Social Science Research Council

"Inventing Locality: Returnees and Reconstruction of the Eritrean Social Landscape"

This project contributes to growing debates on refugee repatriation and post-conflict development, focusing on the value of place-attachments to sustainable development in post-conflict countries. Working through the frameworks of political ecology, the anthropology of development, and refugee studies, this project analyzes resettlement and rural development in the lowlands of Eritrea. After a thirty year armed struggle for independence from successive Ethiopian regimes, Eritrea emerged as an independent nation-state in the early 1990s. However, almost a third of the population had been displaced, with around 400,000 Eritreans living as refugees in Sudan. The challenge of nation-building and reconstruction has involved resettlement of over 95% of these refugees to the Gash Barka district in the western lowlands. A region scarred by years of conflict, Gash Barka is nevertheless envisioned as the future breadbasket of a nation grappling with the pressing issue of food security. Through archival research and comparative ethnographic studies of two communities in the Gash Barka region, this project explores the new dimensions and perceptions of citizenship and stewardship arising within multiethnic returnee communities subject to state-led schemes of resettlement and sedentarization. This study assesses the micro-level impacts of varied property regimes and rural development projects, the impact of transnational organizations on nascent civil society and post-conflict state-making, and the lines along which social identities, relations and networks of power are constructed within the experience of resettlement and the process of adapting to new environments. Of broader significance, this project contributes to knowledge and theory of refugee repatriation, ethnography of the state, and political ecology through a focus on the shifting parameters of citizenship and stewardship in the nation-building project of a multiethnic state.