Paper long abstract:

Concepts of the ‘frontier’ and the ‘borderland’ have long been prominent in historical study, from Frederick Jackson Turner’s classic, though contested, application of the idea in North American history in the late nineteenth century to more recent formulations in the context of modern Africa. This paper aims to draw, and build, upon this literature in an attempt to understand the longue duree in Eritrean history, incorporating northern Ethiopia and northeastern Sudan. In particular, further modifying recent theses on African borderlands, the paper represents an attempt to understand the evolution of much of present-day Eritrea as a violent fault-line, with major implications not only for the nature of state and society in Eritrea itself, but for the wider northeast African region, as recent events in places as ostensibly far-flung as Darfur and Somalia have demonstrated. Equally important are the processes of invention in, and indeed celebration of, the Eritrean borderland, which – inadvertently or otherwise – have become central to the latest Eritrean nationalist discourse. It is suggested in this paper that the fault-line paradigm is one within which a sharper appreciation of the provenance and nature of ‘violence’ – in its various forms – in modern Eritrea can be developed. The paper offers some preliminary observations on the utility of this conceptualisation for the region's modern history, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century but with a focus on the era of militarised identities from the 1940s onward. It might be postulated that the Eritrean region is not unique in northeast Africa in presenting us with an example of the ‘volatile borderland’, both real and imagined, and that the concept of political tectonics may provide us with a tool to better appreciate the history of other zones of conflict in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia.