Short Abstract

What explains the dominant features of change and continuity in Ethiopia's political economy? How can we avoid a binary prism while explaining the shift in Ethiopian elites' ideological orientation from state-led developmentalism (2005-2018) to a full embrace of neoliberalism (post-2018)?

Long Abstract

This panel invites papers that explore and explain the changes and continuities in Ethiopia’s political economy, including the watershed year of 2018, when the country entered a new political era marked by leadership change, deepening socio-economic crises, and shifting global alignments. Contributors are encouraged to move beyond prevailing narratives that romanticise the Ethiopian developmental state model by offering a sober, multidimensional analysis of the country's economic and political recalibration amid internal conflicts, neoliberal economic reforms, and regional power reconfigurations. Understanding current contestations in Ethiopia requires approaches that account for deep-seated historical grievances, questions of economic and social justice and the ongoing negotiations of statehood. We invite various methodological and conceptual prisms to unpack the deeper, multi-layered spectrum of institutional change, elite power reconfiguration, and friction in Ethiopia over the past two decades.

We also invite contributors to reflect critically on their own positionality and on how knowledge of Ethiopia’s political economy is produced, circulated, and contested. We expect paper proposals that examine sectoral and thematic areas such as industrial policy, labour relations, social reproduction, federalism, the financial sector, urban development, and geopolitics. Paper contributors are expected to trace and explain which aspects of institutional arrangements remain intact or consolidated in the post-2018 political economy dispensation, which have changed, and to what extent. Paper contributors are also expected to explain how multiple crises, such as COVID-19, civil war, and protracted internal and global conflict, affected the patterns and dynamics of change and continuity from developmental statism to a neoliberal political economy.

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