Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation
Eritrea and East Timor Compared

This book shows how Eritrea and East Timor developed sophisticated strategies to liberate their countries from colonialism, and emphasizes that these insurgencies avoided terrorism.

Awet Tewelde Weldemichael (Author)

9781107576520, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 March 2016

368 pages, 2 maps
22.8 x 15.3 x 2.4 cm, 0.58 kg

'Awet Tewelde Weldemichael has written an excellent history of two liberation struggles: Eritrea's and East Timor's. The two stories make for absorbing and instructive reading by anyone interested in twentieth-century liberation movements. The detailed discussion of the similarities and differences between the Eritrean and East Timorese liberation struggles provides fascinating case studies for history and comparative study buffs. The study re-examines the premise of previously held theories and views on the power tactics and strategies of survival of local groups engaged in a life-and-death struggle, as well as what kind of political system emerges as a result, and to what extent the armed struggle shapes these systems. In that sense, this study makes a significant contribution to historical and political studies.' Bereket Habte Selassie, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

By analyzing Ethiopia's rule over Eritrea and Indonesia's rule over East Timor, Third World Colonialism and Strategies of Liberation compares the colonialism of powerful third world countries on their small, less powerful neighbors. Through a comparative study of Eritrean and East Timorese grand strategies of liberation, this book documents the inner workings of the nationalist movements and traces the sources of government types in these countries. In doing so, Awet Tewelde Weldemichael challenges existing notions of grand strategy as a unique prerogative of the West and opposes established understanding of colonialism as an exclusively Western project on the non-Western world. In addition to showing how Eritrea and East Timor developed sophisticated military and non-military strategies, Weldemichael emphasizes that the insurgents avoided terrorist methods when their colonizers indiscriminately bombed their countries, tortured and executed civilians, held them hostage, starved them deliberately, and continuously threatened them with harsher measures.

Introduction
1. Swaggering empires and defiant 'new provinces'
2. Bittersweet replicas of foreign experiences and reform
3. Toward reorganization and reorientation: Eritrean fragmentation and East Timorese near-defeat
4. Victims of their own success: the revitalized nationalist movements and their challenges
5. Eritrean and East Timorese diplomacy of liberation
6. To Asmara through Addis Ababa and Dili via Jakarta
7. Winning insurgencies and counterinsurgencies in a changing global order
8. The promise and quandary of 'infusing fresh blood' and 'inaugurating new politics'
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS], African history [HBJH], Asian history [HBJF], History [HB]