peak in the mid2010s, Eritrea had the highest per capita emigration in the world from a country ostensibly at peace. This article captures and seeks to understand those who object to Eritrea's ruling party, the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), and yet, like Sami, are still ambivalent about those friends and family members who leave. Here then it provides further evidence in support of those authors exploring the concept of ‘ambivalence’ in the Eritrean context (Hirt & Mohammad, 2017; 2013; Treiber, 2009; Riggan, 2016; Belloni, 2019a).

E-mail address: [email protected]. All names, and some personal details, have been changed to ensure individual's anonymity. All research was conducted in Asmara, unless otherwise specified.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.05.003 Received 11 November 2018; Received in revised form 7 May 2019; Accepted 12 May 2019 Available online 20 May 2019 0962-6298/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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imparted in our minds and part of our culture, if we are to discuss it honestly. […] Whether consciously or unconsciously, it has affected our mentality. This is the real story.“3 Particularly in the last decade, however, the nature of migration has changed. The number of Eritreans seeking asylum in Europe tripled from 2013 to 2014, when this population lodged almost 40,000 claims for refugee status (UNHCR, 2014). Behind this figure lies a story of indefinite national service, arbitrary and abusive government policies, and general state-induced economic atrophy. Individuals are allocated jobs based on their performance at Sawa, the country's military training academy for high-school leavers, and must serve in these positions until discharged. Employment in Eritrea is overwhelmingly provided through mandatory national service and remunerated at a rate that, at least in Asmara, falls far short of covering basic subsistence costs. Aside from the economically and often physically debilitating nature of this work, the government's overarching control of life within Eritrea has created a sociological variant of ‘locked-in’ syndrome within the country. “The government has a war with us – not with guns or with fighting but with our minds. It is a mind war.“4 Most citizens are fully aware of a world of rights and opportunities outside of Eritrea. They are nonetheless prevented from accessing them legally due to restrictions on exit visas, and are unable to access them in situ because of the ruling party's imposition of a stifling array of restrictions. Most basic freedoms, including of speech, religion and association, do not exist. An ambiguous system of surveillance has created mistrust between citizens, not least because the true extent and capacity of this security apparatus remains unknown (Bozzini, 2015). The overwhelming majority of Eritreans I have spoken with over the last 6 years feel constrained by this system, which has deprived them, and their families and friends, of a safe, viable and meaningful future. Against such a backdrop, the theories provided below are of course only one way through which to understand the nature of political life in this context. Building a rich, textured account of how authoritarian authority is exercised requires numerous, complementary theoretical perspectives (Wedeen, 1999). The present discussion, however, focusses on how migration and migrants are interpreted in the Eritrean context. I therefore draw primarily upon theories that expose the power of ruling elites to shape intimate spaces and interactions by controlling how populations should ‘read’ social and political phenomenon (Havel, 1978; Linke, 2006). To connect the political control of public discourse with its impact on private perspectives, I briefly turn to literature from political anthropology on the affective dimension of power. The next section elucidates these approaches in detail. It provides a theoretical foundation for collapsing the distinction between an oppressive governing regime and an opposing populace, and lays out one means for understanding how ambivalence can become structurally and spatially embedded in authoritarian contexts. The empirical sections then map onto this framework. After detailing the Eritrean government's public narratives on emigration, and the views of the citizens with whom I spoke, I discuss the political and structural relationship between the two. In doing so, this article adds to recent writing on authoritarianism within political geography (Dalmasso et al., 2017; Gerschewski, 2013; Schatz, 2009). Work on this has tended to focus on the concrete policies enacted by authoritarian regimes during moments of contact with their citizens, whether within their countries of origin or abroad. Geographers have, for example, looked at how objects, spectacles and citizens coalesce in a particular space to reproduce dominant or repressive nationalisms (Militz & Schurr, 2016; Griffiths & Repo, 2018). They have assessed how public articulations of support can accommodate private systems of ‘unbelief’ (Wedeen, 1999), thus positioning

These authors note how Eritrea's political and social milieu, rooted in a thirty-year popular struggle for independence and shaped now by restrictive one-party rule, has resulted in a population conflicted about its relationship to the authorities in Eritrea and in its attempts to represent various ideals and positions. Recently, Milena Belloni (2019a: 55)) has detailed the struggle of Eritrean migrants to reconcile, and then embody, contradictory facets of nationalism, political mobilisation and personal aspirations. She attributes this to individuals ‘embodying more than one role (i.e. patriots, family breadwinners, refugees from and citizens of their homeland), from contradictory expectations pertaining to the same role (i.e. young citizens in Eritrea) and from clashing implications of being members of two different social systems (i.e. the destination country and the country of origin).’ While concurring with much of the analysis in this vein, this article goes beyond these contributions to explore not only how individuals and relationships are affected by contradictory narratives but also how the resultant ambivalence leads to citizens co-constituting systems of power they fundamentally object to. It links discussions on the ‘normative inconsistencies’ (Belloni, 2019a) that individuals adapt to and adopt with an exploration of how power operates in authoritarian contexts. Doing so makes apparent that ambivalence and incoherence are more than a systemic feature of Eritrea's authoritarian context; they are key to how the ruling party's control is perpetuated despite their chronic failure to meet citizens' needs. The views below were collected during two research trips to Eritrea in 2017. On the first trip I spoke almost exclusively to people who did not support the government.2 This was unintentional but not surprising: I was discussing migration with an urban population known to be disenchanted – at best – with the PFDJ. The second trip was the opposite. I returned to Asmara to interview those who supported the PFDJ, including current government employees and members of the diaspora who had responded to the government's calls for educated and entrepreneurial returnees. Though opinions from both visits are included below, more emphasis is placed on the views of the former group, since though they represent only a sub-section of the country's urban population, this group represents a larger part of Eritrea's social field than the narrow group of pro-PFDJ political elites. The latter group's views are used as further evidence of the PFDJ's narrative on Eritrean migration. Both trips were part of a larger project to explore the perceived value of refugee status for displaced Eritreans and those contemplating crossing the border. Part of this involved gathering perspectives on migration, and migrants, from individuals who had stayed in Eritrea, to understand both how people viewed migration and how contemporary migration is shaping social space and relationships within the country. Most interlocutors emphasized that migration has served crucial functions throughout Eritrea's history. During the country's long struggle to regain its independence, ‘exit’ promised relative safety and security for those escaping first Emperor Haile Selassie and then the Derg. Once overseas, migrants provided financial and logistical support for the liberation fronts and those who remained within Eritrea (Ek & Karadawi, 1991). Though the context has changed, this trend continues. Members of the diaspora still send remittances to relatives and acquaintances within Eritrea, which helps to prop up an economy that has yet to recover from the 1998–2000 border war with Ethiopia and the stalemate, sanctions and international isolation that have followed. As a result of this history, as one government employee put it, migration “is

2 Here, I intentionally do not use the word ‘opposition’ because this is not a role that any of my close interlocutors identify with. Havel similarly observed that people were reluctant to identify as ‘an opposition’ in the period he was observing because this involved deriving their position from that of the regime. He found that people were far more comfortable building alternative realities that, as much as possible, rendered the government irrelevant. This chimes with my own observations from Asmara.

3 Interview, Male employee of the Department of Economic Affairs, December 2017. 4 Male, 30s, April 2017.

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fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.’ While it is true that individuals can both undertake public acts that reinforce a system and be personally or existentially opposed to it, Havel suggests that there is no neat spatial or personal distinction between public affirmation and private opposition. He argues that the post-totalitarian world is not like classical dictatorships, where a clear delineation seems to exist between the ruler and the ruled, and where the ruler tends to exercise only very shallow forms of control. In Havel’s (1978: 17) view, the line of conflict between individual aspirations for a meaningful life and the political aims of the system, a tension in which feelings of ambivalence are rooted, ‘runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system. What we understand by the system is not, therefore, a social order imposed by one group upon another, but rather something which permeates the entire society and is a factor in shaping it, something which may seem impossible to grasp or define (for it is in the nature of a mere principle), but which is expressed by the entire society as an important feature of its life.’ One way of explaining how this system ‘permeates the entire society’ is provided by literature that has emerged since the publication of these commentaries on authoritarian rule, and which explores the affective dimension of political power. This work has moved beyond analysing the material and planned enactments of political actors to consider how political power is reproduced through the ability of ruling regimes to shape, condition and evoke affective responses within the population (Massumi, 2002). Political anthropologists working in this vein have used ethnography to ‘highlight how state bureaucracy operates through the production and circulation of fear, hope, and suspicion as much as through practices of classification and inscription' (NavaroYashin, 2002: 3; Faria, 2014). It has highlighted how, through various mechanisms, governing authorities provide the contours for citizens' emotional planes, which then become assimilated into ‘the ordinary sensory practices of everyday life’ (Linke, 2006: 212). Here, it is noted, their ‘embodi[ment] without interpretative mediation’ makes the initial prompts much harder to spot (ibid.: 212), leading to individuals unwittingly internalizing, personalizing and reciting the emotional and discursive frames provided by the government. The result is a form of epistemic violence where the ruling party's role in producing certain emotional reactions, or contradictory or ambivalent views on sociopolitical phenomena, is obscured. Importantly, as Linke (2006: 210) flags, this recasts intimate personal practices not as ‘affectively neutral’ but as subjective experiences penetrated and shaped by the state and ruling elites. Control of discourse and behaviour in the public sphere is a critical step in this ideological permeation. Saturating public spaces with images, stories and significations of their choosing, ruling elites attempt to establish how populations should receive and interpret political and social events in all aspects of their lives (Wedeen, 1999). If done ‘successfully’, citizens are compelled to live within, and repeat, government-sanctioned versions of events, thus reifying these narratives. Wedeen shows how the success of President Asad's cult depended on ensuring that the population came ‘increasingly to share the common experience of its vocabulary’ (1999: 30). All interactions within Syria were conducted within a space that was legally, physically and discursively conditioned by the cult, with implications for interpersonal relationships and behaviour. In a rare passage where she discusses the impact of this on intimate spaces, Wedeen draws on Nabil Malik's film, al-Kumbars. Despite succeeding in establishing a private room in which to meet, ‘internalised taboos of sexual propriety and political pretense’ (1999: 116), alongside the eventual intrusion of a secret police officer, prevent two lovers interacting as hoped. Malik's two characters carry with them such politico-emotional baggage that they cannot consummate their relationship. Sexual and political impotence are inextricably linked across space. In one-party contexts such as Eritrea, where ruling parties have a near monopoly on public broadcasting and communication, this strategy of political and emotional control appears particularly well-

the private sphere as an autonomous and privileged site of moral clarity. This article, instead, looks beyond how physical or public coercion, threats of violence and punitive policies influence behaviour in authoritarian contexts. Indeed, in cafes and on couches during informal discussions around migration from Eritrea, the individuals I spoke with were not the same ‘coerced subjects’ that Riggan (2016) has brilliantly described in her work on Eritrean schools. Unlike in the environments she explores, where interlocutors were forcibly conscripted into enacting violence on behalf of the Eritrean state, the ways that governing structures affected individuals in the encounters I document were subtler and less immediately discerned. They did not concern points of direct contact between governing authorities and disciplined subjects, where the rules of engagement dictate various public performances of support. Rather, these discussions were occurring in private spheres of life, where interlocutors' regular critiques of the Eritrean government suggested that they felt no need to perform loyalty to the regime. By observing patterns of interpretation in arenas that governing authorities have a limited ability to directly control, I argue that we can garner deeper insights into the mechanisms through which governing ideologies and their effects are perpetuated and become systematised. 2. Arenas and exercises of authoritarianism Several seminal pieces of writing on authoritarianism and dictatorial control have shown the private sphere to be a critical space for subversion and resistance. Václav Havel (1978: 21), who wrote on power in the post-totalitarian system of communist-era Czech Republic,5 located resistance to the regime in the personal and the private, at ‘the level of human consciousness and conscience, the existential level.’ He saw the threat to power as ‘living within the truth’ and localized this selfless moral act within ‘the hidden sphere’: a space where thought and action had some immunity from the broader universe of lies that structured public conduct (ibid.: 20). Drawing upon this work, Lisa Wedeen (1999) has explored the relationship between public and private life under the cult of the late President Asad in Syria. Though her writing is largely concerned with the interactions between the population and the cult in public view, these interest her precisely because of how individuals reconcile oppositional systems of ‘unbelief’ – which find their nourishment in private spaces – with public performances of loyalty. Despite positioning private and ‘hidden’ arenas as the primary incubators for threats to post-totalitarian and cultish power, both authors – in a somewhat contradictory fashion – also collapse the distinction between an oppressive governing regime and an oppositional populace. They detail how the dominance of any regime is reproduced through the conscious and unconscious actions of the population under its control. Even in authoritarian settings, where power is ostensibly concentrated in officials and ruling parties, Wedeen (1999: 153) maintains that ‘power is nevertheless multiplied and diffused through people's everyday habits of conformity and the meanings they attach to them’. Havel (1978: 9) too recognised that individuals must, to ensure survival, live within the system of lies provided to them by the ruling communists, but that ‘by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, 5 Havel (1978) applies the term ‘post-totalitarian’ to the situation he describes rather than the term ‘dictatorship’ to highlight what he considers to be a unique system of political organisation and control. Alongside other examples, he argues that unlike the ahistorical nature of classical dictatorships, the post-totalitarian system is rooted in a series of social movements that emerged out of widely recognised social conflicts, and which provide some historical nourishment to the regime. Clear parallels can be seen with Eritrea's current situation, where the People's Front for Democracy and Justice emerged out of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF). After several decades in the trenches, the EPLF was instrumental in winning back Eritrea's freedom after Ethiopia's illegal annexation of the country in 1961.

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beneficial to the individuals concerned. “The current approach when these “refugees” are wasting their time and dignity - condemned as they are to leave [sic] on social welfare handouts - will compromise their future while fomenting hatred and resentment in the local community. High time, indeed, for Switzerland and other European countries in the same boat, to revisit their misguided policies which have contributed to create this situation in the first place." (Tibeb Hager in the Eritrea Profile, Swiss Obsession with Eritrea and Eritreans. 28 October 2015. Also available at: http://www.madote.com/ 2015/10/swiss-media-obsession-with-eritrea-and.html). Eritrea's national, state-run newspaper, from which this quote is taken, is not a source to uncritically mine for insights into public opinions or perspectives in Eritrea. Since the closure of all free press in 2001, Hadas Eritrea and its English language version – the Eritrea Profile – have been produced by the Ministry of Information and never waiver from the ruling party's script, often reading more like an organisational newsletter than a national newspaper. Coverage within the Eritrea Profile is nonetheless used here as a starting point for deciphering the government's interpretation of the out-migration of its youth, which has seized upon the idea of ‘strategic depopulation’. Within this frame, external agents encourage and entrench patterns of outmigration to weaken the Eritrean nation. They do so through coercion, deception, structural channels, ‘naked aggression’, ‘working hand and glove with human smugglers and human traffickers’,7 and more overt enticements such as automatic asylum. ‘Eritrea's children, unaccompanied minors, trickling out of Eritrea, are pawns, political props, in the anti-Eritrea political agendas and propaganda.‘8 When hundreds of Eritreans drowned off the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013, the government immediately blamed ‘external aggression’ and a ‘wicked conspiracy’9 for the events: ‘Such heinous crimes against the Eritrean people and government over the past 20 years were perpetrated through fanning unprecedented baseless “border conflicts”, blessing aggression against sovereign Eritrean territory, coupled with unwarranted and illegal “sanctions”, as well as organizing various forms of political, military and economic conspiracies leading to open aggression. And when all such conspiracies ended up in utter failure, the enemy quarters resorted to the human trafficking ploy with a view to disintegrating and paralysing the indomitable people and Government of Eritrea. ‘The prime responsibility for the gross loss of human life, as verified by concrete evidences, squarely rests on the US Administration that assigns agents of international and regional bodies, in addition to deploying various officials and spy agencies of different governments.'3 Government employees, for the most part, faithfully recited these renderings of events, though deviations revealed further state-sanctioned narratives. “Integrated strategic depopulation” was a mantra amongst those I spoke with, with their delivery conveying a certain deference to the script. As one employee of the Ministry of Development relayed, “Europe selects people at its doors, and has a preferential treatment for Eritreans that encourages them to cross the Mediterranean.“10 European governments were held responsible for luring Eritreans over to work as cheap labour only to then provide them with no security, thus forcing them into applying for asylum. “That's a cost for Africa, not for Europe. Europe gets what it needs.“11 An Eritrean woman who had relocated from Europe to ‘build capacity’ in the

honed. Bozzini (2015), for example, exposes mechanisms through which fear of the Eritrean government is reproduced outside directly coercive structures. These have enabled the PFDJ to exercise transnational control over an ever-expanding diaspora. He shows how ‘states of fearful anticipation’ and self-discipline among the Eritreans he spoke with result from the Eritrean government conveying a sense of its own instability and fragility (ibid.: 44).6 More generally, he makes the point that ‘a totalitarian regime cannot be understood except by taking into account official policies alongside their popular representations, fears about the state, and the consequences that these have for social relationships’ (ibid.: 40). By attuning people's understandings of their environment and the individuals they share it with, governments and states can shape the personal and emotional reactions that individuals have to their surroundings. The privileging of the private sphere as a unique space of resistance is thus tempered by an awareness that public discourses inflect personal frames of reference, which in turn shape individuals' interpretations of events, peoples and behaviours wherever they find themselves. In the following sections, I sketch the outline of this in the Eritrean case by relaying the ambivalent opinions held by my interlocutors about those who leave. This reveals individual's partial internalisation of the narrative's proffered by Eritrea's ruling party, and their subsequent positioning as both victims and involuntary vanguards of the regime. In the conclusion, the article returns to explore the political importance of ambivalence in authoritarian settings, and how the frameworks laid out here highlight key spatial and temporal aspects of authoritarian control. 3. Migration from Eritrea The majority of those leaving Eritrea now exit into Sudan or Ethiopia before, finances permitting, transiting onwards, including through Libya to the coast. Trafficking, abuse and extortion are all too commonplace on these routes (Botti, 2018). While commentators speculated that the Eritrean government once saw this exodus as an unfortunate but necessary ‘social safety valve’ (International Crisis Group (ICG), 2014: 9), allowing disenchanted youth to leave the country rather than challenge domestic political systems, the sheer magnitude of emigration did eventually cause concern within the country's ruling echelons. They responded by agreeing to participate in regional initiatives to address migration from and within the Horn of Africa, particularly those centred on human trafficking. Where the human rights narrative had unsurprisingly failed to secure the PFDJ's engagement in multilateral discussions on migration, focusing as it did on how their own domestic shortcomings were causing the country's youth to flee, the trafficking framing has bought the Eritrean government to the table. It has provided them with another new, externallyoriented explanation for the youths' departure. Alongside a series of existing interpretations of this phenomenon, this narrative has been ceaselessly broadcast to the country's population in an attempt to frame discussions on this topic. 3.1. The PFDJ's narrative on illegal emigration “Migration is not, of course, a new phenomenon. It will continue from all parts of the world as it is natural for people to flock where the “pasture is perceived to be greener”. But migration induced by false promises and/or rooted on wrong premises cannot be healthy and

7 Eritrea Profile (hereafter EP) (2015). Eritrea: Turning Challenges into Opportunities. 16 May, 22(22), 8. 8 EP (2015). ERITREA: National Service Does not Kill. 24 October, 22(68), 3. 9 EP (2014). Ambassador Tesfamariam calls on Israel to accord dignified treatment to Eritrean nationals victimised by human trafficking. 1 February, 20(97), 1. 10 Interview, Male employee of the Department of Economic Affairs, December 2017. 11 Interview, Male employee of the Ministry of National Development, December 2017.

6 Laszczkowski and Reeves (2015: 9) thus state that the work that emerges from this intellectual tradition provides an account ‘not of governance through control but of the proliferation of indeterminacy and their effects.’ They draw here on Dunn and Cons (2014) work, which highlights the gap between the total sovereign power discussed by Agamben and people's quotidian experiences of sovereign authorities in refugee camps, humanitarian contexts and at borders.

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country separately agreed that “nobody gets a visa for working so you get asylum.” While reluctantly admitting that some, albeit very few, Eritreans would qualify for asylum, interviewees argued that the vast majority would be better served through a work permit if only European governments were not too myopic or hypocritical to provide these.12 Alongside the government's attribution of responsibility for the youth's departure to a set of external actors, however, is their regular casting of emigrants as personally inadequate: inadequate in ambition, inadequate in morals, and inadequate in their commitment to Eritrea. Respondents reiterated that the previous generation paid with their lives to secure Eritrea's freedom. The “discomfort” of indefinite and underpaid national service was thus a more than manageable price for the current generation to pay.13 “We know we are paying a sacrifice. I could go to Europe and have more security for my family but that's not going to be a solution to our country. We cannot develop without sacrifice.“14 Those who shirked this obligation were dismissed as “betraying their history and their country when they leave”,15 and of risking the nation's integrity.16 It is here that the ‘regime's interpretation provides the guidelines for proper public articulations' around migration within and from Eritrea (Wedeen, 1999: 42, emphasis added). From the party's perspective, illegal migration from Eritrea should be primarily understood as driven by external pull-factors, and as being undertaken by a naïve and often selfish generation intent on ignoring how their departure threatens the very edifice of a state into which so much sacrifice has bled. On the one hand, through seeking to control the systems of signification and meaning that surround ‘illegal’ migration, these official renderings allow discussion on this topic to remain politically acceptable. On the other hand, the explanatory narratives promulgated by the PFDJ also provide prompts that shape the population's emotional and affective responses to such movements (Nuijten, 2004). Eritreans are encouraged to be disappointed in youthful naivety; betrayed by selfish exoduses; and angry, but not surprised, that countries in the Global North are once again disregarding and mistreating Eritreans. There are no prompts, however, that can automatically compel individuals to internalise authoritarian positions or discourses. This is particularly the case if doing so positions that individual as an agent of a state-orchestrated political project that they fundamentally object to (Linke, 2006). Instead, the regularity of the opposite situation emerging, of audiences proving reluctant to embrace sanctioned narratives, leads Linke (2006: 208) to question when and ‘whether there actually exists any congruence between nationalist discourse and everyday sensemaking.’ In a context of authoritarian rule, with its paucity of public legitimation and genuine support, this is an even more pertinent angle of enquiry. Taking this as a starting point she therefore urges empirical enquiry into ‘the complex ways in which the imaginaries of the state take on a social life through the subjects' capacity to perceive, feel, and interpret’ (Linke, 2006: 209). The following section follows this lead. It details the perceptions of migration, migrants and returnees among a population that largely opposes Eritrea's ruling party and its modes of governance, and yet replicates many of the narratives that pervade public space in Eritrea. This underpins a broader attempt to understand the systemic nature of ambivalence in the Eritrean context, by examining its impact on the level of personal and private reflection and by providing a series of

intersecting theoretical frameworks for explaining it. Alongside a series of complementary explanations lies the article's main argument. This follows from the observation that a key strategy of authoritarian regimes is to saturate public space with both a discursive and affective vocabulary through which the population should ‘read’ political and social events. Whether in public or private spaces, in contact with governing authorities or not, this affective footprint of authoritarian power ends up ‘disorientating’ citizens by, consciously and not, shaping opinion and attitude formation (Wedeen, 1999). Contradictory interpretations flow from citizens one after another in a narrative with false consonance, expressed as if they have been reconciled in a logical and harmonious way. The result is that ambivalence becomes an engrained and structural, albeit not totalizing, feature of life and relationships under authoritarian rule, as well as playing a fundamental role in the perpetuation of these systems of control by impeding collective action. 4. Personal narratives on migration from Eritrea Almost all the interviews I conducted in Eritrea contained moments when interlocutors expressed a palpable sense of disappointment with those who had left. Variants of a ‘personal inadequacy’ explanation for emigration underpinned this. Individuals would comment that while the government was largely responsible for the exodus of the country's youth, individual irresponsibility and moral shortfalls should not be discounted. Similarly, people saw their own listlessness as rooted in the country's poor economic situation but did not see that this justified the failure, particularly of parents, to encourage the next generation to work hard and seize what opportunities the country does have to offer.17 One returnee from Germany, a philosophical man prone to speaking at length and loudly about the government's numerous shortcomings,18 recounted a phrase that he felt summarised the youth's impressionable and myopic qualities. Translated by him from Tigrinya, it reads: “the first go without a clue, and the rest blindly follow.“19 Though first applied to the youth who fled their homes to join the country's liberation struggle, he felt that it was now just as relevant for young people trailing their peers across the border. Neither act was devoid of bravery per se, but both showed enormous recklessness and naivety. Individuals spoke of how their friends would follow others simply because migration was now the expected or cool thing to do.20 “It's like a fashion now.“21 Interlocutors would empathise with the reasons why individuals had left, noting how desperate the situation was within the country, but then regularly condemn those same people for their behaviour once they reached ‘outside’.22 The youth now leaving were regarded as being “lazy”, selfish and unmotivated, and – particularly for the college graduates – as wasting their skills.23 Residents, members of the diaspora, females, males, the young and old voiced this perspective, with individuals commenting on how these “new migrants” do not send money to their families and do not do enough to contribute to development in Eritrea.24 While blaming “European countries for making those people apply for asylum and get lazy”, Natu, for example, was also quick to suggest that “it would be better if you got 3 months of help during which time you had to get a job. And then if you couldn't get a job because you hadn't tried, then you should get deported."25 He felt 17

Male, 50s, May 2017. Over coffee one day, for example, this man memorably exclaimed, “What the fuck is this government doing?” in a discussion about national service. 19 Male, 40s, May 2017. 20 Female, 20s, April 2017. 21 Interview, Eritrean-European dual national, Female, 40s, December 2017; Lecturer, Male, 40s, May 2017. 22 Student, Male, 30s, April 2017. 23 Lecturer, Male, 50s, April 2017. 24 Interview, Eritrean-European dual national, Female, 40s, December 2017. 25 Businessman, 30s, May 2017. 18

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Interview, Female, 30s, December 2017. Interview, Male employee of the Department of Economic Affairs, December 2017; Italian-Eritrean, Female, 70s, December 2017. 14 Interview, Male employee of the Ministry of National Development, December 2017. 15 Interview, Employee at the National Union of Eritrean Youth, December 2017. 16 Employee within the PFDJ National Office, December 2017. 13

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that the young people leaving now were untethered and ill-disciplined, lacking the drive and ambition to make something of themselves outside. This was coming from a man who was nonetheless quick to criticise governance within the country. When I asked him on another occasion if he was excited about the Independence Day celebrations, he replied “You think we're independent? Really?! I'll celebrate our independence when I actually feel free!” Respondents referenced stories of Eritreans in Europe committing crimes to highlight that these individuals had lost their moral ways and cultural values.26 They felt ashamed of this population for letting the whole nation down, even going so far as to suggest that they were not really Eritreans anymore.27 Various explanations were provided for this ill-discipline. The fact that young people were leaving with limited language skills and education, which resulted in them struggling to find jobs and status in Europe, was regularly attributed to the confluence of broader social and cultural forces. A sympathetic narrative, theorised in the Eritrean context by Hirt and Mohammad (2013) through the idea of ‘anomie’, alluded to the social and societal fragmentation wrought by migration. With families dispersed around the globe, and children being raised by grandparents or distant relatives, individuals felt that it was unfair to expect these ‘parentless’ kids to grow up with discipline and values intact.28 A less sympathetic narrative was that technological change, foreign influence and general cultural atrophy had spawned a generation in Asmara more obsessed by personal accumulation than national advancement.29 One College lecturer argued that “we are not short of money, we are short of character”, and flagged the trend towards leaving as a pathology.30 He would speak at length about migration with enormous passion and deep concern, afraid as he was that it would first destroy the already damaged fabric of Eritrean society and then, with that, the country's sovereignty. He had no love for his government, but he held his country as sacrosanct. If people could not make something of themselves in Eritrea, respondents argued, they would not suddenly accrue ambition outside. Certain Asmarinos were indeed adamant that they had more opportunities for success within Eritrea than individuals who had left and would languish “in some train station in Europe wasting [their] life.” Of note is the fact that few of my respondents personally knew someone in this situation. This perspective nonetheless chimed with views advanced by the pro-government lobby. These were undoubtedly broadcast as a warning to those considering the journey as well as to draw attention to the failures and misfortunes of this impressionable population once outside: ‘For those who have taken the bait, the loneliness that comes with the separation, the alienation in cultures so different from that of their own, and the constant need to remain compliant with welfare requirements have contributed to the depression and other psychological problems that compound their already precarious state of mind'31 Further criticism was directed at individuals who had left and chosen to engage in political movements outside. Commenting on those who supported the government, one respondent stated “we really hate the people outside who defend this place – who come with their foreign dollars and passports – and say it is alright here, but don't understand how different their experience is” (see also Hirt, 2014). In a bar one evening, a young Eritrean who had returned from Europe began “don't get me wrong, I hate this government” but proceeded to criticise the opposition who misrepresented the situation within the country.32

Others bemoaned those youths who had been pro-government inside Eritrea, peddling narratives that had reified oppressive structures within the country, only to then regurgitate staunchly anti-government rhetoric once they had left. Echoing the government's view, they felt that this population should not have their cake and eat it. Respondents nonetheless knew that this duplicity might stem from harsh censorship within the country, and/or people's attempts to earn the PFDJ's trust so that they might be sent overseas officially and could then use that opportunity to apply for asylum. They also recognised that these individuals probably left for entirely justifiable reasons, rooted in the country's failed political economy. Their critique of this behaviour therefore hinged on the extremity of these young people's narratives: unquestioningly pro-PFDJ when they were inside Eritrea, blindly against as soon as they left.33 According to my respondents, the only real effect of this mobilisation was to caricature the country. Anti-government activists were by no means immune from this ire during discussions on migration. Those behind the Freedom Friday, or Arbi Harnet, movement were singled out for their automated phone call campaign, which was coordinated to deliver messages of hope and solidarity to Eritreans within the country.34 In practice, however, individuals would complain that calls from foreign numbers (rightly or wrongly attributed to this campaign) regularly woke them up, only to cut out as soon you answered them. More cuttingly, however, individuals commented that “we do not need people outside to tell us what our daily oppression looks and feels like.“35 They saw the opposition diaspora as focusing in on sensationalist displays of repression, and headline grabbing statistics about torture and incarceration, while more structural forms of violence enabled by the Eritrean regime received less attention.36 For these interlocutors, as Bourgois (2009: 17) writes, the singular fixation upon physical violence “distrac[ts] … from being able to see the less clearly visible forms of coercion, fear, and subjectification through which violence deceptively and perniciously morphs over time and through history.” Key to understanding this broader ambivalence towards those who have left, therefore, is the normalisation and downplaying of all forms of violence within Eritrea. Speaking from an American context, Graeber (2012) highlights how violence remains ubiquitous – in bureaucracies, in private institutions, in spaces as seemingly innocuous as university libraries – and yet we are ever-more programmed to dismiss this fact, to fail to see the coercive structures and systems of threat that underpin our social existences. Even in Eritrea, where people experience violence in much more overt ways, the same can be said. There is a striking nonchalance to how people discuss incidences of state repression. I was making pasta with an Eritrean friend one morning; a friend who had been sent to prison, aged 19, for trying to cross the border when her frustration with the regime had reached boiling point. I flippantly joked that perhaps we did not need to make two full dishes for lunch, particularly if we had any aspirations for a productive afternoon. They replied that the second dish was actually for an uncle who had been detained a few weeks ago in a prison just outside of Asmara, probably because his son had gone missing. When I apologised for my insensitive joke, the friend calmly replied that it would sort itself out and it was not the first time he had been rounded up to a cell, and we continued to build the lasagne.37

33

Academic, Male, 70s, June 2017. Arbi Harnet (2016). ‘Eritrea: 10,000 Telephones calls with Messages of Hope and Solidarity from Freedom Friday’, 21 November, Available at: http:// asmarino.com/press-releases/4832-eritrea-10-000-telephone-calls-withmessages-of-hope-and-solidarity-from-freedom-friday. 35 Conversation with two male colleagues, June 2017. 36 Academic, Male, 70s, June 2017. 37 Walking through a hotel foyer on another occasion, I bumped in to a woman whom I had already interviewed, who was preparing a presentation on gender inequality in Eritrea. She had previously lamented young people's ‘flightiness’ and impulsiveness, and how so many Eritreans were just 34

26

Male, 20s, April 2017; Student, Male, 20s, May 2017. Student, Male, 30s, April 2017. 28 Shop Assistant, Female, 20s, April 2017. 29 Italian-Eritrean, Female, 70s, December 2017. 30 Lecturer, Male, 40s, May 2017. 31 Sophia Tesfarmariam writing for the EP (2015). The Guardian's Incurable Obsession with Eritrea. 22 August, 22(50), 5. 32 Male, 30s, April 2017. 27

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Downplaying and dismissing violence is firmly rooted in Eritrean culture and history. Throughout the liberation struggle, the ability to endure individual hardship and suffering was promoted by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front38 as warranting no special recognition: resilience, sacrifice and stoicism were essential characteristics of the struggles' members, and adversity was meant to be weathered in silence. The government's tireless promotion of norms of good citizenship, prized cultural values and strong Eritrean integrity have thus left indelible impressions on the country's population, defining the parameters of acceptable behaviour. Today, this self-censorship of personal suffering continues. Eritreans are inculcated not only to interpret their sacrifice as no worse than anyone else's, and thus not worthy of discussion or attention, but also as central to the nation's success and a particularly valorised form of Eritrean identity (Bernal, 2014; see all; Scheper-Hughes, 1998). According to Bernal, ‘propaganda, censorship, and national narratives centred on collective struggle and sacrifice have produced not just strategic self-censorship among Eritreans but a more subtle political aphasia that renders some things unsayable’ (2017: 32). The result, she argues, is that these oppressive narratives about personal sacrifice ‘operate on Eritreans as a secondary form of violence that renders their personal losses unspeakable’ (ibid.: 24). Transposing this argument further upstream, it appears that certain phenomena are not only left unspoken within this authoritarian context but also, at times, unrecognised. Citizens denounce the overarching inhumaneness of their government but do not necessarily recognise the quotidian experiences of control and coercion that inform individual departures (Ordóñez, 2015). The opening story of Tekle and Sami epitomises this. Sami saw Tekle's situation as having been no worse than most, and without being a direct target of violence, the structural forms of oppression that he experienced were merely part and parcel of being Eritrean. Integral to this downplaying of violence are the governing narratives and emotional prompts that valorise suffering and stoicism, and which are naturalised in Tekle's account (Linke, 2006). In such a way, certain forms of violence enabled by the government's actions evade criticism, as “the socially dominated come to believe that the insults directed against them, as well as the hierarchies of status and legitimation that curtail their life chances, are accurate representations of who they are, what they deserve, and how the world has to be” (Bourgois, 2009, 19).39 This is a step beyond the ‘silence’ identified by Bernal (2017), which leaves people unable to recount the hardships they have experienced. Further epistemic violence is enacted on citizens through the government's vocal discounting of their suffering within Eritrea and upon leaving, and the translation of this perspective into a more widespread attitude that renders structural violence unexceptional. It was not therefore unusual for my interlocutors to dismiss the veracity of asylum claims made by individuals outside. Over a meal with close friends, one recounted the story of how his sister had decided to apply for asylum in North America after many years as a European citizen. In order to qualify, she had denied having spent any time in Europe and claimed, in his words, “my life is under threat, they imprisoned my family, the usual story.” She was now struggling to assimilate in her new city and wanted to leave, ideally back to Asmara. However, having used fake documents and spread “all kinds of awful,

clichéd lies about Eritrea”, she felt unable to return. The unsympathetic attitude of her brother and the others in the room towards her disloyalty and fraud indicated why.40 Our conversation continued in this vein for some time, with each individual recounting ways that they had heard that Eritreans outside were ‘playing’ convoluted immigration systems. They extrapolated from personal anecdotes, unauthored rumours and media reports, and implicitly agreed with the Eritrean government about ‘the false narrative that recent Eritrean asylum-seekers have been peddling in the past five years or so, in order to expeditiously get their refugee papers.'41 PFDJ employees I spoke with indeed proclaimed that “People who need international protection need it, but Eritreans are like everyone else. They are economic migrants who just write stories, plays about their situation.“42 In these accounts, and those presented by certain critical interlocutors, individuals are presented not as genuine refugees or as individuals mislead by hypocritical European policies. Despite the hostility of the systems they find themselves in, they are ‘alchemically transformed’ (Riggan, 2016: 209) into opportunists capitalizing on generous asylum procedures in the West: ‘As more and more Eritreans headed for the wealthiest parts of the West (a red flag, they are economic migrants and not genuine refugees), they would in turn fiance [sic] trips for their relatives and friends, which over time, created a snowball effect that led to a phenomenon known as the diaspora pull.’43 Many of the narratives put forward by politically disgruntled citizens therefore closely aligned with readings put forward by the Eritrean government. The PFDJ, and its loyal followers, advance an account of migration driven by individual and societal ill-discipline, impatient and disloyal youth, and poor and irresponsible parenting. President Isaias's annual New Year's interview for 2015 epitomised this sentiment: “Generally speaking, those who have gone to these “dream lands” will eventually regret their actions. Many of them mistakenly fled because their desired state of affairs didn't come overnight in this country.” He goes on: “For those who choose to go abroad and live off charities without working, or those who constantly worry they will never be rewarded, time will definitely teach them."44 The fact that this narrative switches entirely once these illegal migrants are transformed into ‘valued diasporic citizens’ (Riggan, 2016: 209; Belloni, 2019a,b) has done little to lessen the vehemence with which PFDJ members have promoted this derogatory casting.

4.1. Embedded ambivalence However unforgiving, disappointed and frustrated the citizens I spoke with could be, however, almost all their responses were balanced with moments of empathy, sympathy and regret. Individuals were aware of the horrors that accompanied people's journeys away from Eritrea, the enormous financial toll it took on individuals and their support networks, and the inhospitable environments migrants would enter outside. Expressions of guilt were common. Respondents wished they could do more to drive sense into the young people leaving, or that they could have done more to stop those already on their way. One man teaching within the college system explained that he would never tell his students not to leave because he knows that they will be chronically underemployed if they remain. But he implores them to first make a plan, gather their transcripts and secure a scholarship. Nobody finds these things in the desert, he said, and very few find them at their

(footnote continued) languishing in Europe and developing ‘negative vices’. While showing me the statistics she was intending to present later, however, she commented that people only think that the situation is okay in Eritrea because they have normalised the inequality she was pointing out. She then laughed: “you see, this is why women move from this place!” 38 This would later become the PFDJ. 39 Ordóñez (2008; 2015) notes similar dynamics amongst Guatemalan day labourers in the United States, who have normalised extreme violence in Guatemala in a way that renders them unable to see the validity of their own grounds for applying for asylum.

40

Academic, Male, 40s, May 2017. EP (2015). Swiss Obsession with Eritrea and Eritreans. 28 October, 22(69). 42 Interview, Employee at the National Union of Eritrean Youth, December 2017. 43 EP (2015). BBC's Yalda Hakim Got It Wrong on Eritrea. 18 March, 22(5), 3 44 EP (2015). “The People is the Army – this is our unwaivering doctrine”: President Isaias. 10 January, 21(91), p2. 41

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almost no other ways through which Eritreans can regularise their status; and recognising that conditions in Eritrea make it almost impossible for people to get by, and yet people leave ‘prematurely’ from impatience. Running throughout these interactions was this paradox. Vehemently anti-government interlocutors were denouncing their peers' behaviour in language akin to that of the very political establishment these respondents condemned. Descriptions were underpinned by both a deep dislike of the government and a partial internalisation of its ideas and ideologies. Part of this, of course, is that regardless of an individual's political inclination, migration from Eritrea is dangerous (Horwood & Hooper, 2016; Tubiana et al., 2018). Informants views were rooted in reports of the challenges that migrants face throughout their journeys and in joining new economies and societies. PFDJ narratives of migrants' and refugees' recklessness and naivety might then resonate with stories that individuals hear through channels that are not mediated by Eritrea's ruling party, such as friends, relatives and the international media. But narratives centred on personal inadequacy, moral flaws and the inappropriateness of anti-government rhetoric appeared to emerge from a different source; shaped much less by personal experience – and indeed often contradicted by it – these originated far more from the saturation of Eritrea's public space by government pronouncements intended to delegitimise and denigrate those on the move. As such, they illustrate one way that the government and its sanctioned ideologies have partially suffused people's emotional repertoires and ‘the timeless banality of daily life’ (Trouillot, Hann, Krti, & Trouillot, 2001: 133). On the one hand, respondents recognised that it was the stifling, suffocating effects of government policies that had compelled others to leave; they sympathized with those who had left and criticized the ruling party for forcing their departure. On the other hand, there were moments when the imprint of the government's explanatory frames on people's opinions was evident, but largely unacknowledged or unattributed (Gupta, 1995). Respondents would criticise the government for impoverishing the country, but then blame irresponsible parenting for the moral failings of those teenagers who cross the border with no prospects or plans, echoing a line pedalled by the PFDJ. They would thank friends and relatives outside for their economic support, while condemning the Eritrean diaspora for besmirching the country's reputation. As Linke suggested, the ways in which the ruling party has sought to displace responsibility for emigration has become partially lost in the accounts above, as personal and public narratives have become deeply entangled in ‘the ordinary sensory practices of everyday life’ (2006: 212). The result is a false consonance, whereby multiple interpretations are relayed in the same conversation as if they form a complementary, rather than contradictory, whole. Coinciding with this loss is a failure to recognise how the ideologies of the ruling party are also being reproduced in and through these interactions. Respondents' ambivalent statements are not just the result of the infusion of authoritarian governance into people's lives. In concert with the emotional reactions that accompany them, they are constitutive political acts, integral in reproducing these governing structures and ideologies (Laszczkowski & Reeves, 2015; Woodward, 2014). The cultural construction of ruling apparatuses can indeed occur just as effectively through the actions of individuals who see themselves as outside or in opposition to them as through those who actively support the system. To return to Havel (1978: 15), people are ‘objects in a system of control, but at the same time they are its subjects as well. They are both victims of the system and its instruments.’ Furthermore, subtle embodiments and exercises of government ideologies through the general population – seen in citizens' emotional reactions, interpersonal relationships and ambivalent attitudes towards social and political phenomenon within the country – enables the Eritrean government's range and impact to extend far beyond where its formal systems and technologies could reach (Allen, 2011; Bozzini, 2013). The consequence, which I return to now in the discussion, is that

destination either. Others sympathetically noted the enormous pressure on migrants to deliver financially, especially if their families see their departure as a form of ‘investment’. Those sending decent money back were bestowed with respect and gratitude for subsidising the country's inadequate salaries, a fact that has led some parents to encourage their children to migrate (Belloni, 2015).45 Friends and family members knew that this additional cash was hard-earned, often through working multiple jobs in extremely challenging circumstances, and that it came at the expense of this generation's “golden years”.46 Interlocutors therefore recognised that significant sums of money were being sent back, not least because each individual I spoke with had received some remittances from overseas. Yet many still spoke of an amorphous group of individuals outside who were failing to fulfil personal and national responsibilities. Here it seemed that PFDJ narratives prevailed. Even though their own personal knowledge of migrants' experiences often told a different story, respondents made partial sense of migration by echoing the government's position. The corollary of praising those who sent money, however, was a recognition that it might be hard for those who had not contributed from outside to return because of a sense that they had somehow failed their relatives in Eritrea.47 Here, whilst some recognised there would be guilt, others felt there should be. Sometimes we would discuss the ‘hostile environment’ that migrants faced in my own country, and respondents would agree that there were significant challenges to migrants establishing themselves ‘outside’. But this recognition did not overcome the view that migrants' failures to achieve independence also stemmed from certain personal inadequacies; instead it sat uneasily, ambivalently alongside it. This contributed to a broader sense that people who had left in recent years were somehow tarnished by their departure and their means of living outside. In justifying why leaving legally and maintaining a positive connection with the country was non-negotiable, Natu stated that, "There's no right or wrong way but for me, I have to leave legally because I have to come back. I believe there will be change and maybe those people who left illegally will come back, but with a black mark. I'm feeling entrepreneurial and I see opportunities here when there is change, so I want to come back and exploit that."48 Far from being inconsequential personal opinions, these ambivalent views informed and structured the social relationships amongst, and between, my interlocutors in Asmara and citizens outside. One of my Eritrean research assistants in Uganda, for example, was afraid to call her brother back home. He would make her re-justify her decision to leave and, particularly when her elderly mother was doing less well, she would be made to feel guilty for providing insufficient emotional and financial support as well as for not starting a family early. She was thus both a vital resource for her family back home and a source of shame for being a single, childless Eritrean woman alone in Uganda. Aware that her brother did not support her decision to leave, she felt she had to prove him wrong before returning home. Phone calls from family in Eritrea were always a blessing and a curse, riven by a tension similarly noted by authors elsewhere (Belloni, 2019a,b; Rodriguez, 2015). The unifying feature of all the vignettes detailed above was each respondent's ability to reconcile conflicting interpretations of migration and migrants. Wildly different views could be expressed in the same breath: of sympathy and frustration; of support and disappointment; of the fact that the group now arriving in Europe are “lazy” and yet European governments make it incredibly hard to access employment; of resenting the stories that Eritreans tell in order to be granted asylum for sullying the country's reputation, while realising that there are

45

Student, Male, 30s, April 2017. Conversation over tea with students at the Law School, April 2017. 47 Lecturer, Male, 50s, April 2017. 48 Businessman, 30s, May 2017. 46

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distinctions between the ‘powerful and the powerless’.49 The ‘spill-over of authoritarian practices’ (ibid.: 97) into new environments, be they extraterritorial or the same spaces under new governing regimes, occurs through everyday expressions of political and social life as well as through institutionalised channels. Physical proximity to coercive authority is less relevant than how power redefines distance and structures space. Authoritarian control is therefore usefully explored as affective and internalised (Bozzini, 2013), as well as legally, physically and institutionally inscribed. Finally, this article wishes to suggest another mechanism through which ‘contemporary authoritarian rule structures socio-political space in ways that partially transcend both territorial jurisdiction and physical distance’ (Dalmasso et al., 2017: 96). Unlike those who look at the durability of a particular authoritarian regime over time (Albrecht & Schlumberger, 2004) or across space (Bernal, 2014; 2017), this article provides some insight into how and why features of authoritarian rule might endure even when ruling regimes have gone. Literature on the affective life of the state and regimes of political power has involved enquiring into how these are ‘reproduced ‘within’ as well as ‘without’ in the interstices of everyday life and in the desires, hopes, fears, and longings of ordinary people’ (Reeves, 2011: 906). Where government narratives permeate, and are reproduced through, individuals' everyday interactions and frames of reference, these patterns of knowledge might persist even when their initial authors are replaced. Affective and emotional registers take time to recalibrate, with implications for processes of return, reconciliation and rebuilding should migrants begin to return to contexts like Eritrea (Bernal, 2017; Purdekova, 2008).

ambivalence both emerges from and reproduces government control within the country, forming a systemic feature of public and private engagements under PFDJ rule. 5. Discussion The empirical material presented above shows how the saturation of public space by governing ideologies and interpretations shapes citizens' relationships and expectations. Interpretive frames are shown to not only travel with people from the private or ‘hidden sphere’ (Havel, 1978) into the public, performative one; interpretive creep is clearly bidirectional and has impacts beyond purely discursive ones. By observing the impact of the PFDJ's narrative onslaught on individual reflections on migration from Eritrea, and by turning briefly to the literature on the affective dimensions of political power, its influence is argued to extend into all the spaces in which political and social life is conducted. These frames affect personal relationships, direct societal expectations, and establish emotional frames that disrupt individuals' abilities to make sense of all the interpretations that come their way. The result is not only that views, like those expressed above, become incoherent or ambivalent. I argue that this reflects a much more generalised condition of state-induced ambivalence within the country, critical to how political power is maintained in this authoritarian context. As Wedeen suggests, while these governing lexicons may be helpful in orienting citizens, they are also profoundly disorientating. Government narratives blaming illegal migration on external aggression, international conspiracies, individual selfishness, parental irresponsibility and societal breakdown blend politicised fiction with personal reality (Gupta, 1995). While Havel (1978: 20) argues that ‘if the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth’, the narratives presented above suggest that an individual's ability to distinguish between the two can, in practice, be lost. This, and the ways that people are conscripted into reiterating government narratives if they want to get by in the country's restrictive environment, ‘interfere with people's political 'subjectivities', with their sense of themselves as political persons’ (Wedeen, 1999: 160). With these subjectivities fundamentally miscalibrated by the ruling regime, conditions emerge in which ambivalence becomes the norm. But we also see the wider political importance of efforts to monopolise interpretation, whether intended by the ruling regime or not. As Wedeen (1999: 153) states, ‘the significance of official discourses’ is less about their ‘silently intended meanings’ or ‘the explicit intentions of leaders who formulate’ them, than ‘the conditions of their manifest appearance, the transformation which they have effected, and the field where they coexist, reside and disappear’. Continual exposure to a ruling party's prescriptive grammar can transform individuals as political actors and, through the paralysing effects of embedded ambivalence, undermine their ‘capacity for action’ (Wedeen, 1999: 44). This article therefore explores some of the ways in which authoritarian systems function and endure. Governments and ruling elites are clearly not alone in reproducing certain ideologies and systems of exclusion, even if they have developed sophisticated formal and informal systems for ruling populations at home and abroad (Dalmasso et al., 2017). As epitomised in the story of the friend's sister stuck in North America, unable to return home because of her complex feelings of guilt, social and societal sanctioning also govern conduct. A diverse set of actors, some allied to governments and some vehemently opposed to them, convey and translate authoritarian and coercive power. The exercise of authoritarian rule is thus not limited to contact between a population and arms of the state or ruling party; it has multiple mechanisms of transmission that result in a more diffuse exercise of power. It should thus be analysed through an inherently ‘topological’ lens (Collier, 2009; Allen, 2011: 291), attentive to the ‘quieter registers of power’ that defy Euclidean geometric mappings and the neat spatial

Declarations of interest None. Acknowledgements This research came out of a larger project that was generously funded by Ockenden International and the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. I wish to express enormous gratitude to Marthe Achtnich, Tom Scott-Smith and Jonathan Cole for their generosity in reading earlier drafts of this paper and providing such valuable comments. I also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their formative comments, and for pointing me towards literatures that have significantly enriched my thinking. As ever, I wish to thank all those who have given me their time and thoughts in Eritrea. References Al-Ali, N., Black, R., & Koser, K. (2001). The limits to ‘transnationalism’: Bosnian and Eritrean refugees in Europe as emerging transnational communities. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24(2), 578–600. Albrecht, H., & Schlumberger, O. (2004). “Waiting for godot”: Regime change without democratization in the Middle East. International Political Science Review, 25(4), 371–392. Allen, J. (2011). Topological twists: Power's shifting geographies. Dialogues in Human Geography, 1(3), 283–298. Belloni, M. (2015). Cosmologies of destinations: Rootes and routes of Eritrean forced migration towards Europe. Diss: University of Trento. Belloni, M. (2019a). Refugees and citizens: Understanding Eritrean refugees' ambivalence towards homeland politics. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 60(1-2), 55–73. Belloni, M. (2019b). When the phone stops ringing: On the meanings and causes of disruptions in communication between Eritrean refugees and their families back home. Global Networks. Bernal, V. (2014). Nation as network: Diaspora, cyberspace, and citizenship. University of Chicago Press. Bernal, V. (2017). Diaspora and the afterlife of violence: Eritrean national narratives and what goes without saying. American Anthropologist, 119(1), 23–34. Botti, D.. A year on – revisiting the Eritrean exodus. Mixed migration centre. (2018). Available

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