Short Abstract

Ethiopia’s ongoing civil war is a blurred and deeply debated category of warfare. The panel invites social scientists to document and analyze this semantic contest confronting it to grounded realities of the war to render its contextualization and politicization.

Long Abstract

One of the deadliest conflicts in recent history, Ethiopia’s civil war remains largely unknown, partially because of documentation challenges but also because of its nature as a civil war.

Scattered across different battlefronts, evolving in a multi-step continuum, Ethiopia’s civil war is a heterogeneous polycentric conflict opposing the central government to some of its regions. Be it from scholar or public opinion, the very qualification of the war is fiercely contested. Labels like “genocidal war,” “law-enforcement operation,” or “Northern Ethiopia’s war” compete for dominance. They question its objectives, geographical boundaries, its outcomes and time limitations. This “semantic contest” (Kalyvas, 2006) underscores the nature of the conflict as a civil war - an inherently blurred and deeply debated category of warfare. “The very use of the term is part of the conflict itself, conferring or denying legitimacy (or status equality) to the parties in the conflict. “ (Kalyvas, 2006:17).

The panel invites social scientists to document and analyze the contest. We expect presentations to address the following points : to document reality of the conflict by presenting grounded researches and original data (events; social groups or new geographies materialising the civil-war); to reflect on the warfare knowledge production process, in contemporary or past Ethiopia (detailing its constraints, analytical choices, author’s positionalities and their evolution); to analyse information making and spreading in order to document the semantic contest itself (at government or street level, in Ethiopian or abroad); to confront narratives rendering their contextualization and politicization.

Propose paper