Abstract: This essay examines how the Eritrean state converted the moral authority of the armed struggle into a durable political resource. It argues that the category of tegadalay (fighter) flattened unequal wartime experiences into a single claim of equal sacrifice, allowing ruling elites to extract legitimacy from the suffering of ordinary fighters. By separating fighters, conscripts, and civilians into ranked moral categories, the state transformed sacrifice into an instrument of civic alienation and political paralysis. A democratic future requires dismantling this heroic hierarchy and recovering a shared civic identity beyond state-sanctioned titles of sacrifice.
To understand the contemporary Eritrean state, one must look past the standard binaries of totalitarianism versus liberation and analyze the precise institutional mechanisms that translated a prolonged national struggle into a self-perpetuating apparatus of power. At the center of this translation is a profound psychopolitical paradox: the deliberate maintenance of a wartime classification system long after its logistical utility has expired. The armed struggle did not merely sort individuals into different tiers of mortal exposure based on their pre-existing social capital, a structural reality of all military organizations, but codified this sorting into a permanent, rigid hierarchy of civic value. By analyzing this structural production of value, we can see how the ruling elite created an artificial division within the population, effectively alienating the common fighter from the broader public, and weaponizing the concept of institutional honor to paralyze political resistance.
The Preservation of Structural Origin
A defining myth of liberation movements is that the crucible of war acts as a radical equalizer, erasing prior social disparities in the shared pursuit of emancipation. The structural reality of the Eritrean liberation struggle, however, demonstrates the opposite. The movement required an intricate division of labor. Individuals entering the field arrived with vastly unequal distributions of what can be termed symbolic and functional capital, ranging from diaspora-educated professionals, doctors, and engineers to illiterate rural peasants.
Because a fighting organization must prioritize efficiency to survive, it naturally allocated these resources where they were least replaceable. Highly educated cadres were insulated within administrative, medical, diplomatic, or logistical apparatuses behind the front lines. Conversely, the rural peasantry, possessing no specialized technical or bureaucratic skills, could offer only their physical labor and mortal exposure. Their bodies became the primary currency of the front-line infantry.
This sorting was not born of subjective malice or a conscious policy of class devaluation. It was the logical outcome of organizational necessity in a total war scenario. The crisis occurs, however, when this temporary, functional allocation is frozen into the permanent architecture of the post-independence state.
The rural farmer who survived years of frontline exposure did not undergo a structural transformation upon victory. When the war ended, they returned to civic life with the exact same lack of social, educational, and economic capital they possessed when they left their village. They were forced to begin the process of state-building from the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder, a ladder whose upper rungs were now occupied by the exact same administrative and command cadres whom the wartime structure had insulated from maximum exposure. The structural inequality of the field was thus seamlessly imported to become the structural inequality of the state.
Categorical Split and the Extraction of Heroic Capital
To obscure this class divergence and legitimize its consolidation of power, the post-independence leadership deployed a powerful ideological mechanism: the blanket categorization of tegadalay (fighter). This category operates on the absolute premise of equal sacrifice, asserting that because everyone risked their lives, everyone gave equally, regardless of their specific institutional role or proximity to death.
This absolute flattening of experience serves a dual purpose for the ruling elite. First, it allows the small governing faction at the top of the hierarchy to extract the genuine, immense heroic capital generated by the frontline sacrifices of the masses. The elite uses this extracted heroism to justify its monopoly on state power, transforming the collective trauma of a generation into an unassailable political currency.
Second, it forces an artificial division of Eritrean society into two distinct classes: those who fought and those who did not. By elevating the identity of the fighter into an elite moral tier, the state fractured the natural alignment between the common soldier and the civilian population.
This division is particularly stark when analyzing the trajectory of female fighters. During the armed struggle, women were mobilized at unprecedented levels, temporarily disrupting traditional patriarchal structures. Post-independence, however, the vast majority underwent a brutal structural demobilization, returned to domesticity, and marginalized socio-economic roles. Yet, despite being stripped of actual societal authority, they remain bound to the state through their permanent inclusion in the fighter class. Their historical sacrifice is continuously celebrated in state ceremony, not to empower them, but to reinforce the legitimacy of the elite who claim ownership over that collective title.
The Psychopolitical Paralysis of the Fighter
This institutional categorization has produced a deeply fractured psychology within the veteran population. While many common fighters harbor profound disillusionment regarding their economic destitution and exclusion from political power, they find themselves conceptually and linguistically trapped by the very identity the state assigned them.
Because the state has systematically cultivated the binary division between fighter and civilian, the veteran is alienated from the public. They cannot easily build common cause with civilian grievances because their entire sense of historical value is anchored in a category that sets them apart from, and above, civic society. When a fighter falls into poverty, struggles in the bureaucracy, or passes away, they are not treated as a civilian citizen with rights and material needs; they are honored, buried, and memorialized exclusively as a military unit. This perpetual militarization of memory ensures that their identity never reverts to that of a civilian.
Consequently, when the veteran experiences a conflict with the regime, their opposition is structurally disabled. The only ideological phrase available to them within the state’s linguistic framework is “we did not fight for this.”
This formulation is fundamentally flawed because it operates entirely within the state’s own terms. It implicitly accepts that the right to critique the government belongs strictly to those who hold the title of sacrifice, thereby validating the very hierarchy that excludes the broader public. The fighter remains a captive of the honor system. They cannot think of themselves as a civic individual or a member of an exploited economic class because the title of tegadalay acts as a psychological buffer, offering symbolic prestige in direct exchange for material and political submission.
Institutional Proliferation: From Tegadalay to Warsai
The most damning evidence that this sorting is a deliberate mechanism of statecraft, rather than an accidental byproduct of history, is its systematic replication across generations. The elite did not let the classification system die out with the aging veterans of the liberation war. Instead, it institutionalized it through the creation of the Warsai-Yikealo program, dragging the post-independence generation into indefinite national service.
By introducing the title of Warsai (the inheritors) alongside Yikealo (the veterans), and very recently Mendelay, the cobra-like name attached to the new generation of conscripts who fought in the Tigray War, the regime successfully expanded its extractive infrastructure. The youth entering national service are not treated as citizens fulfilling a temporary civic duty; they are recruited directly into the historical category of permanent sacrifice.
Just like their predecessors, when these young conscripts die in military labor or border conflicts, they are rewarded with titles, military burials, and state-sanctioned martyrdom. This production of honor serves a starkly practical end: it replaces the state’s material debt with symbolic capital. The regime does not need to provide economic security, political representation, or an end date to conscription because it converts the citizen’s life into an absolute category of heroism.
By continuously feeding new cohorts into this machine, the ruling elite preserves the fundamental fracture of Eritrean society. The public remains split between those inside the loop of state-defined heroism and those outside it. This prevents the emergence of a unified, nuanced civilian consciousness. It ensures that the population views its suffering not through the clear lens of class exploitation or authoritarian subjugation but through a confusing psychological fog of national duty and military honor.
The Indictment of the Category
The true objective of analyzing this structural arrangement is not to construct a retrospective claim for moral or material compensation for aggrieved veterans. Rather, it is to directly indict the category of equal sacrifice for its role as an instrument of psychological and structural subjugation.
The primary obstacle to a free and democratic Eritrea is not merely the physical coercion of the security apparatus but the profound psychopolitical confusion generated by this class of heroism. As long as the population accepts the state-imposed titles, as long as a citizen’s value is defined by whether they belong to the historic military camp or the civilian camp, the ruling elite will remain completely unassailable. It will continue to exploit this divide, hiding behind the sacrifice of the masses while treating the public as a raw, expendable resource to be allocated without reply.
A transition toward a new political reality requires the systematic dismantling of these categories. The illusion of the heroic hierarchy must be shattered so that the fighter, the conscript, and the civilian can begin to see themselves through a shared civic identity. Until the state-sanctioned titles of sacrifice are recognized as the extractive tools they are, any future political order will remain trapped in the same loop, functioning merely as the armed struggle by another name.
