Nasser Ahmedin Mohammed is a stateless (formerly Eritrean) refugee and a PhD candidate completing his dissertation. He was born in July 1978 and grew up in the town of Asmara. His dissertation deals with the wartime nationalist discourse in Eritrea and the construction of the new enemy. He was a journalist for the culture and arts program through the years from 1998 to 2000. Before he left Eritrea in 2009, he worked at the Research and Documentation Center of Eritrea, where he was a research assistant. He did his Masters of Philosophy from Addis Ababa University. He believes being introduced to the field of philosophy has been the best thing that had ever happened in his life, and likes reading philosophy for sheer intellectual pleasure and for artistic endeavors.
Mohammed is an amateur artist and loves reading literature. He is a great lover of the Bronte novels and has translated Jane Eyre into Tigrigna.
Award Information
The roots of the Eritrea-Ethiopian conflict are tied with Eritrea's perpetual quest for an external Significant Other, which she lost with the demise of "Ethiopian Colonialism". Eritrea's experience of identity crisis, after the loss of the long enduring external significant Other, which was represented by the Amhara ruling elite, has led it into conflict with all its neighbours in the post independence years. In the recent conflict the Eritrean state has re-invented Tigray as the new external "Significant Other" by resuscitating old popular myths, memories and Self/ Other imaginations. This Eritrean identity was originally driven by a colonial-bourgeoisie mindset of the metropolitan Asmarinos of the 1940s, who being infused with the colonially imposed modernism in Eritrea, developed a subculture that lived in antagonism with everything traditional, especially with the Eritrean village culture and the "Agame" (the Tigrayan labourer) --which is the very embodiment of that culture.
