Tricia Redeker Hepner's book is a phenomenal account of the dialectical struggles, both domestic and transnational, that necessitated the birth of the Eritrean state, and have in many ways striven to renegotiate the various elements of statehood – sovereignty, citizenship, identity, political participation, nationalism, and transnationalism. The author presents a historical ethnography of the Eritrean dynamics, embedded in prolonged anthropological fieldwork in Eritrea and the United States, that spanned almost a decade. The study is reported in a moving analytical style that elegantly straddles between literary anthology and social science discourse.

The protracted Eritrean war of independence from the Ethiopian empire-state, the mass nationalist mobilisation that characterised the war project, the collective sacrifices passionately borne by Eritreans at home and abroad in order to actualise the dream of independent statehood, the internal ethno-sectarian and ideological divisions that often attempted to split and impede the liberation movement, as well as the transcendent resolve of national self-determination that animated the struggle, are all brilliantly articulated and analysed by the researcher in a way no previous scholar has done. As the narrative reveals, Eritrean independence from Ethiopia in 1993 came at an enormous price. Hundreds of thousands of martyrs and exiles were produced by the liberation war, while the majority of the people at home who survived the war suffered unprecedented internal displacement and hardship. But more significantly, political independence came with an unbounded feeling of hope and possibilities.

The strong vision and energy to rebuild the nascent war-torn state was particularly vitiated and somewhat reversed by the events of the 1998–2000 Ethiopia–Eritrea border war. ‘Intensified processes of militarization and authoritarian rule’ (p. 219) have been entrenched by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) government that has ruled Eritrea as a one-party state since independence. Forced nationalism, including mandatory military service and extraction of taxes from the scattered diaspora populations, prolonged detention and torture of dissenting voices in various military camps and secret prisons, crackdown on civil society and the private media, have taken centre stage in contemporary Eritrea. Evidently, the PFDJ government is paranoid with imagining adversarial subversion and attack. A major consequence of the instituted police state is that an increasing number of refugees flee Eritrea, while many exiles of the liberation war originally intent on returning to post-independent Eritrea remain trapped in the diaspora. Paradoxically, transnationalism – which historically facilitated the achievement of independent statehood – has been re-instrumentalised by Eritreans to challenge the vision and modus operandi of the dictatorial party-state. This painful twist in transnational struggle within a generation is rigorously portrayed and analysed by the author.

In response to the shifting paradigm in political struggle, the party-state creates boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the political community by reference to such categories as ‘soldiers, martyrs, traitors and exiles’. In the state's propaganda, soldiers and martyrs are depicted as pillars of the revolution that deserve honour. Local dissidents and exiles are variously vilified as traitors deserving nothing but shame and punishment.

Tricia Hepner's book is outstanding in both substance and style. The author deserves commendation for her extraordinary capacity to bond with the research participants, supporting many in the vicissitudes of life, without compromising her investigative and analytical rigour as an academic researcher. Hepner's book is at the cutting-edge of qualitative research methods in African studies and the social sciences. It is a must read for everyone desiring to improve their skills in qualitative research and methods of analysis.