ABSTRACT

This chapter on the significance and contours of territorialization in modern Eritrea begins with a chip of pottery. In the summer of 2003, I traveled to Gash Barka in the Eritrean Western Lowlands in order to explore the possibilities of conducting research among communities of resettled refugees who had been returning to Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. I was responding to a number of Eritrean policy makers and scholars, along with UN and nongovernmental organization (NGO) development workers who directed me to the perceived need for research on the ecological and social dimensions of large-scale refugee resettlement in the western lowlands, a landscape damaged by warfare but envisioned as the breadbasket of a new nation struggling with food insecurity. Perhaps as many as 200,000 refugees had returned to Eritrea since independence, and many of them were settling in the western lowlands through both official programs and spontaneously, creating large, multiethnic, agrarian-based communities on land formerly used for grazing. Land for resettlement and new cultivation was scarcer in the highlands—a region socially and ecologically distinct from the lowlands that flank it to the east and west. The ability of these people to access sufficient resources to build stable livelihoods (Kibreab, Nicol et al. 2002) along with the long-term environmental sociopolitical consequences of large-scale population growth (Naty 2003) were two primary concerns among scholars working in the region, as well as policy makers in the government of Eritrea and the transnational organizations involved with relief aid, development and resettlement.