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- Convenors:
-
Jason Mosley
(University of Oxford)
Jeremy Lind (Institute of Development Studies (Sussex University))
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- NB003
- Start time:
- 29 June, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
Across eastern Africa, extractive and infrastructure projects (both state-led and private) of unprecedented scale are underway, many located in marginal rural areas. While promoting integration, the growing presence of an 'extractive regime' may worsen state-society tensions at the margins.
Long Abstract:
Across eastern Africa, a host of domestic and foreign investors, both states and private companies, are pursuing a range of extractive projects to harness the region's rich deposits of oil, gas and minerals, as well as wind, water and geothermal power. The scale of these investments is unprecedented in the region, with many projects located in marginal rural areas. Examples include Ethiopia's US$4.8 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project, and oil exploitation operations in northern Kenya and western Uganda. Governments in eastern Africa are also marshalling international capital to expand regional infrastructure - roads, railways, pipelines - to facilitate resource extractions while also opening up the region to other capitalist development. These largely spatial processes overlay complex and in some places contested regional political economies. Regional integration in this sense is often seen somewhat benignly, as part of wider development and economic growth, and even a precursor to peace-building. Many marginal areas of eastern Africa have been accorded a new national and regional relevance. Yet, given the top-down implementation and assumptions about development, it is important to question whether there are circumstances in which growth corridors and resource extractions could worsen violence. There is evidence that the growing presence of an 'extractive regime' - encompassing exploration and extractive operations, and political institutions and security architecture around these - worsens state-society tensions at the margins, animating long-standing struggles around public authority in these places and in some cases resulting in new violence.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the governance of oil development in northern Kenya’s and the consequences of these for local institutions and conflict. It examines how oil development in the region has become enmeshed in a web of political and economic relations, overlapping and at multiple levels.
Paper long abstract:
Frontier oil exploration is happening increasingly at the margins in sub-Saharan Africa. Extractive development is expected to be accompanied by increased state presence in these areas, and thus stimulate a transformation of local governance arrangements and institutions, including those that support peacebuilding. Over the past 5 years, oil exploration operations have multiplied across northern Kenya, a region with legacies of violence and a tenuous relationship with the state. This has coincided with Kenya's political devolution as a way of reducing national political violence. Yet, since then levels of sub-national violence have increased across Kenya, with many pointing to the changing ethnic arithmetic brought about by devolution. New county-level governments are benefitting from a windfall of public resources, and at least some of the new violence relates to contestations for local supremacy and power. Yet, devolution also creates a new layer of citizenship, which is animating resource politics and the renegotiation of longstanding alliances and rivalries. This paper uses findings from a household survey and other qualitative fieldwork carried out in south Turkana in 2016, complemented with archival analysis, to assess the implications of oil development on dynamics of security and peacebuilding. It examines the dilemmas and prospects of oil exploration generating new conflict risks at the margins at the same time that devolution raises the spectre of old disputes around borders, identities and territory.
Paper short abstract:
Extractive Industries have become among the emerging economic sectors in Ethiopia, bringing a new dimension of contestation over ownership, entitlement, and management of natural resources.
Paper long abstract:
Ethiopia has recently expanded its engagement in extractive industries by granting concessions to foreign and domestic companies for oil, gas, and mineral explorations and extractions. Although it is considered as part of the plan to diversify the economy as part of the ambitious Growth and Transformation Plan (GTP) that was launched in 2010, the extractive industry has now become a major contested terrain among different actors with regard to the ownership, entitlement, and management of natural resources. For example, a series of conflict, strike, and mass movement has ravaged the operation of MIDROC Gold Plc. that has dispossessed thousands of local people in southern Ethiopia. This paper focuses on the Adola Gold Mining (state owned) and Laga-Dambi MIDROC Gold mining (privately owned), and investigates contestations over land right, corporate social responsibility and subsequent violent conflicts in Oromia regional state, Ethiopia. The paper further probes into the dynamics of state consolidation of power in Ethiopia's marginal region, and argues that extractive industries further marginalize the society while strengthening state power in the periphery.
Paper short abstract:
This paper builds on concepts of ‘illiberal state-building’ and ‘developmental authoritarianism’ in Kenya and Ethiopia, where extractive regimes, high-modernist visions and transformative agendas (LAPSSET and the Addis Ababa-Adama development corridor) face limits and resistance in implementation.
Paper long abstract:
In Kenya and Ethiopia, the emergence of extractive regimes, high-modernist visions and state transformative agendas - notably LAPSSET (Lamu Port and South Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor) project led by Kenya and the Addis Ababa to Adama agro-industrial development corridor in Ethiopia - have brought into sharp focus the capacity of governments to enforce such visions unhindered. Whether implemented through an executive-bureaucratic state whose authority is curtailed by processes of informalisation and relatively autonomous devolved units (Kenya), or through a decentralized but centrally controlled and authoritarian system of government (Ethiopia); this paper shows that in both cases, the state's ability to achieve its often simplified project visions is impeded by local responses and agendas, and in select cases, this incapacity engenders violence and conflict. Based on field interviews conducted in both Kenya and Ethiopia, official and NGO reports, and newspaper sources, this paper argues that the ability of both the Kenyan central government and the Ethiopian government to implement top-down developmental visions is limited, and that this process often times demands negotiations with other players, necessitating a fragmentation of state power. By examining the ability and capacity of state bureaucracies in both Kenya and Ethiopia in enforcing their developmental aims in peripheral regions, this paper builds on the concepts of 'illiberal state-building' and 'developmental authoritarianism' to address the wider literature on the African state.
Paper short abstract:
The paper investigates the relation between water, land and labour redistribution and state formation in a large scale irrigation investment in western Ethiopian lowlands, combing ethongrpahic visual research with remote sensing maps.
Paper long abstract:
The paper investigates the relation between water management and state formation in Ethiopia, in a large scale irrigation investment in an Ethiopian traditional "frontiers", the Beles lowlands.
I combine ethnographic visual research with remote sensing maps on water productivity, to contribute to the debates on the political economy of the Ethiopian developmental state and on the spatial dimension of state formation in Ethiopia. I discuss transformations and continuities in the practices of people and resources control by the current Ethiopian government, situating these practices at the interplay of different scales (international-Nile basin level, national-federal, regional and local), and looking at:
i) continuities and transformation in the representation of an old frontier, both in the government development projects and in the aspirations of different waves of resettlement and migration from the highlands;
ii) the symbolic and material making of a new centre, the sugar project managed by the federal level and attracting new flows of investments and people, resource accumulation and exploitation;
iii) the dynamics of exclusion at the margins of the irrigation scheme, with farmers dispossessed from their land and means of livelihood.
I suggest a main contradiction in the developmental state at work: on the one side, through the territorialisation process related to large scale investments, the State increases its capacity in terms of territory control, resource accumulation and surplus extraction. On the other side, these process contribute to social and economic complexity, and spatial mobility that render a significant portion of the population - and their development aspirations - invisible to the government rigid ideology and practices of political mobilization.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will foreground various framings of new (and existing) divisions, alliances and conflicts within and between ‘communities’ in light of the Lake Turkana Wind Power project and political dynamics of Samburu and Marsabit Counties, northern Kenya.
Paper long abstract:
The Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) project, soon to be Africa's largest wind-farm, is under construction in Marsabit County, northern Kenya. Samburu, Turkana and Rendile pastoralists have grazed livestock in this landscape for generations. This project has come at a time of, and is connected with, regional devolution of political power and capital in Kenya, which is influencing the dynamics of power and power seeking in the area.
The LTWP project and political forces are not homogeneous entities oppressing homogeneous communities. Instead new (and existing) divisions, alliances and conflicts are framed in various ways as (re)emerging within and between 'communities'. Identities, lineages, land rights and aspirations are brought to the fore, guide and are re-created (through) people's pragmatic interactions with various framings and world views in light of the LTWP project and political processes. This presentation will foreground these issues helping to develop an understanding of how lives of people from different communities in the region are undergoing continual negotiation and why the LTWP project and political dynamics of the area are perceived as liberating by some and oppressive by others.