Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the politics of secondary cities through the infrastructural interdependencies that formed in Dire Dawa around the Addis Djibouti Railway. Infrastructural (dis)connections, nodes where multiple jurisdictions coexist, render visible political tensions & bureaucratic fault lines.

Paper long abstract:

The city of Dire Dawa was built around the railway terminal constructed in 1902 connecting Emperor Menelik’s new capital Addis Ababa to the coast of French Somaliland (Djibouti). For the central government, Dire Dawa has served as a gateway to Eastern Ethiopia. For the communities living in the East, Dire Dawa has been the federal government’s urban consulate - an ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan, and ever-expanding eastern outpost. The construction of the new Addis-Djibouti Railway in 2011 was thus seen as reinvigorating the city's lost glory. The federal railway's successful integration, however, depended on local transport systems, logistics centres, and industrial parks. When infrastructures meet, not only are these complex systems physically integrated (or not), but administrative and political boundaries are crossed. Drawing on years of fieldwork in Ethiopia, I explore what these infrastructural nodes can tell us about the mechanisms of contesting central authority in and from 'secondary cities'. By zooming into specific instances of infrastructural (dis)connection, this paper examines the tensions between key political brokers, engineers and bureaucrats across administrative scales. It is at these infrastructural junctures where multiple jurisdictions (federal, regional, and municipal) co-exist that de facto political power is negotiated and rendered visible through infrastructural decisions. Moving beyond the primacy of Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa is poised to not only host a 4200-hectare industrial zone (including Chinese & Turkish industrial parks), but also the wider region's rural youth and pastoral communities that increasingly seek urban refuge in face of repeated droughts and ecological crises.