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.