Eritrea

The territory of present-day Eritrea has been inhabited since deep antiquity, with archaeological finds along the Red Sea coast and the Buya site in the Danakil indicating one of the oldest hominin records in Africa. By the first millennium BCE, the highlands and adjacent coast formed part of the Pre-Aksumite cultural sphere associated with the polity often called D'mt, whose centres included Qohaito and Matara. From roughly the first to the seventh centuries CE the region was integrated into the Kingdom of Aksum, whose principal Red Sea port at Adulis served as a hub linking the Mediterranean, the Nile valley, Arabia, and the western Indian Ocean, and through which Christianity entered the highlands in the fourth century.

After the decline of Aksum, the highland districts of Hamasien, Akele Guzai, and Seraye fell within the orbit of successive Ethiopian Christian polities, ruled at varying distances by the Zagwe and later Solomonic dynasties through hereditary governors known as the Bahr Negash. The coastal lowlands and the Dahlak Archipelago, by contrast, came under Muslim sultanates and trading networks tied to the wider Red Sea world. From the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire established the province of Habesh based at Massawa, holding the littoral while the highlands remained contested between Ethiopian rulers and local notables. In the nineteenth century Egyptian forces extended their reach inland from Massawa before being checked by Emperor Yohannes IV at Gundet and Gura in the 1870s.

Italian commercial agents acquired Assab in 1869, and the Kingdom of Italy formally occupied Massawa in 1885. Through the Treaty of Wuchale and subsequent agreements, Italy proclaimed the Colony of Eritrea on 1 January 1890, drawing the borders that the modern state would inherit. Italian rule lasted until the Second World War, when British Commonwealth forces defeated the Italian army at Keren in 1941 and administered the territory under a British Military Administration. The disposition of the former colony was referred to the United Nations, which in 1950 voted to federate Eritrea with the Empire of Ethiopia under the Crown, a federation inaugurated in 1952.

Emperor Haile Selassie progressively eroded Eritrea's federal autonomy and in 1962 annexed it as Ethiopia's fourteenth province, an act that catalysed an armed independence struggle led first by the Eritrean Liberation Front and later by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front. The war continued through the imperial period and the Derg military regime that succeeded it after 1974. EPLF forces captured Asmara in May 1991, and following a United Nations supervised referendum in April 1993 Eritrea declared formal independence on 24 May 1993 and was admitted to the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity.

A border war with Ethiopia between 1998 and 2000 was concluded by the Algiers Agreement, though demarcation remained contested until a rapprochement in 2018 normalised relations. A constitution drafted in 1997 has not been implemented, and no national elections have been held since independence. The present-day Eritrean state is a unitary republic governed by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice, the successor organisation to the EPLF, with executive authority concentrated in the President, Isaias Afwerki, who has held office since 1993.