Bearing the sobriquet of ‘Africa's North Korea’, it should come as no surprise that scholarship on the notoriously secretive and repressive nation of Eritrea is sparse by necessity: Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea in last place in its global survey of press and media freedom every year from 2008 to 2012 (p. 9). Against this backdrop, Kjetil Tronvoll and Daniel R. Mekonnen's recent work serves as a Herculean accomplishment, rendering the book an imperative read for any serious scholar of Eritrea, the Horn of Africa, or African human rights more broadly.

The central claim of their book is that contemporary Eritrea fits sociologist George Laswell's definition of a ‘garrison state’. Writing in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Laswell suggested that a garrison state is characterised by a ruling national military elite whose rise to power was precipitated by its leadership in the face of international tensions, which subsequently allows it to contemporarily curtail domestic civil liberties under the spectre of another war (pp. 1, 178–80). Tronvoll and Mekonnen convincingly argue that contemporary Eritrea is also rightly characterised as such. President and independence leader Isais Afwerki and the ruling Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) party – which came to power during Eritrea's 1993 independence from Ethiopia – have within Eritrea, they argue, created a highly militarised society against which the EPLF perpetrates widespread human rights abuses justified in the name of national cohesion. In making this argument, the authors offer eleven chapters on various aspects of Eritrean society as evidence of how the country fits Laswell's definition of a ‘garrison state’. In so doing, the authors take a (perhaps unavoidably?) activist stance towards their subject, advocating for substantial change in the human rights landscape in a country that is among the most dire, yet underreported, humanitarian emergencies in the world today.

The book soars in the breadth and depth that it achieves in each individual chapter. While chapters two through five offer thorough overviews of the development of the legal and political spheres of the country, they are outshone by the five subsequent ‘investigative’ chapters, which offer outstanding detail on the myriad (and often horrifying) abuses faced by Eritrean citizens at the hands of their government. Particularly moving are chapters six (on the harrowing ‘archipelago’ of secret detention camps around the country); chapter seven (on the groups most vulnerable to detention and forced disappearance by government forces); and chapter ten (which most convincingly makes the case for the ‘African garrison state’ thesis).

Only very minor critiques are warranted. The work – somewhat by necessity – sometimes feels repetitive in the information it presents. While the authors explain the reasons for this choice (p. 21) one still feels as though one is reading rephrasing of the same expository facets in multiple chapters. Indeed, the employment of such a tactic – which usefully allows every chapter to stand on its own – has the unfortunate effect of making the book's essential ‘garrison state’ thesis sometimes feel an ancillary rather than central claim of the book. While certainly not a drawback per se, The African Garrison State sometimes thus reads as being as much a primer on Eritrea writ large as it is a work of social scientific argumentation.

Nevertheless, one is left impressed with the extent of information and analysis that the authors have cultivated in this notable work, particularly given the difficulties of conducting research of any kind in the country. The book's illumination of the deplorable state of affairs in Eritrea will hopefully serve as the basis for much-needed scholarship on the country well into the future.