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This book offers a comparative ethnography of the contested powers that shape democratization in Ethiopia. Although multi-party elections have become the norm in Africa, relatively little is known about the significance of non-state actors such as traditional authorities in electioneering. Focusing on Ethiopia’s competitive 2005 elections, this book analyzes how customary leaders, political parties and state officials confronted and complemented each other during election time. Case studies reveal the contemporaneousness of traditional authorities in modern politics, but also how multi-party competition reproduces traditional relations of domination among ethnic groups. The book documents the importance of customary authority in selecting party candidates and providing legitimacy to political parties, but also their limitations in a country dominated by a semi-authoritarian party-state.
This book takes stock of national political developments in Ethiopia since the formal adoption of multi-party politics and ethnic federalism in 1991. Chapters on ethnic federalism, revolutionary democracy, opposition parties, the press, the judiciary, state-religion, and state-foreign donor relations provide the most comprehensive review of contemporary Ethiopian national politics to date. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
Most studies on Africa that analyzed the institution of the state emphasized the colonial origins of state formation, tracing the crisis of socioeconomic and political development to that specific historical trajectory. Colonialism has shaped the characteristics of modern African states, but it is also important to address institutional factors, methods of governance, and state-society relations in the post independence period. As Ethiopia was not directly constituted by European colonialism, a study of the Ethiopian state provides an opportunity to look at how the state has performed, and how it relates to its own society, without the colonial baggage. This case study explores the characteristics of the Ethiopian state employing neopatrimonialism as a theoretical framework. It addresses the system of personalization, hybridization, patronage, coercion and external factors in the exercise of state power. According to both Weberian and Gramscian theories of the state, the legitimacy of states is contingent upon the tacit acceptance of its authority by the majority of the population under its jurisdiction. Coercion is used as a threat and a last resort when all other persuasive and ideological methods have failed or become inadequate. Yet, the case study shows the use of coercion as an enduring feature of some states. The Ethiopian state has been consistently challenged internally and isolated regionally. Consequently, it has depended on a combination of coercion and external patronage as a survival strategy. This strategy has further complicated internal cohesion, and external patronage has also served as a disincentive to accommodate internal demands for inclusion. The endurance of violence and internal challenges to the authority of states is a general characteristic of states with contested legitimacy.
A signal feature of legal and political institutions is that they exercise coercive power. The essays in this volume examine institutional coercion with the aim of trying to understand its nature, justification and limits. Included are essays that take a fresh look at perennial questions. Leading scholars from philosophy, political science and law examine these and related questions shedding new light on an apparently inescapable feature of political and legal life: Coercion.
Since 1991, there has been renewed debate in Ethiopia concerning the implication of the country s past for the present polity. The long-standing debate was given an added impetus by Eritrea s independence from Ethiopia and the threat of disintegration posed by the continued struggle for self-determination by other ethnonational groups. Ethiopianist scholars, always committed to the indivisibility and unassailability of the Ethiopian state, blamed the country s political troubles on nationalist scholars, accusing them of fabricating history and instigating people into taking up arms against the state. Vowing to protect Ethiopia from further disintegration, the Ethiopianist elite called on patriotic scholars to challenge, expose, and discredit what they described as the politically motivated propaganda of irresponsible nationalists. In Contested Terrain, a team of historians and sociologists confront the scholarship of power that dismisses politically engaged scholarship in the name of academic objectivity. Based on the experience of the Oromo in Ethiopia, they tackle the methodological and political challenges of nationalist scholarship within the highly contested terrain of Ethiopian studies and argue that objectivity in scholarship should not mean neutrality in the face of injustice and exploitation. In eight chapters, they show that scholars can recover the experiences of the disadvantaged and underrepresented and give voice to the powerless and downtrodden. They demonstrate that there is no contradiction between challenging prevailing dogmas and inherited orthodoxies in academia on the one hand and giving support to struggles aimed at ending exploitative practices and dismantling institutions of oppression on the other. Academic objectivity must not be a tool for questioning the scholarly value of nationalist scholarship solely on the basis of the scholar s commitment to certain political causes. As an intellectual enterprise, politically engaged scholarship should be judged on its own merits, not on the basis of its implications for the well-being of political entities. -- Amazon.com.
WINNER – 2020 SEAA's Francis L. Hsu Book Prize Honorable Mention China’s new globalism plays out as much in the lives of ordinary workers who shoulder the task of implementing infrastructure projects in the world as in the upper echelons of power. Through unprecedented ethnographic research among Chinese road builders in Ethiopia, Miriam Driessen finds that the hope of sharing China’s success with developing countries soon turns into bitterness, as Chinese workers perceive a lack of support and appreciation from Ethiopian laborers and state entities. The bitterness is compounded by their position at the margins of Chinese society, suspended as they are between China and Africa and between a poor rural background and a precarious urban future. Workers’ aspirations and predicaments reflect back on a Chinese society in flux as well as China’s shifting place in the world. Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia sheds light on situations of contact in which disparate cultures meet and wrestle with each other in highly asymmetric relations of power. Revealing the intricate and intimate dimensions of these encounters, Driessen conceptualizes how structures of domination and subordination are reshaped on the ground. The book skillfully interrogates micro-level experiences and teases out how China’s involvement in Africa is both similar to and different from historical forms of imperialism. “A trailblazing ethnography that at once humanizes and complicates our understanding of the China-Africa encounter. Taking us deep into the personal, social, and working life worlds of Chinese and Ethiopian construction staff and laborers, Driessen mounts a powerful challenge against the clichéd narrative of China in Africa as a case of neocolonialism masterminded by Beijing.” —Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA, author of The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa “China rapidly transformed itself from an international aid recipient into a world-leading aid provider. This seemingly epochal shift, as this book powerfully demonstrates, is much more complex and less predictable than it appears to be. Driessen’s wonderfully perceptive ethnography and insightful analyses pave a new path in understanding ongoing global changes.” —Biao Xiang, University of Oxford, author of Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry
Examines and compares diplomatic practices and normative change in the African Union and ASEAN.
A detailed historiographical examination of the role the Ovimbundu people have played in Angolan politics from Portuguese colonization to the present.
This book examines the relationship between inequalities and identities in the context of an unprecedented state advocacy of human rights with a distinct emphasis on (ethnic) group rights in post-civil war Ethiopia. The analysis is set against the background of a dramatic state remaking by a rebellion movement (the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front – EPRDF) that seized control of the Ethiopian state in 1991, after a decisive battlefield victory over an unpopular regime. The new government of former rebels pledged to institute a new system of ethnic self-government that celebrated ethnic diversity with a firm pledge to guarantee basic human rights. After nearly three decades in office, however, the Ethiopian government is challenged by the resilience of identity-based inequalities it ostensibly sought to end, and by protests against its own policies and practices that intensified inequality. The events in Ethiopia, reverberating throughout the Horn of Africa, have inspired heated and often polarized debates between academics, policy experts, political activists, and the media. Data D. Barata contributes to this debate through a nuanced ethnographic analysis of why identities with distinct notions of inequality persist, even after relentless interventions and ideological repudiations. The contestations and struggles over political representation, local governance, cultural identities, land and religion that the book examines are shaped, one way or another, by the global human rights discourse that has inspired millions of Africans to confront entrenched structures of power. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of anthropology, African studies, political science, sociology and cultural studies.
With essays on U.S. history ranging from the American Revolution to the dawn of the twenty-first century, Contested Democracy illuminates struggles waged over freedom and citizenship throughout the American past. Guided by a commitment to democratic citizenship and responsible scholarship, the contributors to this volume insist that rigorous engagement with history is essential to a vital democracy, particularly amid the current erosion of human rights and civil liberties within the United States and abroad. Emphasizing the contradictory ways in which freedom has developed within the United States and in the exercise of American power abroad, these essays probe challenges to American democracy through conflicts shaped by race, slavery, gender, citizenship, political economy, immigration, law, empire, and the idea of the nation state. In this volume, writers demonstrate how opposition to the expansion of democracy has shaped the American tradition as much as movements for social and political change. By foregrounding those who have been marginalized in U.S society as well as the powerful, these historians and scholars argue for an alternative vision of American freedom that confronts the limitations, failings, and contradictions of U.S. power. Their work provides crucial insight into the role of the United States in this latest age of American empire and the importance of different and oppositional visions of American democracy and freedom. At a time of intense disillusionment with U.S. politics and of increasing awareness of the costs of empire, these contributors argue that responsible historical scholarship can challenge the blatant manipulation of discourses on freedom. They call for careful and conscientious scholarship not only to illuminate contemporary problems but also to act as a bulwark against mythmaking in the service of cynical political ends.