Nation as Network

Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship

Victoria Bernal

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780226144818, 9780226144788
• eBook ISBN: 9780226144955
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How is the internet transforming the relationships between citizens and states? What happens to politics when international migration is coupled with digital media, making it easy for people to be politically active in a nation from outside its borders? In Nation as Network, Victoria Bernal creatively combines media studies, ethnography, and African studies to explore this new political paradigm through a striking analysis of how Eritreans in diaspora have used the internet to shape the course of Eritrean history.
           
Bernal argues that Benedict Anderson's famous concept of nations as "imagined communities" must now be rethought because diasporas and information technologies have transformed the ways nations are sustained and challenged. She traces the development of Eritrean diaspora websites over two turbulent decades that saw the Eritrean state grow ever more tyrannical. Through Eritreans' own words in posts and debates, she reveals how new subjectivities are formed and political action is galvanized online. She suggests that "infopolitics"—struggles over the management of information—make politics in the 21st century distinct, and she analyzes the innovative ways Eritreans deploy the internet to support and subvert state power. Nation as Network is a unique and compelling work that advances our understanding of the political significance of digital media. 

CHAPTER 1

Infopolitics and Sacrificial Citizenship: Sovereignty in Spaces Beyond the Nation

How, in fact, can one continue to belong to a community in a context in which one is physically removed from it and in which one can no longer directly take part in the rituals that a sedentary life renders possible?

(MBEMBE 2005, 151)

[M]igrants have . . . emerged as the “bare life” of our times- the in between forms of life, uncoded substances without fixed belongings, unprotected by “their” states.

(HANSEN AND STEPPUTAT 2005, 35)

The powerful attraction of diaspora for postcolonial theorists was that, as transnational social formations, diasporas challenged the hegemony and boundedness of the nation-state and, indeed, of any pure imaginaries of nationhood.

(WERBNER 2005, 29–30)

Conventional notions of sovereignty are premised on the state’s power over citizens or subjects in a bounded territory dominated by state authorities. Sovereignty is understood to include the relations of rule, the power of the state, the sources of its legitimacy, and the scope and limits of state control over its subjects. The flows of people and communications across political borders remake these relationships. The mutual engagement of the Eritrean diaspora and the Eritrean state cannot be analyzed solely from conventional notions of citizenship and sovereign power. The ways that relations of sovereignty and citizenship extend beyond national boundaries and operate outside of legal statuses begin to make sense only when we understand that politics is fundamentally cultural. Neither brute force nor the rational administration of law is what ties Eritreans in diaspora to the nation-state; the bond is a shared political culture. This chapter explores ideas about sovereignty, the contours of Eritrea’s political culture, and the dynamic relationship of the diaspora and the state. Like cyberspace, the spaces of diaspora exist outside the authority of the Eritrean state. Yet, in ways I analyze here, neither of these spaces is outside the political culture of Eritrea or beyond the influence of the state. The concept of infopolitics is central to this analysis and complements recent theories of sovereignty that locate power in violence and control over bodies. The examination of Eritrean political culture, moreover, offers a counterpoint to the focus of so much recent scholarship on neoliberalism, a focus that obscures the realities of millions of people governed by or contending with illiberal regimes. While assumptions about the ubiquity of the neoliberal state are flawed, so too are labels like “authoritarian” state or “dictatorship,” which fail to capture the cultural distinctiveness of different modes of sovereignty and the historical particularities of social orders and strategies of rule.

BIOPOLITICS, NECROPOLITICS, AND INFOPOLITICS

Contemporary theories of power—Michel Foucault’s biopolitics (1984), Achille Mbembe’s necropolitcs (2003), and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” (1998)—share a focus on human bodies, life, and death. These theories provide insights into Eritrean political culture because war and sacrifice to the death are tightly bound up with constructions of Eritrean statehood and citizenship. Infopolitics builds on these insights by shedding light on the cultural and communicative aspects of sovereign power and the means by which power is exercised and contested, not only over bodies, but over minds.

The concept of biopolitics suggests that the exercise of modern state power is fundamentally a matter of life and death. Government entails managing the physical existence of subject populations and the conditions that affect human bodies (Foucault 1984). The concept of biopower has drawn attention to states’ interests in public health, fertility, and sexuality (Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; Petryna 2002). Mbembe has drawn attention to the operation of violence in constituting political formations and shaping political culture, through his notion of necropolitics, which he defines as the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (2003, 39). Necropolitics draws our attention to the operation of the state as a manager not only of life but also of death. The concept of necropower suggests a state that has the power of life and death over its citizen-subjects. Mbembe writes, “Among the dominant imaginaries of sovereignty in contemporary Africa is that which posits the fear of death and the will to survive as critical to any political practice” (2005, 154). The evocative notion of necropolitics brings to the fore the violence at the heart of state power, which is a politics of death (necropolitics) and a politics of life (biopolitics).

Agamben (1998) similarly considers life and death central to the workings of sovereignty. According to him, sovereign power creates the distinction between two kinds of human lives, the “life” of the citizen and the “bare life” of the person defined as outside the political community, this latter life symbolized by the figure Homo Sacer, one who can be killed with impunity. The work of Agamben and Mbembe is particularly relevant to the understanding of politics under authoritarian regimes because in their conception of politics, violence figures not as a breakdown in rational management or as a failure of democratic processes, but as the ultimate foundation of sovereign power.

Threats of violence certainly underlie state authority and can compel compliant behavior in many contexts. However, compliance under threat of force is a simple matter to explain. What is more interesting to try to understand is why people who are “free” and have established or begun new lives abroad, like Eritreans in diaspora, choose to participate in a relationship with a distant state. The concepts of biopower and necropolitics emphasize the power of the state, and the ways the state constructs and exercises its power over subject populations and territories. Eritreans in diaspora are outside national territory and beyond state authority. Moreover, they are active in maintaining their involvement in Eritrean national politics and in constructing and defending Eritrean sovereignty. Eritreans in diaspora are engaged in legitimizing and, increasingly, in challenging the legitimacy of the ruling one-party regime and President Isaias Afewerki. To understand these activities and the relationship of the diaspora and the state requires a conceptual shift.

Although the leading theories compel us to recognize power as a relation of life and death, the transmission of power through spaces beyond the nation reminds us that sovereignty must be exercised not only over bodies but also over minds. Alongside the necropolitical state is the infopolitical state, the state that manages information, censors, authorizes, disseminates, and communicates. Violence and communication are not opposites, however. Infopolitical regimes may distort, suppress, and censor through creating a climate of fear of violence. In her brilliant analysis of the Romanian state, Kligman (1998) dissects the intricacies of power exercised over and through information as a form of symbolic violence. When she observes that “self-censorship became a natural reflex” (Kligman 1998, 14, emphasis added), we see how infopolitics are literally embodied in political subjects. The Eritrean state exerts infopolitical power through overt censorship and by creating conditions for self-censorship as well as through the construction and deployment of potent national narratives and symbols. The communicative aspect of sovereign power takes on new dimensions in the context of the information technology revolution and the growing media saturation of our world.

INFOPOLITICS AND THE INTERNET

If, as Coronil (2006) asserts, “state power lies in fixing meaning,” then the possibility for that meaning to become unmoored from the state, to be circulated and recirculated, commented on, and reinterpreted independently by people in diaspora through cyberspace is a serious matter. As Sassen (2005, 82) points out, “Electronic space is, perhaps ironically, a far more concrete space for social struggles than that of the national political system. It becomes a place where nonformal political actors can be part of the political scene in a way that is much more difficult in national institutional channels.”

The internet remakes our sense of place in a number of ways that are significant for states and sovereignty. Cyberspace is at once a deterritorializing force, a spatial illusion, and a reterritorializing force. Through the internet people connect across political borders in ways that make location seem invisible or irrelevant. The internet also allows for the production of virtual spaces. Websites offer a spatial illusion; we “visit” websites, and we take “virtual tours.” This cyberspatiality is an important aspect of the websites created by Eritreans in diaspora. The first and longest running Eritrean diaspora website, Dehai (www.dehai.org), uses the tagline “Eritrea Online,” on its home page, suggesting a version of the nation as a virtual community and implying that Eritrea can be accessed via the website. For many years a map of Eritrea appeared as part of the logo on Dehai’s home page. On its membership sign-up page (most recently accessed 3–27–13), Dehai describes itself as “the Eritrean Community Online Network,” which, like “Eritrea Online,” blurs the distinction between Eritreans inside the nation and those outside it. Since Eritreans in diaspora have more access to the internet than their compatriots back home, and members of the diaspora are responsible for creating and maintaining Dehai and other Eritrean websites, as well as for producing most of the posts, this blurring of spatial distinctions works as a kind of illusion that bridges the diaspora’s separation from Eritrea as well as concealing the dispersal of people within the diaspora from one another. In this sense, the websites they created reterritorialize the diaspora, locating them in Eritrea.

The speed of communications on the internet is significant for politics because it makes distant places seem as close and accessible as near ones and, moreover, eliminates the delays normally associated with distance. This technologically constructed proximity makes it possible for members of the diaspora to respond immediately and collectively to current events, national crises, and scandals in Eritrea. In this way they can directly participate in unfolding events by framing issues, shaping opinions, and mobilizing action.

If the Eritrean diaspora stands in a particular position in relation to the state because the state cannot control their lives and deaths, their position is especially distinct with regard to the state’s infopolitics. The state cannot exercise its sovereignty over the bodies of Eritreans in diaspora, but it can reach their minds; therefore, infopolitics is particularly central to the dynamics of state-diaspora relations. The national leadership have sought to construct and perpetuate a distinctive Eritrean political culture, one that is defined by sacrificing for the nation. This ethos of sacrifice binds Eritreans in diaspora to the nation in powerful ways. At the same time, Eritreans in diaspora have freedoms of media consumption and production not accessible to Eritreans living in national territory. These conditions give rise to contradictions and radical possibilities.

THE ETHOS OF SACRIFICIAL CITIZENSHIP

One of the most powerful symbols of Eritrean nationalism is that of the martyr who has given his life for the nation. Mbembe suggests that in colonial and postcolonial states, politics and problems of power have been particularly entwined with violence, war, and the authority to kill or to consign to death. He writes: “Imagining politics as a form of war, we must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How are they inscribed in the order of power?” (Mbembe 2003, 12). Agamben’s (1998) discussion of Homo Sacer similarly locates the political in the construction of the conditions under which life can be taken as a sacrifice or, conversely, simply killed without the death being accorded social value. These understandings of politics that place war and the sacrifice of lives at the center suggest that the elevation of the figure of the martyr by Eritrea’s political authorities has deep significance. The martyr, I contend, not only is a key figure in the Eritrean national imaginary, but represents the essence of the social contract between Eritreans and the state in which the citizen’s role is to serve the nation and sacrifice themselves for the survival and well-being of the nation. I call this “sacrificial citizenship.”

Eritrean political culture was forged during thirty years of war for independence from Ethiopia. As Dorman observes, “the Eritrean struggle for self-determination . . . is constitutive of Eritrean identity and citizenship, as well as of nationhood” (2003, 4, ellipses added). The Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) constructed a political culture within its own ranks and worked to extend it beyond the guerilla fighters in its outreach to Eritreans everywhere. A 2001 post that appeared on the website Awate (www.awate.com) on Eritrea’s Independence Day, reflecting on “the Armed Struggle Era” represents that culture as follows: “Altruism became a national religion; self-denial and self-sacrifice a way of life. Each wound, each terror, each death, each birth was accepted as a down payment, an investment into the building of a free Eritrea” (Awate post, May 24, 2001). The political education connected with the nationalist struggle permeated Eritreans’ lives within Eritrea and beyond it (Poole 2001; Woldemikael 1991). As Conrad (2006b, 69) found among Eritreans in Germany:

Until today, the question: “Where do you originally come from?” prompts diaspora Eritreans of all ages to embark on a lengthy (and always very similar) account of their country’s history. Structure, vocabulary and vantage point of these narratives identify them unmistakably as products of the EPLF’s nation-building efforts.

Every family, every home was affected by the decades of war fought on Eritrean soil; therefore, ordinary Eritreans, even if they wielded little power, came to feel that they had a stake in the political. The war is central to Eritrean identity, as a national history and a collective experience that are distinctly Eritrean. Perhaps, as Mbembe (2002, 267) suggests, “the state of war in contemporary Africa should in fact be conceived of as a general cultural experience that shapes identities, just as the family, the school, and other social institutions do.” In the case of Eritrea, the Isaias regime has sought to unilaterally define national political culture and Eritrean identity based on the struggle to achieve national sovereignty. The image of the freedom fighter is a national icon that appears on Eritrean currency, for example. Symbols of the war are particularly evocative of and resonant with the profound losses suffered by Eritreans during the long struggle.

Even more than the fighter, however, the martyr who died for the nation has been made a core political symbol. Martyrs are an important part of Eritrean national mythology. As Matsuoka and Sorenson observe, “the dead became an inseparable element of national identity, an essential component of an Eritrean structure of feeling (2001, 230). For Eritreans the term “martyr” has a distinct meaning. “Martyr” was originally used by the EPLF to refer to fighters who died in the liberation struggle. The PFDJ continued this usage and expanded it to include others such as soldiers killed in the recent border war with Ethiopia. The EPLF was a secular, socialist organization and Eritrea is a secular state; therefore, their nationalist definition of “martyr” is distinct from the more common associations of the term in Islam and Christianity. However, since Eritrea’s population is comprised of Christians and Muslims, the secular nationalist usage of “martyr” resonates with these sacred traditions. The meaning of “martyr” in Eritrea is explained in a post on Awate, dated January 16, 2005, by “The Awate Team” as follows:

Various cultures give various names for those whom they want to honor for having paid the ultimate price for their nation. In the Eritrean context, the word is “martyr.” The word has no religious or spiritual connotation: it is a hold-over from the Revolutionary War of Independence, and it applies to any Eritrean who died while in the service of the Revolutionary War or enlistment in with the Eritrean Defense Forces (EDF) or, in some cases, after a long service in the Revolutionary War or the EDF. In the Eritrean context, an individual does not have to die in the battlefront to earn the title of martyr.

The Eritrean state invokes the history of martyrs’ sacrifices to legitimize itself and to demand unquestioning loyalty and sacrifice from Eritreans. It does so in part by situating itself as the achievement resulting from the huge sacrifices of human lives lost in the Eritrean nationalist struggle. This is not hard to do because the current leadership grew directly out of the EPLF. The state’s construction of the martyr as an iconic national figure is reflected in the establishment of Martyr’s Day as an official holiday celebrated every June 20th. Notably, it was on the first Martyr’s Day celebration in 1991 in Asmara that Isaias Afewerki, then secretary general of the EPLF, introduced himself publicly to the civilian population, delivering the opening speech (Woldemikael 2008).

The ethos of sacrifice represented by martyrs was first established during the struggle for independence. This fight was not only an armed struggle on the ground against Ethiopian troops, but also a cultural revolution among Eritreans led by the EPLF. Constructing and communicating powerful narratives about Eritrean history and identity was a core activity of the EPLF. The Front waged infopolitical battle through the prolific production of nationalist media in the form of radio broadcasts, pamphlets, posters, videos, newsletters, staged performances of music and dance, slogans, and communiqués that were circulated locally and transnationally (Hagos 2002). The nationalist narratives and communiqués generated by the leadership in Eritrea had a strong impact on the diaspora, as McCoy observes: “After 1975, as the Eritreans fled in huge numbers into neighboring Sudan and to Europe and the United States, the information vacuum which confronted the Eritreans in the diaspora was filled by EPLF mass media” (1995, 37). The perspectives presented to the diaspora through EPLF media and informational meetings held in EPLF offices established abroad, moreover, were particularly powerful because world press coverage of the conflict was inconsistent and often lacked sophisticated analysis of the historical and political context (McCoy 1995). The EPLF was not only highly effective in communicating its version of Eritrean politics, it was also “relatively ruthless in dealing with dissidents” (Woldemikael 1991, 35).

Thirty years of war did not so much liberate Eritrea as c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Nations, Migration, and the World Wide Web of Politics
• 1. Infopolitics and Sacrificial Citizenship: Sovereignty in Spaces Beyond the Nation
• 2. Diasporic Citizenship and the Public Sphere: Creating National Space Online
• 3. The Mouse that Roars: Websites as an Offshore Platform for Civil Society
• 4. Mourning Becomes Electronic: Representing the Nation in a Virtual War Memorial
• 5. Sex, Lies, and Cyberspace: Political Participation and the “Woman Question”
• Conclusion
• References
• Index