The Pledged Public and the Problem of Power Before Transition
In my previous essays on the Pledged Public, I have been trying to think about Eritrea’s political problem from the position of the public rather than from the organizations seeking political power. Much of our opposition politics understandably begins with the government: how it can be challenged, weakened, or removed, and what political force might finally become capable of doing so. The Pledged Public begins somewhere else. It asks what the Eritrean public should already have established among itself before we know who will govern the country next.
I want to focus here on one problem that makes the necessity of such a public clearer: the opposition must also be opposed. I realize that this formulation can easily be misunderstood in the Eritrean context because the opposition is already opposed. Supporters of the government attack opposition movements, question their motives, and defend the existing political order against them. That is not the opposition I have in mind. They oppose the opposition to preserve existing power. I am interested in how a public seeking the end of that power can nevertheless remain politically independent enough to place demands and limits upon those trying to replace it.
Part of what has made this question urgent for me is the increasing visibility of the Eritrean Blue Revolution Front (EBRF/‘ብርጌድ ንሓመዱ’). Whatever one thinks of the movement, it has become one of the more organized and politically visible forces presenting itself against the Eritrean government. Its representatives appear regularly in media, speak about Eritrea’s political future and regional questions, and have become increasingly active around Ethiopia and the political dynamics developing there.
None of this means that the Front will take power or even that political change in Eritrea is imminent. My concern is narrower. If circumstances suddenly created an opening in Eritrea, organizations already organized, visible, connected, and capable of acting would begin from a radically different position from ordinary citizens and political groups that exist mainly as possibilities. The Blue Revolution Front interests me here not because I can predict that it will govern Eritrea, but because its growing political capacity makes an older Eritrean problem visible again.
That problem is contained in a proposition that sounds entirely reasonable: remove the dictatorship first, and then create the democratic order in which everyone can participate. A movement may sincerely intend only to remove the government, facilitate a transition, create political space, and eventually allow parties to compete through elections. I do not have to assume dishonesty to be worried by this sequence. The problem is that the organization before victory and the organization after victory do not occupy the same political position. The struggle itself changes the distribution of power.
We can see this in our own history. The Eritrean armed struggle required extraordinary organizational capacity. Liberation organizations had to recruit, mobilize, discipline, administer, fight, raise resources, develop institutions, build international relationships, and survive over decades. We normally describe these activities as part of the struggle for liberation, which of course they were. But politically something else was happening simultaneously: through the struggle itself, they were accumulating power.
Independence, therefore, did not return everyone to a neutral starting point from which democratic politics could begin. The victorious organization arrived with an army, leadership structures, administrative experience, networks of loyalty, international recognition, enormous symbolic authority, and the moral capital of sacrifice. Others could theoretically organize afterward, but they would enter a political field that was already profoundly unequal.
There was something peculiar, then, in expecting plural politics simply to begin after liberation. We were effectively imagining organizations that had not accumulated comparable capacity during the struggle appearing after victory and competing equally with the organization that had fought, sacrificed, organized, and won. We then expected the victor to create conditions under which those competitors could criticize it, organize against it, defeat it electorally, and eventually ask it to surrender the state it had just acquired.
That is possible. But nothing in liberation itself guarantees it. A victorious organization can quite sincerely believe its history gives it responsibilities others do not possess. It knows the country. It paid the price. Its members died. From inside such an organization, restricting political competition can gradually begin to look less like authoritarianism and more like responsibility.
This is why explaining Eritrea’s post-independence trajectory entirely through personalities is insufficient. The more interesting institutional question is what position the struggle itself had created for the victorious organization relative to everybody else, and what the public had accumulated on its own side capable of confronting that power.
The same problem appears whenever we postpone the architecture of democratic transition until after regime change. We will negotiate afterward. Political parties will organize afterward. We will determine transitional arrangements afterward. We will decide when elections occur afterward.
I increasingly think “afterward” is one of the most dangerous words in opposition politics, not because those making these promises are necessarily lying, but because “afterward” is precisely when their political position will have changed.
Before victory, a movement needs people, legitimacy, networks, resources, and sacrifice. After victory, it may possess ministries, weapons, administrative institutions, territorial control, and international recognition. Meanwhile, the political organizations expected to compete with it afterward may only be beginning to organize. Why should the public postpone its most consequential demands until the moment when its bargaining position is weakest?
The lesson of the armed struggle should therefore be more than that the EPLF failed to fulfill democratic expectations after independence. That conclusion may satisfy us morally but teaches us little institutionally. The harder question is why so much depended on what the victorious organization chose to do afterward in the first place.
If democracy depends upon the winner voluntarily creating the conditions under which it can lose, the public has already surrendered too much.
This is where moral superiority enters the argument. The opposition naturally possesses a considerable moral advantage in our political imagination. The government imprisons; the opposition demands freedom. The government suppresses political participation; the opposition demands democracy. Those who have suffered under the existing order may understandably believe that their experience makes its reproduction unthinkable.
There is obviously a moral difference between an authoritarian government and citizens resisting authoritarianism. But moral difference is not yet structural difference. Saying we would never do what they did tells us something about intention. It does not tell us what would prevent it.
The problem need not even begin with betrayal. Imagine that an opposition movement acquires power genuinely intending a short democratic transition. It then discovers remnants of the old regime, foreign interference, political fragmentation, economic crisis or emerging instability. Any of these concerns could be real. The movement may sincerely conclude that the transition needs more time.
But who decides how much more time?
If the organization possessing the greatest power is also determining when the country is ready for political competition, it has become both participant and referee. The liberator need not decide one morning to become a dictator. It may simply become the manager of the transition. Whoever manages the entrance to democracy already possesses considerable power over democracy itself.
This brings me back to the distinction with which I began. When I say the opposition must also be opposed, I am not proposing another political camp against it, and certainly not describing what supporters of the existing government already do. Their opposition seeks to prevent challengers from displacing existing power. The opposition I am describing seeks to ensure that no political organization, including one we support, becomes politically indistinguishable from the public itself.
To oppose in this sense is to retain political distance.
A citizen can support the Blue Revolution Front, defend its right to organize, participate in its activities and hope it succeeds in weakening authoritarian rule while still asking what limits should bind it if it becomes powerful. Indeed, those questions become more important as the movement becomes more successful.
The distinction is between political support and political absorption. Absorption begins when an organization’s victories automatically become our victories, its leadership becomes our leadership, its interests become our interests, and its acquisition of state power begins to feel as though the public itself has acquired power.
But an organization acquiring power and a public acquiring political power are not the same event.
An opposition organization has interests of its own. It wants to survive, expand, maintain cohesion, attract supporters, defeat competitors, and increase its capacity to influence or acquire state power. There is nothing scandalous about this. These are normal organizational interests.
The public has a different interest in one important respect. It should care not only about who acquires power but whether that power remains contestable afterward. The opposition asks how it can become strong enough to change the government. The public must add another question: how can we remain strong enough to challenge you if you succeed?
Authoritarian politics constantly pushes us away from this distinction. Everything becomes organized around the common enemy, until criticism of an opposition organization can appear equivalent to helping the government. Eventually society is divided into those standing with the government and those standing with the opposition.
But where, in that arrangement, is the public?
A democratic public cannot disappear inside whichever organization it currently supports. If the government faces an opposition but the opposition faces only followers, we have not constructed a democratic political relationship. We have merely decided where to place our loyalty.
This brings us directly to the Pledged Public. If an opposition movement becomes increasingly organized, visible, connected and capable of action, it is accumulating political capacity. I do not object to this. An opposition incapable of accumulating power is unlikely to challenge an entrenched authoritarian state.
The question is what the public is accumulating at the same time.
This becomes particularly relevant as Eritrean opposition organizations develop relationships, operating spaces, media networks, and strategic opportunities around Ethiopia and the wider Horn. These activities may increase their capacity to act if circumstances inside Eritrea suddenly change. The point is not to condemn such capacity-building but to recognize what it means politically.
If one side is accumulating organization, relationships, resources, and visibility while the public is accumulating only hope that this organization will behave democratically afterward, then we have learned very little from our history.
The Pledged Public is my attempt to think about what could be accumulated on the public’s side before that moment arrives. Not weapons, another liberation front or a rival government-in-waiting, but prior political commitments around which citizens recognize one another and through which they place conditions upon anyone seeking authority.
The question therefore changes from “Who should replace the PFDJ?” to “What should already be true before anyone replaces it?
The purpose of the Pledged Public is not simply to make Eritreans better democratic citizens. It is to change the sequence through which political legitimacy is produced. Instead of an opposition becoming powerful, replacing the government, establishing a transitional authority and then inviting the public into a process whose broad parameters it helps determine, certain conditions should already exist as public demands before anyone acquires transitional authority.
That is why the pledge cannot be loyalty to an organization, leader, or ideology. It must be an agreement among citizens about what they will require from anyone seeking political authority. The Blue Revolution Front should encounter it. Another opposition coalition should encounter it. Reformers emerging from within the existing system should encounter it. Even a political organization I personally admire should encounter it.
The point is precisely that we should not have to know beforehand who will be good.
This brings me to a legitimate question raised about my previous discussions of the Pledged Public: what exactly are people pledging themselves to? If the concept remains an abstract description of an independent and politically conscious public, it accomplishes very little. The pledge has to become concrete enough that citizens can say to whoever emerges during a transition: this condition did not originate with you, and you do not have the authority to suspend it.
I intend to turn next to what I think the first such condition should be. But the political reason for establishing those conditions should come first.
I think we can, and perhaps we must. Eritrea needs organized political opposition precisely because the existing system has made ordinary democratic change nearly impossible. Yet the more capable an opposition becomes of challenging that system, the more important it becomes for the public to develop independently of it. These processes need not undermine each other. Ideally, they should grow together.
Perhaps this is one lesson we can take from the armed struggle without reducing that history to an argument about bad individuals. The liberation movement accumulated power because it had to. A movement incapable of accumulating power could not have conducted a successful liberation struggle. The deeper problem was that nothing comparably independent had been accumulated on the side of the public that could confront victorious power with conditions established before victory.
I do not want the Blue Revolution Front, or any other Eritrean opposition organization, to remain weak simply so that the public can feel safe. If political change requires organized power, somebody will have to build it. What worries me is the possibility that an organization becomes increasingly powerful while the rest of us become increasingly indistinguishable from its supporters.
The public should be capable of saying two things at once: we support your right to challenge this government, and we are organizing independently of you around the conditions under which anyone, including you, may exercise political power.
That is not the opposition to the opposition practiced by supporters of the existing government. It does not seek to protect the state from its challengers. It seeks to protect the political independence of the public from both.
For decades, we have understandably asked which political force might finally become capable of opposing the government. The Pledged Public asks us to add another question before the answer arrives: if someone succeeds, what will already exist that is capable of opposing them?
Not because the next opposition will necessarily betray us, but because no democratic future should depend upon it choosing not to.
