Book Cover

Chatham House is scheduled to release a new book titled “Eritrea’s External Relations: Understanding Its Regional Role and Foreign Policy” on January 15.

The press release reads as follows:

Eritrea is increasingly isolated, militarised, and misunderstood on the world stage. It has become vital to the stability of east and northeast Africa, and beyond. A focal point of violent insecurity across the region, Eritrea urgently requires better understanding on the part of policy-makers in the international community.

Eritrea’s External Relations: Understanding Its Regional Role and Foreign Policy, publishing 15th January 2010, is a pioneering assessment of the country’s regional role and foreign relations, representing the first significant analysis of those relations and the internal and regional dynamics which lie behind them, and bringing together the insights of several international analysts and scholars.

Eritrea’s External Relations argues forcefully that the international community must engage with the Eritrean Government as a matter of priority, and urges policy-makers to understand the country’s political culture as a first step toward its rehabilitation. It is argued that Eritrea’s diplomatic culture is rooted in a violent and misunderstood past, and makes the explicit connection between troubled foreign relations and external adventurism on the one hand, and a militaristic, oppressive political culture at home on the other.

The book explores the manner in which the lack of resolution in the conflict with Ethiopia – a failure in which the international community is complicit – continues to destabilise the region in unforeseen ways. Until this is addressed, there is no prospect of peaceful development in the region.

Eritrea’s External Relations makes recommendations for policy-makers as to how best to approach this embittered and aggressive regime, and how it might be made a partner rather than an opponent.

Eritrea’s External Relations makes clear that a failed state in Eritrea would be catastrophic both for the wider region and for international security, and that therefore new paths of engagement are absolutely essential in terms of both the stabilisation of external relations and the encouragement of some degree of liberalisation and demilitarisation inside Eritrea itself.

The Editor:

Richard Reid is Reader in the History of Africa in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He taught for several years at the University of Asmara in Eritrea and has also at Durham University. He is the author of War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa and A History of Modern Africa: 1800 to the Present.

He was guest editor of a special volume of the Journal of Eastern African Studies in 2007, dealing with identities in east and northeast Africa. He is also the author of several articles on modern Eritrea and Ethiopia, dealing particularly with the liberation struggle, the 1998–2000 war, and the current political situation.

Released by:

Chatham House has been the home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs for over eight decades. Its mission is to be a world-leading source of independent analysis, informed debate and influential ideas on how to build a prosperous and secure world for all. www.chathamhouse.org.uk

The Book at Amazon:

Eritrea’s External Relations: Understanding Its Regional Role and Foreign Policy