Images of war, narratives of suffering and notions of ethnicity are intrinsically linked to Western perceptions of Africa. Filtered through the medium of a limited number of sources – mostly international reporters unfamiliar with the local context, or foreign diplomats aloof from everyday politics and sufferings in the country in which they serve – the information and pictures of African wars are confined to narrow categories of explanation, categories emerging from and adapted to a Western history and political culture. This book aims at reversing this process; looking at war and its sufferings from the point of view of those who undertake it and suffer through it – in order to identify local frameworks of understanding. When our viewpoint is embedded in the context of war, we discover that the simplistic models explaining contemporary wars in Africa, which are reproduced in a Western discourse, are basically false and not true to the empirical processes unfolding on the ground in the various conflict zones throughout the African continent.

This book explores the understanding of war and the impact of warfare on the formation and conceptualisation of identities in Ethiopia. The context of the study is the conflict-ridden Horn of Africa, where groups of people have been fighting each other – both as informal collectives and as governments sanctioned by state power – throughout history. Building on historical trajectories of enemy images, the recent Eritrean-Ethiopian war (1998–2000) will be used as an empirical backdrop in order to explore war's formative impact, by analysing the politics of identity and shifting perceptions of enemies and allies.