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- Convenors:
-
Sabine Planel
(IRD - Institut de Recherches pour le Développement)
Fana Gebresenbet Erda (Institute for Peace and Security Studies)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Politics and International Relations (x) Violence and Conflict Resolution (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S76
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -, Saturday 3 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Conflicts and the war striking nowadays Ethiopia encompass a multi-layered political crisis. Tackling it from a territorial perspective allows to understand political disputes. Conquest or occupation dynamics; feelings of belonging and claims will be scrutinized through field-based observations.
Long Abstract:
Conflicts and the war that strike Ethiopian territories for few years back, but especially since November 2020 encompass a multi-layered and regionally diversified political crisis. Tackling politics from a territorial-based perspective allows a comprehensive understanding of what political contention and negotiation are truly made of, apprehending the materiality of space, long-term territory formation and war-time short term dynamics and events.
Drawing on recent scholarly work on civil wars, we consider the Ethiopian civil war as the violent competition of social orders, entailing heterogeneous and competing territorial constructs, chronologies, and subjectivities. In this panel we narrow our analytical angle on territorialised contention and its historical makings, political uses, and social grounds. By doing so we seek to comprehend how the war led to and results from specific territorialisation processes.
Carefully documenting the conflicts stands as the panel's main objective. We consider contemporary assertions should rely on local and ground-based observations rather than on ideological statements. Panellists from every field of social sciences are invited to focus on very recent war-related territorial shifts, documented through field-works observation. As a consequence, we expect qualitative and recent material to be presented.
Any dimension of territorial-based contention would be accepted, but appropriation, conquest or occupation dynamics; feelings of belonging or administrative claims are particularly expected for discussion. Collectively analysing of the role and uses of violence in the contemporary making of Ethiopian territories, and for example the way it reshapes political and territorial centrality, stands as our second objective.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Davide Chinigò (Università per stranieri di Perugia)
Paper short abstract:
I interrogate the formation of the political subject in Ethiopia as a concept that describes how state power structures social life, while simultaneously creating the conditions of possibility for new openings and social formations. I argue for an analytical shift in the study of identity politics from questions around belonging to becoming.
Paper long abstract:
In this article I argue for an approach to study identity formation in African studies away from conventional lenses focusing on questions around belonging to questions around the political subject’s becoming. I draw on a recently published book in which I propose the everyday as an analytical lens to study the relation between state formation and social change in Ethiopia under the rule of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Empirically, I discuss the processes of institutional mediation of flagship state policies and development programmes at the intersection between ethnic federalism and the developmental state. I pin a specific analytical focus on the problematics of living that beneficiaries of state policies and local officials experienced in their everyday interactions with state power. A focus on how ordinary people live through, despite, and alongside the constraining forces of state power under EPRDF raises important questions on how Ethiopian studies mobilise the category of ethnicity to explain conflict and war since the 2018 transition. In particular, I argue that studying identity politics and conflict through the category of belonging bears the tendency to culturalise and naturalise power relations. The concept of becoming, which I draw from Deleuzian philosophy, is meant to capture both how the structural forces of history articulate identity politics, while leaving room to discuss new openings and possibilities. This is meant to restore an ethical perspective to fieldwork and qualitative research which casts the struggle for open-endedness as a central concern to the study of social change.
Siyum Adugna Mamo (Ghent University)
Paper short abstract:
Employing an ethnographic research approach, this paper aimed to explore the process of collective identity formation and the production of violence taking a case from Ethiopia’s contentious politics since the 2018 transition.
Paper long abstract:
This article unearths the process of identity formation and the production of violence in the context of Ethiopia’s contentious politics following the transition in 2018. The article employed an ethnographic research approach to unpacking how identities are made and used to produce violence in Ethiopia. Using constructivist alliance theory, the article argues that identity formation has formally been in the making since the introduction of the ethnolinguistic federal system in 1991 and intensified following the democratic opening in the early days of 2018. It also argues that the regime’s lack of clear terms on how the political forces participate in the transition and its indifference to the call for a negotiated transition led to the political forces, which are marginalized and pushed to the periphery of the new political landscape despite their role for the new political landscape to emerge, to produce violence mobilizing their local allies along ethnic identity lines in pursuit of reconfiguring, repositioning themselves to the center of and dominate the new political landscape. Thus, recognizing the participation of the political forces where the demands and aspirations of all are negotiated is needed for a peaceful and democratic transition through a careful application of consociational democracy to lessen the violence.
CHEMEDA Getaneh Wudeneh (EHESS-Paris)
Paper short abstract:
The objective of the article is to examine how violence, repression and the militarization of the state attributes to the onset of popular protest.
Paper long abstract:
Oromia is entering a new wave of massive popular movement waving the whole region. On the 5th of December 2022, footage and pictures displaying two decapitated heads on pikes surfaced all over social media. The two decapitated heads belong to Oromos residing in Wollega and who were labelled ‘Shene’ by Amhara militants. This is in the aftermath of the recurrent drone strikes, mass displacement and the burning of villages and harvests linked with the violence spread along the Oromia-Amhara border districts and the Ethiopian government intensified attack against the resistance of the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) in Western Oromia. The incident is narrated as the modern-day resistance echoing the imperial expansion of the late 1880s. The incident mobilised all across Oromia, including within the diaspora and gave birth to the outbreak of a popular movement called Oromoo haa Baraaruu (#OB) meaning Save Oromo (#SO). The Oromoo haa Baraaruu (#OB) literally named #OB protest is a movement rocked at Haramaya University, Eastern Oromia, in reaction to the continued organized violence by the state and non-state actors in western Oromia since 2018. Like the grand Oromo rally, ‘Oromo protest’ (2014-2018), students and youths (Qeerroo) pioneered the movement. Relying on the fieldwork made on the mundane local politics and the everyday life of the society since the 1st of September 2022 in Oromia, I try to discuss about the made of, the mobilization, and the narrations of the #OB movement. Finally, The paper tries to highlight the current state of turmoil and the implication of the #OB protest on the wider Oromia and Ethiopian politics.
Sabine Planel (IRD - Institut de Recherches pour le Développement)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to unveil one of the evolving powers struggles the conflict entails and focusses on war-induced political violence in the Wolayta statehood quest. It documents the war-induced uses of political repression and control and how it has resulted in a regional territorial reshuffling.
Paper long abstract:
Away from warfronts, this communication observes the political use of a waring context in order to control political opposition. It then raises the question of a war-induced political violence that targeted specific individuals in comparison to the massive violence that had been exerted against civilians. Out of battle fronts, war mobilization has shielded an unprecedented movement to control local societies. In post-2018 Ethiopia, the multiplication of localized inter-ethnic violence gave rise to a more assertive generation of opponents fueled by democratic-oriented governmental rhetoric and social media posts from diaspora that the regime sought to control, either by co-opting them into the PP, or by repressing them, or more often by alternating the two. Grounded in qualitative research conducted from 2019 up to now on ethno-nationalism revivals, this paper focuses on war-induced political repression or control. It deciphers the variety of evolving tools mobilized by the central Party-State in Wolayta, mainly from November 2020 to November 2021. First, we will observe how local Party-State structures served strong political agendas: activists were met with even greater repression, as opponents were more systematically arrested since the summer 2020 and the march to war. As cycles of cooption and repression shortened, detention conditions also became harsher, and the targeting of opponents progressively sophisticated after the state of emergency was reinstated in November 2021. Finally, we will analyze the massive impact war-induced political violence had on territorial reorganization and on the promotion and implementation of a new technology of bounding, the clusterisation of SNNPR.
Yirga Abebe (Institute for Peace and Security Studies, Addis Ababa University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the (un-)making of territorial controls in Wag-Himra zone during the civil war in Northern Ethiopia. It argues that the war did not necessarily have an exclusive, win-lose territorial outcome, and illustrates unique case of negotiated territorial outcome in Wag-Himra zone.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the spatial dimension of the Ethiopian civil war with particular emphasis to the (un-)making of territorial controls in Wag-Himra zone of Amhara Regional State, Ethiopia. It argues that the civil war in Ethiopia’s north did not necessarily have an exclusive, win-lose territorial outcome, and illustrates a unique case of negotiated territorial outcomes in the Agew inhabited Waghimra zone. This argument is based on the study conducted through a qualitative method with data collected from key informant interviews and review of secondary sources. The Ethiopian government appeared to have decided to leave certain areas of Wag Himra Zone under the TPLF after the decisive push in December 2021. The TPLF continues to control and administer two districts of the administrative zone, Abergelle and Tsagbji woredas, while it has abandoned control of other areas in Amhara and Afar regions. On the other hand, during the past two years, the Waghimra zone’s administrative control was expanded to Ofla and Korem districts which were under Waghimra’s administration in pre-1990s. The unique negotiated territorial arrangement in Waghimra zone, it is argued, is a consequence of four interactive factors. Firstly, the geographical factors; second, the socio-political ties between communities and political elites in Waghimra and Tigray regions including during TPLF’s rebel years in the 1970s and 80s; third, the marginalization of the Wag Himra zone by the Amhara regional government; and fourthly the political mobilization of the population by politicians working against the Amhara region, and a few in alignment with the TPLF.
Tirsit Sahldedngil Beyene (Insisitute of Ethiopian Studies) Marie Bridonneau (Université Paris Nanterre) Alula Pankhurst (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses interactions between the TDF and local communities around Lalibela during 5 months’ occupation. It focuses on governance negotiations, survival strategies and gendered relations. We argue that the competition of social orders during this episode.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the interactions and negotiations between the Tigray Defense Force (TDF) and local populations and institutions during five months’ occupation from August to December 2021. It considers differences over space between the town of Lalibela and two rural communities to the South and North, and over time during different durations and phases of the occupation. We analyze data from 119 qualitative interviews from three perspectives. First, governance and the combined role of the Church, the traders, and civil society organizations, notably the iddir funerary associations, in jointly negotiating with the occupying forces the reestablishment of law and order, safeguarding essential travel across the war zones with laissez-passer letters, and providing minimal services and assistance to the neediest. We argue that effective and creative solutions were negotiated with the TDF leadership. Second, we assess different survival strategies based on location, occupation, wealth and status. We argue that certain individuals were able to build trust relationships with TDF leadership and soldiers as a coping strategy during. Third, we examine gendered relations of power arguing that the economic burden on women who migrated less increased but relations between the occupiers and women were less confrontational and more accommodative than with men.
Yared Yetena (Addis Ababa University) Atrsaw Nadew (University of Gondar)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Qimant territorial making in Ethiopia’s Amhara Region using empirical and secondary data. It examines how contentious territorial claims, identity, the interplay of various actors, violent conflicts, and the civil war in Northern Ethiopia shaped the Qimant territorial formation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the Qimant self-determination quest and territorial making within the Amhara region in light of the cascades of contentious politics, the interplay of different actors, and the ensuing conflict with the Amhara from 2009 to 2022. Indeed, assemblages of factors are at play, inter alia, the conflation of ethnicity and territoriality in the FDRE Constitution served as a bedrock in the evolution of ethnic conflicts into territorial boundary making. To capture the case in all of its complexities, this paper situates the Qimant-Amhara conflict in the context of territorialized contention, its interplay with identity and the overarching national political setting. Through drawing empirical data from interviews, focus group discussions, meeting minutes, and documents, the paper argues that a constellation of events of alliance, competition, and violent conflict between the Qimant and Amhara from 2009 to 2021 shaped the Qimant’s territorial making. These phases were shaped by four factors: first, Qimant-Amhara's mutual hostility toward the ruling EPRDF in the early 2010s. Second, the outbreak of the Amhara protests in 2016 that questioned the Qimant territorial claims caused violent conflict. Third, the outbreak of civil war in the North facilitated an alliance between the Qimant and Tigray ethno-nationalists, further exacerbating confrontation of the Qimant and Amhara. Four, the Amhara region's slow response to the quest for self-rule and subsequent measures of granting the establishment of an autonomous Wereda administration consisting of 42 Kebelles in 2015 and later a Special Zone consisting of 69 in 2018 shaped the Qimant territorial making.