Paper short abstract:

This communication explores the politicised dimension of development and its policies of mobilisation. Through agricultural extension policies, and more precisely through the case study of a public debt management, it details voluntary servitude of Ethiopian peasantry.

Paper long abstract:

Even within authoritarian regimes, and especially in the hydride situations of new authoritarianisms (Brooker, 2009), political mobilisation rarely legitimates itself without promoting other objectives: peace keeping, social justice or more generally development. Referring to another goal (tentatively to a non political one) facilitates but also frames the disciplinary effects of popular mobilisation. When it comes to local development, and more specifically to agricultural development, it produces very ambiguous forms of consent and resistance.

The Ethiopian Democratic Developmental State offers a politicised understanding of development and produces through various sectorial public policies a very efficient mobilisation at local level that reinforces political control. This presentation will observe routinized modalities of mobilisation through agricultural extension public policies implemented in rural Ethiopia since the early 2000. It will stresses on their recent evolution after the liberal shift of the Developmental State, more or less after 2011. Based on ethnographic fieldworks and a multi-site enquiry conduced since 2010, the presentation will observe how peasantry consent and resist at the same time to State's pressure. It will specifically focus on their management of the public micro-credit/debt they have been forced to contract. I will then observe that despite the fact that statal, social and agrarian dependencies strengthen domination (Ferguson, 2013) it also enables resisting strategies.