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E/Utopia in practice: the practice and politics of Ethiopian futurity

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E/Utopia in practice: the practice and politics of Ethiopian futurity

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E/UTOPIA IN PRACTICE:
THE PRACTICE AND POLITICS OF ETHIOPIAN FUTURITY

by

Azeb Nishan Madebo

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Azeb Nishan Madebo

ii
Dedication

For the Ethiopians of the World
&
ኒሻን እና ደጉ
iii
Acknowledgements

I want to extend my deepest gratitude to my family, friends, academic mentors, and study
participants. If it were not for your kindness, time, and generosity, I would not have been able to
produce the current iteration of a project which I hope to improve in the coming years. Thank you
for the support as I emotionally and intellectually grappled with the task of writing about my
homeland amidst the painful realities of war and a pandemic.
To my partner Hakim, my dad Jefferson, my sisters Meron and Angela, my brother David,
my aunt Thressa, Jenni, Julia, and mothers-in-love Tigist and Metti, thank you for being my biggest
cheerleaders and guides. In your different ways, you have each helped me think through and
prioritize the things that matter most. Thank you for letting me sit with my feelings, allowing me
room to step back from my research, and providing me respite when I felt overwhelmed or stuck.
I hope to make you all proud by completing this phase of my academic journey.
Thank you to my dissertation chairs, Taj Frazier and Francois Bar, for stepping in when I
needed your guidance and encouraging me to pursue this project. Taj, thank you for being my
guide for the past six (!!!) years as I figured out who I was as a scholar and student. Thank you to
Henry Jenkins for always taking the time to give me generous feedback and encouragement–even
when my ideas felt incomplete. Your commitment to mentorship and scholarship has made an
enduring impact on how I relate to students and my intellectual pursuits. Thank you to Ralina
Joseph, whom I will forever be under an outstanding debt of gratitude. Thank you for stepping in
as my role model during my undergraduate days at the University of Washington, Seattle. If it
were not for you noticing me and showing me a path, I would not have pursued a Ph.D. Thank you
all for being such honest and generous academic mentors, pushing me when I needed it, and
encouraging me to pursue lines of research that made me feel true to myself.
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To my friends and intellectual comrades who formed accountability groups, offered me
advice, and listened as I explained and reworked various iterations of this project, thank you. Thank
you to Bri, Diami, Ignacio, Jillian, Karina, LaToya, Meshell, Riley, and Sarra for helping me stay
focused, for making me laugh, and for offering me space to commiserate and celebrate with you.
Thank you all, especially to Diami, for helping me find my way out of my writing slump and
talking through the many problems and ideas that inform my work. If it were not for all of you,
getting a Ph.D. would have been incredibly isolating and dreary.
To my homeland and its people, I hope this project plays a constructive role in
understanding Ethiopia’s current predicaments and future possibilities. Thank you to Lishan,
Abeba, Yeshi, Beza, Olivia, Nabil, Frazier, Sisay, Amado, Abebech, Girma, Ebenezer, and family
for your encouragement. Thank you to my research participants and guides in Ethiopia, many of
whom became my friends, thank you for taking the time to answer my many questions and taking
my research seriously. Thank you, particularly to Melake, Behailu, Daniel, Neguse, Mekuria,
Befrdu, Feyisa, Enatnesh, Mekdem, Ambas, and Addis Ababa University’s department of
Journalism and Communication. Without your earnest engagement and investment in my project
and ideas, I could not have written what I have so far. Any gaps or mistakes in this dissertation
reflect my own shortcomings and the constraints of time.
And finally, to USC Annenberg and the Graduate School, thank you for the Research
Enhancement Fellowship and your support over the years. Though my fieldwork was interrupted
by COVID-19 and the conflict in northern Ethiopia, your support has been indispensable for
advancing this project and future iterations of my work.
v
Table of Contents
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii

Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................ vii

Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ viii

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter One .................................................................................................................................. 11
Africa is________ ............................................................................................................. 11
Containers of difference and value: race, nations, ethnicity, and development ............... 36
Ordering of humanity. ....................................................................................................... 41
Progress, development, and the possibilities of black/African futurity ............................ 45

Chapter Two .................................................................................................................................. 48
International development ................................................................................................ 50
Modernization and international economic development. ................................................ 53
Neoliberalism and structural adjustment programs .......................................................... 59
Third World Challenges to Modernization and Western Dominance .............................. 64
Latin America, .................................................................................................................. 64
The African and Asian challenge to Western hegemony .................................................. 72
China-Africa cooperation .................................................................................................. 79
Difference, deferral, and development measures .............................................................. 84
Development’s representational regimes .......................................................................... 85

Chapter Three .............................................................................................................................. 101
The Developmental State and its Plans for National Progress in Ethiopia ..................... 107
Nationhood and Development under TPLF-EPRDF Rule. ............................................. 110
Territorializing Ethnic Difference, Nationhood, and Class Conflict .............................. 124

Chapter Four ............................................................................................................................... 142
Futurity, Imagination, and the Limits of Planning .......................................................... 142
Methodology and limitations .......................................................................................... 161
Divvying up the pie ......................................................................................................... 164

Chapter 5 ..................................................................................................................................... 190
National Imaginaries and Techno-liberation .................................................................. 191
Methodological Considerations ...................................................................................... 196
Digital Media and Nationalist Politics ............................................................................ 198
Digital Engagement and Nationalism: @shadesofinjera as a case study ........................ 204

Chapter Six .................................................................................................................................. 228

vi
References ................................................................................................................................... 246

Appendices .................................................................................................................................. 264
Appendix A: Maps of Ethiopia ....................................................................................... 264
Appendix B: Visual Representations of Development ................................................... 270
Appendix C ..................................................................................................................... 273
Appendix D: Interview Tools and Participant Information ............................................ 274

vii
Abbreviations

ADLI: Agricultural Development Led Industrialization
ADP: Amhara Democratic Party
AWiB: Association of Women in Business
EDORM: Democratic Officers’ Revolutionary Movement
EIC: Ethiopia Investment Commission
EPDM: Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement
EPRDF: Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front
EPRP: Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party
ESDP/MEDREK: Ethiopian Social Democratic Party
EZEMA: Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice
GDP: Gross Domestic Product
GERD: Gran Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
GTP: Growth and Transformation Plan
IMF: International Monetary Fund
LDCs: Least Developed countries
MFA: Ministry of Foreign Affairs
MOCT: Ministry of Tourism & Culture
NAMA: National Movement of Amhara
OFC: Oromo Federalist Congress
ODP: Oromo Democratic Party
OLA: Oromo Liberation Army
OLF: Oromo Liberation Front
ONLF: Ogaden National Liberation Front
PASDEP: Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty
PP: Prosperity Party
SEPDM: Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement
TPLF: Tigray People’s Liberation Front
TSP: transformative scenario planning
WTO: World Trade Organization

viii
Abstract
This dissertation illustrates the discourses and practices which constitute contemporary Ethiopian
contestations over ethnicity, nationhood, and futurity. Using an interdisciplinary and mixed-
methods approach that includes ethnographic observations, interviews, and discourse analysis, this
project describes how nationalist and development-oriented pursuits of the future come to be
imagined, crafted, and deployed by three different groups of Ethiopian actors: the developmental
state of Ethiopia, its local civil society, and members of the diaspora. The first two chapters review
the formation of development as a framework of progress and international exchange and consider
how development and its co-constituted classificatory systems like nation, race, and ethnicity
constrain Ethiopians' capacity to realize more endogenous, democratic, and protean pursuits of the
future. Chapter three looks at how state leaders craft and mobilize concepts like nationhood and
development to legitimize the reconstitution of the state, ethnic clientelism, and authoritarian
approaches to road-mapping the future of Ethiopia. The fourth chapter considers how local
Ethiopians navigate civic participation, national belonging, and future world-building while under
the constraints of Ethiopia's economic underdevelopment and nationalist politics. The final study
chapter interrogates how digitally mediated political engagements enable diaspora youth to
transmit information and forge distinct ethnic and national attachments toward their homeland and
its future trajectory—ultimately limiting their capacity to engage in nuanced dialogue and
imagining about Ethiopia. Overall, the case studies evaluate how the material-discursive
relationships that give rise to knowledge regimes and classificatory systems like nationhood,
ethnicity, and development contain imagination, participation, and the realization of more
egalitarian and nonviolent futures in Ethiopia.
Keywords: Ethiopia, development, nation, ethnicity, imagination, futurity, progress
1
Introduction
The future is not determined by a teleological ordering of events but by the ideas, values,
and desires that are communicated and practiced within a society. The future is not a given and
predetermined place on a temporal landscape, a vision or an idea of a time to come, but a contingent
project of transformation and change (Bromber et al. 2015). To understand the contemporary
conjuncture of Ethiopia, and thus the multiple and contingent projects of transformation Ethiopia
is undergoing, means to understand and work with a dizzying (and sometimes frankly depressing)
set of realities, discourses, and contradictions. While Ethiopia occupies a place of historical
significance and is often imagined as a place of historical and primordial wonders, contemporary
Ethiopian practices and discourses regarding nationhood, development, and the future call into
question any neatly woven narratives about the region, its people, and future trajectory. Like many
other parts of the world today the present and future of Ethiopia are fraught with indeterminacy
and exist as contested terrains of political struggle. Struggles which have so far cyclically
manifested in immensely violent contestations over resources, brutalizing projects of state and
national (re)constitution, and horrific attempts by those vying power to arrive at singularly
determined political and future imaginaries for Ethiopia.
Forceful and nearly totalizing pursuits to formulate authoritative visions of the present and
the future, plagued by what Stephen Duncombe (2012) describes as “elite envisioning, single
minded execution, and unyielding manifestation,” have given shape to the problematics of
contemporary Ethiopian politics and the collective failure of Ethiopians to mobilize participatory
civic imagination in the pursuit of collective wellbeing. By studying the discourses and practices
which constitute Ethiopians’ world-building projects, this dissertation illustrates contemporary
Ethiopians’ struggles over nationhood and the future. To make sense of how Ethiopians negotiate,
2
attempt to overcome, and gain control over the indeterminate future possibilities that lie ahead for
them and their homeland, I use the definition of communication as “a symbolic process whereby
reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed” (Carey, p.8) to ask the following
questions:
1. How are local Ethiopians and its diaspora communities shaping the future of Ethiopia?
What kinds of debates and practices are state officials, local civil society, and diaspora
communities engaging in to shape the future direction of the state, the nation, and/or the
ethno-national group(s) they identify with?
2. How are development and nationhood co-constructed and co-determined phenomena? How
do they show up in the Ethiopian context?
3. How do knowledge regimes and classificatory systems like nationhood, ethnicity, and
development—which I problematize as floating signifiers or concepts whose meanings are
not fixed though they often appear discursively as concrete or objective truths—obscure
and contain the capacity of Ethiopians
1
to find more endogenous, democratic, and protean
pursuits of the future as well as solutions to their present predicaments?
4. And finally, for those of us who have borne witness to the failed experiments of single-
minded utopianism—as well as to the limits of responding to these failures through
reactionary nationalism and criticism—how can we start from the complexities of our

1
With the third question, you can read “Ethiopian” broadly. Meaning, I am not only alluding to
the state and nation that is my case study but also more broadly to mean what Vijay Prashad calls
the “darker nations” of the world because of the symbolic meaning attached to Ethiopia in the
black radical imagination and projects for decolonization as well as because the literal meaning
ascribed to “Ethiopia/n” is “dark-skinned” people. So, when I ask how these containers are limiting
Ethiopians, I am also asking how they limit the Third World from being able realize new and
pluriversal modes of being and socioeconomic engagement.

3
inherited Ethiopia to engage in a more collective and nonviolent process of imagining? Or
what Stephen Duncombe (2012) describes as an open process of future thinking and
enactment which is “democratic in its conception and protean in its realization” as well as
open to critique, participation, modification, re-creation?
While grappling with these questions, this project does not attempt to offer a complete
account of contemporary Ethiopian history or politics nor any definitive solutions for its
complicated set of problems. In part, this is because the task of researching and understanding
current-day Ethiopian realities has meant working with gnawing levels of uncertainty as almost
every historical and political account claiming legitimacy and truth is often forcefully contradicted
by competing counterclaims that insist on being even more truthful and legitimate. Rather than
attempting to ascertain authoritative solutions or formulations of truth, my work pays attention to
the material, discursive, and symbolic maneuvers people employ to make sense of and engage in
debates over Ethiopia's national and future constitution. Through an interdisciplinary and mixed-
methods approach that includes the use of ethnographic observations, interview data, and discourse
analysis of social media content and official state documents, I describe how nationhood and
progress come to be co-constituted, imagined, deployed, and contested by three different groups
of Ethiopian actors—the developmental state of Ethiopia, its local civil society, and members of
the diaspora.
In the first two chapters, I give an account of the historical and political formations that
gave rise to growth-based economic development as today’s dominant framework of progress and
global exchange and illustrate how development and categories of difference like nation, race, and
ethnicity are co-constituted. While chapter two offers a historical review of international
development and the Third World’s response to the domineering and bipolar systems that emerged
4
after WWII, chapter three focuses on how frameworks for development are constructed alongside
ethnic and national boundary-making practices within contemporary Ethiopia. In other words,
chapter three illustrates how state leaders came to imagine and institute constraining visions of
developmental progress and instrumentalize ethnonational identification—by systematically
reducing complex social and economic issues into essentialist and primordial nationalist
struggles—in their bid to control the state’s resources and reconfigure the national identity of
Ethiopia.
For chapter three, my analysis draws on government documents, development agendas,
and TPLF party communication—artifacts representing state leaders’ official aspirations and
conceptions for Ethiopia’s developmental progress and national future. My analysis pays special
attention to Meles Zenawi’s 2011 article “States and Markets: Neoliberal Limitations and the Case
for a Developmental State”; the Ethiopian government’s official Growth and Transformation
Plan(s) I and II (2010-2020), which outline the developmental vision and roadmap of the state;
Article 39 and Article 41 of the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia; and
the Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s (TPLF) early party documents like the 1976 Manifesto and
the 1983 People’s Democratic Programme of the TPLF. Some of these artifacts were selected for
analysis because they represented the official views of the TPLF when it was mobilizing as an
armed nationalist movement against previous ruling regimes. Other documents were selected
because they showcase the ideological and operational logic of the TPLF once it captured state
power as the leading member of the EPRDF ethnic coalition party, institutionalized Ethiopia's
current system of ethnonational politics, and embarked on nearly three decades of authoritarian
rule. In addition, some of these documents were selected for analysis because interview
participants and interlocutors often cited them as critical documents reflective of the TPLF-
5
EPRDF's political ideology and ruling strategy and consequently, Ethiopia's contemporary
political struggles over nationhood, ethnic federalism, and progress.
By looking at the discursive maneuvers made in party and state documents about
nationhood and progress, I argue that those in control of the Ethiopian state have harnessed and
reconceptualized ideas of development and nationhood to legitimize the ethnic reconstitution and
territorialization of the Ethiopian state as well as to justify their undemocratic control over the
country’s “national” visions, development plans, and resources. Analyzing the selected
documents, I argue that state leaders deploy nationhood, ethnicity, and development as
technologies or regimes of governance and control. Leaders of the Ethiopian state instrumentalized
and codified ethnonational difference and political participation to legitimize ethnic clientelism
and the repressive administration of populations within ethnic states while simultaneously using
the imperative “need” for “national” development to justify their ethnocratic and centralized rule.
By reducing complex socioeconomic problems and identities—which, while possessing provincial
and cultural differences are also hybrid, itinerant, and contextual—into primordial, essential, and
territorialized categories of identification, state leaders legitimated ethnicity as the determining
factor for the allocation of resources and political power as well as the starting point for the
collective imagination of Ethiopian futurity. In other words, the TPLF, the Ethiopian People’s
Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), other political parties, and even armed groups
appropriate and deploy concepts like nationhood, development, progress, and democracy to
strategically emplace and safeguard themselves within internationally recognized and accepted
discourses about nationhood and development while vying for power. The pretense of national
liberation and national development have not only been used to obstruct public response against
the realities of ethnic clientelism and oppressive rule but also to legitimate ethnic discrimination
6
and violence—practices which entrench the social and felt reality of ethnic difference and
oppression.
In the fourth chapter, I look beyond official state discourse to analyze local Ethiopians’
ethnic and national boundary-making as well as world-building practices. Specifically, I am
concerned with deciphering the material and symbolic contestations reflected in ethnonationalist
and Ethiopian nationalist frameworks—the two predominant and oppositional perspectives that
characterize contemporary Ethiopian politics over Ethiopia’s nationhood, resources, and futurity.
To carry out the analysis, I use information gathered through interviews, in-situ conversations, and
ethnographic observations I made between October 2019 and May 2020 in places like Addis
Ababa, Hawassa, and Jijiga. Interview participants were selected through convenient and
theoretical sampling, recruited through Addis Ababa University, and at times directly solicited via
email and text messaging or contacted at local events. This mixed-methods and ethnographic
approach—which involved taking field notes, conducting participant observations, summarizing,
and indexing fieldnotes—allowed the nature and scope of my study to better accommodate and
respond to the questions and problematics which arose during the timeframe of my research.
That said, chapter four considers how participants’ identity negotiations, found in their
strategic and everyday practices, shape the boundaries of national belonging and, thus, the possible
modes of identification, collective representation, and public engagement available to Ethiopians.
The chapter aims to show how participants’ national boundary-making practices reflect a co-
constitutive process in which they simultaneously shape and are shaped by the material-discursive
struggles over the Ethiopian state’s configuration, cultural (ethnic, linguistic, and religious)
constitution, and future trajectory. For instance, I use this chapter to show how participants respond
to Ethiopia’s economic underdevelopment and ethnic federal model of governance by expanding
7
or consolidating the boundaries of ethnic and national belonging. Participants make, remake, and
deploy ethnic and national containers to legitimate their “collective” visions and demands for their
nation. This includes making demands over, and justifying, their perceived national ownership
over territories, resources, historical events, cultural formations, and the future. At times, national
boundaries, and people’s relationship to them are shaped and reformed in response to feelings of
neglect, perceptions of collective injustice, and desires for dominance or retribution over perceived
enemy groups. In addition to considering these practices, this chapter is concerned with showing
how Ethiopia’s ethnic and national contestations limit people’s abilities to participate in dialogue,
form solidarities and envision futures outside of national containers and ethnic-based
discriminatory politics because Ethiopia’s ethnic federalism fosters reductive politics,
competition, and suspicion among groups of people who are determined to be members distinct
nations with distinct (often competing) political, ideological, and economic interests.
In the fifth chapter, I look at how diaspora youth from Ethiopia use the affordances of
digital technologies to form virtual communities, influence perceptions of Ethiopian conflicts, and
push for change within Ethiopia. To do this, I draw on digital ethnographic observations I carried
out between June 29, 2020, and July 2021, as well as interviews with five diaspora youth Instagram
content creators and digital activists. Using interviews alongside digital ethnographic observations,
I can observe the emergence of digitally mediated nationalist politics and contextualize these
observations with the negotiations social media participants make while engaging in digitally
mediated national and political discourse. For my analysis I draw on a sample of popular Instagram
accounts created to amplify, represent, and bolster dialogue about Ethiopia and its national
contestations. I focus on @shadesofinjera, a popular youth-led Instagram account with over 65,000
followers which functions as digital and cultural hub for diaspora youth, and a sample of
8
information and advocacy-focused Instagram accounts that emerged in response to state and ethno-
national violence within Ethiopia.
In addition to transmitting information, I argue that digital engagement allows diaspora
youth to ritualistically form attachments to their homeland as well as formulate and strengthen
their sense of ethnic and national belonging to distinct places, ideologies, histories, and collectives.
The structures and affordances of Instagram and Twitter encourage expressive politics and help
shape how participants come to politically mobilize, symbolically and discursively form identity-
based online communities, and express their diasporic attachments to their imagined nation(s). The
design and affordances of Instagram encourage expressive political participation and
differentiation through the use of visual cues. Visual cues serve as markers of difference that allow
social media users to imagine and present themselves as members of a distinct collective, identify
their potential political allies, and distinguish themselves from their supposed “other” or enemies.
For instance, the visual culture of Instagram and the coordinated use of profile images, hashtags,
likes, and retweets during campaigns—especially during ethnic and nationalist conflict—
strengthen users’ perceptions of belonging to particular ethnic and national communities. These
nationally demarcated digital communities encourage adherence to group norms by inhibiting
participants from publicly criticizing their groups’ narratives; dissuading the amplification of
events that may undermine their group’s goals, and preventing participants from expressing
sympathy and commonality toward other Ethiopian (ethnonational) groups who are perceived as
different or belonging to “hostile” nations with oppositional political interest. Through digital
engagement, diaspora youth formulate collective memories and grievances, form ethnic and
national identities, and ultimately come to envision hopes for the future continuation or
fragmentation of the Ethiopian nation-state.
9
While chapters three, four, and five show how nationalist and developmental containers
are deployed to legitimate and imagine narrow visions for the future of Ethiopia, I use my
conclusion chapter to discuss the possibilities offered to Ethiopians through more endogenous,
democratic, and protean pursuits of the future. A central tenet of my project is the belief that to
realize a better world, we must first imagine what that better world would look like. However, to
imagine and enact a better world, we must also understand who is included in that process of
communicating, imagining, and creating that better world—and, perhaps, who will be sidelined.
In other words, we must earnestly contend with the values and attachments we ascribe to ethnic
and national belonging and how we use these deeply personal, affective, and political containers
in our world-making endeavors. Ethnic and nationalist frameworks that narrowly define belonging
and human relationality end up obscuring the broader systems and conditions that unite Ethiopia’s
inhabitants and can easily be used to advance single-minded utopian pursuits, which time and
again have failed to deliver in their promises of liberation, peace, economic wellbeing. In the final
chapter, I discuss the possibilities offered to Ethiopia/ns in deploying what I call e/utopian
imagining and practice. While e/utopia is like Stephen Duncombe’s framework of Open utopia—
a democratic and protean approach toward the imagination and realization of better futures—I use
e/utopia to place emphasis on the tensions inherent within utopianist imagination and practices in
contexts where competing and sometimes irreconcilable visions for the future are communicated
and single-mindedly pursued. In addition to presenting these frameworks, I use the last chapter to
consider how this research project reflects my search for identity and struggles to make sense of
Ethiopia during a time of political rupture and crisis—a markedly violent moment I had not only
been unprepared for at the onset of this project but found nearly impossible work through in my
writing. I do this in part to show that the ideas and arguments I put forth in this dissertation are
10
imperfect in their current iteration but to also convey how confusing, high-stakes, and personal the
issues I explore are to me, my family, friends, and study participants. All of whom are variously
situated within and affected by the contemporary debates and efforts to shape Ethiopia’s future
and the identities of Ethiopia’s diverse inhabitants.
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Chapter One
Rising Ethiopia and the Problem of National Containers
Africa is________

Raised in the United States, 2015 marked the first time I returned to Ethiopia since my
early childhood. While I returned to reconnect with my biological family and map out a more
complete personal story, my stay notably coincided with the peak of the “Africa rising” discourse
which was popularized by The Economist’s 2011 cover story titled “The Hopeful Continent:
Africa Rising.” This story was initially received as a pleasant alternative to the typically less
hopeful and negative tropes that dominate international reporting and narratives about Africa south
of the Sahara. In fact, only about ten years prior to its hope-filled coverage, The Economist had
branded Africa “The Hopeless Continent” on the cover of its May 13th issue for 2000. In its
description of a hopeless continent, The Economist characterized Africa as having a complex
confluence of war, poverty, corruption, tribalism, and poor planning. While the most descriptive
examples of “hopelessness” in the issue included illustrations from Sierra Leone, Congo, Liberia,
Kenya, and Zambia, discussions of Ethiopia pointed to “threats of famine (again),” drought, issues
of ethnic-based politics, aid, and war. After offering an explanation as to why (black) African
states are so hopeless, the article ends with a message: Africans lack “self-confidence” and to
realize “real change,” rather than spurts of economic growth, Africans need to “regain their self-
confidence.” According to the author(s), only by regaining their self-confidence can Africans
devise economic plans, trust each other, build political institutions, and engage with the rest of the
world (Economist, 2000).
rising regressing land of origins

backwards
collapsing junk

developing in crisis
12
About ten years later, dramatically oscillating from a narrative of hopelessness toward
hopefulness, the “Africa rising” narrative was deployed to frame sub-Saharan Africa’s recent
phase of development and to rebrand the continent as a rising economic and social force through
more “positive” and “hopeful” reporting (Nothias, 2014; Bunce et. al 2017). At its peak, the Africa
rising discourse pointed to the role of better governance, the emerging middle class, lower levels
of corruption and violence, increased internet access, and the availability of mobile phones as
contributors to sub-Saharan Africa’s rapid socio-economic development and shifting status from
“hopeless” to “hopeful” (Bunce in Bunce et al. 2017, p. 17). However, while such indicators of
progress were often used to support arguments about Africa’s rise, attention often focused on
“shifting external representations of the continent from “hopeless” to “hopeful” (Aiello et al. 2014;
Ojo 2014), or on the abstractions of economic indicators (Mahajan 2009; Taylor 2014) and mobile
penetration (Komunte 2015) as evidence of change” (Rachel Flamenbaum in Bunce et al. eds.,
2017, 116) rather than Africans’ own perceptions and engagements with the processes of change.
In other words, Africans themselves were missing from these discussions of futurity and change
which were often portrayed through a vocabulary of extremes (e.g., hopeful vs hopeless) which
persistently makes into spectacle Africans’ realities by exceptionally attaching negative
characteristic to sub-Sharan Africa and its peoples. Characterizations of tribalism, violence, poor
governance, and poverty which are 1) not exceptional to Africa but rather the norm within much
of todays’ world and human history and 2) detrimental to the psyche or “self-confidence” of
Africa’s peoples.
Ethiopia is________. In the context of a rising Africa, where Africa’s future was
foreshadowed as the last and untapped frontier for the modernizing projects of global capitalism,
Ethiopia was often figured as an exemplary illustration of Africa’s potential for economic
13
development and international investment. My 2015 return to Ethiopia took place at the peak of
the Africa rising narrative when Ethiopia itself was promoting the narratives of “rising Ethiopia”
and “Ethiopia rising.” As an exemplary case of Africa’s rise—under the developmental state and
authoritarian rule of the ethnic coalition party known as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary
Democratic Front (EPRDF), then headed by the ethnic Tigrayan wing of the coalition named
Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)—Ethiopia had been making positive strides to meet the
TPLF-EPRDF’s vision for strategically developing the country into a lower-middle-income
country by 2025 (World Bank Group, 2015 and). By 2015 Ethiopia had reported double-digit
economic growth for over a decade (Regional Economic Outlook, n.d.) was in the midst of major
self-funded infrastructure development initiatives like the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
(GERD), and had become a significant participant within China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Adding
to this, the Ethiopian government had implemented a series of strategic development frameworks
and national plans like the Growth and Transformation Plans and committed itself to international
agendas like UNDP’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) to rapidly meet its goals for the future of the country.
Scattered across Ethiopia’s capital city in 2015 were dozens of construction projects like
the Addis Ababa Light Rail, expensive hotels, and other high-rise buildings built for diplomats,
businesspersons, travelers, and expats. These modernization projects juxtaposed sights of Addis
Ababa’s many poor inhabitants, dilapidated buildings, and makeshift homes, which they were
slowly replacing. With unemployment and underemployment being a major issue, young people,
many with high school diplomas and college education, could easily be spotted sitting around at
street side cafes and looking for ways to fill their time—drinking coffee, chatting with friends,
sharing mobile phones and seeking out Wi-Fi connectivity. On the main streets adjacent to the
14
expensive hotels and homes were many kids, some homeless and orphaned and others sent to the
capital city by their rural families to earn a living. They worked as shoe-shine boys (ሊስትሮ/lestro)
or sold things like mobile cards, gum, and other household and personal goods. Throughout the
city, particularly in parts frequented by foreigners (ፈረንጅ/ferenji), diaspora Ethiopians, and locals
that are well off, it was common to spot pedestrians and cars getting stopped by women, children,
and disabled persons begging for money. Walking through the city, I frequently found myself
being stopped by young kids and toddlers who had been instructed by their mothers to cry, grab at
my clothes, or cling onto me until I gave them something. Many of these struggling and unhoused
individuals were sick, disabled, or had left rural life to seek better opportunities and a chance at
survival in Addis Ababa to find themselves struggling, stranded, and unemployed in the capital.
In most of the conversations I had with local Ethiopians before I began my fieldwork in
2019, people expressed frustration with the lack of change and their desperate desire for the kinds
of change that would make their lives better. People often spoke of their desire for democratization,
better human rights, access to technology, economic mobility, better quality education, living
wages and the ability to secure their basic needs. People also regularly complained about
corruption, poorly functioning government institutions, and the cumbersome process involved in
getting through bureaucracies staffed with ill-trained and passive workers. While the city of Addis
Ababa looked to be developing at a rapid rate, some lamented that the benefits of that development
were not equally dispersed among Ethiopians—sometimes blaming ethnic politics and government
corruption for what they saw as nepotistic and uneven distribution of the resources and the
economic gains made through development.
Locals not only associated the development projects and rapid economic growth in Addis
Ababa with progress but also with an increased cost of living, wealth inequality, high inflation
15
rates, lack of employment, and a general deterioration in the country’s “social fabric.” Because of
this, many of the Addis Ababans I was able to strike a conversation with between 2015 and 2020
expressed a desire to be anywhere but Ethiopia, often locating their hopes for the future in faraway
places like the United States, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and China—imagined places of
abundance and opportunity. Places where they could escape Ethiopia’s complicated and corrupt
politics, find employment, and the possibility of upward economic mobility. Maturating
underneath the impressive development agendas and growth rates achieved during the TPLF-
EPRDF’s rule were intense feelings dissatisfaction, resentment, mistrust, and a complicated set of
grievances sometimes articulated as being regrettably intractable characteristics of life in Ethiopia.
Furthermore, Ethiopia’s rapid economic growth and efforts at modernization were realized
through a highly repressive system of rule, which codified ethnic discrimination and used
economic growth to justify the continued exploitation of ethnic-based politics. Despite impressive
economic growth, the TPLF-EPRD’s rule was marked by ethnic clientelism, violent repression,
and an authoritarian approach toward development and governance—all of which were eventually
challenged by growing levels of unrest and political struggles for change within Ethiopia’s two
most populous states. Ethiopian civic struggles for political freedom and rights, primarily within
Addis Ababa and the regional states of Oromia and Amhara, would go on to capture critical
international attention between 2014 and 2018. During this time, the TPLF-EPRDF regime faced
pushback for being undemocratic and for implementing highly coercive policies that displaced and
forced locals into complying with “national” development initiatives. One of the stated goals of
the regime was to make development a hegemonic and imperative objective throughout the
country. However, the top-down and coercive approach toward development adopted by the
central government was seen by supporters of Ethiopia’s ethnic federal arrangement as
16
undermining the 1994 constitutional devolvement of administrative power away from the central
government and toward ethnic groups and their designated regional territories. While some found
issues with the TPLF-EDPRF and its state-led developmentalism because it compromised or failed
to uphold the promise of decentralized rule under ethnic federalism, others found an issue with the
regime and its developmental projects because they believed it compromised the integrity of the
Ethiopian state as whole. In other words, the economic changes were argued to have been realized
through practices that normalized ethnic discrimination, nepotism, and ethnic clientelist politics—
all of which were feared to undermine the Ethiopian state and its “national” status by sowing ethnic
division.
Disputes over governance and land intensified throughout Ethiopia, particularly in the
regional state of Oromia, when the central government expropriated land from farmers to allot land
to “domestic and foreign investors in the name of national development” (Aalen, 2020, p. 662). At
the center of rising Oromo nationalist sentiment and protests was the 2014 Addis Ababa Master
Plan. The proposed plan sought to expand the boundaries of Addis Ababa by about 1.1 million
hectares into the surrounding regional state of Oromia to meet growing demands in Addis Ababa
for residential, commercial, and industrial development (Raleigh & Pinaud, 2017). As part of the
state’s centralized and national development agenda, the plan was created without consulting
locals and would primarily affect ethnically Oromo farmers who lived within the proposed areas
for expansion. Soon after its proposal, the plan was criticized as an undemocratic and unfair
transfer of wealth from the Oromo farmers to the Urban business class and the TPLF. Adding to
this, many saw the plan as directly violating Ethiopia’s ethnic federal arrangement and the
constitutional protections guaranteed to its ethnic groups—namely, the division of power between
17
the central government and the ethnonational states, which have the right to self-administration
and cultural preservation.
Expropriation of land and the government’s plan to expand the capital city of Addis Ababa
further into the surrounding territories (allocated to the ethnic-regional state of Oromia in 1991),
in addition to public resentment against TPLF dominance within the EPRDF coalition and
Ethiopian national politics, provoked Oromo opposition and protests which began in 2014 and
intensified between 2015 and 2016. This event also member of the OPDO, the ethnic Oromo wing
of the EPRDF, who spoke out against the Addis Ababa Master Plan garner support from their
ethnic Oromo constituents who had previously thought the OPDO to be too unassertive, or the
TPLF’s puppet.
2
By 2016, the youth-led nationalist movement known as Oromo Protests
3
captured

2
For some Oromo, the OPDO/ODP was not (and is still not) considered to be the legitimate
representative of Oromo national interests because it was created inorganically by members of the
TPLF/EPRDF by soliciting captured Derg soldiers of Oromo descent in the early 1990s. Because
the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) refused to join the TPLF/EPRDF coalition, the OPDO was
created to represent Oromo people and legitimize the EPRDF’s rule over Ethiopia. However, the
OPDO, emboldened by the passing of Meles Zenawi (TPLF leader) in 2012 and the protests which
started in 2014, was able to rebrand itself as an Oromo “opposition” party within the EPRDF. This
effort was aided by the emergence of OPDO politicians like Lemma Megersa, who was more vocal
and assertive about Oromo national interests than previous OPDO leaders had been (OPride,
2017). Though Lemma came into power as Oromia’s regional president and ruling party’s
chairman in October of 2016, he left the party after having disagreements with Abiy Ahmed (also
leading member of OPDO/EPRDF) in 2019. While OPDO garnered its leadership position in the
EPRDF coalition after being more assertive in its Oromo nationalist demands, it is still
suspiciously seen as part and parcel of the EPRDF’s repressive state apparatus by Oromo
nationalists and secessionists who are supporters of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF)—a
secessionist armed group and opposition party formed in 1973 and seen by some Oromo as the
legitimate representative of the Oromo nationalist struggle.
3
Also referred to as Qeerroo Bilisummaa Oromoo or Qeerroo in the Oromo language (Oromiffa)
in which Qeerroo means youth in the masculine form. These protesters also call themselves the
Qubee Generation, in reference to the generation of young Oromo who grew up learning how to
read/write Oromiffa using the Latin alphabet in the 1990s (as opposed to the use of Ge’ez script
that originated in Northern Ethiopia and is associated with Semitic, or Amhara and Tigrayan
culture). These naming/linguistic practices assert the existence of a distinct Oromo national culture
and are meant to engender Oromo pride in that difference.
18
international attention by advocating against the TPLF-led government and its repressive rule. The
activists sought greater autonomy for the Oromo people, demanded that Oromo Ethiopians have
greater political
4
and cultural representation within Ethiopia, and made claims to the capital city
of Addis Ababa. Contentious claims over Addis Ababa, what Oromo nationalists call Finfinne,
were made by ethnically Oromo politicians and activists who claimed that the Oromo have
indigenous land ownership or special rights over the capital city and perceived many of current-
day Addis Ababa’s residents as settlers.
5

While the 2014 Addis Ababa Master Plan and perceptions by Oromo-identifying
Ethiopians that their ethnic group's rights were disproportionately violated mobilized Oromo anti-
government protests, frustrations over discrimination, and conflicts over land and administrative
rights, also triggered widespread opposition and protests in the northern regional state of Amhara.
Protests in the Amhara region began in 2016 after the Ethiopian government arrested Amhara
activists and Wolqait Identity and Self-Determination Committee members for challenging the
legitimacy of the ethnic-regional boundaries between the Amhara and Tigray regional states
(Amnesty International, 2016). Amhara protesters and irridentist claims contested the borders
drawn between Tigray and Amhara region by disputing the incorporation of Wolqait-Tegede,
6
a

4
Many believed it was an ethnic Oromo’s turn to be chairman of the EPRDF and prime minister
of Ethiopia
5
Despite evidence—like the recent discovery of the medieval city of Barara (Walker, 2019)—
contradicting the narrative that Oromo-identifying people have singular historical claims to the
lands that comprise Oromia and the area of Addis Ababa, Oromo nationalist claims to land
entitlement are made using narratives of indigeneity (in which non-Oromo are identified as settlers
and/or colonizers), primordialism, and single-category ethnic identification. This strategy is also
used by other groups who seek to expand their territorial control, maintain their control over an
existing territory, or marginalize others ethnocultural groups' who inhabit that land.
6
In addition to contesting Wolqait-Tegede (now part of western Tigray), protesters also contest
the incorporation of Raya (part of southern Tigray) into the Tigray regional state and claim that
the ethno-culturally Amhara residents of these areas want administrative independence from
Tigray.
19
geopolitically strategic and fertile area bordering Sudan and administered by Amhara before 1991,
into the Tigray regional state when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) seized state power
after the Derg regime was ousted (International Crisis Group, 2020). Amhara protesters argued
that the TPLF-EPRDF’s process of redrawing Ethiopia’s internal boundaries used an undemocratic
process that marginalized local participation and discriminated against ethnically Amhara people,
characterized by the TPLF and its supporters as enemies of Tigrayan national interests.
Furthermore, for Amhara protesters, the use of ethnolinguistic classification to justify the
incorporation of Wolqait-Tegede into the Tigray regional state—into what is now formally known
as Western Tigray—not only dispossessed Amhara people of land but amounted to demographic
engineering.
7
An Amhara-identifying interlocutor explained that because the process of assigning
ethnic categories to people in Western Tigray used language, many ethnic Amhara who spoke
Tigrigna were identified as Tigrayan, and many non-Tigrayans were forced to flee Wolqait-Tegede
to justify the incorporation of people and land historically administered as part Gonder into
Tigray's administrative boundaries. In other words, the process of ethnic classification and
boundary-making allowed Wolqait-Tegede, a region that was part of the historic Gondar province
before 1991, to be incorporated into the Tigray state, which ethnic Tigrayans administer. The maps
in Appendix A depict the continuous reconfiguration of land and identity in Ethiopia over the last
century.

7
One frequent example I came across in my discussion with Amhara anti-government protesters
was that the TPLF was interested in diminishing the size of the Amhara population to weaken their
ability to make political claims under Ethiopia’s approach to ethnic federalism—which uses ethnic
groups’ population sizes to determine their political representation. Many Amhara argued that their
ethnic group was not only discriminated against through the redrawing of state boundaries but also
through the discriminatory processes used to allocate aid, medical care, and other resources, which
they complained amounted to ethnic discrimination and led to comparatively low health outcomes,
population growth, and economic growth in the Amhara regions when compared to other regions.
20
Furthermore, because people identified as Amhara were deemed the “oppressors” of
Ethiopia’s other (or “oppressed”) ethnonational groups—as a consequence of the TPLF’s
nationalist political rhetoric that pinpointed Amhara as its national oppressor and also the political
grievances accumulated during Menelik II and Haile Selassie’s rule were blamed on “Amhara
hegemony”
8
—Amhara as a population experienced discrimination under the TPLF-EPRDF’s rule.
There discrimination was worsened because most Amhara hold critical views about Ethiopia’s
ethnic federal arrangement and politics, and at the time being were ardent supporters of Ethiopian
nationalism—which threated the TPLF’s ethnonational rule. Within this context, Amhara
protesters demanded for political reform that would see the replacement of TPLF’s state control
with more democratic leadership and hoped for reforms that would de-ethnicize Ethiopia’s
politics.
9

Representing Ethiopia’s two most populous ethnic groups and regions, protesters from
Oromia and Amhara formed a strategic alliance (sometimes referred to with the portmanteau
Oromara) to rally against the ruling regime with the shared perception of economic and political
marginalization under TPLF-controlled EPRDF rule.
10
Even though the Amhara and Oromo I

8
Menelik II and Haile Selassie, as well as their governments, are often posthumously given
Amhara identities justify perceptions of Amhara hegemony/oppression
9
These desires for a federal arrangement not based on ethnicity are often misleadingly described
by ethnonationalists as an assimilationist desire to form a unitary state that would (forcefully)
remake all of Ethiopia’s inhabitants under an Amhara identity.
10
While the most vocal protesters came from the two dominant ethnic groups and regional states,
the state also faced a lot of protest and dissent in other regions as well as from those who lived in
the diaspora. What distinguishes these two regions and ethnic groups is their population size and
geographical location (especially for Oromia because it surrounds the capital city of Addis Ababa,
the state's economic and political hub). Because Oromo and Amhara identifying Ethiopians make
up about 2/3 of the Ethiopian body politic, concerted, and large-scale dissent from within these
two regions, ethnic groups, and the capital city of Addis Ababa (which is inhabited by a majority
of Amhara-identifying Ethiopians) made it impossible for those who held state power to maintain
their control without reform because the TPLF's rule through the EPRDF coalition relied on
keeping dissent from these two groups at bay as the ethnic group it claims to represent only make
21
spoke to were generally split when it comes to their support of ethnic federalism—with most
Oromo supporting it and most Amhara being against it—the widespread anti-government protests
overwhelmed the TPLF-EPRDF regime which responded to their grievances by applying nation-
wide network shutdowns, restricting the press, extrajudicially killing protestors, and unlawfully
jailing critics with the aim of weakening and curtailing political opposition.
The EPRDF ruling coalition party was forced to respond to the protesters’ demands by
reshuffling its leadership and implementing government reforms that would appease protesters and
opposition political interests. One of the protesters’ collective demands was to reduce TPLF’s
disproportionate position within the coalition party and the Ethiopian government’s overall
security apparatus. By 2018, pressure from local and diasporic activists for better governance and
human rights forced the EPRDF to reform its leadership structure. Through internal party
negotiations, Abiy Ahmed, an ethnic Oromo politician from the Oromo Democratic Party (ODP)
wing of the EPRDF, was selected to become the prime minister of the transitional government and
leader of the government’s reforms.
11
With many of the TPLF leadership forced out of their
government positions and largely antagonistic to the reforms, the TPLF did not remain part of the

up 6-7% of the Ethiopian population.
11
Once Hailemariam Desalegn of the SEPDM resigned from his role as prime minister (as well as
chair of the EPRDF coalition party), Lemma Megersa (ODP chairman), Abiy Ahmed (ODP),
Demeke Mekonnen (ADP chairman), Debretsion Gebremichael (TPLF Chairman), and Shiferaw
Shigute (SEPDM chairman) were vying to chair the EPRDF coalition—and by default become the
next prime minister. Following the strategic replacement of Lemma Megersa with Abiy Ahmed as
the chair of ODP, EPRDF’s Council of 180 members (where each of the four parties had 45 voting
members) voted among the TPLF, SEPDM, and ODP contenders and appointed Abiy Ahmed as
the chair of the EPRDF, and thus Prime Minister of Ethiopia. Demeke Mekonnen of the ADP had
withdrawn last minute and made way for Abiy Ahmed who, through a contentious process, won
with 108 votes (where he got 45 votes from ODP, 45 from ADP, 18 from SEPDM, and 0 from
TPLF). See “Abiy Ahmed elected as EPRDF chairman,” “Breaking: Dr. Abiy Ahmed elected,”
“Who will be Ethiopia's next prime minister” in references list for a selection of articles from 2018
thar describe Ahmed’s selection.
22
coalition and would eventually return to the regional state of Tigray, where it still had political
support.
E/utopia is on the horizon? Witnessing the appointment of the reform-oriented Abiy
Ahmed Ali to the prime ministerial position in April of 2018, many local and diasporic Ethiopians
anticipated and recognized the political reshuffle as potentially producing the kinds of
transformative and democratic changes that would help Ethiopians reconcile their political
differences and help realize a more e/utopian future for their homeland. Soon after assuming
power, the young Oromo-identifying PM made waves by ending the decades-long border conflict
with Eritrea, releasing over 13,000 political prisoners, inviting back exiled political opposition
leaders and armed groups, ending the state of emergency, assigning women to 50% of cabinet
positions, appointing Ethiopia’s first woman president, and reinforcing diaspora Ethiopians as
necessary political and developmental agents through the establishment of initiatives like the
Ethiopia Diaspora Trust Fund. Because of these rather remarkable actions, the prime minister was
received across the diaspora and in the mainland as a sign of hope and progress, upheld as a
welcome change by many Ethiopians who were unhappy with the TPLF-run EPRDF government
and its approach toward governance since 1991. So much so that on July 28
th
of 2018, when Abiy
Ahmed made a stop in Washington, D.C during his tour to address diaspora Ethiopians, thousands
of Ethiopians who call D.C home and others who commuted from across the United States came
to catch a glimpse of Abiy Ahmed and hear what he had to say. At that time, I had just returned
from a two-week-long trip to Ethiopia and started a summer fellowship at Ranking Digital Rights
in Washington, D.C. Tagging along with a friend who flew in from New York, I witnessed the
young prime minister speak to an estimated audience of over 35,000 people (Potter, 2018)—many
of whom had like me waited outside for over 4 hours on that horribly hot and humid D.C Saturday
23
before we could enter the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and hear the new prime
minister speak.

Figure 1: crowd waits in line at Walter E. Washington Convention Center holding signs that read
“Uniter not a divider” and “With you tomorrow is looking great!!!” as they wait for Abiy Ahmed
(own photo).

While most of those in line donned the colors of Ethiopia’s flag, the lady I was standing
behind carried an umbrella and flag displaying the Oromo Liberation Front. She tried to speak to
me in Amharic and visibly showed her disappointment when I told her I could not speak it, telling
me that I should know my country’s language. While I found that moment amusing and
24
perplexing,
12
I pieced together what I could with my grasp of Amharic and relied on my friend to
translate some of the dialogue we overheard in the line. I was surprised by the way in which joy
and pride reverberated through the space. Even with language barriers, the joy and anticipation
that swept through the crowd was unmissable. As the wait grew longer, what started off as a line
of morphed into a crowd of bodies pressed against one another. People inched forward in
anticipation of the convention center’s doors opening, some chanting slogans, others visibly
growing impatient with the hours-long delay and heat. Disoriented and dehydrated from the
humidity and suffocating crowd, I pulled myself out of the disorderly line to sit on the sidewalk
and stop my head from spinning. Sitting there annoyed by the heat and delay, I watched as people
joyously chanted “Down, down Woyane!”
13
and counted that 27 years of authoritarian rule had
come to an end. For those attending the event, Abiy Ahmed’s assumption of power seemed to be
a definitive marker for the end of TPLF’s 27-year rule and the beginning of democratic change in
Ethiopia.

12
While it is common for many young diaspora Ethiopians to be scolded by other Ethiopians for
not speaking any of Ethiopia's indigenous languages (especially Amharic), I was perplexed by the
recognition that I was being reprimanded for not speaking Amharic (a language from the Amhara
region associated with ethnic Amhara people) by a supporter of Oromo nationalism and/or the
Oromo Liberation Front (an armed and secessionist Oromo nationalist group).
13
Woyane is Tigrigna term used to refer to TPLF
25

Figure 2: Thousands of diaspora Ethiopians celebrate as Abiy Ahmed enters to address them in
his new role as Prime Minister of Ethiopia (own photo).

Once inside, the crowd, adorned in Ethiopia’s green, yellow and red, and with many
waving the non-emblemed tri-color flag of Ethiopia,
14
seemed to exhale with the overwhelming
sense that long-awaited change was on the way. The attendees eagerly listened and erupted into
applause as the prime minister called on the diaspora to actively support their homeland on its
journey toward a more unified and prosperous future. Even the mayor of D.C. made an appearance

14
Rather than the flags with the pentagram emblem (often associate with TPLF-EPRDF rule)
and the lion emblemed flag (often associated with imperial rule and Haile Selassie).
26
to announce that July 28
th
would officially be recognized as “Ethiopia Day,” to which the audience
exploded with applause. Noticing my lack of visible excitement (I was honestly just tired from the
long wait, D.C. heat, and could not catch everything being said in Amharic), one elder attendee
wiped tears from his eyes as he explained to me how significant the moment I witnessed really
was. He told me he had been waiting his entire life for this kind of change to take place in Ethiopia.
Earlier, another man standing near his young daughter had explained how important it was for me
and young people like his daughter to experience this historical moment of transition as the sound
of Tilahun Gessesse singing “ኢትዮጵያ” swept many in that room through an affective journey of
pride, nostalgia, and sorrow-filled longing and undying love for their motherland.
For many in that audience, Abiy Ahmed’s administration and development approach
promised a welcomed difference from the previous EPRDF leadership. This was partly because
Ahmed began his tenure by mobilizing the Ethiopian diaspora and their nostalgic longings for their
homeland to actively involve them in the country’s development and future aspirations. While the
previous regime sought to surveil and control the threat of diasporic political involvement, Ahmed
made it clear he intended to involve the diaspora in Ethiopia’s efforts by instituting development
initiatives like the Ethiopian Diaspora Trust Fund (EDTF) and asking the diaspora to return home
to invest their expertise and dollars in Ethiopia’s future. In addition to encouraging the diaspora to
return home, the EDTF offered the over 3 million Ethiopians who are part of the global diaspora
to donate $1 a day to Ethiopia to support the nation’s development efforts and the new Prime
Minister’s reforms (EDTF website). While some donors showed concern regarding the
transparency and use of the donated funds, more than $1.6 million in donations had been given to
the fund through the official EDTF website (an additional $200k has been donated through
GoFundMe as well as an unknown/unpublicized amount through direct bank transfers to EDTF
27
bank accounts in Ethiopia) within just as a couple of months of the EDTF’s launch. Looking below
at the kinds of comments diaspora Ethiopians left with their donations to EDTF, it is clear that for
many of the diaspora Ethiopians taking up the call to donate, the fund offered a tangible
opportunity for them to help their country economically develop and regain what they believed to
be its former glory.

Figure 3: screenshots captured in 2018 of comments made on EDTF website with donations

Initiatives like the Diaspora Trust Fund, Abiy Ahmed’s promises of liberalization (moving
away from state developmentalism toward a liberal democratic economy), promises of government
transparency, and political mobilization of concepts like “hope,” “love,” and “unity” by the new
prime minister pointed to the hopeful possibility of changing relations between the state and the
people of Ethiopia. For one thing, Ethiopians within Ethiopia and the diaspora seemed more
hopeful and motivated in thinking that they could take action to realize their homeland’s
development aspirations without the government employing coercive tactics. In October of 2019,
Abiy Ahmed would go on to become the first Ethiopian to ever receive a Nobel Peace Prize. His
28
reforms, action to “resolve” the Ethiopian-Eritrean border conflict (Abiy, 2019)

and efforts to put
Ethiopia on a path toward peace, captured widespread international attention and support. Civic
modes of engagement and discontent from both local and diasporic Ethiopians at the time seemed
to have changed the course of events for a country that only two years prior stood as a limit case
for truly achieving progress within Africa.
However, by the time I returned to Ethiopia for my dissertation fieldwork in October of
2019, the narratives and public perception regarding Ahmed’s rule had noticeably changed from
hopeful anticipation to wariness and uncertainty. When I asked an Addis Ababa resident why she
thought there was a change in perceptions toward Abiy and even cynicism toward his Nobel Peace
Prize award, she explained that she thought the award was illegitimate and, at best premature. Not
only because the Nobel Peace Prize is a western accolade but also because ethnic violence and
political tensions were escalating within Ethiopia despite Ahmed’s rhetoric of national unity and
prosperity. For locals who had just witnessed the “October massacre” where over 100 Addis Ababa
residents (mostly of Amhara background) were killed at the hands of protestors after a tweet by
Jawar Mohammed (leading and controversial Oromo opposition leader) claimed that the
government was after him, the award for “peace” was surely premature she explained. In addition,
I often heard people say Ahmed was mismanaging the state; he was “too weak” and incapable of
containing the varying political interests and armed groups he had allowed to return to Ethiopia.
In addition to him not maintaining the “rule of law,” there was growing uncertainty around the
rationale and results concerning the border resolution between Eritrea and Ethiopia— much of the
initial changes that came with the resolution seemed to be backtracked quickly. Moreover, the
agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia did not include Tigrayan politicians who represent the
regional state that borders Eritrea nor the minority Irob population who live in the borderlands of
29
Ethiopia (Tigray) and Eritrea. Furthermore, there was growing uncertainty over the democratic
nature of the new government as the upcoming election, scheduled for August 2020, was
continuously postponed. Many Ethiopians feared possible election violence, and critics of Abiy
Ahmed claimed that his lax response toward violence—especially against civilians—and
longwinded speeches of unity were not enough to solve Ethiopia’s complicated problems.
Much of Abiy Ahmed’s planned reforms were beginning to face criticism for failing to
deliver meaningful change, and his rhetoric of national unity and prosperity was beginning to
sound hollow and didactic. The Ethiopians I spoke to expressed a general state of distrust toward
politicians who, while preaching national unity, continued to leverage ethnic identity for political
gains. Most Ethiopians I encountered, dismayed by the speed of change, lamented that few political
leaders offered anything better than Abiy Ahmed as Ethiopia’s political space was growingly being
organized along ethnic lines of interest rather than democratic processes and political platforms
that can address Ethiopia’s complex challenges. While many Ethiopians pointed to the need for
“dialogue” and “consensus-building,” much of the existing dialogue lacked inclusivity as it largely
centered on the voices of political and social elites from Ethiopia and the diaspora.
In this context, the prime minister’s rhetoric of prosperity through unity—highlighted in
his book Medemer
15
—and his attempts to discursively and symbolically advance political
reconciliation and a unified Ethiopian national identity were supported by many Ethiopian
nationalists (or pan-Ethiopianists) but opposed by ethnonational skeptics who believed Ahmed
was undermining multinational (or ethnic) federalism and the gains they had made since the

15
Medemer is an Amharic word meaning synergy, unity, and addition. This rhetorical strategy
brought Abiy Ahmed and his reforms a great deal of support from supporters of the Ethiopian state
and Ethiopian nationalism (he was seen as a “uniter”) while his ethnic identity garnered him
support from Oromo-identifying constituents who were happy to see an ethnic Oromo hold
Ethiopia’s highest position of power.
30
implementation of ethnic federalism in the early 1990s. At the core of these debates was the 1994
constitution
16
, which used ethnolinguistic classification for the first time in Ethiopian history to
establish federal states with rights to self-determination, administration, and even secession. Those
critical of the constitution are critical of it because it came into fruition through processes
controlled by TPLF leadership and ethnonational ideology— processes which condemned and
marginalized Ethiopian nationalism and multinational political organizations like the Ethiopian
Revolutionary Democratic Party (EPRP) and the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (Meison) in
favor of ethnic nationalism—and aimed to reshape the Ethiopian state into a decentralized
federation of distinct ethnic state (Abebe, 2014). Adding to this, those who took the lead in crafting
the constitution are opposed by many proponents of Ethiopian nationalism because they blamed
Ethiopian nationalism (its proponents and the ideology) for the ills experienced by Ethiopia's
diverse polity, which the constitution reconfigured as “nations, nationalities, and peoples”
belonging to distinct and territorialized ethnonational groups with distinct national interests.
While pan-Ethiopian supporters of Abiy Ahmed were hopeful, his rhetoric of Ethiopian
unity was met with hostility by some opposition groups and political interests—namely
ethnonationalists who had played key roles in mapping Ethiopia along ethnolinguistic lines or had
made the most political, economic, territorial, and cultural gains through the implementation of
ethnic federalism.
17
For instance, the reconfiguration of the EPRDF ethnic coalition into Prosperity
Party, and Abiy’s growing support from Ethiopian nationalists, was met with suspicion and

16
The constitution was ratified in December of 1994 and came into effect August of 1995. Some
sources refer to it as the “1995 Constitution” while I use its year of ratification in reference to the
document.
17
Though many Ethiopian nationalists across all ethnic groups were highly supportive of Abiy,
some were also cautious/uncertain because of his role within the OPDO—whose politicians
"represent/represented” Oromo interests within the EPRDF coalition and Prosperity Party which
was formed in 2019.
31
political opposition from ardent supporters of ethnic federalism who not only challenged Abiy
Ahmed’s reforms and projects but warning that any changes to the constitution aimed at undoing
ethnic federalism would lead to the complete disintegration of the Ethiopian state. For instance, in
the summer of 2020 political opposition groups and activists, including Oromo Protests
participants who had helped bring the ethnically-Oromo prime minister into power, spearheaded
discourses against the ethnically Oromo prime minister and the newly rebranded (and superficially
de-ethnicized) Prosperity Party after placing blame on the government for the murder of a famous
Oromo singer who they upheld as a symbol of Oromo nationalist struggles. Some Oromo-
identifying protesters claimed that Ahmed was not Oromo
18
because his politics did not align with
Oromo nationalist interests. He was labeled as an “Amharanized” politician working to re-install
a “unitarist” state that would forcefully assimilate Oromos and Ethiopia’s various ethnic groups
into a single “Amharanized” identity. At the same time, with the loss of power at the center and
the dismantling (or more so rebranding) of the ethnically based coalition party (EPRDF) into

18
At the time of Abiy Ahmed's appointment to the Prime Ministerial position, there was confusion
regarding his ethnic background. As an Amhara-identifying study participant informed me, there
was an effort to initially position Abiy as mixed (Oromo-Amhara) to gain Amhara's support toward
Abiy. However, Ahmed later confirmed he was "full" Oromo to appease any concerns regarding
his fidelity to Oromo-identifying people. While his rhetoric of unity and possible multiethnic
heritage could be said to have gained him support from some non-Oromo constituents who had
protested against the TPLF-EPRDF regime, some people in the Amhara region began to protest
against Ahmed and Prosperity Party after the administration killed off Amhara political figures in
the June 2019 Amhara regional coupe attempt. When I went to Debre Markos (a town in the
Amhara region) in January 2020, signs of this mistrust were present on Bajaj/taxi cars which had
Amharic signs stating the equivalent of "the people know the truth" to signify their mistrust of
Prosperity Party and Abiy Ahmed. By April of 2021, there were mass protests against Abiy Ahmed
and Prosperity Party throughout the Amhara region because the government had failed to protect
Amhara civilians from ethnic discrimination and massacres in Oromia. Regardless of these
complex relationships Amhara-identifying people have with Abiy Ahmed, Oromo
ethnonationalists tend to position Ahmed as either mixed or "Amharanized," and thus position
Amhara people as the primary beneficiaries of the government and the Oromo as the most
oppressed— a tactic used to justify ethnic discrimination and violence against civilians.
32
Prosperity Party (PP), TPLF was marginalized and refused to cooperate with Abiy’s
administration. Secluding itself within the Tigray regional state, where it claimed widespread
support, the TPLF and PP fostered an antagonistic relationship—both working to undermine each
other’s governments and national agendas. By the end of 2020, the conflict between Abiy Ahmed’s
regime and TPLF escalated into war—leaving millions of Ethiopians living in the northern region
at risk of becoming casualties of war and famine (the very issues the TPLF set out to protect
Tigrayans from during its inception as a radical student organization and movement).
During this complex historical conjuncture, the Ethiopian government and diaspora
supporters of Ethiopia continued to promote the narrative and vision of a country on the rise by
using catchphrases derivative of “Africa rising” like “Ethiopia rising” (Haylemariam, 2017) and
“rising Ethiopia.” Attempting to undo the lingering effects of narratives from the late 20
th
century,
which cemented Ethiopia as a destitute place of poverty, famine, and conflict in the imagination
of international audiences, Ethiopians and the Ethiopian state have tried to envision and publicize
the country as one that is worth investing in, visiting, and learning more about. The narrative of a
rising Ethiopia has not only been used to counter the simplistic reporting that takes place in the
West when it comes to Ethiopia and Ethiopian politics but also to showcase the country’s positive
attributes—namely, Ethiopia’s ethnic and cultural diversity, history, archeology, and natural
environments—all while attracting foreign direct investments aimed at reaching the country’s
future economic goals. Take, for example, a recent campaign called “Rising Ethiopia” which was
launched in December of 2020 to bring positive attention and investment to Ethiopia:
33

Figure 4: Agenda for #RisingEthiopia, two-month-long positive social-media campaign launched
in December of 2020

The “About” section for the campaign’s Facebook profile reads: “Ethiopia has huge
potential, which could be changed to an economic powerhouse in Africa. With the current Ethiopia
political development, it is critical to carry out a positive campaign to change the now-negative-
narrative in social media” (Rising Ethiopia). During the campaign, Ethiopians on social media, in
collaboration with varying Ethiopian embassies, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA),
the Ministry of Tourism & Culture (MOCT), Tourism Ethiopia, and the Ethiopia Investment
Commission (EIC) took part in posting “positive” images and descriptions about Ethiopia(ns) with
the hopes of countering negative, and often contextually unnuanced, media reports about conflicts
in Ethiopia. The social media posts highlighted various development projects, tourism locations,
Ethiopian businesses, and the ethnocultural diversity of Ethiopians to positively showcase Ethiopia
as a place full of potential and beauty. With the goal of “promoting Ethiopia’s investment
potential” and “showcasing Ethiopia as an emerging tourism destination” (Rising Ethiopia
34
campaign Facebook), the campaign took place at the very same time Abiy Ahmed’s regime and
Ethiopia as a whole internationally received critical media attention for the government’s decision
to respond to provocations from the previous ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front
(TPLF), with a military offensive in November of 2020. Setting off a conflict that devastated the
lives of people in Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regional states and unraveled for many any semblance
of “progress” and democratization they thought the country was experiencing.
Though I set out to study the developmental state of Ethiopia, its imaginaries of progress,
and the varying approaches local and diaspora Ethiopians put into practice to achieve these visions
of economic development, what I found during my fieldwork and digital ethnographic work which
took place between October 2019 and the start 2022, forced me to change the analytical
frameworks, questions, and ideas I had originally used to propose my research project. In addition
to revealing how Ethiopians perceived and engaged with/in the state’s developmental imaginaries,
my observations and discussions with Ethiopians between October 2019 and March 2021
illuminated the primacy of ethnic and nationalist imagining in Ethiopia’s contemporary political
contestations and world-building aspirations—nationalist stakes which I had failed to grasp during
the initial visits and conversations I had with Ethiopians before my fieldwork.
Growing levels of violence and ethnic tension had eclipsed and made unstable much of the
poverty reduction and economic improvements Ethiopia achieved through development. Not only
did those I spoke with express ambivalence toward the developmental state’s imaginaries and
approach to attaining progress, but they were also often dejected by how their own desires and
expectations for the future were largely contingent on how the “nationalities question” played out
in the near and far future. Oftentimes, interlocutors expressed dissatisfaction with Ethiopia’s ethnic
party system and complained that government leadership was not only incompetent but also
35
corrupt—exploiting and fanning ethnic differences to enrich a select few. Because ethnic
classification is used to determine the distribution of power, the dispensation of land, and even the
deployment of violence against civilian populations, it was not uncommon for interlocutors to
believe that their hardships resulted from ethnic discrimination.
While supporters of ethnic federalism argued that the state needed to guarantee
proportionate power and representation to Ethiopia's distinct ethnic groups, many others I spoke
to explicitly blamed ethnic federalism and ethnic politics for the failures of the state and the many
uncertainties which plagued the country. Those who supported ethnic federalism blamed Ethiopia's
problems on the mismanagement of ethnic federalism—claiming that the problems seen in
Ethiopia since the institution of ethnic federalism in the early 1990s are not due to ethnic
classificatory and administrative practices but due to the central government's mismanagement and
inadequate implementation of the ethnic federal model outlined in Ethiopia's constitution. Those
who positioned themselves as not supporting the current ethnic-federal arrangement believed that
the institution of ethnic federalism had frayed the "social fabric" of Ethiopia and fomented violent
identity politics. On both sides of the spectrum, the "nationalities question," the question of how
to manage Ethiopia's 80+ ethnic groups and their demands for representation and resources
allocation, was seen as the primary reason for Ethiopia's uncertain future and current problems
with poor governance, violence, tribalism, and poverty.
Unsure of how to make sense of the complex political conjuncture I was witnessing, I
initially tried to steer my interviewees and interlocutors toward a discussion about socioeconomic
development—the topic I had set out to study—and away from ethnic and national identity politics.
However, I eventually realized that Ethiopians’ visions, fears, and hopes for the future could not
be disentangled from the “nations, nationalities, and peoples” question as their hopes and fears for
36
the possible scenarios that loomed ahead were inextricably tied to how nationhood and
development have been crafted and co-constituted within Ethiopia. The unanswered questions over
Ethiopia’s federal arrangement and nationalism(s) made it difficult for many of my study
participants to envision any future outside of the recurring and violent power struggles they had
known to be true, and which stood in stark contrast to the state’s linear conceptions and promises
of growth-based economic change and social progress. I also realized that underneath the euphoria,
cautious optimism, and sudden changes that swept through the country in 2018 were highly
divergent and often violently authorized imaginaries of Ethiopian futurity. The legitimacy of these
imaginaries often relies on forging nationalist narratives of identity and territoriality, tactical
deployments of victimhood and violence, and the (re)casting of Ethiopia’s past in the service of
contemporary contestations over culture, land, and power. The discursive, symbolic, and strategic
classification of Ethiopia’s peoples into distinct national categories, the territorialization of
identity, the fraught practice of revising historical events to make claims to particular future
outcomes, and the terrorizing deployment of violence by state and non-state actors has not only
worked to authorize the idea that present-day antagonisms in Ethiopia can only be solved through
the containment, management, and instrumentalization of difference but have also given credibility
to zero-sum contestations over Ethiopia’s future and economic trajectory.

Containers of difference and value: race, nations, ethnicity, and development
Understanding how our discursive and symbolic practices construct and nurture our social
imagining is essential to understanding how we arrive at commonsense attachments and meanings
for seemingly natural yet troubling, classificatory schemes like race, nations, ethnicity, and
progress, as well as how we use these categories to justify and create inequitable worlds.
37
Communication, and the varying frameworks we use to the apprehend the significance of
communicative acts, thus inarguably influence how we arrive at our social imaginaries, understand
culture, and take part in the discursive practices through which we not only forge connections but
also naturalize boundaries and inscribe meanings onto human variation.
One of the most recurring definitions of communication I have come across as a
communication student can be found in James Carey’s Communication as Culture (2008). In this
classic reading, Carey presents an argument for the integration of a ritual view of communication
into North American communication scholarship. He explains that North American privileging of
the transmission/transportation view of communication has resulted in the production of mostly
positivist studies of (mass) communication which preserve an inadequate view of communication
as a process of primarily transmitting information for the purposes of control. On the other hand,
the ritual view of communication proposed by Carey recognizes communication as the symbolic
processes through which people create, maintain, and negotiate reality and their conceptions of
culture. Before making a case for the study of communication as ritual, Carey traces the North
American origins of the transmission view of communication by explaining that early American
statesmen like Thomas Jefferson sought to use communication to solve the problem of creating a
union out of a geographically expansive space and sizable population. Communication, understood
as transportation and transmission, was seen as the means for binding a large population spread
across a vast distance into a “cultural unity” (p. 4). While the creation of a unified and democratic
nation was to also take place through investments in press, literacy, and education, Carey makes
the case that the dominant view at the time considered communication as transportation and
transmission. Jefferson hoped that technologies of transportation and communication would
facilitate not only economic, but also political and cultural unity by reducing the effects of
38
geographic separation, enabling economic exchange, and promoting national unity (Carey, p. 6).
While the metropole’s peripheralization of the North American colonies informed the settlers’
formation of nationalist coalitions (toward an American nationalism), modernization in the form
of capitalism, the spread of communication technologies, and public education were essential to
mobilizing nationalist beliefs and ideologies in North America.
In his 1983 canonical text Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson historically
contextualizes and conceives of the genesis of modern imagined communities of nations through
mass readership of newspapers. For Anderson, the novel and newspaper “provided the technical
means for ‘re-representing’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (2006, p. 24). The
conjuring of the imagined community takes place through the temporal (i.e., calendric)
coincidence of the mediated (i.e., news) stories and the readership’s conception of a “solid
community” that emerges from the anonymous, steady, and simultaneous activity of reading (p.
24-26). Going further, Anderson claims that the newspaper, as cultural production and artifact, is
“embedded in fiction” because independently occurring events are arbitrarily included into the
newspaper and yet imaginarily linked because of their calendrical coincidence (Anderson, 2006,
p. 33). While the mass-produced novel is a self-contained and distinct commodity durable through
time, the newspaper is unique in its ephemeral nature because the “obsolescence of the newspaper
on the morrow of its printing [...] creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely
simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaper-as-fiction” (p. 35). This ceremonial
phenomenon enables the imagination of community and national identity as the readership, in
anonymity (i.e., without knowledge of all other members of the nation), is reassured that the
imagined world is “visibly rooted” in the everyday life practice of reading the newspaper (p. 35-
36).
39
Responding to the positivist academic traditions of their time, Anderson and Carey both
make the case that communities are imagined into existence and maintained in time through ritual
practices like the consumption of newspapers. The idea is that communities like nations and
ethnicities come into existence not because the individuals belonging to them share some essential
characteristic or belong to some confined geographic place but because they are imagined, brought
together, and inscribed with meaning through the varying practices and artifacts which constitute
communication and culture. However convincing, the premise that communities are imagined and
formed through shared ceremonies like the consumption of print-capitalism shrouds the role that
struggles over culture and power play in the formation of communities like nations. Shared
conceptions of community and the recognition of someone as part of a national culture or
community do not just emerge out of shared and inclusive practices that positively affirm different
people as community members. Communities come into being through the dual process of
recognition and refusal and are thus formed through the differential incorporation, marginalizing,
and exclusion of difference (the sense of we/us as being part of a community often works by the
differential inclusion or complete exclusion of difference). For instance, while reading Carey’s
take on Thomas Jefferson’s articulation of the union, one can easily ask, “How do those of African
descent figure into Jefferson’s imagined community of a nation? What role did the rejection of
non-White persons into the “national union” have in the North American process of creating a
union out of a geographically dispersed and diverse people?” Categories of belonging like nations
and ethnicities exist and transform individuals into communities through their very nature of being
exclusive as much as they do through symbolic and affirming processes.
Chatterjee’s (1991) essay “Whose Imagined Community?” forces us to contend with the
implications of Anderson’s theory of imagined and modular nations by considering how
40
nationalisms emerge in parts of the world colonized by the West. For Anderson, nationalisms are
modular cultural artifacts “capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-
consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains” (Anderson, p. 4). Anderson’s concept of
modular nationalism refers “to the path-dependent and translocal transplantation of particular
nationalist models through time and across space” (Goswami, p. 779). In his classification of
nationalisms as modular artifacts, Anderson causally and temporally delinks the circulation of
nationalist models from “their ongoing contexts of production” (Goswami, p. 780), including the
social relationships that were produced under racialized global capitalism. One implication of this
is that the nationalisms developed around the world are assumed to be unidirectionally modeled
after Western formations of nationalism. Contending with the assumed modularity of Western
nationalism as a cultural artifact, Chatterjee critically asks, “If nationalisms in the rest of the world
have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available
to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?” (p. 216). To put it in
another way, is the postcolonial world left only to be perpetual consumers of modernity and
“modular” Western modes of the nation? If this were the case, Chatterjee argues that “even our
imaginations must remain forever colonized” (p. 216). Rendering modern experiences like
nations/nationalisms as modular cultural formations that are adopted in non-Western contexts
constrains the capacity of non-Western subjects to imagine alternative forms of relationality and
positions non-Western parts of the world as mere consumers of Western social structures that were
developed under modernity.
Chatterjee’s critical response to the supposition that models of nationalism diffuse (from
the West to the rest of the world) as modular forms does not only force readers to contend with
how modularly can foreclose the possibility of those in non-Western contexts to imagine
41
alternative modes of community and human relationality. The critique reflects broader criticisms
levied against universalizing Western onto-epistemological systems, which are used to
discursively contain, inscribe, and assimilate non-Western “Others” into exogenously derived and
stubborn systems of meaning. These Western onto-epistemological formulations often assert
themselves with universalizing authority, overshadowing local experiences and knowledge
systems, discursively essentializing difference, and systematizing discriminatory practices through
the deploying classificatory schemes—or what Stuart Hall calls in The Fateful Triangle
“classificatory systems of difference” (p. 33). These systems symbolically mark human variation
with meaning, hierarchically order societies, confine human imagination, and in the process,
produce difference.
Ordering of humanity. Contemporary Western scientific and philosophical discourse on
“the human” have their origins in European colonial encounters with the African/black being
which was subsequently constructed as the European human’s “Other” through Enlightenment-era
thinking and the globalizing/universalizing projects of modernity. While early (15
th
century)
formulations of Western humanism were underpinned by theological discourse, toward the end of
Enlightenment thinking (the 18th century), the status of the human was understood and codified
through philosophical and scientific discourses which predicated their racializing logics of ‘the
human’ on scientific claims to truth/knowledge. The construction of the African/black being as
ontologically different than the Western human, its ontological status as the European’s
“Other,” was essential to the creation of the Western subject and the differential status assigned to
the “others” of Europe throughout the world.
At least since the start of the eighteenth century, “Blackness and race have constituted the
foundation […] from which the modern project of knowledge—and of governance—has been
42
deployed” (Mbembe, 2017, p. 2). At the onset of European encounters with the black/African
being, the question was whether the African—it’s flesh, traditions, and whole being—constituted
something outside the regime of “the human.” Early encounters with the African “Other” not only
produced different classes of “the human” but started off by asking whether Blacks were even
“humans like all others,” or, if they were in fact “beings apart” (Mbembe, 2017, p. 85). Western
knowledge systems established a fundamental difference between the African/black “Other” and
the Western ontological human by excluding the African “from the sphere of full and complete
human citizenship” (Mbembe, 2017, p. 86) and transforming Africans into fungible human-
commodities, objects, and money.
19
Thinking of the African/Black other as “beings apart,” akin to
animals [or even as animals and objects in the most extreme configurations of dehumanization]
the African was deemed ahistorical, uncivilized, and inherently unable to self-determine, govern,
and reason—and thus, unable to self-possess and reason like the Western/White subject. The
African, positioned as the West’s other and primarily founded through Western philosophical and
scientific projects that hierarchically inscribed and codified
20
racial difference with meaning, came
to constitute a different kind of human which is not self-contained and determined like the
European human subject but rather outer-determined, affectable, and more akin to non-human
animals on the scale of being where, as Zakiyyah Jackson (2020) argues:
modern racialized animalization stratified humanity, preemptively barring or excluding
black participation in the symbolic order while also establishing or including black
humanity as an object in the discursive-material institution of proto-scientific Western
humanism. Here, human recognition is extended, but only to serve further objectification.
(p. 49)

19
For more on the othering, animalization, and objectification of Africans and Blackness see
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; Saidiya
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; and Kara Keeling’s “Passing for human: Bamboozled and digital
humanism.”
20
For an illustration of how these projects were carried out see Shannon Lee Dawdy’s “Proper
Caresses and Prudent Distance: A How-To Manual from Colonial Louisiana.”
43

While varying configurations of the African/black as having a lesser humanity were used
to legitimize the enslavement and colonial dispossession of black people, the time of abolitionism
and the end of the slave trade was marked by appeals (often moral and religious) which sought to
affirm the humanity of enslaved and colonized people around the world. While, as Kara Keeling
(2005) argues, “Black” and “Black culture” are European constructs which have “been necessary
to the Europeans' attempts to understand themselves and their cultures in collective terms, they
nonetheless have been the site of innovations and struggles by black people, the very people those
concepts have come to contain” (p. 240). Blackness, and I would add Africanness, were mobilized
by those contained within the racializing “classificatory systems of difference” (Hall) to respond
to their conditions of dehumanization, the deprivation of their capacity to self-determine, and as
Mbembe puts it, the “dispossession of the future and of time, the two matrices of the possible
[emphasis added]” (2017, p. 5).
This movement of Black people demanding inclusion and recognition as “full subjects in
the world of the living” was punctuated by the 1804 independence of Haiti, the abolition of the
slave trade, African decolonization, and civil rights struggles in the United States (Mbembe, 2017,
p. 3). Amid formulations of the African as the “Other” of the self-determining and rational
European human, anti-colonial and abolitionist movements demanded for the inclusion and
recognition of the African/Black into “full and complete human citizenship” as Mbembe puts it,
through the deployment of liberal humanist discourse and frameworks. In other words, the
processes used to seek inclusion by making the African’s humanity legible to Western audiences
(to which these claims of humanity were addressing and soliciting recognition from), often
involved deploying the very frameworks and differential language used to inscribe
Africans/Blacks with the status of racialized essential difference. Rather than granting equitable
44
treatment and recognition to the African/Black subject, the assimilation of the African into the
universalizing liberal human project only reconfigured discourses about Blackness and worked to
maintain the exploitation of Black people around the world under the semblance of recognition
and universal humanity. As Jackson argues, the recognition of the African/Black as human did not
“annul the animalization of blackness” (p. 18) or give any assurances of “reprieve from
ontologizing dominance and violence” (p. 20).
To this day, race, and other classificatory systems of difference which have roots in “Euro-
imperial encounters with difference,” Enlightenment era thinking, modernity, and liberal
humanism discursively codify and ground human variation along “differential levels and grades
of “civilization” and “barbarism”” (Hall, p. 53-55). During his three-part lecture on race, ethnicity,
and nations as concepts of cultural difference, Stuart Hall describes race as a master concept which
organizes “the great classificatory systems of difference” and operates within human societies as
the “centerpiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences” (p. 33). Hall explains that
despite centuries of effort to biologize observable human variation––what Du Bois describes as
the “grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone” in The Conservation of Races––social
characteristics cannot be fixed to human variation by using genetic, biological, and scientific
claims to “truth” (p. 67). Put differently, though we cannot overlook the commonplaceness of
essentializing and biologizing configurations of racialized difference (and thus cannot simply end
racialization by pointing to the many failed scientific attempts at inscribing difference with
essential meanings) race and ethnicity are able to do what they do because they are sliding
signifiers which work discursively. Through their discursive construction and reconstruction, race
and ethnicity are discursively deployed to produce knowledge about the world, organize society,
and differently distribute resources among and between groups. Because of this, Hall argues that
45
“any attempt to contest racism or to diminish its human and social effects depends on
understanding how exactly this system of meaning works, and why the classificatory order it
represents has so powerful a hold on the human imagination [emphasis added]” (p. 33). The racial,
discursively established through Western onto-epistemological projects, not only does the
ideological work of normalizing and obfuscating the ways in which contemporary historical and
material conditions shape (and are shaped by) the systematic inscription of human difference with
hierarchically ordered meanings, it also has a strong grip on our capacity to imagination ourselves
differently – outside of the existing regimes of humanity, progress, and recognition.
Progress, development, and the possibilities of black/African futurity. Mainstream
development discourse would have us believe that there is a logical and universally accepted path
to change, one that is inherently good, desirable, and unidirectional. This teleological path,
proposed by economists like Walt Rostow assert that if poor countries do the right things at the
right times, the indeterminacy and contingency of the future can be managed and ordered to give
way to a programmatic process of change. In his seminal work, “Social Science as Imperialism,”
Claude Ake (2012) analyzes how Western social sciences have come to advance Western rubrics
of teleological progress and Western imperialism in the global south – assigning the global south
to the lowest stages on a prescriptive evolutionary continuum and characterizing them in terms of
abjection. Ake intervenes within the teleological thinking of development studies and
developmentalism by arguing that the use of Western history and historical formations as the ideal
and most rational teleological path for the rest of the world creates limits in imagination and
potentiality for the global south. In other words, development, conceived through the framework
of capitalism, is not only a domineering teleological discourse of change—it is also an ordering
mechanism that trains and makes the Global South conform to Western ideals. Neoliberal
46
capitalistic logics constituting dominant discourses of development create subjects by rewarding
conforming countries with better rankings, more aid, and more recognition at international
foundations like the World Economic Forum. Putting the responsibility of change on the African
nation-states’ ability to train its people into the kinds of global citizens that resemble the Western
onto-epistemological man.
Since gaining independence from colonial rule, Africa has been “assimilated” into the
space of modernity and globalization through inegalitarian and coercive measures like structural
adjustment programs (covered in more detail in Chapter 2). While the classificatory systems used
to measure progress extend recognition to Africa and Africans, and thus help legitimize Africans
and African nation-states as agents within global systems of exchange, the codification schemes
and discourses used to measure progress (such as Gross Domestic Product and Gross National
Product) make Africa/Africans intelligible in ways that are overdetermined and subordinating.
Within this discursive system, Western derived frameworks for measuring and defining progress
make it so that Africa is ostensibly known, signified with meaning, even before Africans speak.
When they do speak of their aspirations and experiences, its often understood through vocabularies
and frameworks that are derived exogenously to African experiences, desires, and epistemes about
the future and possible configurations of ‘a good life.’ For instance, as I show in the third chapter,
Ethiopian leaders pursuing development agendas have often positioned Ethiopia and Ethiopian
traditional practices using terms like “backwards” while seeking development assistance from
international development organizations and rationalizing their deployment of ethnic
discrimination and authoritarian development agendas.
In line with Ake, African and black diasporic scholars have argued that we need to move
toward new, experimental, and reinvigorated ideological debates that help us understand Africa
47
and Blackness in the context of contemporary global capitalism, socio-economic change, and
environmental crisis. One work dealing with the question of African futurity in relationship to
progress is Felwine Sarr’s Afrotopia. Like Ake, Sarr argues that Africans need to cultivate new
and experimental terms to not only make sense of the today’s complexities but also begin to
collectively imagine alternative futures. To do this means to recognize that even though Africa is
positioned as an interlocutor within today’s systems of global political economy, the conversations
and rubrics for participation were determined without Africa or the well-being of Africans in mind.
Globalizing systems of economic and political participation, which I discuss in the
following chapter, extend recognition with the aim of further reifying the very dynamics and
structures of exchange that created the African as the “Other” of the West—as the limit case for
progress, self-determination, and reason. Because of this Mbembe, Ake, and Sarr argue that new
terms and approaches to writing about African realities and desires are needed. Ways that move
away from development discourse’s negative connotations and the assimilative forces of
capitalism which not only authorize Western rubrics of progress but ultimately situate Africans at
the lowest rungs of the human ladder. While nobody would contest that poverty reduction is
essential to increasing the qualify life in Africa, the hegemony of capitalist logics and their regimes
of measurement obscure the ways in which capitalist formulations of development and progress
have failed materialize in sustainable change and bring Africa out of poverty. In the following
chapters, I look at how Ethiopians negotiate the complex realities of globalization and socio-
economic change and explain how these unequal realities shape their contestations over resources
and the very future of Ethiopia.
48
Chapter Two
Domineering Regimes of Developmental Progress: Africa and the Third World

A nagging and seemingly persistent problem within discourses about international socio-
economic development and progress concerns the ways in which development projects aimed at
jumpstarting the trajectories of underdeveloped countries have often under-delivered in their stated
promises and goals. International institutions that emerged to establish post-WWII international
systems of cooperation and economic stability (like the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN) have
played significant roles in establishing internationally recognized benchmarks, agendas, and
definitions of development. Since their inception nearly eight decades ago, these international
organizations, along with their regional and local partners, have attempted to collaborate on,
advance, and control the development agendas and outcomes of African states like Ethiopia. More
recently, “emerging” economic centers like China have joined forces with other “emerging” and
“developing” economies with the promise of offering alternative and more effective growth and
development partnerships for underdeveloped countries. However, international development
agendas, partnerships, and economic exchange have not ameliorated inequities between the West
and the rest the world. With all these agendas, organizations, financing, and expertise, why has
“development” not reached Africa south of the Sahara?
While the question of why development projects and financing keep falling short of
realizing their promises of poverty eradication, sustainable economic growth, and the
“development” of underdeveloped parts of the world like Africa south of the Sahara is not new,
much of mainstream development work and attempts to answer the question conceal the ways in
which international development constitutes what Omi and Winant (2015) describe as racial
formation and racial projects. In their analysis of how race is a master category of social
49
organization in the United States, Omi and Winant define racial formation as “sociohistorical
process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed” and racial
projects as the “simultaneous and co-constitutive ways that racial meanings are translated into
social structures and become racially signified” (pp. 109 and 128). Development—including its
institutions and representational strategies which are used to organize and inscribe meaning onto
human variation on a global scale—can then be considered an axis of global Western domination
because its racial/izing significations are used to create and reproduce Western onto-
epistemologies and domination.
Critically considering development as a racial project, this chapter presents a brief
sociohistorical and theoretical grounding of the ideological frameworks, material relationships,
and debates on international development. It then illuminates how international development
policies, practices, classificatory systems, and mainstream discourses are inextricably tied to
processes of racial discrimination and thus designed to fail at granting equitable recognition and
access to people who are made to signify the lowest rungs on the scale of being. In doing so, this
chapter also presents some of the theories and frameworks that have emerged to challenge the
myths, promises, and contradictions of development economics, which encourage extractive
capitalist logics of “free trade” and “comparative advantage” while deploying punitive policies,
prescriptive frameworks, and value-laden (hierarchically racialized) classifications to maintain
uneven material-discursive relationships that ultimately legitimize the differential value given to
human life on the bases of racial and developmental classification.
Adding to existing critical race and development scholarship, I then use this chapter to
highlight the symbolic and material effects of international development discourse and practices
by considering how development functions as an axis of the global racial formation through the
50
discursive construction, signification, and differentiation of people in racialized and racializing
ways. I argue that development discourse is often deployed to discursively construct difference
and inscribe meaning onto human variation in ways that obscure inequitable material relationships.
Development as a racial project deploys institutions, policies, extractive practices, financing
regimes, measurement tools, and other knowledge regimes. These institutions and their
representational regimes normalize and obscure the uneven organization, distribution, and
inclusion of the global by mystifying the extractive and discriminatory realties of growth-based
capitalist development and precluding pluriversal possibilities. In other words, the hierarchical
ordering of people through aggregate categories (such as nations, countries, and regions.),
alongside development measures ranking practices, limits human and planetary possibilities and
creates conditions for the perpetuation of discriminatory practices—or the differential treatment
of people along racial, ethnic, and national lines.
The accumulation of wealth in the West cannot be understood without an analysis of the
connections between capitalism and globally racializing forms of domination. The power to know
and create knowledge about human beings through racial(ized) classification is inextricably tied
to the emergence and domination of capitalism and capitalist development as the globalizing force
of today. Because of this, I argue that what is presented in development indexes, measures, and
discourses is not so much concerned with telling us any truths about the underdeveloped parts of
the of the world, but the signification, normalization, and justification of a global and racial
economic hierarchy in which Whiteness comes to signify “progress” and capitalism is understood
to be the primary means to achieving that progress.
International development. While discourses of development, progress, and poverty are
longstanding, we can trace the origin of today’s dominant international development institutions
51
and policies back to postwar international monetary cooperation efforts. By the end of the Second
World War, the United States had emerged as an economic leader and proponent of trade
liberalization. Taking lessons from failed attempts at international cooperation during the interwar
period as well as the 1930s depression, the United States’ agenda largely involved: laying the
grounds for a new political and economic world order based on free-market capitalism, helping
European allies recover from war, as well as containing and preventing the spread of communism.
During the July 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire––commonly referred to as the Bretton Woods Conference––delegates from 44
nations
21
met to decide how to regulate the post-WWII international monetary and financial
systems. This conference resulted from discussions and negotiations between the United States,
Britain, and other international interests over varying plans and policies for a new international
financial order during the Second World War. The Bretton Woods conference led to the
establishment of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1944. Initially responsible for aiding in European post-war
reconstruction efforts and preventing a backslide into depression, the bank and fund did not
become involved in international development until the independence of colonized regions began
in the 1950s. The IBRD expanded to form what we now know as the World Bank with the
establishment of the International Development Association (IDA) in 1960. Along with IBRD and
the IDA, the International Finance Corporation (established in 1956), the Multilateral Investment
Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes
(ICSID) constitute the World Bank Group’s five institutions. While the Bank describes its lending
arm, the IBRD, as working in “partnership with MICs and creditworthy poorer countries” while

21
From the African continent, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Egypt had delegates present
52
the IDA is described as a “fund for the poorest countries” (International Bank, n.d.). The eligibility
for countries to get financial aid, mostly in the form of “concession” loans, from the IBRD rather
than the IDA depends on their “graduation” from a low to middle income country category:
We place special emphasis on supporting lower-middle-income countries as they move up
the economic chain, graduating from IDA to become clients of IBRD. We are also
expanding capacity to help countries dealing with fragility and conflict situations. And as
a long-term partner, we step up our support to all MICs in times of crisis. […] IBRD earns
income every year from the return on its equity and from the small margin it makes on
lending. This pays for World Bank operating expenses, goes into reserves to strengthen the
balance sheet, and provides an annual transfer of funds to IDA, the fund for the poorest
countries.

The World Bank and IMF (along with the UN) have not always played significant roles in
the international development system and agenda-setting processes. Before the Second World
War’s devastating impact on Western European economies motivated international monetary
cooperation efforts, the depression of the 1930s had brought about domestic political support for
greater state involvement in economic life and states “largely avoided international issues” (James,
1996, p. 32). According to the US Department of State, “In the decade after the end of the First
World War, the United States continued to embrace the high tariffs that had characterized its trade
policy since the Civil War. These were enacted, in part, to appease domestic constituencies, but
ultimately, they served to hinder international economic cooperation and trade in the late 1920s
and early 1930s. High tariffs were a means not only of protecting infant industries, but of
generating revenue for the federal government” (Protectionism, n.d.). The later reorientation
toward greater international economic cooperation came at the time in which the devastating
effects of the Second World War made it evident that international economic cooperation was
necessary:
As the international political situation deteriorated and as the countries of the world fought
the Second World War, the initial neglect of international economics in the theory of the
New Economics appeared less and less justifiable. In the first place, international economic
53
cooperation was intimately connected to wartime discussions with the creation of a new
order of peace. Second, the realities of wartime diplomacy between the Western allies
become more and more concerned with financial issues. (James, p. 32)

In other words, after the protectionism that ensued in the interwar period (especially during
the depression of the 1930s) was seen to be less justifiable, the Bretton Woods institutions were
designed to oversee the international financial system that would not only help in the recovery of
Europe but also foster world trade and cooperation.
Understanding the emergence of international organizations like the IMF and World Bank
helps us understand how these organizations came to shape the contemporary conventions and
discourses used to characterize and exert influence over underdeveloped countries and countries
that do not participate in global systems of exchange under Western logics and policies of liberal
capitalism. Specifically, these institutions often inform the discursive frameworks, classificatory
systems, and international policies used to shape and understand global experiences with
development, underdevelopment, and socioeconomic difference. In addition to giving an overview
of modernization and neoliberal approaches to development, the following sections consider
theoretical frameworks like dependency and world-systems theory as alternative approaches to
development paradigms like neoliberalism which are dominant within today’s international
development context.
Modernization and international economic development. In the 1950s and 1960s, a
variety of frameworks and approaches for development were proposed and applied to the
“developing” world. The first set of frameworks, non-Marxist in their orientation, came to be
known under the umbrella of “modernization theory.” The inception and advancement of
modernization theory was made favorable by the conditions that marked the global historical
moment of its inception. Modernization theory developed at a time in which the United States was
54
establishing itself as a superpower, communist influence was spreading across the globe, and
newly independent nation-states were in search of a “model of development to promote their
economy and to enhance their political independence” (Reyes, p. 2). Within this historical
conjuncture, modernization theory became the dominant framework for understanding and
approaching socioeconomic difference and development within the “developing world.”
Going into detail about the formation of modernization theory, David Harrison’s The
Sociology of Modernization and Development highlights how varying and vying ideas of social
evolutionism, diffusion, and structural-functionalism came to inform modernization theory––or
what Giovanni E. Reyes (2001) describes as “classical” modernization theory. While
modernization theory was the dominant development framework of the 1950s, ideas of social
evolutionism and progress are not new to the modernization theory of the mid-twentieth century.
Conceptions of social evolution existed in eighteenth and especially nineteenth-century Western
Europe as Europe (and later the United States) transitioned to being more industrialized,
scientifically and technologically advanced societies. Harrison stresses that evolution theories of
the nineteenth century “were characterized by an emphasis on the naturalness and inevitability of
such changes. It was the ‘blockages’ in evolution that required explanation, rather than the process
itself. [...] In so far as change occurred, it was deemed to follow the same pattern, and societies
were distinguished from one another in that they occupied different positions on the evolutionary
scale” (Harrison 2003, 2). Within this notion of social evolution, modernization was marked by
proximity to, and attainment of, the benchmarks set by Western industrial societies. Even Marx
“spoke of ‘laws’, of ‘tendencies working with iron necessity toward inevitable results’, and
suggested that ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed,
55
the image of its own future’ (Marx, 195, p. 19)” (Harrison, 2003, p. 2). Harrison goes on to argue
that even for Durkheim,
societies evolve from lower to higher stages, and move from the simple and
undifferentiated to the more complex. Western industrial society, with its highly developed
division of labour, is ultimately superior to pre-industrial society, but only when it has dealt
with the problems of social integration and value consensus. Taken together, these may be
seen as the dominant themes of evolutionary theory which were to pass, through Durkheim
and other nineteenth-century writers, into modernization theory. They were formulated at
a time of rapid social and economic change, when traditional social orders were under
attack and when the bases of new societies were yet to be established. They were revived
after the Second World War, during a similar period of rapid socio-economic and political
change. Then, however, it was the orderly evolution of the ‘new nations’ of the Third World
which exercised the minds of the (predominantly Western) social scientists [emphasis
added]. (p. 3)

The dominant themes from nineteenth century discourses and theories regarding
evolutionary theory were passed down to, and revived, in the post WWII context where the
formation and application of modernization theory focused on the evolution and development of
the newly independent and developing nations.
Within the modernization theory framework, state intervention was seen as good, and it
was assumed that newly independent nations around the world could copy the recovery methods
of post-war Europe in the development process by replacing “traditional” values and technologies
with “modern” ones. According to Claude Ake, African leaders like Senegal’s Leopold Senghor,
Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta “expressed the urgent need for African
societies to become more competitive in the modern state system, a need often crudely expressed
as “catching up with the West’” (Ake, 2001, p. 8). The discourse of failing to “catch up” does not
only validate evolutionary schemas like modernization theory which position the West as the finish
line of social and economic evolution. It also positions African cultural resistance to
Westernization as a sign of African deficiency–whether it be in terms of governance, cultural
“backwardness,” or the lack of African desire to make national sacrifices in order to attain growth-
56
based economic transformation. However, modernization theorists did not immediately appear
culturally biased because they positioned economic development (not Westernization) as an
objective and universally desirable state. As Claude Ake highlights, by time modernization
theorists were forced to contend with “divergent social structures” and “cultural resistance,” they
“talked of making the structure of the backward country identical to Western ones” and
“proclaimed the need for the modernization of attitudes” without taking the historical and cultural
specificities of the Third World as valuable (Ake, 2001, p. 10).
Adding to this, modernization theorists maintained that underdevelopment and global
inequalities resulted from poorer countries not having the necessary technologies, capital, and pre-
conditions to move through the development stages. For instance, in The End of Poverty, Jeffrey
Sachs (2006) argues that international and donor organizations should significantly increase the
aid they provide to the developing world, especially countries within Africa, to see real change
and impact within these countries. Though Sachs does not claim modernization to be his approach,
he argues that poor countries face eight barriers (the poverty trap, physical geography, fiscal trap,
governance failures, cultural barriers, geopolitics, lack of innovation, and the demographic trap)
which impede their achievement of economic growth. According to Sachs, the greatest of these
barriers is “the poverty trap”—where poverty impedes the ability of poor nations to progress
through the development stages. For Sachs,
If a country is trapped below the ladder [of development], with the first rung too high off
the ground, the climb does not even get started. The main objective of economic
development for the poorest countries is to help these countries to gain a foothold on the
ladder. The rich countries do not have to invest enough in the poorest countries to make
them rich; they need to invest enough so that these countries can get their foot on the ladder.
(p. 73)

In a similar fashion to Sachs, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan argued in the 1940s and 50s that a “big push”
in foreign aid and investment was needed to give underdeveloped economies momentum to get on
57
the path of self-sustained economic growth and development. Otherwise, according to Rosenstein-
Rodan, underdeveloped economies may be stuck in vicious poverty cycles and never be able to
get started on the economic growth process (Hettne, 1983, p. 248). With the Western world
functioning as the development blueprint for modernization theorists, development is typically
seen as a linear process—where societies move from traditional to modern, from agricultural to
industrial, and underdeveloped to developed. Upward movement on the “ladder” of economic
development can thus be achieved through state intervention and aid, which are believed to propel
the development process for underdeveloped countries struggling to meet the preconditions for
economic development. For this reason, many early modernization approaches to development
have relied on identifying the barriers to development faced by poorer countries and then
implementing interventions (like international aid) to help the poorer countries overcome barriers
to development. Even though a variety of frameworks and approaches to development came to be
known under the umbrella of “modernization theory,” Bernstein (1971, p. 141) summarizes
modernization theory as containing the following assumptions:
modernization is a total social process associated with (or subsuming) economic
development in terms of the preconditions, concomitants, and consequences of the latter;
(2) that this process constitutes a ‘universal pattern.’ [...] Some writers stress structural
aspects while for others ‘the concept of modernization has to do with a transformation of
culture and of personality in so far as it is influenced by culture, rather than some aspect of
social organization or of human ecology’ (Stephson, 1968, p. 265).

With these assumptions, the provision of aid, adoption of Western technologies, and
emulation of Western “civilized” cultures and values were believed to help the newly independent
and formed nation-states of the 1950s catch up to the “developed world.” In this context, the rapid
post-war recovery and reconstruction of Europe was upheld as the example for newly formed and
post-independent states to emulate.
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While notions of development, growth, and improvement existed well before the formation
of the Bretton Woods institutions, Bernstein (1971) argues that “Development—as aspiration,
ideology, and field of study—became an issue of urgent priority following the end of the Second
World War in the context of internal events in the colonial countries and the economic and political
realities of a changing international situation” (p. 142). Adding to this, Wallerstein pinpoints how
“Development, as the term came to be used after 1945, was based on a familiar explanatory
mechanism, a theory of stages. Those who used this concept were assuming that the separate units
— “national societies—all developed in the same fundamental way [emphasis added]” (2004, p.
10). The Bretton Woods institutions, having seen Europe through its recovery efforts, initially
implemented policies and advice within the African context with ambivalence and with the
assumption that aid would inevitably help the newly independent and formed African states
develop through the professed “necessary” stages.
The modernization theory perspective relied on “the assumptions that: a) Modernization is
a systematic process. [...] b) Modernization is a transformative process; in order for a society to
move into modernity, its traditional structures and values must be totally replaced by a set of
modern values; and c) Modernization is an imminent [and irreversible] process due to its
systematic and transformative nature, which builds change into the social system” (Reyes, p. 3).
Walt Whitman Rostow’s five-phase model for economic growth, developed in 1960, exemplifies
the application of these modernization theory assumptions. According to Rostow’s model, non-
industrialized, Third World societies transition into economically developed and industrial nation-
states by going through the following “universal” stages of economic development: (1) from
traditional societies (societies composed of small communities and reliant on subsistence
agriculture), (2) to meeting preconditions for take-off (e.g., generating surplus by using technology
59
for production), (3) having a take-off phase (reinvestment of profits from surplus into better
technology and infrastructure which will lead to industrialization and growth of manufacturing),
(4) the drive to maturity (increased state involvement in sectors like education and health and
diversification of industrial base), and finally (5) reaching the age of mass consumption—marked
by high demand for consumer goods and industry-based economy (Rostow, 1990).
Supposing that internal economic and cultural barriers prevent the modernization of
underdeveloped countries, Western-derived and controlled development institutions enact policies
and projects to increase and (or) manage the distribution of international development assistance.
In turn, these institutions purport that development assistance will lead to economic growth and
modernization—the effects of which would supposedly trickle down to the most impoverished
members of the underdeveloped countries. However, economic development policies driven by
unidirectional and Eurocentric modernization perspectives have led to increased levels of global
economic inequality and often blamed underdeveloped countries and their internal conditions for
their poverty. This is because Western derived and Eurocentric economic frameworks not only
inform how we diagnose economic conditions but also avoid taking serious account of how
external forces (like colonialism) came to thwart the economic aspirations and possibilities of the
states formed through encounters of European colonization. In other words, modernization
perspectives would have us believe that conditions of underdevelopment and the existence of
global inequities are due to internal problems caused by “traditional” values systems, lack of
advanced technologies, and capital.
Neoliberalism and structural adjustment programs. While the United States and
Europe relied on aid like the Marshall Plan and economic protectionism for post-war economic
recovery, the implementation of similar economic growth and recovery strategies have been denied
60
to countries affected by Western colonialism, resource extraction, and empire-building. Efforts at
economic protectionism and self-reliance have been counteracted with punitive measures that
heavily regulate the economies of underdeveloped countries and ultimately force them into
unequal and costly trade relationships with the West.
Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has been the dominant ideological perspective guiding the
IMF and World Bank. Neoliberal perspectives on development rose to dominance as conservative
governments, influenced by neoliberal perspectives, came to power in the 1980s. By the 1980s,
conservative governments, like that of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, garnered support
in the United Kingdom, United States, and elsewhere and were able to use international advising
(through the IMF and World Bank programs) to advance structural adjustment plans “designed to
address the four maladies assumed to underlie all economic ills: poor governance, excessive
government intervention in the markets, excessive government spending, and too much state
ownership. Belt tightening, privatization, liberalization, and good governance became the order of
the day” (Sachs, p. 81).
Unlike modernization theory perspectives that promote international aid as a means for
helping poorer countries advance through the predetermined stages of economic development,
neoliberalism emphasizes free trade. Rather than aid and economic protectionism, proponents of
neoliberal policies argue that free trade and trade liberalization help stimulate the development of
impoverished countries. Like modernization theory perspectives, the neoliberal approach to
development blames internal conditions and barriers (like corruption) of poorer countries for their
underdevelopment. With aid and technological assistance failing to help African countries
develop, the Bretton Woods institutions applied structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in
response to the economic crises and mismanagement that plagued many African countries post-
61
independence. Highlighting the complex set of conditions that brought forth SAPs and economic
crises in post-independence Africa, Donald Gordon writes:
The political agendas that created costly government superstructures and siphoned money
into the hands of a relatively nonproductive elite class inhibited the development of most
African countries. In many regimes, inefficiency, mismanagement, and corruption wasted
public resources. [...] From a growth rate of approximately 1.3 percent per year in the
decade prior to independence, economic growth dropped to 0.2 percent yearly for the
period from 1965 through 1984. [...] By the mid-1980s, the “great descent” had become an
internationally recognized tragedy of crisis proportions. (p. 81)

Neoliberal theorists argue that developing countries need to increase their share of international
trade because increasing trade would generate more money for underdeveloped countries than
what they receive through international aid. Rather than nurturing national industries and imposing
higher tariffs on imports, underdeveloped economies are encouraged to end economic
protectionism and adopt a free trade approach. For neoliberal thinkers, economically protectionist
policies (e.g., subsidies and tariffs) are not good economic policies because they insulate national
producers from competition and support inefficient national industries that would otherwise be
stronger and better if they were put into a more competitive environment. In other words,
developing countries are encouraged to liberalize trade and remove (or reduce) trade barriers that
inhibit competition across borders in order to ensure that local and foreign companies are treated
the same.
When the Bretton Woods institutions, the bank and fund, implemented neoliberal policies
through Structural Adjustment Plans (SAPs) and later through Poverty Reduction Strategies
Papers (PRSP) in the early 2000s, Western international development institutions have become
more and more conservative in their lending practices to underdeveloped countries and attached
heavily restrictive conditions loans. In 1996, the IMF and World Bank launched the Heavily
Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) in order to provide debt relief to poor countries. In 2005,
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the HIPC Initiative was supplemented by the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) to help
“accelerate progress toward the United Nations Millennium Development Goals” (paraphrasing
IMF’s Factsheet, 2021). The Fund and Bank, through the HIPC and MDR Initiative’s claim that
they aim to “ensure that no poor country faces a debt burden it cannot manage” [and that] “the
international financial community, including multilateral organizations and governments, have
worked together to reduce to sustainable levels the external debt burdens of the most heavily
indebted poor countries” (Factsheet, 2021). Ethiopia and 30 other African countries are on the list
of 37 “heavily indebted poor countries” approved for debt reduction under the HIPC initiative—
two other counties (Eritrea and Sudan) will be considered eligible for debt relief through the HIPC
initiative once they completely meet the liberal criteria (compliances/conditionalities) set out by
the Fund and Bank. With plans to provide $76 billion in debt relief to the approved countries over
time, the joint IMF-World Bank initiative is designed to reduce the debt burden of borrowing
countries to sustainable levels so that least developed countries can have lower debt to GDP ratios.
However, these debt reduction/relief initiatives are criticized because the compliances force the
liberalization of the LDC’s economies and make them even more dependent on core nations. The
conditions usually obligated countries to cut back on subsidies, eliminate import tariffs, deregulate
their economy, and reduce the tax burden by privatizing public services. Rather than fostering
economic growth, many of these economic prescriptions are accused of negatively affecting local
populations—especially the poor.
Even though the 1980s Western neoliberal interventions ostensibly aimed to curtail what
Western powers consider to be “excessive” nationalization and government corruption, structural
adjustments worsened economic and human conditions within Africa’s countries. Similar to the
modernization theory perspectives of the 1950s and 60s, the neoliberal approaches of the 1980s
63
claimed that the barriers to development were caused by the internal conditions of the developing
countries––rather than considering how external policies, institutions, and historical realities like
colonialism systematically maintain globally situated inequities. In other words, developmental
failures in Africa were attributed to internal corruption, traditional values, cultures, and economic
mismanagement. Sachs writes that during the SAPs of the 1980s, “The responsibilities for poverty
reduction were assumed to lie entirely with the poor countries themselves. Increased foreign
financial assistance was deemed not to be needed. Indeed, foreign aid per person in the poor
countries plummeted during the 1980s and 1990s” (Sachs, p. 82).
The one-size-fits-all and top-down approaches of the IMF and World Bank have failed to
account for how regional and local complexities necessitate different diagnoses and solutions for
poverty and made it difficult for countries to take on more nationalized approaches to ending
poverty. In Kicking Away the Ladder (2012), Ha-Joon Chang argues that the neoliberal perspective
and the application of structural adjustment in developing countries is hypocritical because
developed countries, those spearheading neoliberal policies, used economic protectionism to
protect and nurture infant industries during their early stages of economic growth. In other words,
developed countries did not develop using free-market strategies alone. Modernization and
neoliberal frameworks are deceptive because they ignore the global relationships of extraction and
domination that enabled the West to develop while making it unattainable for underdeveloped
countries to accumulate capital by participating in today's inequitable global systems of exchange.
Adding to this, assumptions of linear and predetermined growth are logically untenable because
economic policies and arguments using these assumptions fail to account for how systematic state
interventions, protectionism, and colonization buttressed the West's economic growth and wealth
accumulation. These hegemonic models for economic growth obscure the real economic
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relationship that constitute today's inclusion and recognition of underdeveloped countries as part
the “international” or “global” community.

Third World Challenges to Modernization and Western Dominance

Latin America, dependency, world-systems, and underdevelopment
As shown in the previous section of this literature review, modernization perspectives of
development place emphasis on identifying the internal barriers that prevent poorer countries from
developing, they advocate for increased international aid to poorer nations, assume that growth
and development follow a linear path of inevitable stages, suppose that underdeveloped countries
are economically poor because of internal problems like the “poverty trap,” and advance the notion
that non-western cultural values prevent underdeveloped countries from fully participating in the
global economy.
While modernization perspectives place emphasis on identifying and targeting internal
conditions and barriers to development, a body of Marxist-oriented work emerging out of Latin
America in the 1950s and 60s, under the umbrella of what we now consider “dependency theory,”
offer a competing explanation to global inequity by arguing that external factors and relations
caused conditions of economic development and underdevelopment. In contrast to modernization
theory assumptions, development economists like Argentina’s Raúl Prebisch argue that external
forces not only determine the economic activities of the dependent states but that the participation
of dependent states within the already unequal international system reinforces the
dependent/dominant relationships––benefiting the center/dominant/metropolitan states while
being costly to the periphery/dependent/satellite countries. In fact, development economists and
dependency theorists questioned assumptions of neo-classical models for development and
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economic growth by pointing out and arguing that the development path of the advanced industrial
economies do not (and cannot) “serve as a model for the currently developing economies” because
“the success of the richer countries was a highly contingent and specific episode in global
economic history, one dominated by the highly exploitative colonial relationships of the European
powers” (Ferraro, p. 63). Economists and leaders from underdeveloped parts of the world
challenged established economic frameworks and principles which assert that underdeveloped
parts of the world can develop by taking advantage of “comparative advantage” or relying on the
“invisible hand” of the global capitalist market. Rather, dependency theorists demanded
“preferential treatment in interstate trade” and the erection of a tariff regime that would support
the economic development needs of underdeveloped economies (Prashad, 2007, pp. 66-69). In
addition to challenging the tariff regime which benefitted the West, they sought to create
conditions that would enable greater trade among underdeveloped countries—even going as far as
creating “cartels of primary commodities” in order to stimulate the domestic economies of
underdeveloped countries, generate surplus capital for industrialization, and guarantee that
producer nations would get fair prices for their raw materials (Prashad, pp. 69-70). These policy
challenges which were brought forth by underdeveloped countries received contempt from First
World economists like John Maynard Keynes who did not believe that the underdeveloped world
should play a significant role in shaping international economic policies. So much so that Keynes,
who served as the director of the British Eugenics Society between 1937 and 1944 (Kurbegovic,
2013) and believed that eugenics was "the most important, significant and […] genuine branch of
sociology,” (Magness & Hernandez, 2017) complained about representatives from
underdeveloped states being invited to the Bretton Woods Conference by stating that they “clearly
have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground” (Prashad, 2007, p. 68).
66
Illuminating the systems and historical realities that gave rise to our unequal and
hierarchical world, critical scholars of development economics also point to a very important
difference between conditions of underdevelopment and undevelopment. While the state of
undevelopment involves conditions in which resources are not being put to use,
“underdevelopment refers to a situation in which resources are being actively used, but used in a
way which benefits dominant states and not the poorer states in which the resources are found”
(Ferraro, p. 62). According to Ferraro, this distinction is significant because it:
places the poorer countries of the world is a profoundly different historical context. These
countries are not "behind" or "catching up" to the richer countries of the world. They are
not poor because they lagged behind the scientific transformations or the Enlightenment
values of the European states. They are poor because they were coercively integrated into
the European economic system only as producers of raw materials or to serve as
repositories of cheap labor, and were denied the opportunity to market their resources in
any way that competed with dominant states [emphasis added]. (p. 62)

In other words, it is not internal cultural characteristics of underdeveloped societies (e.g.,
being “traditional”) that led to their condition of underdevelopment. The dependency approach
reveals that what should be looked at is how international systems of capitalism, global power
differentials, and historical dimensions of dependency and underdevelopment have systematically
underdeveloped and kept some countries (constituting the “majority world” in terms of population
and land mass) in the periphery while benefiting the core (or “minority world” constituted by
Europe and North America) through unequal systems of exchange on a global scale. In fact,
development economists have argued that the West is morally responsible for the effects of the
colonial and mercantilist policies which, while enabling Western industrialization and
accumulation of wealth, have entrapped over half of the world in conditions of poverty.
Responsibility means that West needs to “provide outright grants” (reparations) rather than loans
and needs to stop demanding that people in underdeveloped parts of the world continue to sacrifice
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in order to meet the conditions necessary for industrialization while sacrificing their basic needs
(Prashad, 2007, p. 66).
In addition to this, rather than measuring success using Western-derived rubrics that
emphasize economic growth and growth indicators, dependency theory emphasizes the
distribution of wealth and social indicators of wellbeing like access to education. For critics of
capitalism like Prebisch, “The point of industrialization was to increase the productivity of labor,
whose end result was not simply an increased growth rate but a better standard of living for the
masses” (Rashad, 2007, p. 69). In other words, industrialization and capital accumulation were not
ends in themselves. According to Ferraro, “contrary to the neo-classical models endorsed by the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, greater integration into the global economy is
not necessarily a good choice for poor countries” (Ferraro, p. 64). Instead of aiming to join or
advance to the status of core/dominant countries, dependency theorists propose that dependent
countries should focus on national policies that make them more self-reliant and less susceptible
to the negative effects that come with participation and exchange in a global economy that has
been configured to benefit the core at their expense.
The foundation for dependency theory, and theoretical variants of dependency, world-
systems, and underdevelopment theory can be traced back to Raúl Prebisch’s 1950s research and
model, which Prebisch developed when he was Director of the Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Prebisch’s main argument was that poor (periphery)
countries, which exported primary commodities to the Global North (the core), were being
exploited and systematically impoverished through the global capitalist system. In other words,
the poorer countries exported primary commodities to the rich countries and then bought the
manufactured products using the raw materials at a high cost––resulting in the rich nations getting
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even richer while the poorer nations experienced economic problems. Issues with economic
growth, or the lack of growth within poorer countries, “was not predicted by neoclassical theory,
which had assumed that economic growth was beneficial to all (Pareto optimal) even if the benefits
were not always equally shared” (Ferraro, 58). This is due to the simple fact that periphery nations
supply core nations with raw materials and labor cheaply––core nations, with their technological
advances, manufacture and add high value to the raw materials before selling the products for
profit.
According to Prebisch’s model, conditions of development could be created within a
country when governments have effective roles in relation to national development, when internal
demand and domestic markets are promoted to reinforce the industrialization process, and national
production is protected by the establishment of quotas and tariffs on external markets (Reyes, p.
5). Combining Keynes’ economic theory and the liberal economic ideas that emerged as a response
to the depression of the 1920s with neo-Marxist perspectives, dependency theory contains four
main ideas:
To develop an important internal effective demand in terms of domestic markets; b) To
recognize that the industrial sector is crucial to achieving better levels of national
development, especially due to the fact that this sector, in comparison with the agricultural
sector, can contribute more value-added to products; c) To increase worker’s income as a
means of generating more aggregate demand in national market conditions; d) To promote
a more effective government role in order to reinforce national development conditions and
to increase national standards of living. (Reyes, 2001, p. 5-6)

Prebisch's solution for poorer countries involved these countries embarking “on programs
of import substitution so that they need not purchase the manufactured products from the richer
countries. The poorer countries would still sell their primary products on the world market, but
their foreign exchange reserves would not be used to purchase their manufactures from abroad”
(Ferraro, p. 59).
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However, there were limitations and difficulties with implementing Prebisch’s model
within poorer countries. According to Vincent Ferraro the three main issues that emerged included
the fact that (1) “internal markets of the poorer countries were not large enough to support the
economies of scale used by the richer countries to keep their prices low,” (2) the “political will of
the poorer countries as to whether a transformation from being primary products producers was
possible or desirable,” and (3) there were questions regarding “the extent to which the poorer
countries actually had control of their primary products, particularly in the area of selling those
products abroad” (p. 59). However, Prebisch’s work and the difficulties in carrying out his
guidelines came to inform and challenge the dependency theory perspectives that were later
advanced by scholars who were similarly interested in exploring the relationships behind global
inequality (especially in regard to international trade) like Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin
as well as influencing the work of Wallerstein and other world systems theorists.
Building on dependency theory and critiquing modernization approaches to development,
world-systems analysis as a perspective came into development discourse in the early 1970s and
is attributed to the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. The world-systems perspective, while having a
considerable amount of overlap with dependency theory, has as its standard unit of analysis the
“world-system” rather than the nation-state—a unit of analysis privileged within dependency
theory (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 16). This is because world-systems theorists argue that the capitalist
world-system does not respect national borders. The priority of capitalist firms is to maneuver and
garner support from the hegemonic state for the “endless accumulation of capital”—not the
maintenance and glorification of certain states as the world-hegemon (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 59).
In addition to this, while dependency theorists use the core and periphery as the categories of
analysis, the world-systems perspective adds a third and intermediate category—semi-periphery
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economies are an intermediate relational group between the core and periphery. This third category
of relation importantly points to the dynamism of international relations. Within this configuration,
semi-periphery economies can move into core status, core economies can downgrade to the semi-
periphery, and periphery economies can move into semi-periphery status. Because the movement
of semi-periphery economies to the core tends to be at the cost of another group, the global
economy and system, based on unequal exchange, remains stable. This dynamic and relational
system puts into question the assumptions of inevitable transition and progress that have
historically informed discourses on socio-economic development. According to Wallerstein, the
conviction that economies transition progressively from one stage to the next reflects “the
Enlightenment theory of progress, which had informed both liberal thought and classical Marxist
thought. World-systems analysts began to be skeptical about the inevitability of progress. They
saw progress as a possibility rather than certainty” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 18). Wallerstein’s
approach to studying global inequalities also places emphasis on the historical and intellectual
processes that came to inform the modern world-system. For instance, Wallerstein argues that the
modern world-system originated modern colonies:
The origin of modern colonies is in the economic expansion of the world-system. In this
expansion, strong states at the core tried to incorporate new zones into the process of the
modern world-system. Sometimes they encounter bureaucratic units which were strong
enough to become defined as sovereign states even if not strong enough to stay out of the
expanding world-system. But often the militarily strong states (mostly located in western
Europe, the United States, Russia, and Japan must be added to the list) encountered areas
where the political structures were quite weak. To ensure the incorporation of such area
into the world-system in a satisfactory manner, these areas were conquered, and colonial
regimes installed. (p. 55)

Unlike mainstream frameworks like neoliberalism, the world-systems approach recognizes
how the relative “weakness” of the colonial states makes them subjectable to exploitation by the
firms and people of the metropoles - or “strong states.” Strong states and institutions maintain
71
control over the production processes of the colonies and make sure that “no other relatively strong
state in the world-system could have access to the resources of the markets of the colony” (p. 56).
In addition to this, Wallerstein points out that the world-system does not allow for the simultaneous
rise of many semi-periphery states into the core because there “is not enough space in the
production structure of the whole system to permit this kind of relocation (called “development”)
simultaneously in too many countries” (p. 57). This creates a condition in which states in the semi-
periphery must compete to attract capital from the core while also making sure they form strategic
relations with the states and institutions that constitute the other economic zones (the core and
periphery). While strong states compete amongst one-another for hegemonic power, the peripheral
states attempt to improve their standing to core status.
While they differ, dependency theory and world-systems theory both critique
modernization theory and its Eurocentric assumptions of linear economic growth. Both
perspectives also argue that modernization theory is founded on the faulty premise that all
countries can develop and become like the Western world. They also show that modernization
theorists, placing emphasis on the internal barriers to development, leave out important historical
periods like colonialism and processes of underdevelopment experienced by periphery (and some
semi-periphery) countries. The assumption of inevitable growth along the developmental stages,
like the growth model proposed by Walt Rostow, fail to account for the ways in which processes
of colonialism and global capitalism underdeveloped the periphery—this is important to keep in
mind because while the West was once undeveloped, it never had to go through a process of being
underdevelopment.

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The African and Asian challenge to Western hegemony
While international institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and UN remain significant
stakeholders in today’s international development scene, Global South (or south-south)
relationships have influenced and challenged Western dominance, harmful international
development policies, and demeaning discourses by calling for greater national ownership of
development priorities, south-south cooperation, and a reduction in power asymmetries between
economically wealthy and underdeveloped nations.
The Cold War era designations of the “First World” and “Second World” are attributed to
a 1946 speech by Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill who, to an audience in Missouri,
United States, declared that the world was divided between two opposing blocs by an “iron
curtain.” The First World comprised of Western Europe and the United States which subscribed
to free market capitalism while the Second World denoted the Soviet Union—which rejected
capitalism in favor of socialism. The conflict that ensued in 1946 between the United States and
the USSR marked the start of the Cold War and lasted until after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989
and the dissolvement of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term “Third World” was later coined by
Albert Sauvy in a 1952 L'Observateur article during the height of the Cold War. In the article,
Sauvy critically extends Churchill’s bipartite division of the world by describing international
relations as one that comprises of a third political position—one that is occupied by colonized and
newly independent nations that fall outside of the First and Second World. However, while Sauvy
is credited with naming this third position in Cold War international politics, the conditions and
ideology that gave rise to the Third World
22
project preceded Sauvy’s 1952 article.

22
With the end of the Cold War and the dominance of First World market economies over Second
World, command economies, the difference between First, Second, and Third World has changed
in meaning. Now, these categories imply the superiority of the First World over the Second and
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In The Darker Nations (2007), Vijay Prashad gives an illustrative and compelling historical
account of how the Third World project began to take shape in the unlikeliest of places — Brussels,
Belgium. Meeting for the first time in 1927, the League against Imperialism
23
conference—a play
of words condemning the League of Nations’ “paternalistic imperialism”—convened two hundred
delegates which represented thirty-seven colonized countries and a hundred and thirty-four anti-
imperialist organizations (Prashad, pp. 20-21).
24
The conversations, personal connections, and
resolutions laid out during the 1927 meeting influenced those at the meeting like India’s Jawaharlal
Nehru and was later described by the delegates to be a formative “bedrock for the creation of
sympathy and solidarity across the borders of the colonized world” (p. 20). While the league could
not maintain its influence in the colonized world, the meeting in Brussels was important in
consolidated what would eventually become Third World platform.
Though Africa’s presence during the Brussels conference was limited, the Pan-African
meetings (Pan-African Congress) played an important role in creating pan-African unity among

Third (the Third World being the worst ranked and least “developed”). While imperfect, I use
underdeveloped and Third World—primarily referring to the project, principle of non-alignment,
and refusal—to address what other scholars may call the “Global South” or “developing countries”
throughout this dissertation. I also lean toward using “underdeveloped” and “Third World”
because both terms are less explicit about locating conditions of underdevelopment through
geographic or linear/end-oriented logics and more concerned with the processes, agency, and
conditions which lead to differences in development. Using Walter Rodney’s (1981) definition of
underdevelopment, as an expression exploitative relationships between/among countries, I use
“underdevelopment” to point to the power asymmetries and processes of economic extraction
which have resulted in today’s global-racial condition of economic and political inequity (though
I acknowledge that terms like “underdevelopment” pose the risk of continuing the naturalization
of the “development” paradigm and the binary discursive division of the world between
“developed” and “underdeveloped”). Another term that appears in development literature is
“Majority World,” which describes underdeveloped parts of the world as the majority world even
though they are minoritized and disempowered within contemporary global relations and capitalist
economic systems.
23
Also referred to as the League against Imperialism and Colonialism
24
Event was organized or funded in part by the Communist International (Comintern),
Kuomintang, and the Soviets.
74
African descendants and advancing a project against colonialism. The first Pan-African conference
was held in London in 1900, the second in Paris (1919), the third in London (1923), the fourth in
1927 (New York City), and the fifth in 1945 (Manchester).
25
Through these meetings, pan-African
leaders like North America’s W.E.B. DuBois, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta,
and Trinidad’s George Padmore convened in dialogue, demanded freedom for the colonized world,
and condemned “the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry” while
fighting for “economic democracy” (Prashad, p. 24).
26
The Pan-Africanist movement and ideology
envisioned an Africa independent of colonialism and a world guided by a more egalitarian and
democratic political dispensation. I should note here that the nation was brought together not by a
shared conception of some essential culture, language, or race but by a shared marginal relationship
to power shared political position against colonialism and imperialism. As Prashad highlights, by
the time Ghana became the first African nation to gain independence in 1957 and hosted the All-
African People’s Conference, “Africa” “operated in a homologous manner to the idea of the Third
World” for the Pan-African political leaders (p. 24).
Later in April of 1955 twenty-nine representatives from African and Asian countries
27
met
in Indonesia for what would become known as the Bandung Conference or the Asian-African
Conference. Representatives from the newly independent nations discussed issues of colonialism,
racial discrimination, nuclear disarmament and how they should position themselves in the bipolar

25
The sixth conference met in 1974 in Dar es Salaam, the seventh met in 1994 in Kampala and the
8
th
was in 2014 in Johannesburg.
26
Prashad citing George Padmore, ed., History of the Pan African Congress: Colonial and
Coloured Unity (London: Hammersmith Books, 1963), 5.
27
In addition to the five sponsoring countries of Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan,
24 other countries participated in the conference. These included Afghanistan, Cambodia, People’s
Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast (Ghana), Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon,
Liberia, Libya, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam,
State of Viet-Nam, and Yemen.
75
context of the Cold War. Though the Third World is now commonly used to refer to three
categorical levels of development (as well as to the countries within the tropics and subtropics), it
started out as a movement of nations who had recently gained their independence (or were on the
cusp of independence) from colonial rule. At the time of the Bandung Conference, leaders from
underdeveloped countries adopted the nomenclature to reflect their position of non-alignment and
their struggle to carve out a space for themselves as newly independent and soon to be independent
nations. As Sheppard et al. (2009) succulently put it, “The term “third world” was intended as a
political statement—to distinguish newly independent, decolonized countries, intending to pursue
a neutral, unaligned foreign policy vis-à-vis the “first world,” the capitalist economies of western
Europe and North America, the “second world,” the state or centrally planned economies of eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union” (p. 19). While the Third World emerged as a project and political
position not aligned with either of the competing ideologies and powers of the Cold War it was
simultaneously an expression of resistance and a demand for political recognition and inclusion
within international politics.
Even though some of the nations represented in Bandung had different ideological and
political perspectives regarding how they should manage their relationships with nations of the
First and Second World, Prashad shows that the conference was able to accomplish several
important outcomes. Fist, the representatives were able to use the conference as a platform to signal
“their refusal to take orders from their former colonial masters” and demonstrate “their ability to
discuss international problems and offer combined notes on them” (p. 41). Adding to this, the
conference helped facilitate the formation of the Afro-Asian, and later the Afro-Asian-Latin
American, bloc in the United Nations. According to Prashad, “the bloc would, alongside the
socialist one, be the bulwark against “dollar imperialism” and offer an alternative model for
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development” (p. 41). Unlike the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the United
Nations served as the main international stage where the Third World could unify and demand
political equality. The UN was so important to the newly independent nations who were united by
shared anti-imperialist and decolonial political aspirations (and disadvantaged by capitalism) that
India’s premier highlighted it as the “principal institution” where the Third World could achieve
its goals of “planetary justice,” “political independence, and nonviolent international relations”
(Prashad, p. 11). For instance, the Third World (particularly India and its experience with non-
violent agitation) were able to use the United Nations to push for dialogue and a program aimed
at disarmament at a time in which war and carpet-bombing campaigns by the West entrenched the
world in fear. Through their position of nonalignment and nonviolence, those identifying as part
of the Third World were able to use the United Nations to assert themselves through the creation
of the UN’s Disarmament Sub-Committee in 1953, the International Atomic Agency (IAEA) in
1957, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in the early
1960s.
In addition to promoting world peace, human rights, self-determination, and closer cultural
cooperation between Asia and Africa, the Asian-African Conference placed economic cooperation
at the top of their agenda. Recognizing “the urgency of promoting economic development” and
“for economic co-operation” among Asian and African countries “on the basis of mutual interest
and respect for national sovereignty” the last communiqué of the conference stated that the Asian-
African Conference recommended:
the early establishment of the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development;
the allocation by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development of a greater
part of its resources to Asian-African countries; the early establishment of the International
Finance Corporation which should include in its activities the undertaking of equity
investment; and encouragement to the promotion of joint ventures among Asian-African
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countries in so far as this will promote their common interest. (“Final Communiqué of the
Asian-African conference of Bandung,” 1955)

While colonialism and disarmament were central issues of the Third World platform, the
need for economic development and cooperation were no less significant to the newly independent
countries. So much so that participants at the Bandung conference made the effort to “stave off the
imperialist pressure brought on them not so much by direct colonialism but by finance capital and
the comparative advantages given to the First World by the legacy of colonialism” (Prashad, p.
44).
The Third World used the United Nations as their platform to advocate for more favorable
financial assistance as well as challenged the West (namely the United States), who enacted
initiatives like the Marshall Plan in 1948 to provide Western European countries with billions of
dollars in financial aid (mostly in the form of grants) to help with their post-war economic recovery
efforts while unfavorably restricting development assistance to newly independent and
underdeveloped countries. On January 12, 1952, Resolution 502-A on “Financing of economic
development of under-developed countries” was approved by the United Nations’ sixth General
Assembly. In the resolution, the General Assembly requested that the Economic and Social
Council submit a plan for the establishment of “a special fund for grants-in-aid and for low-interest,
long-term loans to under-developed countries for the purpose of helping them, at their request, to
accelerate their economic development and to finance non-self-liquidating projects which are basic
to their economic development” (United Nations General Assembly 502A). The “special fund”
and organization were based on the UN General Assembly’s belief that there needed to be “new
sources of international financing suitable for the acceleration of the economic development of
under-developed countries, with a view to raising the standard of living of their peoples” (United
Nations, 1952). The Third World advocated for the creation of economic development initiatives
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like the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development (SUNFED) to increase
development assistance to the Third World from within the framework of the United Nations—
where all member states, including those outside of the United States and Western European
countries, had equal voting rights. However, the United States resisted the creation of SUNFED
as it would give too much political power to the Third World (whose voting bloc outnumbered the
West) and thus undermine US interests. Instead of SUNFED, the United States and its Western
allies supported the creation of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) which worked with
the IMF and utilized private international capital investments. Though the IFC was established in
1956 and SUNFED was postponed further, the Third World continued to advocate for the creation
of SUNFED. By the twelfth General Assembly in 1957, the United States proposed the formation
of a “Special Projects Fund” (Special Fund) which would expand “existing technical assistance
and development activities of the United Nations” like the Expanded Programme of Technical
Assistance (EPTA) and would “provide systematic and sustained assistance in fields essential to
the integrated technical, economic and social development of the less developed countries” (United
Nations, 1957).
While the creation of the Special Fund indicated the United States and other UN members’
recognition that the existing programs and specialized agencies of the United Nations could not
meet the development needs of underdeveloped countries, the Special Fund did not provide what
the Third World needed—capital grants and loans which would have been provided through the
formation of SUNFED. In response to the shortcomings of the Special Fund, underdeveloped
countries pushed for the formation of the Capital Development Fund. However, the United States
and its Western allies proposed instead for the formation of the International Development
Association (IDA) which garnered support in a 1959 UN resolution and began to operate in 1960
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as part of the World Bank Group. Even though the Third World argued for the establishment of
grant-based programs which would provide the capital they needed to alleviate conditions of
underdevelopment that resulted from colonialism what they got instead was World Bank programs
like IDA. Refusing to establish a program within the structure of the United Nations was strategic
on the part of the United States and its allies because the weighted voting system of the World
Bank allows Western states to have greater control over the development funding policies,
programs, and decisions applied to the Third World. In addition to this, the creation of a capital
fund within the UN would have undermined the Western agenda for free-market capitalism and
private capital. Later in 1965, the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA) and the
Special Fund were merged to form the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) without the
provision of capital investment toward the development of underdeveloped countries.
China-Africa cooperation. Since the emergence of the Third World project and the
continued difficulties faced by underdeveloped countries to influence and challenge the capitalist-
driven development paradigm with alternative models through international organizations like the
UN, south-south relations have also emerged. For instance, since 2009, BRICS (Brazil, Russia,
India, China, and South Africa) members, especially China have been playing more important
roles in funding and influencing the economic development trajectories of African countries like
Ethiopia. Since the first Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit was held in
Beijing in October of 2000, China and African states have met every three years to negotiate and
outline the terms of their economic relationship. According to the FOCAC summit website
(FOCAC, 2000), the first ministerial conference meeting in Beijing had two “major” agenda
items/questions on the table:
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1. In what way should we work towards the establishment of a new international political
and economic order in the 21st century?
2. How should we further strengthen Sino-African economic cooperation and trade under
the new circumstances?
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia was chosen to host the second FOCAC meeting in 2003. The agenda that
came out of the 2003 Addis Ababa FOCAC meeting highlighted that China would continue to
provide economic development and economic assistance to African countries “without attaching
any political conditions and increase grant assistance as may be appropriate for projects to be
agreed by both sides” (FOCAC, 2003). For the then highly authoritarian and developmental state
of Ethiopia, this was good news. During each consecutive FOCAC meeting, China revealed larger
financing packages and further cemented its influence and involvement over Africa’s development
prospects. So much so that the growth of African economies in recent years (popularly represented
in the “Africa rising” trope) has been attributed to increasing levels of Chinese involvement within
Africa.
China’s politics of “non-interference” and emphasis on infrastructural development (i.e.,
Belt and Road Initiative) are attractive to many African governments who aim to replicate the same
development trajectories they have witnessed many Asian economies undergo over the past sixty
years without having to answer to the kinds of restrictions placed on underdeveloped economies
by Western dominated institutions like the Bank. Adding to this, China’s historical ties with the
Third World project allow it to relate and align itself with African countries in ways that Western
countries cannot. Part of China’s “win-win” relationship with Africa is premised on the ideas that
it is also a “developing” country that has been negatively impacted by colonialism and external
forces. Thus, it intimately understands the process of undergoing industrialization and economic
81
transformation post-independence—allowing it to better grasp the need African countries have for
quick infrastructural development. Not only is it able to “cooperate” and
“partner” with governments of underdeveloped countries, it is also able to help them meet their
needs while having few conditionalities and a “non-interventionist” stance. During the 2018
FOCAC summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping made it clear that Chinese development financing
in Africa is not for "vanity projects" but for building infrastructure because "inadequate
infrastructure is believed to be the biggest bottleneck to Africa's development," (Reuters, 2018).
With international development institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and European
Development Bank becoming more and more risk averse and implementing compliances that make
it difficult for already indebted African countries to borrow money and carry out projects, China
offers alternative and necessary financing options for many countries like Ethiopia.
With Western international development institutions approaching development through
liberal conditionalities (structural adjustment) in order to reduce the indebtedness levels of African
countries to “sustainable” levels, it comes as no surprise that the West is critical of China’s large
financing pledges and packages. One of the main concerns is that Chinese lending is surpassing
the debt capacities of African countries—the very same countries that qualify for debt relief under
the HIPC initiative. Critical arguments against Chinese assistance contend that raising the debt to
GDP ratios of the borrowing countries could potentially result in a situation where African
countries amass large amounts of debt that they are unable to repay like they did during the
financial crisis of the 1970s/80s. While those highly critical of China have called China’s approach
to development “debt trap diplomacy,” neocolonialism, and predatory it is undeniable that China
is playing a significant role in the development of much needed infrastructures within African
countries. Especially in countries that are part of the Belt and Road Initiative like Djibouti, Kenya,
82
and Ethiopia. However, these criticisms of China (usually emanating from the West) are not only
limited to concerns over growing levels of debt in African countries. China’s approach to aid is in
many ways challenging the assumptions and conditions that often come attached to Western
(particularly American) approaches toward debt and development assistance in underdeveloped
countries. A good deal of the tensions come because of growing competition between the United
States and China for global influence and power. For instance, one can think of the United States’
passing of the Better Utilization of Investment Leading to Development Act (BUILD Act) in
October of 2018 Act allocates 60 billion US dollars of aid to Africa (in the form of private sector
investments) and is a direct challenge to the development financing approach used by China.
While it is likely that neither China or the United States have altruistic motives and
investments in the prospects of Africa, the continent figures into the competition between the two
countries and echoes back to the Cold War period where the U.S. deployed development aid and
financing to advance modernization and free-market perspectives of development in order to
curtail the socialist and USSR influences within Africa’s newly independent states. Consider
Laureen Fagan’s 2018 article “The U.S. may wish otherwise, but what if Africa has chosen
China?” which was first published on Africa Times but then featured on FOCAC’s website. The
article denounces the United States’ criticisms of Chinese involvement in Africa, the newly passed
BUILD Act, and “Prosper Africa” plans by arguing that America’s growing interest and increasing
involvement in Africa is preoccupied with China and Russia. Fagan and China’s ministry of
foreign affairs accuse the then U.S. National Security Advisor’s claims that “China uses bribes,
opaque agreements, and the strategic use of debt to hold states in Africa captive to Beijing’s wishes
and demands,” and that “China’s initiatives, including the “One Belt, One Road” plan, all advance
China’s goal of global dominance” as erasing Africa’s agency and being reflective of the United
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States anxieties about China’s growing influence around the world (Fagan, 2018). For Fagan, the
U.S. rhetoric on China and Africa is problematic because the discourse paints African countries as
victims being taken advantage of and refuses to acknowledge that Africans have agency and self-
determination. While the U.S. continues to use Africa as a pawn in its battles and anxieties, Fagan
argues China, even though it is not perfect, has an advantage in Africa because “the continent’s
hydroelectric dams, its mines and factories, its hospitals and student scholarships, and its foreign
investors reflect decades of China’s engagement. That’s a $440 billion opportunity for Chinese
firms in Africa by 2025” (Fagan, 2018).
In addition to this kind of south-south development cooperation and exchange,
development-oriented institutions with African origin like the Africa Development Bank (AfDB)
and Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) have surfaced to not only fill roles in financing but
also define and set development agendas within Africa. Even though China’s economic
engagements with the Third World have helped African states finance and implement
infrastructure projects, it remains that Africa has major infrastructure needs–both in regard to
social and economic infrastructures (e.g., from educational and health care facilities to roads,
railways, and airports). According to a recent Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) report
on infrastructure financing in Africa, “estimates by the AfDB [Africa Development Bank]
published in its African Economic Outlook, 2018 reveal that Africa’s annual infrastructure
requirements amount to $130bn– $170bn with a financing gap in the range of $68bn–$108bn”
(ICA, 2018). At the time of the Africa Development Bank’s (AfDB) 2018 African Economic
Outlook report, “overall commitments to Africa’s infrastructure from all reported sources declined
to $62.5 billion in 2016, the lowest in five years, due mainly to a large reduction of $14.5 billion
of reported Chinese funding and a $4.9 billion reduction of private investment” (AfDB, 2018, pp.
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84). While African governments are financing many of their infrastructure projects, and funding
from China accounts for a substantial portion of all the infrastructure financing in Africa, Africa
states are still left with a deficit in infrastructure spending. Even with this level of funding and
cooperation, underdeveloped parts of the world have not managed to transform the capitalist and
neocolonial economic world order that was consolidated and globally entrenched in the 20
th

century.
Difference, deferral, and development measures
Although economic development’s discourses, representational regimes, and
institutionalized practices purport to present a universal and objective path for poverty
alleviation—one that guarantees the inclusion of the Third World into global, human,
relationality—development’s material-discursive practices have worked to extend and safeguard
extractivist and inequitable modes of relationality on a planetary scale. Third World intellectuals
and leaders have responded to this uneven and dehumanizing process of onto-epistemological
inclusion by calling for the decolonization of knowledge as well as the creation of more
endogenous, pluriversal, and alternative paths to socioeconomic relationality and international
exchange.
In this section, I look at how growth-oriented development regimes shape not only the
structural conditions of economic disparity between the “center” and “periphery” but also how we
come to know and relate to one another through classificatory categories of difference like
nation(hood) and race in the contemporary moment. To do this, I draw on the works of critical
scholars whose works interrogate the relationship between economic development, power,
difference, and discourse. In agreement with thinkers like James Ferguson (1994 and 2006), Arturo
Escobar (1995), Mudimbe (1988), Claude Ake, C. (2001), and Uma Kothari (2006), I briefly
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consider how Africa, and the Third World more broadly, have responded to the hegemony of Euro-
American epistemic regimes and the universal/izing project of capitalist economic development—
which are rooted in principles of accumulation, extraction, industrialization, and endless
consumption. To consider how Euro-American epistemic dominance is challenged, this and the
following chapters weave in the kinds of arguments and epistemic reorientations presented in
works like Edward Said’s Orientalism and post-development scholars’ explorations of the
pluriverse as an alternative path for worldmaking and planetary relationality. This connects to this
dissertation’s broad concern for how racial formation projects, ethnic and national boundary-
making practices, hegemonic rubrics, and knowledge regimes for assessing progress, wellbeing,
and difference can be confronted with onto-epistemic reorientations and projects that enable us to
envision a world of coexistence, multipolarity, epistemic diversity, and a “universal” plurality.
Development’s representational regimes. Along with the geopolitical events and debates
that established the field of international economic development, several measurements and
frameworks have been constructed for the purpose of classifying, sorting, ranking, and comparing
differences in socioeconomic practices and conditions on a global scale. Conventional
measurements and representations of development, often based on aggregated, nation-level,
statistics are used to rank, measure, and compare human beings across the globe. Statistics like
gross domestic product (GDP)—and its variants like GDP based on purchasing power parity
(GDP-PPP)—are constructed to measure the economic productivity and the mass consumption
capacities of nations (the endpoint of development as outlined by Walter Rostow) though they are
often presented as measures of “wellbeing.” Even indicators like UNDP’s human development
index (HDI), which was constructed to be an alternative way of assessing wellbeing, measure
wellbeing using Western development rubrics for progress as they are inseparable from the process
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of development “whose end is already determined in a way that also determines the questions and
answers about the inquiry” (Ake, 2001, p. 15). In effect, these measures and their claims to
objectivity end up presenting development as universal, paradigmatic, and necessary truth.
Categorizing and comparing countries based on the average amount of “value” they have
produced/accumulated, development measures and their discursive representations not only
calculate aspects of economic activity but also reify capitalist development, linear conceptions of
progress, and economic wellbeing—which can be used to make judgement about, or infer
differences in, human wellbeing and progress. For example, GDP, the most used and
internationally standardized calculation for economic activity, has “often been treated as if it were
a measure of economic well-being,” though it measures market production (Stiglitz et al., p. 85).
The ubiquitous use of economic measures like GDP as benchmarks and tools to monitor economic
development, human wellbeing, and drive policy decisions can be misleading. These measures not
only obscure the inequities and differences that exist within politically demarcated boundaries like
countries (i.e., Ethiopia) but also normalize the organization of people through aggregate statistics
and hierarchical categories which are taken to be objective ways of seeing the world.
Consequently, these representational regimes can be used as tools to 1) bolster state and national
boundaries as the only legitimate containers through which people can make political and
economic demands and 2) obstruct and mystify the discriminatory and uneven material-discursive
relations that constitute “the global” through the implicit messaging that global inequity has more
to do with regional, cultural, and racial difference (conditions internal to racial groups, nations,
and states) rather than the systematic practice of extractivist capitalism and discrimination.
The organization and representation of human and economic difference through
presumably objective regimes of representation is not only useful for ostensibly objective and
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neutral economic aims like tracking, diagnosing, and solving socioeconomic problems.
Development’s representational regimes organize and differentiate human beings and their
socioeconomic characteristics by using classificatory tools, often developed by Western
economists and international organizations, to inscribe and compare human difference with Euro-
American value-laden meanings. Consider the following visual representations of GDP per capita
and Gross National Income (GNI) per capita from the World Bank as illustrations:

Figure 5: visual representation of countries color coded from light (yellow) to dark (blue) based
on their real GDP per capita.

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Figure 6: visual representation of countries differentiated by their classification as high, upper-
middle, low, lower-middle income.

These regimes of representation are symbolic tools—or projects of racial formation—that
mark the global as racial and can be deployed to both corroborate and form conclusions about
individuals and groups of people based on the regions they come from, what they look like, and
what kinds of cultural practices they engage in. In other words, these maps function as explanatory
tools which enable audiences to discern differences (real and imagined) between and among the
aggregate categories of people and ascribe meanings to those people in their aggregate form.
For instance, looking at Figure 5, we can see how the arrow-like scale at the bottom of the
map starts on the left with a real GDP per capita of zero (light yellow) and progresses toward
infinite growth on the right (dark blue). This symbolic representation and comparative formulation
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not only suggests that the represented countries can experience linear and endless progress through
capitalist accumulation, but that progress can be objectively observed/located in certain
countries—the majority of whom are in North America and Western Europe. Though aiming to
measure a different construct than Figure 5, the measure and comparison of countries by categories
of “income groups” (Figure 6) is nearly a direct reflection of the map depicting Real GDP per
capita (Figure 5). Countries with relatively low levels of real GDP per capita and those classified
as “low income” stand at the opposite end of the spectrum from those who are marked as high-
income or as having high market values. Within these two discursive representations, Africa and
South Asian countries are marked as low and lower-middle-income compared to Western Europe,
North America, and a couple of oil-producing Middle Eastern countries who are depicted as having
attained high levels of progress and value relative to other countries. In other words, their
representation in these figures as the West’s “Other” helps bolster ideas that the West is at the apex
of human civilization and progress.
Beyond their stated aims, the language and representation of development produce
knowledge about contained subjects (nations, races, ethnicities, states, countries) and teach their
audiences to see and differentiate constituents of “the global” by using predetermined
discriminatory frameworks which are often corroborated by other classificatory schemes and
regimes of knowledge. Rather than interrogating the social, economic, and political forces that
give rise to today's conditions of global economic inequity, these racial projects enable audiences
to use ascriptive (racial, national, and cultural) categories of difference as explanatory frameworks
for underdevelopment and global inequity. In this sense, audiences can infer that inherent/internal
conditions and racial/ethnic difference explain why parts of the world (especially Africa south of
Sahara) lag significantly behind the West when it comes to varying indicators of "progress.”
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These racial projects, or measures and visual representations of development
28
, shown
above allow audiences to distinguish and classify entire regions, countries, and groups of people
by using simplistic and linear scales that indicate whether groups of people are “developed” or
“not developed” and thus make problematic conclusions about whether they productive or
unproductive; modern or backwards; civilized or uncivilized. Even though the use of economic
figures like income and product suppose that these measures are concerned with the objective
representation of economic life, they imply that non-Western nations have deficits which
can/should be overcome through a process of transformation that amounts to Westernization (Ake,
2001). In other words, commonly accepted measures and representations of economic
development are epistemological tools that discursively establish racial/national difference,
maintain Western hierarchy, and what early Third World scholars identified as a system of
dependency and neocolonialism. The practices and discourses that encompass development map
onto and substantiate other existing classificatory schemes and ideologies about racial, ethnic, and
national difference.
Even with attempts to disaggregate and nuance categories—or measure progress along
other rubrics of wellbeing happiness like the Kingdom of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness
(GNH) Index,
29
the World Happiness Index, or Amartya Sen’s (1999) conceptualization of
development as freedom—statistical constructs and the hierarchical distinctions they make
between the West and the rest of the world remain and frame the kinds of conversations,
generalizations, and values we take for granted as universally accepted ways of knowing and being.

28
See additional examples in Appendix B
29
The GNH Index has the following 9 Domains of measurement: psychological wellbeing,
material wellbeing/standard of living; good governance; health; education; community vitality;
cultural diversity and resilience; balanced time use; and ecological diversity.

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Let us consider how happiness is measured and presented by using Global Happiness Levels as an
example.

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Figure 7: Maps of “Global Happiness levels in 2022” from https://www.visualcapitalist.com
93
The representation of “the most and least happy countries around the world” is created
using data from the World Happiness Report (2022) to, as the producers of the map say, “uncover
the average happiness scores of 146 countries” and “highlight which countries are the happiest—
or unhappiest—and why [emphasis added]” (Ang, 2022). The World Happiness Report uses
happiness (subjective well-being) scores derived using Cantril’s Ladder scale from the Gallup
World Poll (Helliwell et al., 2022). Questions from Cantril’s Ladder which are described as “an
overall measure of how someone feels about their life using two simple questions [emphasis
added]” (Wellbeing, n.d.). The first question in the measure asks people to imagine a ladder with
10 steps and then to indicate where on the ladder they feel they stand at the time of the survey–on
a scale of 0 to 10, the lowest score indicates the worst possible life and 10 the best. The second
question asks respondents to indicate “where they think they will be on the ladder in five years”
(Wellbeing, n.d.). Using this measure, those who are “thriving” have scores of 7 or higher (color
coded orange on the map) whereas those with a score of 4 or less are placed in the "suffering"
category (shades of violet to blue), and everyone in between is categorized as “struggling” (color
coded as magenta). The World Happiness report then uses the subjective wellbeing scores from
they get from the Gallup World Poll to carry out regression analysis with statistics like GDP per
capita and Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE).
Unlike the other visual representations which measure wellbeing using GDP and GNI, the
representation of Global Happiness Levels is meant to tell us about happiness. Notwithstanding
the obvious issues with the operationalization and measurement of a complex and culturally
embedded construct like “happiness,” this measure does the very same thing as economic growth
measures by ranking a construct, in their aggregate national form, in order to draw conclusions
about why some countries and regions are happier than others. As part of development’s
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representational regime, the measurement and comparison of happiness through aggregate metrics
neatly maps onto and affirms assumptions about the Third World while upholding the idea that
capitalist development, and material accumulation, is the ladder unhappy parts of the world need
to climb to attain the endpoint of happiness. Development, or the proximity to development and
endless consumption, promises happiness and becomes the route for experiencing happiness. Said
differently, for the countries which constitute the Third World to be happy, they need to orient
their energy and desire toward becoming like the West because that is where happiness is visibly
to be objectively located.
Despite the impetus to incorporate concepts like happiness into development discourse
coming from the recognition that existing economic statistics are inadequate indicators of overall
wellbeing, representations like the World Happiness Index have the detrimental effect of
convincing us that Africa’s state of “suffering” is primarily due to its failure to fashion itself in the
image of the West through the appropriation of the development ethos. The universalization of
capitalist economic development and reinforcement of modernization theorists’ assumptions that
all countries can, and should aim to, climb the ladder of capitalist development—moving from a
state of underdevelopment toward that of developed—entails the possibility of Africa “becoming
what it is not and probably can never be” (Ake, 2001, p. 15). This is because capitalist economic
development and its discursive-material practices originated as tools and expressions of Euro-
American imperial legitimacy. For instance, as Walter Rodney (1981) explains, modern
underdevelopment:
expresses a particular relationship of exploitation: namely, the exploitation of one country
by another. All of the countries named as "underdeveloped" in the world are exploited by
others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now preoccupied is a product
of capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist exploitation. African and Asian societies were
developing independently until they were taken over directly or indirectly by the capitalist
powers. When that happened, exploitation increased and the export of surplus ensued,
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depriving the societies of the benefit of their natural resources and labor. That is an integral
part of underdevelopment in the contemporary sense. (p. 14)

As Macekura echoes, the word “development” first came into widespread use in English
during the middle part of the nineteenth century to describe how officials could spur and manage
the process of improvement in far-flung parts of the empire. Development discourse became bound
up with the challenges of managing and justifying imperial rule and maintaining racial and cultural
superiority” (2020, p. 43). The assurances of development were deployed to maintain Euro-
American hegemony by creating dependent nations and markets for western products.
Understanding entire cultures, regions, states, and peoples from a place of lack while
presenting culturally specific, Euro-American, economic practices and values as universal and
teleological endpoints of human/social development leads to the attribution of problems like
poverty and underdevelopment to the internal conditions of underdeveloped parts of the world
while authoritatively marking Euro-Western societies as sites of “progress” and human
development (Rodney, p. 21). Adding to this, the presentation of development as a growth-oriented
economic program—as well as an objective, desirable, and universally attainable path for
progress—has partly resulted from the decontextualization of capitalist development from its roots
in Western cultural, ideological, and imperial conditions. Decontextualizing capitalist economic
development from its connections to colonization and underdevelopment of other regions in the
world has enabled it to be seen as a universal/izing truth rather than one approach out of the many
options we have for developing and realizing desirable socioeconomic relationality. Statistical and
representational regimes of capitalist development help detach capitalist development from its
cultural and historical particularities and allow proponents of the growth paradigm to make claims
to objectivity. In other words, it is partially due to discursive knowledge-making practices that
development is accepted as an objectively desirable, natural, universal, and linear path toward the
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realization of global socioeconomic wellbeing. In this context, the “backwards” cultures, religions,
politics, and a lack of desire to progress are blamed for the Third World’s circumstance of
underdevelopment and little accountability is taken by the West for the colonial, extractivist and
repressive practices that enabled it industrialization.
Presenting linear, capitalist, end-oriented development as an issue of the underdeveloped
parts of the world not only masks the material-discursive relationships that led to their inequitable
inclusion within today’s dominant system of economic exchange. The inclusion of underdeveloped
countries into categories of the universal, global, or international community (by recognizing them
in development indexes and authorizing their participation in international development
organizations) has not led to their economic development or reduced their unequal power status in
today’s global market. As Walter Rodney explains, Africa’s comparative status of
underdevelopment in relation to Western Europe has come about not because Africa and Europe
evolved separately, without prolonged and extensive historical contact, but because Africa’s
relationship with Western Europe entailed its exploitation (Rodney, p. 33). To elaborate, Rodney
explains that “when two societies of different sorts come into prolonged and effective contact, the
rate and character of change taking place in both is seriously affected to the extent that entirely
new patterns are created. […] First, the weaker of the two societies (i.e., the one with less economic
capacity) is bound to be adversely affected-and the bigger the gap between the two societies
concerned the more detrimental are the consequences” (p. 11). In other words, unequal economic
conditions, and the exploitative processes through which Africa is drawn into contact, or
integrated, within the Western capitalist world adversely affect Africans—their cultural, economic,
and political structures as well as their psyches.
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In effect, capitalist economic development and its discursive regimes discourage “any
belief in the integrity and the validity of African societies” and imply that “African societies can
find validity only in their total transformation, that is, in their total self-alienation” (Ake, 2001, p.
16). Economic development’s value-laden discursive regimes and comparisons place Africa, and
the Third World more broadly, at the lowest rungs of humanity and come to constitute the ways
we know and relate to human difference—especially if the difference challenges Western capitalist
hegemony. Contrary to the stated aims of international development agencies and actors that the
inclusion and economic development of the underdeveloped world will aid in economic
development of underdeveloped countries, international development discursively and materially
maintains racialized global distinctions by positioning the West and its cultural practices (its value
of consumption and production) as the apex of modernity and providing “objective” proof of
Western superiority to further legitimize racialized distinctions between the West and its Other(s).
The over-generalizing, systematic, and positivist significations of development discourse (Kothari
et al., 2019) lead to the assumption that the West = progress while mystifying the colonial and
racial roots of development. All this to say, Africa, presented as the antithesis of the West and
progress, can never be known as “developed” because the values, meanings, and representational
regimes of development are created to advantage the West and necessitate the ordered ranking of
different parts of the world in ways that position Africa and the Third World, especially Africa, at
the lowest position of human progress.
Development benchmarks, indexes, and measures are discursive tool and constructs used
to give scientific/positive grounding to what are inherently discriminatory constructions of racial
and national difference (Kothari et al., 2019 p. xiv). Measures like the GDP are created to relatively
compare differences in ways that construct deficits. As Wolfgang Sachs argues in Pluriverse: A
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Post-Development Dictionary, “data allow comparison, and comparison constructs deficits along
a timeline, just as between groups and nations” (p. xiv). In the African context, the use of aggregate
nationals statistics, the hegemonic appeal of growth-based development and the objective of
“catching up” to the West, and the appropriation of development as an ideological and survival
imperative by authoritarian governments interested in maintaining power leads to the privileging
of policies that increase national wealth (measured through GDP) and visual markers of progress
(like large cities) rather than concerns over overall human and planetary wellbeing.
The ritual use of visual and statistical representations to sort, organize, and rank human
beings and its varying economic practices do not alleviate global inequity and conditions of
poverty because they never challenge the underlying colonial, racial, and economic agendas that
shape, and sustain, international development discourses and practices. Even though economic
development efforts and discourses have led to higher life expectancies, increased access to
education, and helped meet people’s basic needs, they have also produced a culture of material
needs, overconsumption, and accumulation. What is often left out of the development
conversations in the West is an earnest interrogation of the claim that industrialization and endless
growth are desirable and possible achievements for all nations/states—despite the very real
planetary limits that exist to achieving the kind of economic growth that ends in limitless
consumption for all. The reality is that capitalist development initiatives will always under-deliver
in their underlying promises of prosperity because the current world-system of extraction and
accumulation relies on the continued marginalization and exploitation of underdeveloped
countries. In addition to the assumption that countries should aspire to reach “the age of mass
consumption” ignoring the limits of our planet, it also assumes that industrialization and mass
consumption are inherently more valuable than planetary and inter-species wellbeing.
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To recapitulate, while conventional theories of economic development offer varying
explanations about why development initiatives tend to underdeliver in their stated objectives, they
often do not seriously take into account how local and national stakeholders perceive and situate
themselves within development discourses and practices. In other words, international and regional
development initiatives are often carried out using Western rubrics, cultural values, and
assumptions about what development should mean and look like (or what kind of development is
desirable), without a clear understanding of how local stakeholders imagine, debate, and put to
practice their regionally/locally perceived and oriented ideas about development. Development’s
regimes of representation and inclusion, however objective or inclusive they appear to be, have
done little to lessen the gap between the regions of the world which have accumulated the greatest
resources and wealth and those regions which have faced the consequences of that wealth
accumulation and practices of mass consumption. Instead, these discourses have effectively
signified underdeveloped regions of the world in ways that undermine their agency and
alternative/endogenous economic practices while naturalizing the West and its practices as the
universal symbol and path of progress. The formulations of nationhood, economic
internationalism, and globalization offered up to us as an example by the West are founded on
relationships of inequity and differentiation. Rather than inclusion and equity, they are used to
defer and suppress alternative conceptions and ways of living the “good life” and while they are
presented as the universal and logical formula for achieving prosperity they are based on economic
calculations and structures that deliver neocolonial relationships of inequity. The positioning of
capitalist development as the ideological and political imperative of the Third World, both by the
West and Third World leadership, has led to the deployment of development as the irrefutable
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justification for political and social repression on the local (e.g., through authoritarian and
developmental rule) and international level (e.g., through SAPs).

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Chapter Three
The Economics of National and Ethnic Classifications: how contestations over nationhood,
ethnicity, and economic development shape Ethiopia’s future

Orientalists and anthropologists emerged before the 20
th
century to construct and produce
knowledge about the Western world’s “Other.” While anthropologists developed methods like
participant observation to immerse themselves within and study cultures that were unfamiliar to
them, the Orientalists also studied culture but with a focus on the literature, religious texts, and
artifacts emerging from the East. Anthropologists, on the other hand, studied “primitive”
communities and cultures in colonized regions like Africa. Through this process of knowledge
production, the East was characterized differently from parts of the world considered to be
“primitive” because it had systems of writing, dominant religion(s), and common language(s) that
made it a “high civilization” and thus more familiar to the West. And yet, the East was seen as
being fixed in history and tradition in ways that impeded its progress toward civilization. Both
Orientalists and anthropologists, as producers of Euro-American centered knowledge, constructed
the parts of the world that would constitute the “Other” in order to legitimize the colonial
domination of those who were “othered” and position the West—its cultural, economic, and
political practices—as the signifier of progress. The endpoint to which the “lesser civilizations”
and the “uncivilized” parts of the world could aspire and one day reach through processes of
imitation.
However, by 1945, Oriental and anthropological approaches to knowing the “Other” could
not meet policymakers’ demands for producing the kinds of knowledge that would be useful for
establishing and maintaining a new world order and economic system—one headed by the United
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States (Wallerstein, 2004). With the United States emerging as the global economic and political
force and the Third World asserting mounting demands for independence and political autonomy,
the West needed to adapt its approach to knowing, and thus controlling and relating, with the rest
of the world. Area studies emerged as an alternative to Orientalism and anthropology—the two
fields of knowledge created to study the “Other” to produce the kind of knowledge United States’
policymakers needed regarding the world’s changing geopolitical circumstances. With the creation
of area studies, academics from economics, sociology, and political science (disciplines used to
study the Western, or the “modernized,” world) were trained to specialize and “study what was
going on in these other parts of the world” (Wallerstein, 2004, pp. 9 – 10). The concept and study
of “development” emerged during this time of global political, economic, and social
transformation.
Because development, as a generalized understanding of progress, assumes and legitimizes
the existence of national societies, it facilitated the formation of both nomothetic (generalized) and
idiographic (specific) explanations of the world (Wallerstein, 2004) in ways that allowed the West
to continue producing knowledge about “Others” while positioning itself as the most developed,
and thus the best, model for the “universal” path of progress, modernization, civilization,
nationhood, and governance. Said differently, development and its regimes of knowledge allow
for the deployment of universal/izing conceptions of progress while simultaneously allowing the
West to know other parts of the world in ways that are not only hierarchically ordering but also
prescriptive and constraining toward Africa’s possibility of realizing alternative relationalities and
economic paths.
Development’s related concept of nation/nationalism has origins in the 18th and 19th
centuries and is inextricably tied to the economic, political, and cultural transformations brought
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forth by modernization. Structured as a modular entity
30
and precondition for participation in
national and international development efforts, nationhood legitimizes the claims of states and the
power they assume over “national development” efforts. As a container for geographically
dispersed and oftentimes culturally heterogeneous peoples, nationhood was used to invoke people
into a unified community and became a necessary condition in the developmental process.
Development, seen as a process of progressing through stages of modernization, assumed that
people belonging to distinct social groupings—like nations—would all follow a “universal” and
linear path of progress. In this context, parts of the world deemed to be pre-modern, primordial, or
traditional would need to be recomposed as nations and nation-states to participate in the modern
world system, lay claims to sovereignty, and protect themselves from further exploitation. For
societies to “develop” and gain recognition in the interstate and international political system, the
boundaries of the state and citizenship would have to be both materially and discursively
demarcated and people would need to transcend localized, pre-modern, itinerant consciousness to
become part of nations and states which were encouraged to model themselves after the West. And
of course, the assumption was that the modernization process, brought through democratization,
advances in industrial capitalism, technology, and transportation would bolster the emergence and
maintenance of these nations.
The “concept of partnership in development” was initially used by colonial powers to
maintain their leverage and presence in the colonies as well garner allies in the First World’s battle
against communism (Ak, 2001, p. 8). Though the West deploys development to relate to and
maintain power over the Third World, development is also the ideological footing upon which
African governments, like that of Ethiopia, stand on to maintain their power. In other words,

30
See chapter one for discussion on nations and modularity
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development and the need for nationalized development efforts have been used by leaders of newly
independent African states to legitimize their rule and envision their nation-states. Since gaining
their independence, African states have used the ideology of development—or, more aptly, the
strategy of maintaining power by exploiting the “objective need” for economic and social
wellbeing— to stay in power. As Tesfaye Asfaw explains, the political independence of African
countries “unleashed high expectations for accelerated socio-economic development” and national
development planning was embraced “as an effective means” for the acceleration of the socio-
economic development process (p. 251). The planning process not only drew on examples of
planning from the West (e.g., The Marshal Plan), but was influenced by organizations like the
World Bank and the IMF whose funding structures growingly required planning and plans for
development financing as well as for the evaluation of project outcomes. Within this context,
development ideology and national development plans can be said to have replaced demands of
independence and decolonization as the grounds used to secure and maintain power as well as
forge national solidarities. This means that development has not only become the necessary
ideological footing for leaders and elites to maintain their power but one of the primary, and
arguably precarious, ways in which African nations and states are held together and imagined.
Through this model of nationalized development, developmental states like Ethiopia have
the incentive to strengthen their national borders and national identity as well as suppress any
internal challenges that jeopardize their imperative of growth-based economic development.
However, the relationship between development and nationhood is complicated in Ethiopia’s
contemporary historical conjuncture as its political, economic, and national contestations are
framed through the lens of ethnicity, ethnic oppression, ethnic antagonisms, and ethnic (group)
rights. With the modern Ethiopian state consolidating itself during Europe’s “scramble for Africa,”
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the people integrated into the modern Ethiopian were able to ward off European attempts at
colonization through their unification—making Ethiopia the only uncolonized state in Africa
outside of Liberia. Despite Ethiopia avoiding external (European) colonization, those favoring
ethno-national perspectives have mapped Ethiopia’s contemporary state formation onto Third
World discourses of (de)colonization by claiming that Ethiopia’s oppressed “nations and
nationalities” experienced internal colonization and subjugation at the hands of Amhara rulers like
Menelik II and Haile Selassie. For instance, considering their “national oppressors and class
exploiters as basically one and the same,” the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)—the
winning armed ethno-nationalist group which took control over the Ethiopian state in the early
1990s—originally framed its class struggle as a struggle to defeat “Amhara national domination
and oppression” (TPLF, 1983). The TPLF situated itself as an organization that not only
represented the interests of an “oppressed nation” (ethnic Tigrayans) but as one that also aimed to
“eliminate” the national and class oppression of Ethiopia’s oppressed nations through the
formation of a democratic or “popularly accepted” order (TPLF, 1983). Dissenting against Amhara
cultural, linguistic, and political dominance, the TPLF argued that the issue of national oppression
would be solved though a democratic order that ensures voluntary national “unity based on
equality” or the ability of “oppressed nations and nationalities to form their own independent
states” (TPLF, 1983). This program and nationalist framing of class struggle, highlighted in the
TPLF’s 1983 “People’s Democratic Programme” helped the TPLF, an ethno-national political
organization who represents a small portion of Ethiopia’s population, secure national power at
both the central level (the Ethiopian state) and ethno-regional level (the Tigray regional state) in
1991.
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With the TPLF and its EPRDF coalition government establishing an ethnic federal
arrangement in the 1990s, Ethiopia’s ethno-linguistic groups have had a strategic and
constitutionally authorized interest to define themselves as territorially and culturally distinct
entities with rights to self-determination–even up to secession. However, this has resulted in an
arrangement where national unification and development are antithetical to the promises of ethnic
federalism and ethnic-based group rights. One the one hand, there is a central government invested
in deploying a state-controlled and nationalized development agenda to meet the needs of the
“oppressed nations” who not only constitute culturally marginalized “nations” but the vast
majority of Ethiopians that live under conditions of poverty. On the other hand, the political
program implemented in the 1990s promises a decentralized state—through the formation of an
ethnic-federal arrangement—that not only grants ethno-national states the right to cultural and
administrative autonomy but also secession if their rights to equality and national self-
determination are not honored by the central government. The problems that arise out of this
contradiction are the central problematics I explore in the remainder of this chapter.
Although the account I have provided thus far risks overgeneralization, it is within this
wider context and argument of nationhood and development that I position the modern state of
Ethiopia, its ethno-national composition, and the different political interests currently vying to
assume authority over the country’s national and developmental paths. Using textual and
discursive analysis, this chapter draws from a selection of government documents, media artifacts,
and fieldwork experiences to interrogate the troubling relationship between Ethiopia’s ethnic
federalism, its employment of national development agendas, and Ethiopians’ contestations over
questions of nationhood and progress. Through this process, I illustrate how essentializing and
territorializing codifications of identity (namely the floating signifier of ethnicity) and progress
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shape contemporary Ethiopian politics and responses to conditions of underdevelopment and class
tensions. I argue that the state deploys development, nation, and ethnicity (ethnic nationhood) as
technologies of governance and control. Even supposing that Ethiopia’s history as a state surpasses
that of many existing Western states, I argue that the uptake of modular configurations and
implementations of nationhood and development, what I see as two co-determining conditions of
Western progress and modernity, are root causes behind Ethiopia’s current political conflicts over
land, identity, economic precarity, and well as our inability to locate more forgiving and endogenic
solutions for our political and economic problems.
The Developmental State and its Plans for National Progress in Ethiopia
Throughout Ethiopia’s modern history, the few who’ve managed to control the state have
also been those authorized to imagine, plan, communicate, and bring about particular visions of
Ethiopia’s future into reality. National development plans encompass the most prominent and
authoritative ways in which the aspirations and roadmap for Ethiopia’s future have been articulated
by different regimes in the past seven decades. Most notable of these plans are the 5-year-long
national development agendas which emerged in the 1950s, under the imperial rule of Haile
Selassie, to help the country transition from a subsistence to an agro-industrial economy (Library
of Congress, n.d.). By the mid 1950s, the National Economic Council (NEC) was created to
coordinate the state's development plans and formulate a national agenda for improving
agricultural and industrial productivity; eradicate illiteracy and diseases; and improve living
standards for all Ethiopians (Library of Congress, n.d.). Ethiopia’s first two Five Year
Development Plans, prepared by the NEC, were in effect between 1957 and 1967; and the Third
Five-Year Plan, prepared by the Ministry of Planning and Development which would be later
reorganized as the Planning Commission, lasted between 1968 and 1973. However, even though
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Ethiopia’s economy was starting to grow and diversity by the 1970s, the implementation of these
plans was hindered by Ethiopia’s insufficient administrative, technical, and resource capabilities
and largely failed to improve the lives of most Ethiopians who were subsistence farmers living
under conditions of poverty Library of Congress, n.d.).
Following the 1974 revolution which overthrew Haile Selassie and the monarchy,
Ethiopia’s political and economic configuration was marked by communist military rule and
nationalization measures. The communist regime and its planning institutions, the National
Revolutionary Development Campaign and the Central Planning Supreme Council (NRDC &
CPSC), implemented programs like the Development Through Cooperation Campaign (locally
known as Zemecha) and the Ten-Year Perspective Plan (1984/85-1993/94) to “fulfill the
objectives of the government to raise the living standards in the nation and enhance capital
formation” (Mitiku, p. 130). Despite these objectives, the plans faced a series of technical,
political, and resource setbacks which were exacerbated by issues like war, internal political
instability, and of course, the 1983-1985 famine which severely distressed Ethiopia’s northern
region (particularly the areas of Tigray and Welo/Wollo) and galvanized large-scale international
charity events like Live Aid. International events which cemented Ethiopia’s image as a famine-
stricken, impoverished, and backwards country without much consideration of the political
contestations that triggered and exacerbated the crisis.
In the wake of the communist military regime losing its position of power in 1991, rebel
forces, namely the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the coalition party they
formulated—the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front or EPRDF—came to
establish Ethiopia’s dominant political force. The new government implemented national
developments plans like the Agricultural Development Led Industrialization (ADLI), the Plan for
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Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP), and the Growth and
Transformation Plans (GTP I and II). The first national development plan of the new regime,
ALDI, was implemented in 1992; the second plan, PASDEP, covered the years 2005 through 2010;
while the first Growth and Transformation Plan (I) was in effect between 2010 and 2015; and the
second Growth and Transformation Plan was implemented between 2015 and 2020.
Nevertheless, after years of sustained protests against its authoritarian rule, the Tigray
People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was forced to give up its dominant position in the Ethiopian
People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in 2018. Following the EPRDF coalition
party’s reshuffle—which put current prime minister Abiy Ahmed at the helm of the coalition—the
TPLF decided to break away from the EPRDF coalition party and return to the regional state of
Tigray where is still possessed a great deal of political strength and authority. The new political
alliance forged by the remaining EPRDF coalition members and other smaller parties went on to
create the current ruling party known as Prosperity Party in December of 2019. In June of 2021,
the transitional government led by PM Abiy Ahmed and the Prosperity Party, replaced the TPLF-
EPRDF’s five-year Growth and Transformation Plan (Vision 2020) with a new national plan—the
10-year National Perspective Plan which culminates in 2030 and is sometimes referred to as Vision
2030 (ENA, 2020; Office of the Prime Minister, 2021). All this to say, each subsequent ruling
regime in control of the state has formulated “new” and “national” plans, roadmaps, and visions
to aid in the socioeconomic and national development of Ethiopia. This planning process and the
official communication of plans helps each ruling regime legitimate its government’s mandate
over the future of the country and its nation(s) even while its rule is attained through undemocratic
means and contested by many of Ethiopia’s citizens.
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Nationhood and Development under TPLF-EPRDF Rule. Despite the TPLF being
pushed out of its leadership position in the central government, the accelerated growth of
Ethiopia’s economy prior to Abiy Ahmed’s premiership has been attributed to the economic
policies put in place during TPLF rule by prominent and highly contentious political figures like
Meles Zenawi. During the first decade of its rule, the TPLF was focused on establishing a ruling
coalition that would legitimize its leadership over Ethiopia (i.e., the EPRDF coalition); forging a
new federal arrangement that would satisfy the political and economic interests of ethno-
nationalists and secessionists; settling internal power struggles within the TPLF; holding a
referendum for the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia in 1991; and fighting a border war with
Eritrea between 1998-2000 as a result of the mismanaged separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia.
Formed and led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the EPRDF initially seized power
with U.S backing, positioning itself in favor of a free-market economy and declaring its
willingness to establish a federal and democratic polity. Obtaining its ruling position through
armed conflict and international backing, the TPLF originally substantiated its ideology-driven
and authoritarian approach to governance (and its “right” to rule) by asserting itself as a
“vanguard” party and “revolutionary democracy.” As the vanguard and revolutionary democratic
force, it assumed for itself the right to protect the interests of, and rule on behalf of, Ethiopia’s
“oppressed masses.” Many of whom were subsistence farmers and civilians whose lives had been
tormented by years of war, famine, and economic downturn.
In the English translation of a 1993 TPLF-EPRDF party document titled “Our
Revolutionary Democratic Goals and the Next Step,” the party describes its “struggle” to attain its
“revolutionary democratic goals” which not only includes economic and political outcomes but
the party’s efforts to maintain control of the state while faced with internal and external pressures.
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The document describes the TPLF-EPRDF’s revolutionary democracy as having a “partisan
outlook” in which “materializing human and democratic rights means protecting the rights of the
great oppressed majority [emphasis added].” While the rights of the “oppressed majority” are to
be fully protected, the TPLF-EPRDF states that its Program will “suppress” the rights of “the
oppressor” which include obstructive enemies like “imperialists.” Imperialists here, is coded
terminology which is not only used describe external forces like the United States but internal
groups who posed challenges to the TPLF’s political dominance or ascribed to Ethiopian and pan-
Ethiopian nationalism—which opposed to the kind of ethnic nationalism and ethnic federal
arrangement that the TPLF’s political agenda favored. In his discussion of the TPLF-EPRDF’s
revolutionary democracy, Iginio Gagliardone explains that “Revolutionary democracy favours a
populist attitude claiming a direct connection of the vanguard party with the masses, bypassing the
need to negotiate with other elites who advance competing ideas of the nation- state and of the role
different groups can have within it” (p. 67). Furthermore, the TPLF was able to assert its legitimacy
without relying on the “representational model that characterizes most liberal democracies” by
“claiming to have a special relationship with key constituents in Ethiopia’s society” (p. 60).
Through revolutionary democracy, the TPLF was able to situate the vanguard as having a
privileged relationship with masses while framing groups with competing ideas as “irrelevant or
as enemies of the oppressed” (Gagliardone, p. 70). Even if the masses it claimed to represent never
supported the TPLF, or even protested against TPLF rule, by virtue of claiming to represent the
class interests of the “majority,” the TPLF was able to employ its own definition of democracy
and claim to directly represent their interests.
In its first decade of rule, the TPLF-EPRDF’s socioeconomic policies focused on
agricultural production. The early 1990s Agricultural Development Led Industrialization (ADLI)
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policy positioned agricultural producers as the engines of growth for the economy (Abbink, 2017,
p. 30). Building on the country’s agricultural base, the ADLI policy sought to “add economic value
to indigenous raw materials” and create an industrial economy (Abbink, 2017, p. 93). However,
this strategy was unsuccessful in creating an industrial economy because “the Ethiopian peasantry,
especially in zones of desperately poor subsistence farming such as Tigray [home state of the
TPLF], simply did not produce a surplus from which ADLI could be generated” (Clapham, p. 94).
Adding to the inability of smallholder farming to produce surplus and meet the demands of a
growing labor force, the results of the ADLI model proved to be unpredictable and dependent on
weather conditions.
Once the regime was able to focus on development as its key political priority in the early
aughts, the TPLF-EPRDF began to implement state-controlled development—referring to itself as
a democratic developmental state—by drawing on the development strategies of East Asian states
like China, Japan, and South Korea rather than adopting neoliberal economic policies. Meles
Zenawi, leading member of the TPLF and prime minister of Ethiopia from 1995 until his death in
2012, explains the logics of the developmental state in his 2011 article “States and Markets:
Neoliberal Limitations and the Case for a Developmental State.” In his article, Zenawi describes
developmental states as possessing the following attributes:
The motive and source of legitimacy of developmental states is the single-minded pursuit
of accelerated development. (2) The development project is broadly shared in the country.
(3) They are autonomous from the private sector; they make and implement decisions
regardless of the views of the private sector; and they have the motive, the incentive, and
the means to reward and punish the private sector in order to promote desired behavior and
activity. (4) They can be either democratic or undemocratic, and this does not determine
whether they are developmental states or not. (p. 170)

As explained by Zenawi, the developmental state is one that is autonomous from the private
sector—and thus has the ability to “discipline, encourage, and cajole” the private sector in order
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to prevent rent-seeking
31
behavior while creating an environment conducive to accelerated
economic growth (2011). Unlike the subordinate state,
32
Zenawi describes the autonomous state
as having the capacity to effectively create and implement policy “regardless of the views of the
private sector on the issue” (p. 168). However, while autonomous, Zenawi argues that the
developmental state will have to garner widespread support for the developmental process and
“build some sort of consensus on its development agenda if it is to be a developmental state” (p.
169). Zenawi goes further to distinguish between democracy and the developmental state. He
argues that the defining characteristic of a developmental state is not dependent on whether the
consensus over its development agenda is built in a democratic context or not (p. 169). In other
words, developmental states are defined by their approach toward state-led development (as it is
broadly characterized above) and not whether they employ a democratic form of governance and
consensus building.
While the developmental state model is presented by Meles Zenawi as a challenge to
Western (neoliberal) models and demands, one can infer that development, as an ideology and
model for attaining economic wellbeing, is partly taken up by the TPLF-EPRDF as an essential
and objective motivation in order for the party to justify its limitations on democracy. In other
words, the deployment of development and the developmental state sanctions the Ethiopian

31
Rent-seeking is an economic term which describes “a process of wealth transference through
the aegis of government. It is not about creating new value, but about transfer of already produced
value through the state. As rent-seeking is an act of the state to transfer value to preferred clients,
it is perpetuated indefinitely by that act of the state and is incapable of being dissipated through
competition as in rent creation” (Zenawi, p. 142).
32
A subordinate state “makes and implements decisions through a process of juggling interests
among various sections of the private sector” (Zenawi, p. 168)

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government to undermine political opposition and human rights if these elements are deemed to
stand in the way of the state’s imperative to achieve growth-based economic development and
reduce rent-seeking behavior. Arguably, between the 1990s and the early aughts, the TPLF
transitioned from using its special status as a “vanguard” party and “revolutionary democracy” to
using the rhetoric of “democratic developmental state” to negate local demands for political reform
and democratic consensus-building and positioned itself (and the EPRDF coalition) as having the
imperative to achieve fast-paced economic growth through whatever means necessary. Said,
differently, terms like democracy and consensus were reformulated and recast to meet the political
objectives of those in power and to denounce the contestations of people who were either
marginalized by or disagreed with the party’s authoritarian rule, developmental program, and
overall vision for the future of the country.
Taking a closer look at the Growth and Transformation plans which are indicative of TPLF-
EPRDF’s developmental and state ambitions we see that the center of the “national plan” which is
outlined officially in GTP I and GTP II is the goal to establish a “democratic developmental state”
which conditions citizens to accept “the hegemony of developmental political economy [emphasis
added]” (GTP II, p. 80). In the second iteration of the Growth and Transformation Plan (2015-
2020), “Ethiopia’s vision of renaissance” was articulated as being the realization of the country’s
“national vision” to “become a lower middle-income country by 2025” (GTP II, p. 2). With these
“national” visions for the future, a hegemonic acceptance of a “developmental political economy,”
is outlined as a necessary condition for achieving both the state’s economic aspirations as well as
addressing issues of competing nationalist struggles between Ethiopian nationalists (also referred
to as pan-Ethiopian nationalists) and ethno-nationalists. Furthermore, a “renaissance” to an
imagined and better Ethiopia is mobilized by the state to pursue a unifying “national vision” and
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project of progress—a teleological project of progress that is meant to be achieved through state
controlled, rapid, and broad-based economic development with the TPLF-EPRDF acting as
vanguard.
Ethiopia’s official “vision of renaissance” involves the realization of rapid economic
development, with the short-term goal of reaching lower middle-income economic status by 2025.
In brief, the category of Middle Income Countries (MICs) includes both lower middle-income
economies which have a Gross National Income (GNI) per capita between $1,036 and $4,045 and
upper middle-income economies which have a GNI per capita between $4,046 and $12,535 (World
Bank). In 2021, Ethiopia was considered a low-income economy with a GNI per capita of $850.
To give additional perspective, Ethiopia is considered to have “low human development,” ranking
173rd out of the 189 countries which are included in the 2020 Human Development Index (HDI)
Ranking with a score of .485. The HDI, an index established by Mahbub ul Haq to compete with
the GDP as a measure of development, shifts away from a focus on national income toward non-
income measures like education, health expectancy, and standard of living with the aim of assess
“human development” and quality of life (United Nations Development Programme).
Though TPLF-EPRDF’s stated goal was to establish a “democratic developmental state
[emphasis added]” (GTP II, p. 80) and the coalition party has called itself as a “Revolutionary
Democratic Front [emphasis added]” the TPLF-EPRDF was resistant toward the democratization
of political and economic participation. That is to say, the government, while calling itself
“democratic” has reconceived and redefined “democratic” in a way that falls outside of the
denotative and connotative meanings ascribed to democracy by Western interests. Its struggle
against practicing a democratic form of governance and consensus-building was made evident
during the 2005 and subsequent elections where the TPLF-EPRDF strengthened its position of
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power by violently repressing opposition parties and its supporters to retain its control over the
Ethiopian government. Observing the government’s actions, we can draw the conclusion that the
“‘democratic’ element in the developmental state project bore little resemblance to the liberal
democracy practised in the West” (Clapham, p. 95). As Clapham elaborates, the TPLF-EPRDF
regime was “a classic case of ‘illiberal state-building’,

in which acceptance of the regime’s
hegemony and its programme for the political and economic reconstruction of Ethiopia is a
prerequisite for participation in government” (Clapham, p. 77).
Here we see that the vocabularies of development and democracy can be taken up by
African political powers like the TPLF-EPRDF so that they (as authoritarian leaders) can
strategically emplace and safeguard themselves within internationally recognized discourses about
development and progress while simultaneously presenting themselves as challenging Western
ideological, political, and economic dominance. By referring to their authoritarian rule as one that
is simultaneously developmental and democratic, they are able to shut down external criticism by
asserting their foremost commitment to growth-based development and also claiming to have
support from the “majority” of Ethiopians without actually garnering uncoerced support from the
very Ethiopians they claim to represent. For example, the government claims that the Growth and
Transformation Plan came into fruition after having “passed through a series of broad based [sic]
consultation processes with relevant stakeholders at regional and federal levels in a structured and
coordinated manner to enrich its content and forge national ownership of the Plan [emphasis
added]” (GTP II, p. 2). However, the regional and federal officials are usually not democratically
elected as they are closely affiliated or hand-picked by the ruling party to carry out its political and
economic agenda. Furthermore, in GTP II, lack of cooperation or resistance from civilians toward
the state’s development program is framed as a problem of “backward attitudes and practices”
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(GTP II, p. 46). Backward attitudes which can be addressed through processes that reinforce
“organised, informed and direct participation of the public” and ultimately “strengthen
developmental attitudes” to ensure “the supremacy of developmental political economy” (p. 80).
In this context, anyone that dissents is regarded as either misguided or as an “enemy” of the state
and the state’s mandate to realize its developmental objectives.
In this setting, the achievements of developmental states in other parts of the world are
hailed to showcase that state-led developmentalism is an effective (or the most effective) way to
realize socioeconomic transformation in underdeveloped countries and development cooperation
between Third World states (like China and Ethiopia) are fostered and established as alternatives
to the West and its demands for neoliberal economic transformation. As Ethiopia began to
experience consistent and high levels of (GDP) economic growth, the TPLF-EPRDF was able to
point to Ethiopia’s economic growth to support its mode of governance as an effective and
necessary means for achieving one of the fastest growth rates in Africa. By the 2010s, Ethiopia
was heralded as an exemplary case for economic growth even by Western institutions and
policymakers who deplored the state’s human rights record and implementation of authoritarian,
state-controlled, illiberal, governance. See for instance this expect from GTP 11 where the state
describes the overall impact and relationship of government-controlled and growth-based
development on the country and civilians:
Most farmers, pastoralist, private sector, women and youth groups and other members of
the society experienced the sustained, rapid and broad based growth of the country. This
broad-based and rapid economic growth performance during the plan period, 2010/11-
2014/2015, has in turn consolidated the aspirations of individual citizens and the country
in general to achieve even better in the time ahead. Ethiopia’s achievements over the last
five years have also attracted global recognition, and help the image of the country for the
better [emphasis added], as can be observed from the increased inflow of FDI and strong
performance of the country’s first ever sovereign bond in the international capital markets.
(p. 5)

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The results of GTP I are not only attributed with helping consolidate the country’s
aspirations to achieve more of its economic development goals in the future but also credited with
bringing positive attention to country—both in terms of greater foreign direct investment and
media representations. In fact, the government has undertaken “economic diplomacy” via different
communication media like news outlets in order enhance positive images of Ethiopia “among the
international community” and increase FDI (GTP II, p. 19). Through this plan for national
development, we see that Ethiopia has reduced the proportion of people living below the poverty
line from 45.5% in 1994 to below 20% in 2020 in the following representations of country-specific
aggregate statistics. In addition to this, the country has seen consistently upward GDP growth rate,
has increased its share of industry and construction sectors while reducing reliance on agricultural
output (though it hasn’t been able to greatly increase manufacturing sectors) while implementing
the Growth and Transformation Plans I and II.

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Figure 8: Representations of Ethiopia economic growth trends between 1994 and 2020 from
Ethiopia 2030: Pathway to Prosperity document.

Similar to how international development statistics and visual representations (used to
order and rank countries based on aggregate measures that indicate progress) legitimate growth-
based development as a path to progress, so do these statistical representations of Ethiopia’s
economic growth. As part of development’s representational and knowledge regimes, both the
process of planning and the measures of economic growth used to calculate the outcomes of plans
are used by the Ethiopia government to showcase the country’s progress and legitimate its growth-
oriented plan and ideology. However, regardless of these indications of growth and the praise
Ethiopia has received from international development institutions for making significant
improvements in economic and human wellbeing since the early 1990s—especially during the
peak of the Africa Rising discourse I introduced in chapter one—it is consistently ranked at the
lowest end of almost all indicators and measures of progress including the Human Development
Index (see figure 9 below).
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Figure 9: Human Development Index from https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth
Moreover, much of the government-led economic growth had been the result of heavy
borrowing from international donors (like China) for state-led infrastructure development projects
like roads, rail, hotels, and industry parks. These projects were often criticized by my interview
participants and other interlocutors for not including local participation, for exacerbating economic
inequities and ethnic tensions, being very low in quality, mired in government corruption, and for
not equally improving the lives of average Ethiopians—majority of whom still rely on subsistence
farming for their survival. With the mapping of class conflict onto ethnic difference, many
Ethiopians experiencing economic hardship made sense of their experiences through the
framework of ethnicity and ethnic oppression. For instance, interlocutors pointed to the unfair
privileges granted to ethnic-Tigrayan residents in Addis Ababa and complained that they were kept
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out of having access to land, government positions, contracts, and business opportunities because
the ethnic federal arrangement and party system motivated ethnic nepotism rather than equality.
This meant that when an ethnic party is in power, its ideological allies and ethnic
constituents stand to gain the most privileges while those outside of its ethnic and ideological
worldview and investments are marginalized or violently repressed. Under these circumstances,
those who identified as Amhara complained about being marginalized and scapegoated. They
argued that the TPLF was not only intent on marginalizing them through the instrumentalization
of ethnic identity in contemporary Ethiopian politics but invested in recasting historical events in
ways that harmfully position Amhara people as colonizers and settlers within the dominant
Ethiopian national imaginary. This not only has the effect of attaching blame to Amhara people as
whole for Ethiopia’s sociopolitical and economic problems but ends up justifying the enactment
of discrimination and violence against them on the basis of their ethno-linguistic identity. On the
other hand, the Oromo, who mostly supported the ethnic federal arrangement and constitution
which was instituted after negotiations between the TPLF and the Oromo Liberation Front,
complained that even though they comprise the largest ethno-linguistic group within Ethiopia, they
were marginalized within the Ethiopian political and cultural representation. They argued that
“their lands” (which encircle the capital of Addis Ababa) was being forcefully or unfairly
appropriated by the state for the purposes of “national” development—a national development
which marginalized their ethnonational interests.
While the ethnic federal arrangement and constitution promised to recognize and protect
the rights of ethnic groups, the federal government’s centralized and nationalized development
agenda were violating ethnic groups’ rights to the administration of their lands. With the TPLF
representing around six percent of the Ethiopian population in terms of ethnic body politic,
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segments of both the Oromo and Amhara ethnic groups—who constitute the two largest ethnic
groupings within Ethiopia—began to ally in 2014 to protest against the TPLF’s authoritarian
control over the EPRDF, the state, and its developmental agenda. Aside from these two groups’
resistance, the TPLF-EPRDF also faced challenges in other regions like the Somali regional state,
the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples (SNNP) regional state, and the Gambela regional
state where the TPLF-EPRDF government was responsible for committing mass arrests, torture,
extrajudicial killings, and the mass displacement of local populations in the name of development
and national prosperity.
However, with the top priority of making developmental attitudes hegemonic within
Ethiopia underway the state pushed aside people’s grievances and argued that a piecemeal
approach to democratic rights will be achieved in Ethiopia when the country begins to sufficiently
develop. That is, despite Ethiopians’ continued efforts to voice concerns about TPLF-EPRDF’s
approach toward state-controlled development and authoritarian governance, high-level leadership
maintained that Ethiopians need to embrace as commonsense the developmental state’s logics
before there could be a transition toward democracy. Otherwise, state power could fall into the
(wrong) hands of those whose views compromise the ruling regime’s approach toward realizing
economic development and overall visions of progress for Ethiopia’s future—groups of people,
politicians, and interests deemed to be enemies of the state and development. For instance, in
conversations with Alex de Waal about the state’s national vision and approach toward
development and democracy, Meles Zenawi pointed to the problems of Ethiopia’s “national
humiliations.” According to Zenawi, “Ethiopia is proud and we feel our national humiliations
deeply. The source of our country’s humiliation in our time is poverty and backwardness” (de
Waal, 2018, p. 7). The answer to these collective and “national humiliations” and current
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condition of “backwardness” is determined by Zenawi to be the deployment of state-led economic
development and the normalization of a developmental and democratic ethos within Ethiopia. As
Zenawi explains to de Waal:
We have to push ahead with this accelerated development. We must have growth, growth,
growth [emphasis added]. The pressures for a conventional liberal democracy are there and
cannot be contained indefinitely. What’s essential for our national survival is that we have
achieved sufficient economic growth that when the transition [toward democracy] comes,
it is manageable and doesn’t jeopardize our developmental state [emphasis added]. […]
The trajectory for the evolution of democracy must focus on the norms and values that
make democracy real. We don’t have the social and economic base for following the
western model of democratizing through a piecemeal expansion of rights [emphasis
added], though those will come in due course. It is not enough to have a political economy
of value-creation: the democratic ethos also has to be hegemonic. We need a ‘whole cloth
democracy’ which will have many impurities that need to be eliminated as we go along.
We have inherited many problems from our feudal past including value systems. The
opposition is not comfortable with the constitution as such: they wanted to change the
constitution by unconstitutional means [emphasis added]. They play the democratic game
in order to throw out the rules of the game. (p. 5)

In sum, Zenawi reasoned that before the realization of democracy in Ethiopia there needs
to be economic development. This logic is made apparent by the TPLF-EPRDF’s policies and
efforts to make the developmental state hegemonic within Ethiopia
33
through the use of
authoritarian measures where “consensus” was assumed by force or by curtailing the political and
economic participation of Ethiopians who vocally opposed the state’s policies (including Tigrayan
opposition politicians). Anyone who contested the state-controlled and growth-based approach to
economic transformation or the TPLF’s command over the Ethiopian state was deemed ‘enemies
of peace,’ the developmental state, or a threat against the rights and protections granted to
“oppressed” nations/classes through the delineation of minority and group rights in Ethiopia’s

33
Growth-based and extractivist development policies led to forced resettlement, the creation of
“development armies” on the local level of villages, and punitive measures like arrests, fines, etc.
against those who refused to participate in forced development labor or land expropriation.

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ethnic federal arrangement. Those who oppose the violent, environmentally destructive, and
socially repressive tactics used to attain growth-oriented “sufficient development” are seen as
enemies of progress who only want to deploy the idea of democracy for their own political gain at
the expense of the largely “backwards” masses. What’s more, “sufficient” economic development
is seen here as an essential condition for Ethiopia’s “national survival” though it is not clear
through what measures sufficiency is established. In other words, to be against “national
development” or demand democratic rights has been synonymous with being against national
interests or the nation—the dynamics of which I explore in the following section.
Territorializing Ethnic Difference, Nationhood, and Class Conflict
Although the narrative of Ethiopia’s “renaissance” has come on the heels of glowing
international coverage regarding Ethiopia’s economic performance the country struggles with the
competing and hostile politicization of ethnic and national belonging. So much so that the
repressive government of the TPLF-EPRDF was frequently accused of bringing on economic
change through the instrumentalization and politicization of ethnic politics during my fieldwork
in 2019 and 2020. A politics which has in current day Ethiopia resulted in a devastating war
between the TPLF and the current ruling regime of Prosperity Party; reignited heated debates about
centuries old grievances among different political interests; and undermined the developmental
state’s vision, as well as control over, discourses of progress. Nevertheless, neither the democratic
nor developmental ideologies are hegemonic in their acceptance within Ethiopia and Ethiopia’s
problems are not limited to (economic) “backwardness” or to the lack of the democratic “ethos”
as described earlier in this chapter. Along with development and democracy, ethnicity and
territorialized conceptions of national belonging are co-constitutive problematics that shape
contemporary Ethiopia’s class struggles and contestations over futurity.
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In 1974, a popular student and urban uprising led to the ousting of Emperor Haile
Selassie.
34
Haile Selassie’s regime had failed to seriously listen to various student movements and
their growing demands for land and economic reform as well as their calls for more equitable
ethno-linguistic representation within Ethiopia. However, a Marxist-Leninist military junta,
commonly referred to as the Derg (meaning “committee” in the Amharic language), took over the
government to only begin facing challenges from the same student movements that had protested
against the monarchy. By 1976, the military Derg regime, headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam,
faced direct resistance in the form of attacks from student-led movements like the Ethiopian
People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP). The Derg retaliated against these attacks which were known
as “White Terror” through a military campaign called “Red Terror”—killing thousands of
Ethiopians who opposed the junta’s approach toward governance. After hundreds of thousands of
Ethiopians died during the period of bloody conflict known as the Ethiopian Red Terror and the
famine of 1983-85 the Derg attempted to rebrand itself as the Worker’s Party of Ethiopia (WPE).
Despite efforts to rebrand itself the Derg soon lost its funding from the USSR and was defeated by
a coalition of rebel groups in 1991.
The groups which formed the coalition, formally known as the Ethiopian People’s
Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), had their roots in the radical student movements which
had led to the urban uprising against, and subsequent downfall of, Haile Selassie’s regime in 1974.
Aside from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)—which started off as an armed
nationalist group fighting for the right of ethnic Tigrayans to have their own, autonomous, state
(Greater Tigray) and the right to secession—the EPRDF coalition was comprised of the “Ethiopian

34
His official title in Amharic translates to “King of Kings” though he is commonly referred to as
an Emperor outside of Ethiopia.
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People’s Democratic Movement (EPDM), a group composed mainly of former EPRP members
that had been operating in northern Wallo [Welo/Wollo] after the collapse of EPRP in 1978; the
Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), which was meant to represent the Oromo
population; and the Ethiopian Democratic Officers’ Revolutionary Movement (EDORM),
composed of government military officers who had fallen into TPLF hands” (Zewde, p. 265). Even
though EPRDF was presented as a “united front of national liberation,” Bahru Zewde elaborates:
EPRDF was far from being a united front of national liberation movements waging a
common struggle in equal partnerships; the predominant position of the TPLF was beyond
dispute. Moreover, although EPDM was mainly active in Amhara-speaking [Amharic-
speaking] areas, it did not at this stage present itself as an Amhara organization. The
alliance with OPDO was also an arrangement of second resort, after negotiations to forge
a front with OLF [Oromo Liberation Front] had collapsed. As for EDORM, it barely
survived the attainment of victory in 1991. (p. 265)

Coming into power in 1991 as winners of the armed struggle, the TPLF (of which Meles Zenawi
was chairman) formed the EPRDF and began the process of drawing new regional boundaries in
Ethiopia to establish an ethnic federation. In 1994, the TPLF-led EPRDF coalition party adopted
a constitution that divided Ethiopia and Ethiopians into nine ethnic-based territorial states and
allowed these states the right to self-determination as well as secession.
In the map below, you can see the nine states formed under TPLF-PERDF rule: Afar,
Amhara, Benishangul-Gumuz, Gambela, Harari, Oromia, Somali, Southern Nations Nationalities
and People Region (SNNPR), and Tigray along with the two chartered cities of Addis Ababa and
Dire Dawa. Each of the nine states was ostensibly demarcated to represent the numerically
dominant ethno-linguistic groups residing within its boundaries. Between 2019 and 2021, the time
I began conducting fieldwork and writing this dissertation, two new states were created from the
Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (SNNP) regional state under Abiy Ahmed’s
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Prosperity Party rule—making the current state count eleven (see Appendix A for additional maps
that showcase how Ethiopia has been mapped and re-mapped in the last century).

Figure 10: A 2005 map of Ethiopia representing Ethiopia’s nine administrative
regional states (from UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)
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Figure 11: Map of Ethiopia from 1987-1991 including autonomous regions.

Figure 12: Map of Ethiopia in 1960 (see Milenioscuro, 2018)

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The victors of 1991 chose to implement boundaries which they saw as solutions to their
perceptions and analysis of oppression, envisioning and championing a future where the ethnic
groups could self-determine within their assigned territories and together form Ethiopia while
maintaining their distinct status as nations, nationalities, and peoples of Ethiopia. With this plan,
the state of Tigray would be carved out by incorporating lands where Tigrinya-speakers resided—
allowing the creation of a territorial boundary where ethnic Tigrayans could self-determine and
preserve their cultural difference all while the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, through the
EPRDF coalition, ruled the country from the center. However, this process assumed lands that
were historically administered by Amhara, inhabited by Amhara-identifying people who spoke
Tigrinya, as well as other ethnic groups who, while comprising smaller population sizes like the
Kunama and Irob, were incorporated into the Tigray regional state. When asked by de Waal about
the TPLF’s approach toward federalism and the potential issues that come with determining state
boundaries using predetermined and static identity categories like ethnicity Zenawi explains:
This is a critically important point that we have not resolved. It may be the most politically
sensitive and explosive question that we need to face. Our federal formula was devised
during the transition in negotiation with the OLF [Oromo Liberation Front]. Having been
the most articulate element in defining the Oromo people, and demanding self-
determination for them, the OLF were unable to form a coherent political programme that
could represent those Oromo people. They regressed to a narrow nationalism that is the
obverse of developmentalism or democratic nationalism. Meanwhile the chauvinists
adopted another pathology of nationalism, inherited from the feudal-imperial past, of a pan-
Ethiopian chauvinism that refuses to recognize other national-cultural entities as equals.
For us to move forward it is absolutely essential that the equal status of nations and
nationalities is not only enshrined in the Federal Constitution but is internalized as part of
our common political discourse. This is the foundation of democratic nationalism. (p. 7)

Zenawi describes two versions of nationalism which he condemns as pathological and obstructive
forces to the developmental ambitions of the state: the ethno-nationalist Oromo Liberation Front
who are claimed to “represent” the interest of “Oromo people” as a nation and the “chauvinists”
(often a coded word used to address ethnic-Amhara or “Amharanizaed” Ethiopians) whose
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attachment to the nation is not only sweepingly described as being “inherited from the feudal-
imperial past” but hostilely as one that “refuses to recognize other national-cultural entities as
equals.” Through strategic omission, Zenawi’s statement places the TPLF, its nationalist ideology,
and its supporters outside of these two nationalisms which are described as either obstructive or
pathological. Rather, the TPLF is characterized as being the primary political entity capable of
forming a “political programme” that could (at least temporarily) quell the demands of extreme
ethnic and pan-Ethiopian nationalists, avoid the possibilities of national disintegration, and help
put the country on a more desirable path of achieving development and democratic nationalism.
However, most interview participants I spoke to were split between two different perspectives on
the “nations and nationalities” question addressed by de Waal and Zenawi.
One group of participants mostly supported the TPLF’s ethnic federal arrangement and
believed it to be the only or best means for realizing equality among Ethiopia’s various ethnic
groups even if they opposed the TPLF rule. They argued that ethnic federalism was essential to
maintaining the national unity of Ethiopia without requiring the assimilation of different
ethnic/national groupings into the country’s dominant culture which draws heavily from the
regions that comprise the modern-day Amhara and Tigray regional states. The other group
suggested that TPLF’s political ideology and formation, rooted in ethnic-nationalist and
secessionist grounds, risked exacerbating ethnic conflicts and intensified the possible
disintegration of the Ethiopian state. They maintained that ethnic federalism was being used as a
“divide and rule” strategy by the TPLF and its EPRDF allies to maintain power by enflaming
ethnic antagonism and institutionalizing the ethnic administration of resources and power.
These contestations over how the “nation” and “nationalities” are determined,
territorialized, and administered is evidenced by results from a country-wide survey released by
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Afrobarometer in August of 2020—results which garnered debate from both supporters and non-
supporters of the highly contested aspects of Ethiopia’s constitution on social media.
Afrobarometer’s study indicated that 69% of Ethiopians support amending the constitution while
11% want it to be completely discarded or replaced. Amendments like the inclusion of more
languages as federal working languages, the placement of a two-term limit on prime ministers, as
well as the establishment of a constitutional court garnered support from the majority of Ethiopians
who were surveyed. Of those surveyed, 43% of adult Ethiopians supported the removal of Article
39 (article on self-determination and secession) from the Ethiopian constitution while 50%
supported retaining the article.
Figure 13: Graph on Ethiopians’ support for constitutional amendments (Afrobarometer, 2020)

In short, Article 39 of the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
guarantees nations, nationalities, and peoples in Ethiopia the rights to: speak, write, and develop
their own language as well as promote their culture and preserve their history; establish institutions
of government within the regional territories they inhabit; the right to “equitable representation”
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at both the state and federal levels of government; and the “unconditional” right to self-
determination and secession. In addition to these rights, Article 39 defines a “Nation, Nationality
or People" as “a group of people who have or share a large measure of a common culture or similar
customs, mutual intelligibility of language, belief in a common or related identity, a common
psychological make-up, and who inhabit an identifiable, predominantly contiguous territory.”
Later in Article 46, the constitution outlines that the states of the Federal Democratic Republic are
“delimited on the basis of the settlement patterns, language, identity and consent of the people
concerned” (Ethiopia’s Constitution of 1994).
For supporters of ethno-nationalism, the adoption of ethnic-based federalism within
Ethiopia is argued to be an important step in preventing the disintegration of the country and
bringing an end to what is often described by proponents of ethnic federalism as Amhara or Shoan-
Amhara rule and northern (typically referring to Amhara and Tigrayan) cultural hegemony within
Ethiopia. As I described earlier in this chapter, Zenawi speaks of this group by referring to them
as “chauvinists” who have adopted a “pathologized” form of nationalism which does not
“recognize other national-cultural entities as equals” while he refers to ethno-nationalist groups
like the OLF and its supports as adherents to “narrow nationalism” which he argues is obverse to
developmentalism and democratic nationalism. Citing their rejection of the monarchy, feudal
system, and the Ethiopian state’s attempt to establish a common national culture and working
language through the nationalization of Amharic and northern (Tigrayan and Amhara) culture
within Ethiopia, ethno-nationalists contend that Ethiopia is a colonial empire that consolidated its
territory and people through force. Because of this, the state needs to constitutionally recognize
and protect each of its nations, nationalities, and peoples’ rights to self-determination and cultural
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autonomy. Only by protecting these rights can Ethiopia preserve its ethno-linguistic diversity and
avoid what would otherwise be inevitable state collapse.
As Alemu Habtu explains, the division of Ethiopia along ethnic-based territories intended
to “achieve ethnic and regional autonomy, while maintaining the state of Ethiopia as a political
unit” (p. 313). Furthermore, supporters of ethnic-based federalism claim that the “federal system
has thus far maintained the unity of the Ethiopian peoples and the territorial integrity of the state,
while providing full recognition to the principle of ethnic self-determination” (Habtu, 314). When
pointing to issues stemming from the federal arrangement’s institutionalization of ethnic identity
politics, like that of ethnic-based discrimination against ethnic groups living outside of their
designated ethnic territories, prominent Oromo political figures, academics, and proponents of
ethnic-federalism whom I interviewed also contend that the issue is not the ethnically
territorialized federal arrangement but the lack of commitment from the Ethiopian government to
properly enforce the existing constitution and the rights it guarantees is nations, nationalities, and
peoples.
However, we can establish that based on what Zenawi described above, the ethnic-based
federal arrangement of Ethiopia is largely the result of negotiations between the Tigray People’s
Liberation Front and the Oromo Liberation Front who respectively claim to represent the group
interests of ethnically Tigrayan and Oromo Ethiopians and who, to varying degrees, either
advocate for or forewarn the inevitable balkanization of the Ethiopian state if the ethnic federal
arrangement and constitution are reformed in ways that jeopardize their existing territorial and
political claims. As shown by Zewde, the EPRDF coalition party did not result out of negotiations
that represented all Ethiopians. This means that both the political leadership and federal
arrangement were not derived through inclusive negotiations at the national level or with much
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consideration for how identities, in their fluidity, change over time and across/along borders. The
future envisioned by the architects of Ethiopia’s constitution and ethnic-federal arrangement
discounted the lived realties and desires of many Ethiopians who do not fit neatly into prescriptive,
biologized, and primordially conceived ethnic categories; those who don’t agree with ethnic-based
federalism as being the solution to Ethiopia’s problems; nor those who attribute different root
causes (such as poverty rather than ethnic difference and antagonism) to Ethiopia’s current day
political impasse and its various violent manifestations.
During my fieldwork in 2019 and 2020, those objecting against ethnic federalism and the
institutionalization of ethnic politics complained that while the TPLF-EPRDF spoke of “national
visions” and democratic consensus-building its policies and practices did the opposite of nurturing
democracy and equality within the larger Ethiopian body politic. In addition to dismissing and
violently suppressing the dissent of those who disagreed with the territorial and ethnic
configuration of Ethiopian politics, the architects of ethnic-based federalism were criticized by
study participants for inaugurating the systematic ethnicization of territorial and political
arrangements with the intention of justifying the differential treatment and political
inclusion/exclusion of people based on ethnic identification. One of the sharpest and recurring
criticisms I heard of the ethnic federal arrangement and its discriminatory underpinnings relayed
that the Ethiopian constitution, the formal territorialization of ethnic identification, and the ethnic
party system (of which the TPLF and EPDRF dominated) reflected the TPLF’s hostility toward
“rival” ethnic groups—namely the Amhara—whom they considered to be their “historical
enemies” as well as Ethiopians who championed pan-Ethiopian nationalism as a vehicle for
unifying Ethiopia’s diverse population. The most critical interview participants and interlocutors
with Amhara backgrounds conveyed that placing the brunt of the blame for the past failures of the
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Ethiopian state on Amhara and Amharic-speaking people, and the ethnic territorialization of land
and political participation, leads to the authorized alienation and subjugation of people. They
lamented that the Amhara region is one of the poorest regions in Ethiopia and that while they
benefitted from their language and culture being ubiquitous in a country that has over eighty-five
different ethno-linguistic groups, people from the Amhara region had no say in the decisions of
autocratic rulers and experienced the negative effects of war, poor governance, and poverty that
has been experienced by other Ethiopians. These shared experiences were seen as possible points
for the formulation of a unified and coalitional political agenda that is rooted in the recognition of
shared struggles rather than categorical difference (a point I cover in more detail in chapter four).
However, those committed to the implementation of ethnic federalism as the solution to Ethiopia’s
problems often rebuffed these criticisms and claims against Ethiopia’s ethnic political project by
labeling their political and ideological counterparts as assimilationists and unitarists who seek to
“Amharanize,” and effectively obliterate, the hard-won rights of Ethiopia’s “nations and
nationalities” to self-determine and reproduce themselves.
As proof of their suspicion that Ethiopia’s ethnic federal and political project is designed
to be intolerant of difference and national unity, some interviewees pointed me to historical
documents like TPLF’s 1976 Manifesto and the 1983 People’s Democratic Programme of the
TPLF. While these documents precede the TPLF-EPRD’s period in office and introduction of
ethnic federalism in Ethiopia, the rhetoric, grievances, and solutions envisioned in them showcase
the groundwork and fundamental principles that would later shape Ethiopia’s ethnic federal
project. In the 1983 Programme, the TPLF defined its primary objective as the “elimination of
national oppression” and claimed to struggle “against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic
capitalism, which is now evolving to the stage of state capitalism” (1983). The goal was to realize
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a state where all of Ethiopia’s different nations and nationalities could be guaranteed equality and
self-governance. If “national oppression” was not resolved by staying within Ethiopia, TPLF
argued that it could be “resolved by [Tigray’s] independence,” in which case, the TPLF could
“actualize” its “programmes in a free and democratic Tigray.” While the program determined these
issues as the “the source of oppression and exploitation of the Tigrayan people” it also claimed
that “their national oppressors and class exploiters were basically one and the same and recognised
the necessity to continue the resistance against them.” The national oppressors are generalized as
the “Amhara ruling classes” which the TPLF blamed as causing Tigray to “suffer” under “Amhara
national domination and oppression.”
In the 1983 Program, we see that ethnicity is often used to stand in for class, and though
the document attempts to specifically lay blame on the “Amhara ruling class” it slips into figuring
the entirety of Amhara-identifying people as culpable for manifestations of class conflict in
Ethiopia by framing issues of class and authoritarian rule through the primary lens of ethnicity and
the ethno-national oppression of the nations that encompass “the masses.” Rather than advocating
for a material and class analysis that could unite all Ethiopians—majority of whom, regardless of
their ethnic identification, live under conditions of poverty—the TPLF and its EPRDF partners
used ethnicity and nationalism to stand in for class analysis. By attaching ethnicity to class, they
were able to deploy a Third World positionality and thus claim to represent the interest of the
oppressed nations and classes. In other words, I argue that ethnic federalism was seen as a viable
solution for Ethiopia’s problems because the consequences of the dominant economic world order
and Ethiopia’s internal class struggles was strategically and narrowly masked by an analysis that
centered ethnic difference, conflicts, and grievances. This process ascribes people and groups that
have interwoven histories and cultures into rigid and consequently biologized ethnic classifications
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in order to understand and respond to questions of “national oppression” while simultaneously
excluding from the category of “oppressed masses” nations (or ethnic groups) deemed to be
oppressors through processes that apply contemporary understandings of ethnic identity onto past
historical events and actors.
I offer this critical discussion not to dismiss that human being have affinities with particular
cultures or localities, or to deny the reality of how Amharic-speaking rulers and their collaborators
played dominant roles within Ethiopia’s modern historical and cultural formations, but to show
that ethnic categories are floating signifiers that can be instrumentalized to bolster and legitimate
contemporary political and economic agendas. Our affinities to certain cultural practices, ancestral
lands, as well our sense of historical connection and grievances, can be instrumentalized to our
determent. In a similar fashion to how development, democracy and nation are meaningfully recast
and reconfigured for political ends, so are ethnic and national categories of identification. For
instance, early in my fieldwork I was often perplexed by the slippery definitional and discursive
deployments of ethnic categories like Amhara, Oromo, Tigrayan onto different contemporary and
historical political figures. While leaders like Menelik II and Haile Selassie are typically figured
as “Amhara” leaders, some Ethiopians I spoke to actually debated over the “Amharaness” of their
identities and even argued that the contemporary signification and boundaries of “Amhara” is a
relatively new political formulation that could not be used to accurately describe Menelik’s rule –
not only because the information on his biological lineage is contested but because his ascendence
into power was relied on the support of Shoan Oromo and was contested by other Amharic-
speaking rulers who did not agree to being incorporated under his rule. In contemporary politics
the ethnic identification ascribed to political figures like Abiy Ahmed changes based on who you
speak to and their national and political outlooks. While he himself identifies as Oromo and
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legitimizes his political position through that identification, some Oromo-identifying people deny
his “Oromoness” by claiming that he is “Amharanized”; by questioning the veracity of his
biological (Oromo) lineage; or simply claiming that his political reforms and political rhetoric of
“medemer” (meaning unity in Amharic) run counter to the interests of Oromo people. In other
words, those who find his rule to be a threat to their desires and perceptions of an essential and
unified Oromo identity and system of values rhetorically assign him with an identity that falls
outside of the boundary that constitutes “real” Oromoness. While on the other hand, Abiy Ahmed
uses his Oromoness to legitimate his contested rule.
While I will go into more depth about these debates in the next chapter, it is important to
emphasize the fungibility of ethnic identification because the taken-for-granted acceptance of
essentialist ethnic classifications and their regimes of knowledge condition us to overlook how
ethnic classification is used to inflict violence, suppress dissent, defer rights, and ultimately
naturalize indifference toward human suffering. Though there are cultural and linguistic
differences within Ethiopia, the boundaries among and between groups are quite fluid and people
move in and out of identification with different groups through the adoption of customs, languages,
marriage, names, attire, religion, et cetera. Ethnic classification can be a useful way to understand
some of these differences and the groups of people which practice and ascribe to certain cultural
formations, but they can also be instrumentalized through the exaggeration of cultural differences
and the denial of commonalities in order to legitimize ethnic categories as signifiers that point to
embodied and indubitable referent groups—referent groups which in reality can possess as much
in-group difference as between-group difference.
Territorialized and essentialist ways of managing difference fail to truly describe the lived
experiences of many Ethiopians, who like myself come from mixed backgrounds or have ties to
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historical experiences which are located at both extremes of victor/victim and
oppressor/oppressed–binary narratives. Narratives which are used in contemporary Ethiopian
political discourse to make sweeping generalizations about groups of people and reduce complex
geopolitical and class conflicts into primordial, essentializing, and territorializing forms of ethnic
antagonisms. The process of using settlement patterns, language, and identity to determine
territorial boundaries oversimplifies the regions complicated history and the fluidity of identities
within the Horn of Africa. A region where different groups have migrated into and out of, claimed,
settled, and called home since the start of human evolution and history.
Intolerance toward ethnocultural fluidity and the instrumentalization of identity for the
purposes of deferring rights and systematizing the state’s control over resources and political
power has restrained the possibility of Ethiopians engaging in nuanced political discourses and
practices that might help the country realize social change rooted in human wellbeing. In
contemporary Ethiopia, this happens through processes that formalize and cement categorical,
either-or, identifications with ethnic identity. Processes that validate ethnicity as a primordial and
biologized sign of a person or groups’ attachment to a particular (ethnic) ideological camp, set of
cultural practices, peoples, and geographic territories. With the state making ethnic classification
and identification a precondition for political participation, people are left with the option of
ascribing to a single ethnic classification and that ethnic/national group’s purported ideological
stance or being considered ethnic-imposters and conspirators. The other option, taken by some of
the participants I spoke to was to refuse engaging in ethnicization and ethnic politics all-together—
at least in public settings. Some practiced refusal to dissociate from Ethiopian politics and political
discourse to avoid participating in a politics they believed to be ultimately divisive or hopelessly
entrenched in ways that their participation could not alter. Others did so in order to protect
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themselves from the assumptions and consequences that come with being recognized and assigned
membership to particular ethnic groups.
While the ethnically territorialized boundaries satisfied some of the political grievances
and political ambitions of the TPLF and other proponents of ethnic federalism like the OLF, it did
so, in practice, by alienating millions of Ethiopians who called home regions where their ethnic,
cultural, and linguistic identities are numeric minorities. Ethiopia’s experiment with ethnic-based
federalism has gone to the extreme of requiring Ethiopians to declare ethnic identities on
government identification cards—a process that not only essentializes ethnicity but also erases the
rights of Ethiopians who have mixed ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds from being
represented at both regional and central levels of the government as people of mixed heritage.
These cards have been used to profile, harass as well as target and kill individuals and entire
families who come varying ethnic groups at different moments of protest and political tension.
Furthermore, while the constitution enshrines equal rights onto both men and women, the practice
of ethnic identification in Ethiopia erases the importance of maternal backgrounds in the political
lives of Ethiopians as the ethnic identity ascribed to Ethiopians is traditionally that of their paternal
lineage. This process normalizes the process of ascribing single ethnic identity categories to people
who are mostly of multi-ethnic and cultural backgrounds. As a result, ethnic population sizes are
often exaggerated for political gain and population figures are used to justify different ethnic
groups’ claims to land, greater representation, and access to power. Often, this process leaves
people who come from less populous, mixed, and minoritized ethnic groups voiceless in cultural
and political spaces—though, their contribution to diversity is often capitalized on by the
government to market Ethiopia as a diverse mosaic of more than 80 different ethno-linguistic
groups in order to attract tourism and foreign currency.
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In effect, rather than creating a “democratic ethos,” the projects of the last thirty years have
legitimized ethnicity and nationalism as the points of departure for fashioning political and
economic projects aimed at realizing economic change and Ethiopia’s overall future. In other
words, the constitutional arrangement that stemmed from the negotiations between the TPLF and
OLF superimposed politically motivated and prescriptive ethnic boundaries onto an otherwise
fluid and mixed amalgamation of people with the promise of greater equality, democratic rights,
and regional administration that would be better attuned to the ethnic diversity and local needs of
Ethiopians. However, the single-minded and authoritarian approach toward envisioning and
enacting projects and visions of progress have had the opposite effect. Overall, the
institutionalization of ethnic identity within Ethiopia has normalized a context where ethnicity and
ethno-national allegiances become the primary basis for the political support of leadership, ideas,
and world-building projects; for the valuation of life and assessment of suffering; for the formation
of social bonds; as well as the starting point for envisioning the future (or non-future) of Ethiopia.
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Chapter Four
Futurity, Imagination, and the Limits of Planning

Race is thus, also, the modality in which class is ‘lived’, the medium through which class
relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and ‘fought through’. This
has consequences for the whole class, not specifically for its ‘racially defined’ segment. It
has consequences in terms of the internal fractioning and division within the working class
which, among other ways, are articulated in part through race. (Hall, 1980, p. 341)

On February 6th, 2020, I attended a Destiny Ethiopia panel discussion on Ethiopia’s future
at the Hilton Hotel in Addis Ababa. Hosted in partnership with the Association of Women in
Business (AWiB), the event introduced its audience of over one hundred people to Destiny
Ethiopia and the transformative scenario planning (TSP) process—a process Destiny Ethiopia
undertook to construct four plausible scenarios of what Ethiopia’s future could be by the year
2040. At the time of Destiny Ethiopia’s TSP process and the AWiB event, the Ethiopian
government was amid political reform. With Abiy Ahmed, a politician from the OPDO wing of
the EPRDF coalition, taking helm of the transitional government and the TPLF pushed out of its
central role after nearly thirty years of political dominance, many Ethiopians were hopeful, fearful,
and highly uncertain about Ethiopia’s future and political stability. It is within this affective and
political conjuncture that AWiB and Destiny Ethiopia organized a panel discussion on Ethiopia’s
future. Attendees, many of whom were either AWiB members or those capable of paying a hefty
fee of 400 birr to attend, were invited to snack on hors d’oeuvres, network, and think through
Ethiopia’s future while waiting for the panel discussion to begin. Written on strips of paper and
placed on cocktail tables, attendees were encouraged to discuss their answers to two ice-breaker
questions, “What does the future of Ethiopia look like to you? What are you doing as a citizen
towards the vision you desire for Ethiopia?” Though nobody around me seemed to show interest
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in the opening activity, I found myself struck by the questions because they were remarkably like
the questions I was discussing with locals!
At the start of Destiny Ethiopia’s presentation, the panel had attendees watch a seven-and-
a-half-minute-long video that explained Destiny Ethiopia’s origins and the benefits of using
transformative scenario planning (TSP) in contexts of political transition and conflict like Ethiopia.
The video explained that Destiny Ethiopia emerged amid Ethiopia’s political transition, during
heightened levels of intercommunal and ethnic conflict and heightened debates over historical
grievances, with the recognized need to convene diverse voices to talk about Ethiopia’s future. To
do this, Destiny Ethiopia employed transformative scenario planning with the help of one of the
process’ founders, Adam Kahane. The approach was developed by borrowing from the adaptive
scenario planning methodology established by Royal Dutch Shell in the early 1970s and the Mont
Fleur scenario exercise during South Africa’s transition from “apartheid to democracy” in the early
1990s (Kahane, 2012). Adam Kahane explains that while Shell used “adaptive scenario planning”
to anticipate and adapt to changing economic, political, and environmental contexts by developing
robust corporate strategies and plans, the Mont Fleur scenario exercise was used to bring together
a group of twenty-two politically and socially heterogeneous South Africans with the task of
collectively constructing plausible scenarios (stories) about South Africa’s future in 1991. The
Mont Fleur transformative scenario planning exercise asked participants to talk about what they
thought could happen in the future—rather than what they thought should or will happen (Kahane,
2012). The focus on generating plausible scenarios of what could happen allowed for the formation
of a common understanding and vocabulary regarding South Africa’s future by a heterogeneous
group, as opposed to the more fraught process of thinking about what should happen and the more
predictive process of determining what will happen. Rather than focusing on identifying the
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different interests of the participants and attempting to “narrow and reconcile” their differences,
the Mont Fleur exercise emphasized the common ground between all participants (the future of
South Africa) in order to have the otherwise divergent individuals reflect on, imagine, and generate
scenarios that could be used to encourage public discussion about how South African’s should go
about shaping their country’s future toward the most desirable scenario (Kahane et al. 1992). At
the end of the Mont Fleur storytelling and scenario planning exercise, participants had created four
scenarios in which: three offered warnings about what could be if actors made the wrong decisions,
and one scenario envisioned what could be “a better future” for South Africa if the three other
plausible scenarios were avoided. A similar approach was used in Ethiopia to bring together a
diverse group of people and have them envision and asses plausible futures for their homeland.
Working with the Mont Fleur transformative scenario planning facilitator, Adam Kahane,
the Destiny Ethiopia Team of “nine concerned individuals” brought together fifty different
Ethiopians deemed to be influential, including businesspeople, intellectuals, and politicians from
within Ethiopia and its diaspora, to think through Ethiopia’s problems and possible futures
scenarios collectively. Over the course of three meetings that spanned six months, participants
discussed Ethiopia’s circumstances and generated four scenarios that could be used to understand
Ethiopia’s possible future trajectories. At this panel were four of the fifty participants, including
the Director General of Ethiopia’s Ministry of Peace, the Addis Ababa office head of the Ogaden
National Liberation Front (ONLF), a committee member and public relations head of the Oromo
Liberation Front (OLF), and an academic/businessman. The panelists explained that the fifty
individuals were brought together with the aim of convening people who represent Ethiopia’s
varying political, ethnic, and ideological backgrounds as well as those that have different
perspectives on Ethiopia’s history, present challenges, and future possibilities.
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Figure 14: picture taken of panel and audience at the Destiny Ethiopia and AWiB joint event

Reflecting on their participatory experiences, panelists asserted that while they do not
allude to knowing the future, the scenarios they crafted through their collective discussions could
be used to inform how Ethiopians, diverse in their identities and politics, can come together to
discuss and influence the course of the country toward a more equitable and democratic reality.
And although not exhaustive, these scenarios offered Ethiopians a tool and vocabulary for
visualizing and discussing the future in tangible and strategic ways. Neither offering concrete
policy solutions nor claiming to forecast events, the scenarios were meant to present the challenges
faced by Ethiopia and enable Ethiopians to work with the understanding that while the future is
full of uncertainties, they “can work with and influence it” (Destiny Ethiopia pamphlet). Illustrated
through short stories (see figure 15 below) and “based on the current reality and dynamics around
key certainties and uncertainties” within Ethiopia, the following scenarios were presented as what
could happen in Ethiopia in the coming twenty years (Destiny Ethiopia pamphlet).
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Hegemony
Authoritarianism is the most prudent response
to our challenges and conflicts. An authoritarian
state uses a strong hand to control violence and
to manage the economy, the environment, and
population pressures. With time, Ethiopians
become disenchanted with inadequate social
development, and an uprising is inevitable.

Broken Chair
Like a Broken Chair that appears to stand but
cannot bear any weight, our incapacity cannot
support progress at all levels of society. There
are bright spots initially but the need to
respond to the booming population places
strain on the system. The challenges are clear,
but our inability to develop the capacity to
respond effectively and early leads to
stagnation later on.

Dawn
Progress is hopeful but initially tentative: it
takes time for the full light of the new day to be
visible. Ethiopians build on recent reforms and
reconciliation processes as it progresses on a
democratic path. Deep rooted contradictions
salient at different levels within communities
are being resolved through open, round table
discussions. Conceptions of forgiveness and
conciliation—as opposed to antagonism and
hatred—are gaining currency among formal
and social media channels. Institutions and the
economy are gradually and steadily built up and
strengthened in line with a clarifying vision and
with a growing unity.

Divided House
Like a Divided House, different sectors and
regions use their newfound freedom to pursue
their own ambitions; gaps and divisions grow
at all levels of society. The economy is doing
well but social development does not receive
adequate attention. Multiple crises expose the
central government’s fragility. Some regional
states strengthen to the point that they are
confident about total self-autonomy.

Figure 15: Destiny Ethiopia’s four scenarios (adapted from their brochure, emphases added)
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Three of the possible future scenarios generated by Destiny Ethiopia anticipate dystopian
outcomes marked by characteristics like a weak government, instability, authoritarianism,
division, and corruption, while one scenario, “Dawn,” describes the possibility of achieving
reconciliation, unity, and positive outcomes like democracy. The idea is that these scenarios have
utility because they can be used to prompt discussions about what needs to be done to avoid future
trajectories of (continued) division, ethnic antagonism, and violence—not only what needs to
happen within Ethiopia’s formal political spaces but also in digital spaces as highlighted in the
scenario of “Dawn.” For instance, the scenario categorized as “Hegemony” is intended to help
Ethiopians diagnose, interrogate, and prevent conditions that might lead to the realization of a
dystopian future marked by authoritarian rule. Recognizing the prospects of returning to
authoritarianism and its attendant consequences, “Hegemony” encourages Ethiopians from
different ethnic, political, and ideological backgrounds—like the four Destiny Ethiopia panelists—
to engage in dialogue, come to terms with the consequences of that dystopic path, reach a
compromise, and thus be better equipped to prevent Ethiopia from backtracking toward the
direction of an authoritarian state which tries to forcefully hegemonize its ideology and agendas.
As the representative of the ONLF explained to me a few days after the panel, this process
of compromise is possible if Ethiopia’s different political, ideological, and ethno-cultural groups
set aside some of their competing political demands for the greater good of helping the country
and its new government maintain its course of democratic political reform. For him, the new
(transitional) government, its reforms, and promises of inclusion offered the best possible option
and outcomes for all Ethiopians—at least when compared to previous regimes that were in power.
So much so, that oppositional and even armed nationalist groups like the ONLF and OLF, which
have historically had contentious relations with the Ethiopian state, could stand to benefit more for
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themselves and their constituents by participating in processes that aimed to put the country on a
path toward the scenario of “Dawn.” As cultural studies scholar Stephen Duncombe explains,
while dystopian imaginaries suggest forward-dawning scenarios, they also “always return to the
present with a critical impulse - suggesting what must be curtailed if the world is not to end up the
way it is portrayed” (2012). Because of this, dystopic narratives like “Broken Chair,”
“Hegemony,” and “Divided House” can be said to reveal the problems of the present moment and
by confronting their audience with distressing scenarios of future likelihoods. The scenarios can
then be used to illuminate “the Truth” in ways that stir the audience into action—even audience
members who might hold highly divergent political perspectives. Like criticism, the revelation of
dystopic and utopian futures and truth can be useful in encouraging us to act in ways that steer us
away from the present course of disaster.
By positioning the future of Ethiopia as the “common ground” for its participants, Destiny
Ethiopia was able to bring together individuals who are not only deemed “influential” and
“representative”
35
but also ascribe to divergent and often antagonistic political, social, economic,
and ideological positions. Even though many of the participants were selected to represent the
divergent worldviews and agendas of their particular “nations, nationalities, and peoples” as well
as their economic and ideological interests, hope was to be found in the participants’ capacity to:
reflect on the scenario planning process; publicly show empathy toward “other,” and even
competing groups’ hardships; and the hope they publicly proclaimed to feel about the future of
Ethiopia after completing the scenario planning process. In other words, the panel discussion I
observed was meant to evidence how a shared commitment and open process can be used to foster

35
Two of the 50 participants were explicitly listed as representatives of their respective ethno-
regional states and its people on Destiny Ethiopia’s list of participants (Appendix C). For instance,
one of the participants was there to be the “Harari people representative.”
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dialogue among groups of people who have been committed to competing political interests in the
past.
Looking through the list of fifty participants in Appendix C we can see that many of the
participants represent political organizations that hold incompatible political agendas though they
arrived at the four scenarios, including “Dawn” through a process that they describe as collective
and dialogic. The fifty participants included state ministers, regional government officials,
opposition politicians, armed secessionists, ethnonationalists, pan-Ethiopian nationalists,
feminists, media owners, academics, local and diaspora Ethiopians, and artists. Participants
represented political groups like the Amhara Democratic Party (ADP), Arena Tigray, Balderas for
Genuine Democracy party (Balderas), Baytona Tigray, Ethiopian Citizens for Social Justice
(EZEMA), Ethiopian Social Democratic Party (ESDP/MEDREK), National Movement of Amhara
(NAMA), Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), Oromo Democratic Party (ODP), Oromo
Federalist Congress (OFC), Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), Somali Democratic Party (SDP),
the Southern Ethiopian People’s Democratic Movement (SEPDM), and Tigray People’s
Liberation Front (TPLF). In addition to the chairpersons, committee members, and even “public
relations” persons from these parties, the transformative scenario planning process had
representation from regional and federal governing officials; media owners of popular radio and
news outlets like Sheger FM Radio and Addis Fortune Newspaper; the founder of the Setaweet
Movement (a feminist organization); both local and diaspora academics; businesspersons; as well
as traditional leaders like the Oromia Abageda and Gamo elders. The act of bringing together these
individuals, and thus the groups they seemingly “represented,” is meant to be an exercise and
display of how governing officials and Ethiopia’s broader public(s) have the capacity to find
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common cause, engage in dialogue, and arrive at common understandings despite there being
many grievances and differences among them.
Despite the characterization of the participants as both “influential” and representative of
Ethiopia’s various political, economic, ideological, and intellectual groups, the scenario planning
process and panel failed to equitably include youth, working-class Ethiopians, and
underrepresented women. For example, while nearly 80% of Ethiopians live in rural contexts and
rely on subsistence agriculture for survival, the participants chosen for Destiny Ethiopia came from
educated, urban, and diasporic backgrounds. Moreover, a majority of the participants representing
different political factions are from the most populous ethnic groups like Oromo, Amhara,
Tigrayan, and Somali—this means that members of ethnolinguistic, ethnocultural, and
ethnoreligious groups whose “nations, nationalities, and peoples” are less populous, and thus
consequently bear little political significance within Ethiopia’s structures of ethnic representation
and politics, are underrepresented or completely left out of the scenario planning process.
36
All
this to say, rather than being the norm, inclusive dialogue is limited to a privileged few in Ethiopia
and the AWiB event and Destiny Ethiopia’s transformative scenario planning process reified one
of Ethiopia’s central problems: how access to political representation and influence is determined.
Even with the success of Destiny Ethiopia and its overall effort to foster dialogue,
awareness, and action, the project failed to convince everyone in the audience that it modeled a
participatory and dialogic framework for critically engaging with Ethiopia’s problems and future
possibilities. Noticeably missing from the event’s panel and underrepresented within the array of

36
This is not to say that the 50 individuals, especially political leaders, could even claim to
represent any particular “ethnic groups” or political constituencies as they were not selected by
their supposed ideological, ethnic, or national constituents to represent them in the scenario
planning process or Ethiopian politics through democratic means.
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fifty participants who constructed the scenarios was any meaningful participation from the youth
of Ethiopia. Observing the omission of youth, an audience member asked the panel why youth did
not participate in Destiny Ethiopia’s scenario planning process. Asma Redi, the Director General
of Ethiopia’s Ministry of Peace and the only woman panelist from Destiny Ethiopia present that
night, pointedly responded by stressing that young people would not have been mature enough to
carry out the kind of work and discussions asked of the selected participants. According to her,
and probably the Destiny Ethiopia organizers, which comprised “nine concerned citizens,” young
people would not have been capable of carrying out the difficult task undertaken by Destiny
Ethiopia. I found this response troubling for several reasons.
First, the omission of young people was especially glaring because, at the time of my
fieldwork, those under the age of 30 not only made up over 70% of the Ethiopian population but
also embodied the very protest movements of the mid-2010s that eventually forced the EPRDF
governing coalition to change its leadership and begin a program of political reform. While youth
are not centrally figured in civilian-led initiatives like Destiny Ethiopia or within Ethiopia's
governing bodies and decision-making processes, the young people I spoke to were keenly aware
of how their futures are determined by the decisions that were being made on their behalf by
political and social elites—some of whom who took part in Destiny Ethiopia's scenario planning
process as “representatives” of the political demands and desires that spurred young Ethiopians to
protest in the streets between the years of 2014 and 2018 despite the regimes highly oppressive
and violent response. A few days before the Destiny Ethiopia panel, I interviewed Tesfaye, a 23-
year-old Ethiopian of Tigrayan ethnic background who grew up in Gonder (Amhara region). When
I asked Tesfaye to explain his perspective on the role youth have within Ethiopia's development,
politics, and future, he lamented that while young people in Ethiopia are the majority, “for the
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youth to be heard someone has to die.” He explained that death and violence is not what youth
plan but they “understand that their voices won’t be heard” and “so they get emotional and angry
and get violent.” But even then, as he saw it, "we are not even taken seriously when we protest
unless we die” because the government is primarily “focused on the futures [they present] to the
outside world.” Governing officials “want Ethiopia to be spoken of as a good country to the outside
world. But most of Ethiopia is poor.” While the government is concerned with the image of
Ethiopia and want the
37
country to be seen as growing in order to attract FDI and development
assistance, Tesfaye observed that “what they’re doing is not practical. They are planting the trees,
but not care about maintaining or growing the trees. All they want is foreigners to think about
Ethiopia as planting trees and breaking world records.” For Tesfaye, whose family had to leave
Amhara region only a few weeks prior to our interview due to fears of ethnic conflict, the only
hope he saw for himself was to go to Europe, possibly Sweden, so he could pursue his Masters
degree and hopefully return when the political landscape stabilized.
Tesfaye’s straightforward and poignant explanation is illustrative of how the hierarchical
and repressive political context leaves many young Ethiopians feeling left out of any meaningful
political dialogue and decision-making processes. Even when youth mobilize through protest,
those in leadership typically only respond to their demands when the state and local governments
are faced with outbreaks of violence that threaten their control or when they face international

37
Soon after coming into power, Abiy Ahmed had used tree planting campaigns (called “Green
Legacy”) as a tool to fight deforestation and land degradation but to also garner popular support
for his leadership. The campaign, which claimed to plan over a billion trees through the
mobilization of citizen participation garnered some international attention as a recording breaking
event. While many supported his campaigns, others saw it as superficial photo-op project of the
PM, especially considering that other pressing issues (growing levels of ethnic violence and
civilian deaths) and political tensions between PP and TPLF were indicators that the “peaceful”
transition may in fact be worrisome.
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criticism for their brutal clampdown on protests. To draw out his point of how little space young
Ethiopians have for participation, Tesfaye explained that even death had lost its potency and
capacity to serve as an impetus for listening to and taking young people's desires seriously. As he
explained, this is because young people are only heard when they die, when they resort to violence
and force the state to respond, or when their frustrations can be used to serve the divisive political
interests of ruling and oppositional political groups vying for power. With the normalized
occurrence of brutalizing and deadly violence against civilians—often at the hands of central and
regional police, armed political opposition groups, or violent protesters seeking some form of
revenge by usually targeting those who are minoritized or from different ethnic and religious
backgrounds—young people who account for the majority Ethiopia have limited formal spaces to
influence Ethiopia's policies and future trajectory.
Throughout my fieldwork, the problem of participation and vocabularies like “national
dialogue,” “all-inclusive dialogue,” and “reconciliation” were brought up by various interlocutors,
governing officials, and those that I interviewed when I asked them to tell me what Ethiopians
needed to do to avoid crisis in the future. On a small scale, the Destiny Ethiopia panel and its fifty
participants were meant to model to audiences how Ethiopians can use imagination, storytelling,
and dialogue to convene competing voices and collectively formulate common understandings
about the desirable and undesirable future possibilities that were likely in store for Ethiopia. With
key language like “unity,” “reconciliation,” “open, round table discussions,” “democratic path,”
and “forgiveness,” the scenario of “Dawn” is offered up by the group as the most utopian scenario
achievable by the year 2040 if Ethiopia’s political leaders, “influential people,” and citizens
followed the path toward “progress.” Presumably, transformative scenario planning was figured
as one of those corrective measures and early actions that could be used to prevent crisis and set
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Ethiopia on a path toward “progress.” Though the TSP and Destiny Ethiopia’s stated aim was to
avoid prescribing what should or will happen, the wording of “Dawn” is, in fact, rather
prescriptive. See the phrasing below:
Progress is hopeful but initially tentative: it takes time for the full light of the new day to
be visible. Ethiopians build on recent reforms and reconciliation processes as it progresses
on a democratic path. Deep rooted contradictions salient at different levels within
communities are being resolved through open, round table discussions. Conceptions of
forgiveness and conciliation—as opposed to antagonism and hatred—are gaining currency
among formal and social media channels. Institutions and the economy are gradually and
steadily built up and strengthened in line with a clarifying vision and with a growing unity.

However, while trying to remain neutral and inclusive of Ethiopia’s competing voices, Destiny
Ethiopia presented a utopian scenario that says everything while at the same time saying nothing
useful for those who want to pursue a transformative path toward an egalitarian future. First, the
path toward “Dawn” is predicated on Ethiopians “building on” the existing paths and programs of
reform which are, without critical interrogation, described in the scenario as progressing “on a
democratic path.” However, as I already discussed in the previous chapter, descriptors like
“democracy” are strategically re-defined and deployed by political regimes in Ethiopia to deny
formal democratic rights to its citizens. Furthermore, the current ruling regime of Prosperity Party
did not come into power through a democratic process but through internal maneuvering aimed at
shrinking the TPLF’s control over the state and disproportionate power within the EPRDF
coalition. While it used the demands pushed forth by young and working-class
38
Ethiopians to

38
Even though much of the protests were expressed through the modality of “national” or “ethnic”
rights and oppression, protesters clearly had class-based grievances and demands. The frustration
against TPLF and the EPRDF leadership—many of whom are currently leading through Prosperity
Party—was based on the corruption of the government, the perception (often rumored) that the
Tigray regional state had amassed disproportionate amounts of wealth, and frustration over the
expropriation and unfair transfer of land for development projects which involved the construction
of infrastructure, condos, factories, and large-scale farms for local as well as export crops. While
these development projects were claimed to be in the interest of the working class and poor
Ethiopians, protesters maintained that they were inegalitarian and largely beneficial to a small class
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legitimize its rule, the government’s process for selecting leadership and implementing reforms
does not actively engage the broad Ethiopian public.
39
In other words, even though transformative
scenario planning claims to avoid the fraught process of reconciling participants’ differences and
the predictive and determining processes of detailing what will or should happen, the boundaries
between could, should, and will are not actually clear based on the scenario of “Dawn.” Implied
within the language of “Dawn” are value-laden and ideological commitments to certain
perceptions of progress and development. Second, “Dawn” says very little because TSP and
Destiny Ethiopia’s attempt at arriving toward a possible utopian scenario present empty and vague
statements like “Deep rooted contradictions salient at different levels within communities are
being resolved through open, round table discussions” without confronting which contradictions
they mean and how the contradictions which are identified as “deep rooted,” are actually politically
driven demands being made by some of the very people, political groups, and elites who took part
in the scenario planning process. By attempting to be agreeably neutral and inclusive, Destiny
Ethiopia’s TSP did not generate a utopian scenario that could be used to drive a political program
aimed at transformation because it obscured the reality of Ethiopia’s political and economic
problems and avoided the “fraught” processes that Ethiopians need to undertake to bring about
any semblance of “Dawn” by 2040.

of Ethiopia’s wealthy.
39
Neither the negotiations that brought Abiy Ahmed into power nor the decision to revamp the
EPRDF into Prosperity Party involved democratic engagement with civilians. Because of this,
Prosperity Party is believed by many to be an iteration of the EPRDF—now with the OPDO/ODP
(Oromo wing of EPRDF) having control over the state and party. However, for Oromo nationalists
who don’t see Abiy Ahmed or the OPDO/ODP as their legitimate representatives, Abiy Ahmed is
seen as using his Oromo identity to ascend into power while not representing the interests of the
Oromo nation.
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Regardless of the diverse political “representation” in the scenario planning process, the
glaring omission and lack of explicit discussion regarding contentious issues like Ethiopia’s
ethnic-federal boundaries, the constitutional provision for ethnonational secession and self-
determination, and the question of “nations, nationalities, and peoples” makes “Dawn” an
impossible rather than possible scenario of the future. Listening to the panelists, I could not stop
asking myself, “how can self-proclaimed secessionists, ethnic-nationalists, pan-Ethiopian
nationalists, capitalists, and socialists come to formulate a “common ground” if they did not
attempt to reconcile their commitments to divergent political projects in ways that could lead to a
workable and shared orientation for the future?” The scenario planning participants belong to
political organizations that hold highly divergent and competing views regarding the legitimacy of
the Ethiopian state, disagree on how Ethiopia should be federally structured and governed, and
even take issue with whether the people of Ethiopia can be said to constitute a nation. Some
participants, especially those with ethnonational perspectives, are known to argue that Ethiopia
has no legitimacy as a state because they view the Ethiopian state as one formed through violent
incorporation and colonization of distinct and “oppressed” nations. With such divergent views, I
could not understand how three transformative scenario planning meetings (or even the EPRDF’s
reshuffling) could change these groups’ commitments to clearly antagonistic and ideologized
political perspectives—perspectives that have manifested in violent political contestations over
land, power, and national/ethnic boundaries and shaped the lives of Ethiopians in both material
and viscerally affective ways.
The only explanation I could come up with to make sense of how the participants could
arrive at “Dawn” as a scenario was that maybe they (a) did not all actually believe in the possibility
of “Dawn” and were simply engaging in the TSP activities with no real political commitment to
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egalitarian and transformative change necessary to bring about a dawn or (b) they did not believe
Ethiopia’s “contradictions” were as “deep rooted” as some of the participants and political
organizations’ outward political discourse and commitments made it seem. If the first option is
accurate, it means that not all participants were genuinely committed to the political project of
realizing “Dawn” for all Ethiopians and/or that phrases like “inclusive dialogue” were simply
being deployed as political rhetoric. If the second option is accurate, it maybe means that
Ethiopia’s problems are not rooted in the existence of politically irreconcilable and primordial
differences between and among Ethiopia’s inhabitants. Differences that are often discussed in
contemporary Ethiopian politics through frameworks of ethnic-based group oppression, the need
to protect categorically distinct “nations, nationalities, and peoples,” and thus, the need to grant
political rights to groups of people based on their belonging to distinctly bounded groups. If there
is any truth to this, then maybe Ethiopian political discourse overstates the centrality and essential
reality of ethnic difference and the idea that people primarily experience oppression because of
group-based ethnonational oppression. If the primary issue driving Ethiopia’s conflicts and
divergent political ideologies—especially the political and ideological contradictions around the
issue of ethnic groups’ “national” oppression and rights—is not due to ethnic
discrimination/oppression emanating from the irreconcilable or essential differences in identity
and ideology, then maybe essentialist formulations of ethnic difference are given too much
independent explanatory weight in the political, discursive, and material contestations over
Ethiopia’s issues with class inequity, cultural difference, and power.
I highlight Destiny Ethiopia and the scenario planning process as an interesting exercise in
imagination and future-thinking not only because it falls outside the confines of the formal, state-
driven, planning processes I looked at in the previous chapter but because it showcases the
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problems which plague contemporary Ethiopian political discourse, future world-building, and
contestations. First, by failing to contend with the fraught realities of Ethiopia’s politics the ideal
of “participation” and the scenarios is put forth as an end-goal in and of itself without an equal
commitment to openly re-envisioning the very products or structures which were realized in the
1990s as solutions to Ethiopia’s problems. According to Duncombe’s Open Utopia, political
engagement marked by openness and democratic governance, involves “continual re-vision” and
“open participation” in which openness to “criticism, participation, modification, and recreation”
are applied to both “product and process” (2012). In other words, while there was some level of
openness within the TSP process, it is mired in what Duncombe describes as “elite envisioning”
and what I explained to be a process that lends itself to the undemocratic exploitation of
“representational” politics. A politics in which elites or those vying for power can claim to speak
for the interests of the “bottom” while deploying a “politics-from-above.” This is an issue because
for utopia, or future-thinking, to be taken up as a political project of worldbuilding, “as the basis
of an alternative society” in which populations are not coerced into accepting the plans and process
for realizing alternative society, “requires the participation of its population” (Duncombe, 2012).
Though Destiny Ethiopia’s approach could be said to use a representative process, and it stood
outside formal state planning and processes for future world-making which are more totalitarian
in their pursuits and envisioning, it still represented a form of “elite envisioning” and largely failed
to “persuade the public to ponder such radical alternatives” (Duncombe, 2012) because it failed to
democratically and critically engage with the fraught politics that brought the fifty participants to
the same table in the first place.
That being said, the project was successful in bringing the scenarios and discussion about
Ethiopia’s future into mainstream Ethiopian political discourse through different panel events and
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media broadcasts at a time in which many of the Ethiopians I spoke to expressed feeling uncertain
and fearful about Ethiopia’s future outlook. Soon after launching, Destiny Ethiopia closed down
its website and halted public engagements. Nine months after I attended the panel, the worst
aspects of Destiny Ethiopia’s scenario of a “Divided House” were realized within Ethiopia.
Political and ethnic conflict intensified during the Covid-19 outbreak, and Ethiopians had to
grapple with growing levels of economic precarity, high levels of inflation, and joblessness. By
November of 2020, Ethiopia was mired in a war between the ruling regime of Prosperity Party and
the ousted regime of TPLF. The war especially devastated civilians in the regional states of Tigray,
Amhara, and Afar; further exacerbated the economic precarity experienced by most Ethiopians;
and drew in regional ethnic forces as well as external states like Eritrea into a deadly conflict to
determine who—or whose visions of utopia—would get to govern the Ethiopian state and
ultimately control the future direction of the country. These events further entrenched perceived
ethnic differences and antagonisms; expanded the political instrumentalization of ethnicity,
nationhood, and violence; and deepened rifts within Ethiopian political imagination and discourses
about what is possible and what is to be done with the project of Ethiopia. These contestations,
which followed soon after the launching of Destiny Ethiopia and Ethiopians’ other attempts to
engage in “national dialogue,” show us the limitations that result from projects that attempt to
respond to uncertainty and crisis while: unknowingly reifying essentialist perceptions of ethnic
difference and class conflict; deploying top-down approaches to civic imagination and dialogue;
and working in contexts where authoritarian rule and ethnic-opportunism limit the kinds of actions
every-day Ethiopians can take to voice and realize a path toward egalitarian change.
Ethiopia is not only facing its current problems due to a lack of dialogue or a shortage in
scenarios about its dystopic or utopian future possibilities. One of my central assertions in this
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project, and particularly this chapter, is that the conditions for civic participation and imagination
in Ethiopia have not only been constrained and determined by globally situated, unequal, and
hierarchically racializing regimes of inclusion and economic exchange. Rather, I contend that the
conditions for Ethiopian civic participation and imagination have been crucially limited by the
insidious instrumentalization, territorialization, and codification of national belonging and ethnic
difference. Through their material, political, and discursive codification, categories of ethnic and
national belonging are crafted and re-crafted within Ethiopia to inscribe, politicize, and signify
difference in ways that biologize, exclude, and territorialize ethno-cultural and national belonging.
Such processes and otherwise “deep rooted contradictions” shape people’s relations to the state
and different ethno-cultural groups in ways that are ultimately detrimental to realizing any possible
future based on egalitarianism, non-violent principles, and the rights of Ethiopia’s poor.
In the remainder of this chapter, I look at the complicated dynamics of Ethiopians’
contestations and desires for their future—the future of their nation(s) and themselves. While doing
this, I consider how Ethiopians’ conditions for civic participation and imagination are (a)
constrained by externally driven economic conditions of poverty and internal conditions of state-
controlled and growth-based development as well as (b) limited by essentialist and codified
formulations of nationhood and ethnicity. While I primarily draw my conclusions from field
observations and interviews, I also borrow from the intellectual work of Stuart Hall which I
introduced earlier in this dissertation and Andreas Wimmer’s Ethnic Boundary Making (2013) to
formulate an analytic framework and vocabulary for ethnicity as a boundary-forming and socially
constructed project in order to consider how the interrelated concepts of race, nation, and ethnicity
function within Ethiopian political contestation over material inequality and imaginations about
the future.
161
Methodology and limitations. My fieldwork in Ethiopia was cut short due to the outbreak
of Covid-19 and the following restrictions, which made it unsafe to travel and conduct face-to-
face interviews with study participants. While Covid-19 and the disastrous outbreak of war in
November 2020 limited my ability to travel through all of Ethiopia’s ethnic-regional states and
speak to people from less privileged socioeconomic positions, those that I did speak to offered
fruitful insights which are reflective of the major themes and perspectives that permeate Ethiopia’s
current political conjuncture. My analysis draws on 29 in-depth interviews, fieldwork
observations, and the many more informal conversations I carried out between October 2019 and
May 2020. Using the observations and conversations I had during my time in Ethiopia, I use the
following portion of this chapter to look at how those I spoke to perceived Ethiopia’s path of
economic development; negotiated Ethiopia’s contentious politics of national and ethnic
belonging; and imagined Ethiopia’s future.
While I conducted most of my formal interviews in Addis Ababa, a few of the interviews
took place in Hawassa, Jijiga, and over the phone with those living outside the boundaries of Addis
Ababa. The three interviews I carried out in the city of Hawassa took place at a time in which the
city was transitioning from being the capital of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples
(SNNP)— a multi-ethnic regional state of which the Sidama ethnic group were included—to the
regional capital of the Sidama people. The regional state of Sidama was carved out of SNNP to be
a distinct state administered by Sidama people (or nation) in response to Sidama ethno-national
demands for national self-administration and statehood. The three interview participants I spoke
to—two women below the age of 30 and one man in his late 60s—were long-term residents of
Hawassa but did not identify as Sidama and thus offered interesting perspectives regarding ethnic
state formation from the perspective of ethnic minorities. Six interviews took place in Jigjiga (also
162
known as Jijiga), the Somali state’s regional capital. In Jigjiga, I interviewed members of the
Ogaden National Liberation Front, Ogaden Youth and Student Union (OYSU), a Jijiga University
lecturer, a Jigjiga University student, and a high-level Prosperity Party (PP) member who held a
regional post in Jigjiga. Almost all of those I formally interviewed held ethno-nationalist views
though they were on a spectrum regarding whether they supported outright secession or believed
Somali-Ethiopians would be better served by working to integrate and acquire fair representation
40

within the Ethiopian state.
I conducted 20 of the remaining interviews while I was in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis
Ababa. Study participants in Addis Ababa ranged from 18 to over 65 years of age and included
people who identified with single ethnic categories like Amhara, Oromo, Tigrayan, Somali,
Kembata, Hadiya, and Kafficho, as well as those who claimed multi-ethnic backgrounds. Some of
those who had multi-ethnic backgrounds identified with single-ethnic categories by either picking
their paternal or maternal lineage.
41
A few of my formal interview participants in Addis Ababa
and Hawassa preferred not to identify with an ethnic category and found it more fitting to be
identified as Ethiopian. The 20 study participants included Addis Ababa University professors and
students, opposition politicians, Qerroo activists (young Oromo activists), lawyers,
businesspersons, young diaspora entrepreneurs, and recent college graduates. Almost all the

40
Claims to “fair” or “equitable” representation and distribution of resources were often made by
referencing the Somali ethnic group’s population size (because Somali-Ethiopians constitute one
of the most populous ethnic groups in Ethiopia) and/or the size of the Somali state’s regional
territory (which was argued to have the capacity to generate resources for not only their ethnic
group but Ethiopia as a whole).
41
While traditionally and officially Ethiopians are assigned an ethnic category based on their
paternal lineage, sometimes those who picked “a side” did so based on their perceptions of which
identity-group was most oppressed. For example, some Oromo-identifying participants who
actually had Oromo and Amhara background related to their “Oromo side” because they felt that
that side of their identity was the most marginalized or because they grew up in places where other
Oromo-identifying people were dominant.
163
interviews were carried out using English. This often limited who I could comfortably interview
as most Ethiopians only speak languages that are indigenous to Ethiopia—this means that
participation in my study was often limited to more privileged members of Ethiopian society who
had access to college and English education. I accommodated those who preferred interviewing in
Amharic by employing a research assistant who clarified and translated on my behalf during the
interview process. In Appendix D you can find the interview tool I used to guide the interview
process. However, many of my interviews were semi-structured due to the expertise of
participants, time constraints which necessitated more than one interview session with the same
participants, and because my research project’s aims shifted throughout the progression of my
fieldwork experience.
As I learned more about the nuanced politics and problematics of Ethiopia throughout the
ethnographic process, the shape and direction of my research also changed in ways that led me to
de-emphasize development and place greater focus on questions of ethnicity and nationhood as the
central problematics of my study. For instance, while half of my questionnaire focused on
questions regarding the development and people’s perceptions and desires for development, many
of my interview participants were more concerned with speaking to me about ethnicity,
nationhood, and their understanding of how competing conceptions of nationhood affected
Ethiopia’s political and economic future. Shifting my emphasis from development to questions
about ethnicity and nationhood significantly altered the nature of my project from being primarily
concerned with economic development and its effects on Ethiopia and Ethiopians to an
interrogation of how nationhood and development are co-constitutive and con-determined
phenomena.
164
In the previous chapter I showed how those in control of the Ethiopian state harnessed and
shaped the idea of nationhood to legitimize the reconstitution and territorialization of the Ethiopian
state as a union of distinct ethno-regional states as well as justify their control over “national”
vision, development planning, policies, and practices of the country. Ultimately, their construction
and deployment of two contradicting formulations of the “nation” which sought to simultaneously
centralize and decentralize the kinds of rights granted to Ethiopian citizens (rights which are
granted based on the ethnic and national status of citizens) as well their contradictory deployments
of national development visions and policies (which blurred the lines between decentralized and
centralized national politics) resulted in the political rupture that would eventually force a reform
within the TPLF-led EPRDF government. In this section, I look beyond official state discourse to
how Ethiopians register and negotiate the boundaries of national belonging and how these
negotiations relate to the kinds of solutions they believe are necessary for addressing issues of
underdevelopment, social inequality, cultural difference, and poverty. Below, I offer a synopsis of
the insights I garnered from interview participants regarding the interrelated, dominant, and
“deeply contradictory” perspectives over nationhood, development, and progress which permeate
Ethiopian political discourse and the recurring violent contestations over which these perspectives
are fought.
Divvying up the pie:
nationhood, territorialization, and the distribution of resources
Ethiopian nationalism and ethnic nationalism constituted the two dominant and competing
perspectives the Ethiopians I spoke to align their politics of national belonging and rights to. Those
who aligned with Ethiopian nationalism sometimes referred to themselves as Pan-Ethiopian
nationalists or more broadly as Pan-Africanists and regarded Ethiopian unity (often referred to as
165
Ethiopianism or Ethiopiawinet in the Amharic language) as essential to solving Ethiopia’s
problems. Many of those who aligned with Ethiopian or pan-Ethiopian nationalism believed that
Ethiopians needed to unify and work against the politicization of ethnic and religious difference if
they are to collectively address Ethiopia’s problems. They often spoke of Ethiopia’s historical
formation as one that spans thousands of years, showed pride in the place Ethiopia held within
black national imagination and liberation struggles, and even pointed to the discovery of well-
known hominins like Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) and its predecessor Australopithecus
anamensis to proudly demonstrate how the region and its people’s history go as far back as to the
“origin” of humankind. Those who identified with Ethiopiawinet also pointed to Ethiopia’s
cultural and linguistic diversity as well as its historical and contemporary ties to Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam to explain how Ethiopia’s strength and unique beauty are found in its
people’s capacity for cultural and religious co-existence despite there being moments of political
conflict over these differences—conflicts which have shaped and reshaped the boundaries of the
state but not severed the connections among the people of that region. Though the Ethiopian state’s
boundaries have shifted over the centuries, some of this group’s identification with “Ethiopianess”
span beyond formal state boundaries as well as ethnic categories.
42
This is not to say that those

42
Some of those I spoke to (including Eritrean nationals living in Ethiopia) often spoke of Eritreans
as being “the same people” as Ethiopians and sometimes used terms like “habesha” to describe the
cultural/national ties that existed among the people of the horn. This was often not done to deny
the statehood of Eritrea but in attempt to describe how people living in these different states hold
a lot in common and are thus “inseparable.” The separation of the people was viewed as a
consequence of political conflict and not due to their being inherent differences between the people
of the two states. Though pan-Ethiopianism and pan-Africanism are different categories, those
who identified as the first were also vocal about being the later, and sometimes wistfully spoke
about the need for greater African cooperation—through the confederation of Africa, east Africa,
of Eritrea with Ethiopia—believing that greater cooperation and exchange was necessary between
states and nations. However, some of the pan-Ethiopianist logic is often critiqued by nationalists,
especially ethno-nationalists, who view it as an assimilationist discourse cloaked in a discourse of
unity.
166
who viewed themselves as Ethiopian nationalists did not identify with particular ethnic
backgrounds or regions. Most identified with or had affinities with a specific ethnic background
or multiple distinct backgrounds. They often identified with ethno-cultural groups based on their
ancestral heritage or the affinities they had with specific localities and cultural practices depending
on where they spent their formative years (sometimes identifying strongly with cultures,
languages, and areas that were outside the territories designated for their patrilineal and matrilineal
ethnic groups or identifying with cities). The identification with Ethiopia nationhood allowed them
greater flexibly and fluidity than ethno-nationalists as they could affirm and identify with a mixture
of cultural norms they derived through ancestral as well as experiential ties. Some of those who
identified with pan-Ethiopian nationalism engaged in a politics of refusal by disidentifying
altogether with ethnic categories and were suspicious when asked about ethnic identity because
ethnic identity is used within Ethiopia’s political discourse to attach certain ideologies and
essentialized characteristics to people. However, those who refused identification or fostered a
multi-ethnic identity were still often sometimes labeled with ethnic categories (often Amhara) or
claimed to have become “Amharanized” (a term used to describe those who do not necessarily
trace their ancestral lineage to the Amhara region but identify with Ethiopianism, show no issues
with speaking the Amharic language, and/or participate in cultural practices that have roots in the
northern highlands of Amhara and Tigray).
43

43
For instance, many people who asked me of my background did so to surmise my ideological
leanings and pinpoint my phenotypic feature to an ethnic group. What I told them was often used
to affirm their perceptions about people from that region (though I told them I am unfamiliar with
my ancestral regions) and/or used to relate to me to a political perspective regarding nationalism.
People who related to my father’s ethnic background made assumptions that I would be open to
ethno-nationalist views and demands. Those who related to my mother’s background felt easy
relating to me as an Ethiopian national. If I questioned or pushed back against either assumption,
my pushback was sometimes attributed to the “confusion” that supposedly emanates from having
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On the other end of the spectrum, ethno-nationalists’ identification with their ethnic
nationality often superseded their identification with Ethiopian nationality. The strongest
proponents of ethnonationalism held secessionist views and completely denied identification with
Ethiopianess and contested the legitimacy of the Ethiopian state. While most ethno-nationalists
identified as Ethiopian, their identification with Ethiopian nationality was contingent on the
Ethiopian state guaranteeing and protecting their rights to ethno-national self-administration,
determination, and cultural autonomy. They often described Ethiopia as a composite of distinct
nations—with distinct languages, cultures, territories, and histories—and argued that the survival
of the Ethiopian state depended on the state’s recognition of these distinctions and the rights of its
distinct groups to make territorial, economic, and political claims. This perspective undermined
Ethiopian nationalists’ views that there are deep-rooted ancestral, cultural, and historical ties that
bind Ethiopia’s diverse populations in ways that outweigh ethnic differences. Though most ethno-
nationalists agree that there are important ties, they claimed that ethnic (or ethno-national)
differences are rooted in essential, territorial, are primordial truths while Ethiopian nationhood is
a more recent, political, and/or colonial construct. For example, Ethiopian nationalists often drew
on the histories of ancient kingdoms like Axum, Abyssinia, as well as the period between the 16
th

and 19
th
centuries—where Muslim expansion, Oromo rule, and the era of princes (Zemene
Mesafint) manifested in a great deal of religious, political, and territorial shifts as well as
decentralized rule—to explain that while the modern state of Ethiopia is recent, the history that led
to its formation spans centuries. Most ethnonationalists however, often began their account of the
Ethiopian state at the end of the 19
th
century with Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the point at

a “mixed” ethnic heritage, I was flat out considered an Amhara, or the belief was that “the other
side” had won me over with their ideology.

168
which the king of Shoa (Shewa)—following the state consolidation process of Emperor
Tewodros—brought an end to regional rule by becoming Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia. From
the ethnonationalist perspective, Emperor Menelik II is an Amhara
44
ruler who colonized and stole
land from other indigenous nations while for Ethiopian nationalists he is an Ethiopian leader who
managed to bring (at times force) together regional leaders under his rule and thus create the
necessary conditions to ward off colonization.
I illustrate these two overarching perspectives as the two political and ideological extremes
that dominate Ethiopian political discourse because these two perspectives on Ethiopian
nationhood and statehood were often explained to me as the underlying ideologies which drive
and explain Ethiopian politics, resource conflicts, and contestations over the future of the country.
However, many of the Ethiopians I spoke to held negotiated perspectives that problematized both
extremes—even when they ascribed to one dominant perspective over the other. Take for instance
Hiwot, a 27-year-old journalist and lecturer at Hawassa University, who described ethnic politics
and ethnic clientelism as the two significant roadblocks standing in the way of Ethiopia’s economic
growth and social cohesion while also reflecting on the positive aspects of facilitating ethno-

44
This point is contested by some interview participants and interlocutors who argued that local
identities were more important at the time of Menelik’s rule than that of being “Amhara.” At that
time, there was not such thing as “Amhara region” but several provinces which hard their own
rulers/princes/kings that competed for power and territory. While many people in Shoa, Gonder
(Begemder), Gojjam, Wollo (Bete Amhara)—the current regions of Amhara—spoke Amharic,
that did not mean they identified as “Amhara.” For example, while visiting Gojjam, a companion
told me that the king of Gojjam did not give power to Menelik willingly but was forced to do so
by Menelik (Shoan Amhara) who was allied and supported by Shoan Oromo during his conquest.
Thus, the narrative of “Amhara rule” and hegemony flattens historical complexity as it erases the
role of Oromos in the consolidation of the modern Ethiopian state by positioning them as victims
of an “Amhara” ruler while positioning all those who are identified as Amhara as willing
participants in the consolidation of the state who then went on to oppress and forcefully
“Amharanize” the rest of Ethiopia.
169
regional administrative structures which can be useful in protecting and providing for the cultural
diversity of Ethiopia’s nations.
Younger locals, the ethnic elite groups, and some of those in urban groups, they want the
creation of new states for two reasons. One positive reason and the second is negative
reason. They want to take power. They want to be one of the political leaders. The younger
people also want a new state because a new state means new government structures and
new jobs. This is the negative side for me. The positive part is, if there is a federal state
formed [if a nation gets statehood], the people are ruling themselves. They can develop
their identity and their own culture.

For Hiwot, Ethiopia’s ethnic federal arrangement is used by ethnic clientelist politicians,
young professionals, and urban dwellers (those living in Hawassa) to create a new state and
administrative center that would give them employment opportunities. She described that the
SNNP could not meet the needs of locals—both rural and urban—because the Southern Nations,
Nationalities, and Peoples’ (SNNP) regional state was created by combining 56 nations into a
single state through a process that did not fully include their constituents’ participation. This means
that the 56 ethnic nations were compelled to compete for limited government jobs at the regional
level, and the financing allotted to the SNNP from the central government was divvied up between
the 56 nations—a process that fosters competition and corruption. In other words, a large state like
the SNNP has the pool of money it gets from the federal government divided among all its member
nations and the people from these member nations who seek government positions. This process
allots less representation and positions of power to the individual nations than if they had a state
of their own. Because of this, she explained that over a quarter of the 56 nations who are part of
the SNNP want to either secede from SNNP to form their regional states or self-administer by
forming their own zones and woredas within the SNNP.
45
For this reason, the Sidama people, who

45
Aside from the Sidama, the Welayta have sought to secede from SNNP and form a regional state
though the federal government has not granted their request (despite them having a referendum on
the issue and agitating for their constitutionally recognized rights). Adding to the Welayta, other
170
have territorial claims to the land that the city of Hawassa is on, protested for several years (at time
through demonstrations that became violent) and held a referendum in 2019 to secede from SNNP.
Having a Sidama state run by Sidama people means that their administrative budget increases
significantly, and they would not have to split high-level as well as other administrative jobs with
55 other nations as the new state’s jobs would go to Sidama people. However, this would not
necessarily benefit the poorest members of the nations as the new jobs created would go to the
ethnic elites and clientelists, the educated, and urban dwellers rather than the rural poor. Hiwot
explained to me that “people in the rural area don’t care about the political structure. They most of
the time care about their water supply, health care, and basic needs.” More states means more
leadership opportunities and jobs in a region and country where many young people, even those
with college education, are struggling to find jobs.
This also means that Hawassa would go from being the administrative center of SNPP to
a city administrated by the Sidama state and people, even if the residents of places like Hawassa
include people like Hiwot who are born in Hawassa but have parents of non-Sidama background.
Hiwot, who described herself as having a father from Oromia and a mother from “another ethnic
group,” complained that the ethnic system in Ethiopia makes her feel like she is from “another
planet” depending on where she goes. Though she was born in Hawassa and knows the Sidama
people more than she knows her mother or father’s ethnic groups and respective regions, she
explained that “when you come to Hawassa or Adama, you are not treated as an Ethiopian, you
are treated like anyone who comes from another place, another plant.” In other words, she is not
entirely accepted in her father’s hometown of Adama, Oromia, because her mother is not Oromo

groups like the Ale, Gamo, Gofa, Gurage, Hadiya, Kefa, Konso, and Silte have either sought to
secede or have special administrative zones and woredas for their ethnic nations.
171
and because she grew up outside of Oromia. She is not accepted in Hawassa because she is not
recognized as Sidama, even though she is most familiar with Sidama people and spent her
formative years in Hawassa.
While the ethnic federal arrangement and SNNP forced its member states to share power
amongst the different ethnic groups that constituted it, the Sidama were able to make historical,
cultural, and population-size claims to legitimate their national difference and thus use the
Ethiopian constitution’s provisions for ethnic statehood to formally seek recognition and demand
rights to a self-administered Sidama state from the central government. Because the Sidama
constituted the most populous ethnic group within the SNNP and claimed indigenous status to the
land that Hawassa is on, the plan to change the SNNP administrative center from Hawassa to
elsewhere was met with anxiety and frustration by those from the SNNP and other parts of Ethiopia
living in Hawassa not only because they called Hawassa their home and were heavily invested in
it but also because they contested Sidama claims ownership over Hawassa and the Sidama territory
by arguing that their claims to indigenous status ignored how other groups had been assimilated
or pushed off the land which now makes up the Sidama state. For some, the fear was that the
transformation of Hawassa and the surrounding areas into a Sidama state would lead to greater
discrimination against now minoritized ethnic populations. To illustrate, on a trip I made back to
Ethiopia in 2020, a couple of young college graduates who were born in Hawassa but came from
Kembata (a member of the SNNP) and Kembata-Tigrayan ethnic backgrounds complained that
they could not find employment in Hawassa—not only because Ethiopia was facing high
unemployment rates but also because of ethnic favoritism and discriminatory practices against
non-Sidama had now been “legitimized” in Hawassa. One of the young men explained that he had
been offered a job but only if he paid a large bribe (which amounted to around $1,000 USD) to
172
take the role. Another person I spoke to conveyed that the highest positions in most well-paying
government sectors were filled by Sidama people and that he had to carefully negotiate his identity
and politics to avoid discrimination while on the job. He complained that advancing through the
ranks was hard because fit job candidates were being passed up for those who met ethnic
preferences, but he could not do anything about it because he was considered “lucky” to have a
job and there were no recourses for addressing ethnic discrimination.
Despite these concerns of ethnic discrimination and the double-edged realities of ethnic
federal politics—what Hiwot described as having the positive aspect of cultural preservation and
representation but the negative reality of being manipulated by a few for economic gain—for
ethno-nationalists
46
and those who are proponents of ethnic federalism, the only way Ethiopia can
maintain stability and meet its economic goals is if it first respects the rights of Ethiopia’s nations
to self-administration and determination by decentralizing the federal government and granting
greater political and cultural autonomy to regional governments. When I relayed what I had learned
about ethnic discrimination and the economic rationale behind seeking statehood in Hawassa to an
Oromo-identifying scholar at Addis Ababa University during an interview, he responded to me
that the complaints I heard were likely “exaggerations” or the consequence of the interviewees
expressed could be “personal problems” that result from not “integrating” into the local society. It
was only after I explained in greater detail how there seemed to be a difference in how ethnic
federalism is outlined in the constitution as a framework for granting more equitable representation
and protections and how it is practiced and lived out in reality that he responded by saying:
There should be rules and regulations made by regional governments to provide for
everyone as a citizen. It's not only those people born in Sidama, entitled to a piece of land

46
Some ethno-nationalists argue that Ethiopia is a failed political project and advocate for the
dismemberment (balkanization) of the state into multiple states. In contemporary politics, the
most vocal supporters of this ideology identify as ethnic Oromo and Tigrayan.
173
to live in Hawassa, others are also having the same right in terms of property and in terms
of development. And in terms of political participation, also, based on merit, these must be
put in the rules and regulations of regional governments, and that is administration. […]
There are rules and regulations and they have to be put in place very clearly, in terms of
human rights in terms of going from one place to another and working in ordinary spaces.
For example, even people from all walks of life to live here, even from other African
countries or Asian countries, and they have you know, rules and regulations of this area
and abide by laws. If, for example, the regional states say we don’t want you because you
were not born here, that is called discrimination.

The constitution sets up protections and it is the responsibility of the federal and regional
government to enact the policies, protect ethnic minorities, and “punish” the leaders who abuse
the ethnic federal arrangement. However, when I asked what people are to do when the
constitutional protections and corpus of laws written to protect citizens from discrimination do not
align with the realities of violence and discrimination, the interview participant responded by
saying that “the problem is really putting rule of law in place.” The solution is not to try another
form of federalism or undo ethnic federalism but to make the current system work by following
“genuine federalism and genuine democracy which we have not seen up to date.” He elaborated
that trying to solve the issue of ethnic discrimination by moving away from the ethno-national
federalism toward more geographic federalism will be a problem:
Perhaps, if you really want to do it in another regional, geographical provincial context,
that could be tried but that will not work as far as I'm concerned. Going back again [to
geographic federalism], will never ever work and bring about peace and harmony. The only
way is to have rules and regulations, which will accommodate non-Welaytas in Welayta,
non-Sidama in Sidama, and non-Oromo in Oromia. If it is tried to undo ethnic federalism,
I am afraid for the future [emphasis added].

He reasoned that what Ethiopia needed to do is respect and honestly commit to the ethnic
federal project which is not designed to harm ethnic minorities but rather built with safeguards to
protect them and their rights. In other words, the issue was not ethnic federalism but the lack of
commitment from federal and regional officials to carry it out properly. Those currently
experiencing discrimination then have to wait and follow the rule of law until the rule of law is
174
upheld at the federal and regional governing levels as criticism of ethnic federalism, or attempts
to redesign it, are seen as a leading to a frightening future scenario.
However, this does not answer the issue that exists between the ideals of ethnic nationalism
and federalism on paper and how people experience its enactment in real life. For instance, during
my interview with Tesfaye, the young Tigrayan and recent college graduate from the regional state
of Amhara (Gonder) that I introduced earlier, he explained to me that during a political upheaval
in 2019 he and his family had to flee because ethnic-Tigrayans were being targeted in response to
the frustrations Amhara region residents felt. He explained that while he grew up in Amhara
province and nobody cared that he was from Tigray, “people now people care. People care more
now about where you come from and what you speak. You will get in trouble [if you are from the
wrong group at times of political conflict].” While it is true that the citizens have rights on paper,
and ethnic federal arrangement recognizes those rights, in practice it engenders and motivates a
reactionary political context where members of ethnic groups are attacked during peak moments
of political upheaval for the wrong doings of politicians who claim to represent distinct ethnic
groups. In addition to killing civilians, angry protesters often destroy factories, businesses, and
homes of those who are deemed to be settlers—especially those who are from “opposing” ethnic
groups as political ideologies are often ascribed onto ethnic identity (and people are assigned
ethnicities) within Ethiopia.
For instance, at the beginning of my fieldwork in October of 2019, Jawar Mohamed, and
ethnonationalist Oromo politician, posted on his social media accounts that the federal government
was after him. His supporters, angered by the idea that Jawar was under threat, responded by killing
around 100 mostly Amhara civilians in Addis Ababa. Because Abiy Ahmed and his discourse of
“unity” and Ethiopianism is considered a reflection of an “Amharanized” political project, Abiy
175
Ahmed’s Oromo identity (or allegiance to his Oromo nation) is often denied by Oromo ethno-
nationalists as they believe he is working on behalf of interests that benefit Ethiopian nationalists
and Amhara people. With this logic, protesters take their frustrations out on Amhara civilians and
those who are considered “Amharanized” (e.g., those who speak Amharic or follow Orthodox
Christianity) when the actions of the federal government
47
are found to be jeopardize the interests
of Oromo ethnonationalism.
48
In other words, under ethnic federalism, exacting collective
punishment against civilians who are members of “competing” or faulted ethnic groups is the
norm—this is often fueled by both federal and regional governing officials, police, rebels groups,
opposition politicians, and angry protesters who fail to either protect civilians, incite violence, or
actively target groups of people based on their ethnicity. In other words, while the rule of law is
on paper, those who designed the constitution and federal arrangement did not come into power
by using democratic means and do not currently vie for and maintain power by using “the rule of
law.”
In the case of Somali regional state where most of the residents identify as Somali (though
there are clan and political differences), the hope most often conveyed to me was that the new
administration in power would more earnestly deliver on the promises of ethnic federalism than
the previous government controlled by the TPLF. As Hasan, a leading member of the Ogaden
National Liberation Front explained to me, he hoped the new administration and waves of change
would lead to “greater portions of the pie” being distributed to the Somali regional state. Every

47
The current Prosperity Party (PP) government is dominated by Oromo politician though their
rule is contested by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), armed Oromo rebel group, and prominent
opposition leaders like Jawar Mohamed who publicly hold more extreme ethno-nationalist stances.
48
In the next chapter I detail a case from 2020 where the lives and properties of ethnic Amhara,
Orthodox Christians, and “Amharanized “ethnic groups like Gurage were targeted throughout
Oromia after an Oromo singer was killed by unknown attackers in Addis Ababa.
176
ethnically Somali Ethiopian I spoke to explained to me that Somali people in Ethiopia face
discrimination and unequal access because they are not equally included into the nation. They
complained that the Somali region and people had a periphery role within the Ethiopian state which
they often argued only wanted the Somali region because of geopolitical reasons and because of
the resources (i.e., oil) the state could extract and use to meet its economic ambitions. In addition
to desiring cultural representation and recognition as Ethiopians in a country whose “national”
culture mostly reflects the cultures that emanate from the highlands (the Tigray and Amhara
regional states), interview participants complained that their region was especially deprived of
resources. A Somali-identifying high-level Prosperity Party official echoed these points during my
interview with him saying:
In Ethiopia, of all the electricity that is available, we are getting only 0.04%, it is less than
one percent. And population wise we are third [largest], geography wise we are number
one [size of the territory]. In terms of population, we are 3
rd
[most populous]. But the share
of electricity we get is less than 1% and the share of telecommunication is less than 5%.
What I’m talking about is the federally administered infrastructure. The share of road
network we get is less than 4%. These people [of Somali region], they are happy because
for the first time in 70 years we don’t have armed insurgency, the people are content now
because they have seen even worse. We want our share of the pie but it is not just that, we
want respect […] The federal government should reflect everyone and the best thing to do
is be neutral. […] One thing I don’t doubt, let me tell you, is that he [Abiy Ahmed] is
committed to transform Ethiopia into a very rich and prosperous country. And I am part
his party because I believe we will be one of the first beneficiaries. (Emphases added)

While I was only at Jijiga for four days, his complaints of economic inequity were not hard to see
in the built environment as most of the roads were unpaved, many locals did not have running
water nearby, were unemployed, and spent much of their time chewing Khat in the streets or at
Khat houses to pass their time. The Prosperity Party official went on to say, “Imagine, I am
privileged, in that even when I go to Addis I go to the VIP. But as a citizen I would like to explore
the city. Officially I have all the privileges that all my counterparts from other regions have and I
have many personal connections to different parts of the country” [from having studied in northern
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Ethiopia to having traveled within other regions]. However, despite having these privileges he
explained that he does not feel like he belongs when he goes to different regions of Ethiopia or
even Addis Ababa—the capital city, economic hub, and most diverse territory within Ethiopia. He
explained that while officially, and as a citizen, he has all the privileges, he does not get recognized
as an Ethiopian by other Ethiopians when he goes outside of Somali region. This sentiment seemed
similar to what other Somali Ethiopians expressed to me while I was in Jigjiga—that even if they
spoke Amharic,

their belonging was questioned, and they faced discrimination while attempting to
access jobs and other opportunities.
49
The Prosperity Party official expressed that when he goes
to Addis Ababa, “People look at me and say, “Oh, you speak Amharic!” They are surprised. When
it comes to this region, they typically know about the land but not the people. They have hopes for
the land, not the people, not the culture.” When I asked him what role Somali Ethiopians can play
to help with the issue of representation, “respect,” and inclusion he responded that people like
Mustafa Omar, the Somali Regional State President and the then Minister of Finance (federal
level), were doing a good job representing Somalis on the national level. More capable Somalis
like him needed to be given fair access to work and more capacity-building needed to take place
within the Somali region.
In another conversation, Omar, an Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) member and
head of Ogaden Youth and Student Union (OYSU), explained that he spent most of his life in

49
While Amharic is the second largest first language in Ethiopia after Oromiffa (Oromo), it is
Ethiopia’s most widely spoken language. Many Somalis I met couldn’t speak Amharic which
presented a problem for them even though Somali (along with Oromiffa/Oromigna,
Amharic/Amarigna, Tigrigna, and Afar) was officially recognized one of Ethiopia’s working
languages in 2019. The very limited use of Amharic in the Somali region likely means that Somali
Ethiopians, once they venture out of the Somali regional state, would have difficulty
communicating with and economically exchanging with over half of the Ethiopian population
which speaks Amharic as their first or second language.
178
Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa not only because he was pursuing his education but also
because of the ONLF’s adversarial relationship with the TPLF-EPRDF led to many ONLF leaders
needing to flee Ethiopia. After spending years organizing Somali Ethiopian youth from abroad
through the Ogaden Youth and Student Union (OYSU), Omar had recently moved back to Ethiopia
because Abiy Ahmed had invited political opposition groups like the ONLF
50
back to the country
if they agreed to lay down their arms and work with the government toward a more peaceful and
prosperous future. Omar pointed to his party pin and showed me the updated ONLF official logo,
explaining that without the kinds of repression ONLF experienced during TPLF rule, the party
could replace its fight with a gun with that of a pen.

Figure 16: First image is of the ONLF party emblem used to represent ONLF’s stance before it
reached a ceasefire agreement in August of 2018. The second image represents the ONLF’s non-
violent approach to working with the Ethiopian government to find a comprehensive and
negotiated agreement. Images captured from onlf.org.

For Omar, Prosperity Party and the political reforms that started in 2018 legitimized the
ONLF, unlike the TPLF which he had described as fighting against the ONLF and the Somali
people of Ogaden since 1993. Though Omar and all of the ONLF affiliated interview participants

50
ONLF and OLF were allowed back without having to answer to any crimes though many
Ethiopians were warry that such a move by the gov would result in resurgence of armed conflicts
179
were skeptical of the Ethiopian government’s political reform and the kind of political participation
the ONLF would be granted,
51
the changes being undertaken in Ethiopia meant that ONLF could
pivot from armed resistance and politics toward dialogic participation with the state and other
political parties. The ONLF could go from viewing secession and complete self-determination as
the only political solution for the Somali people of Ogaden to viewing participation within Ethiopia
(as Ethiopians) as a beneficial move for their people.
With these changes and signs of hope, Omar anticipated the return of Somali youth and
diaspora and hoped they would play active roles in shaping the future of Ethiopia and the Somali
regional state. He hoped that young Somali Ethiopians would pursue entrepreneurial projects and
help bolster the Somali region’s infrastructural needs rather than merely seek out government and
political posts.
52
For Omar and many of the Somalis I spoke to across the political spectrum, the
hopeful future they envisioned hinged on whether the upcoming elections would be “free and fair”
and whether Abiy Ahmed’s government kept its promise of protecting “all” Ethiopians’ freedoms
and rights. While they hoped that Ethiopia was headed toward a more democratic future—and thus
more political stability and greater human and economic investments throughout the horn of
Africa, Ethiopia, and the Somali region—there was a great deal of uncertainty regarding how long
this political moment of hope and stability would last.
53

51
Especially because the “new government” was made up of the previously ruling EPRDF
members sans TPLF
52
The issue being that 1) there are too many political groups/parties within Ethiopia and 2) most
educated Somalis seek out (and only know to seek out) government jobs rather than finding
“entrepreneurial” and tangible ways to help the Somali region progress.
53
Interviewees in Somali region were keen on telling me that the Somali regional state was “the
most peaceful” region in Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s instability was often blamed on the fighting between
Amhara, Oromo, and Tigrayan interests.
180
Omar expressed the possible significance of the changes taking place within Ethiopia by
explaining that the previous government of the Somali state was corrupt, not only because it was
a “puppet government” of the TPLF but because it was highly repressive, violent, and did not
represent the interests of the Somali people or the Somali region as a whole. In the national
imagination of the Somali I spoke to in Jijiga, the lives lost due to armed conflict, corrupt regional
leadership—most interviewees alluded to or directed criticized the rule of Abdi Mohamoud Omar
aka Abdi Ilay who was the Somali region’s president between 2010 and 2018 and head of the
state’s security apparatus between 2005 and 2010—and mass detention in Jail Ogaden (Jijiga
Central Prison) stood as reminders of their distinct national oppression. While Somali Ethiopians,
especially those who allied with the ONLF and its aims to realize “self-determination” for
Ogaden’s Somali population, were repressed by the Ethiopian state (because the ONLF’s
secessionist politics directly posed a threat to those at the helm of the Ethiopian state), this meant
that their experiences of repression came at the hands of the central government, ethnic (clientelist)
politicians, and other ethnic Somali officials who claimed to represent the interests of the Somali
region all while using their government positions to control the local populations, serve clan or
personal interests, and deny the people of the Somali regional state their formal rights to
democratic representation. As the Prosperity Party official had expressed to me “As a Somali, the
mainstream feeling in the Somali region is that, if there is anyone in Ethiopia who can legitimately
claim they are marginalized economically and socially, it is Somalis.” To explain how legitimate
this issue of Somali discrimination and representation is at the Ethiopian national level, Omar
relayed a story about how a Somali Ethiopian was recently denied a highly sought-after piloting
job for Ethiopian Airlines—not because he was not technically qualified for the position but
because the veracity of his claim to Ethiopian nationality and citizenship was questioned. Similar
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to the high-level Prosperity Party official’s reflections on how he is not genuinely perceived or
accepted as an Ethiopian, the core problematic Omar and the two other interviewees who brought
up the pilot’s story as an example of Somali Ethiopians’ marginalization was a question of their
national belonging and the access they are granted or denied as a consequence of that recognition,
or lack thereof.
While all interview participants expressed a desire to see a future where Somali Ethiopians
were politically, culturally, and economically integrated in ways that are equitable, I was perplexed
to hear several of them indicate that their ultimate dream was to see the Somali region secede from
the Ethiopian state. Even though all of the participants claimed to seek greater inclusion within
Ethiopian nationhood, development, and politics a competing desire for secession was echoed by
the ONLF and OYSU youth members I spoke to—despite the ONLF’s official rhetoric of tabling
secession in favor of pursuing the broader aims of country-level participation and national
prosperity. Mustafe, a young Ogaden Youth and Student Union (OYSU) member Worldwide
member and activist who described himself as an advocate for the Somali people of Ethiopia
54

expressed his doubts about the political transformation in Ethiopia and told me that once the
Somali region was developed enough to sustain itself, he thought it should form its own country.
He explained that the primary “vision” of OYSU Worldwide and its participants was to realize the
“freedom” and “development of Somali region.” Development meant to him bringing better
quality education, “developing the minds” of Somali people, and meeting the region’s basic needs
like that of health care, electricity, potable water, and sanitation. For him, neither the previous
regime of TPLF-EPRDF (with Abdi Ilay as Somali region’s president) or the current regime of

54
As of May 2022, the OYSU Worldwide Twitter bio reads “actively advocating on the plight of
the Somali people in the Ethiopian-Occupied Ogaden region”
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Abiy Ahmed (Prosperity Party) which replaced Abdi Ilay with Mustafa Muhumed Omar in 2018,
were developing the region.
55
In fact, highly skeptical, he argued that “the corruption is the same”
between Ilay and Omar, “the only difference is Omar is not killing people” the way Ilay and the
“TPLF” were. As we continued to discuss the issues of underdevelopment faced by the Somali
region, he elaborated why he thought development was not reaching the Somali region more
broadly and the Ogaden territory more specifically:
Oromo people have development coming from central government. But still, the people of
this country,
56
the Somali regional state have not seen development. Abiy, the Prime
Minister of Ethiopia, and he only develop Oromo, Amhara, Debub [sic], Afar,
Benishangul, Gambela, Welayta [sic], Harar, and Tigray.
57
He only prime minister of 8
country [8 of the 9 total regional states]. Because of this, people living in biggest region
[referring to Somali region’s land mass], the county of oil and mineral [Somali region’s
natural resources], is not developed. I have seen picture of Tigray country, Mekelle. I have
seen pictures of Harar country.
58
[…] The people living in this Ogaden region have not
seen development and are not accepted as Ethiopian. No development, the reason is
[Ethiopia and Ethiopians] not accepting I am Ethiopian. This region [Ogaden and Somali
more broadly] only came to this county [Ethiopia] because of force and war. It is symptom
of colony. Before Ethiopia come, we are Ogaden. But Oromia people and Amharic
[Amhara] people they are Ethiopia.

While the OYSU member and advocate desired for development of the Somali regional state, and
especially of the Ogaden, he also recognized Ethiopia’s national development efforts were an
affirmation or disaffirmation of nationhood. Though there are many ethno-nationalists and

55
The non-ONLF affiliated interviewees, especially the high-level Prosperity Party member,
supported Mustafa Omar though they were also critical of central and regional leadership during
TPLF-EPRDF “era”
56
He often used country and region interchangeably and used county to demarcate Ogaden and
more broadly the Somali regional state of Ethiopia
57
While Welayta (zone in SNNP region) and Harar (city) are not regional states he lists them as
such. He also calls SNNP “Debub” which is a general term used to differentiate between the
northern regions (often referring to just Amhara and Tigray) and southern regions of Ethiopia.
58
Though a majority of those I interviewed in Jigjiga had never ventured to Ethiopian regions
outside of Somali regional state (aside for nearby areas like Oromia), they imagined that places
like Tigray and Amhara were more prosperous and more developed than Somali.

183
secessionists within Oromia also—the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) has allied with the ONLF
to meet both nations’ respective goals for attaining freedom and self-determination—he believed
that more development had reached Oromia because they were included in the category of
Ethiopian nationhood along with the other regional territories he listed. He sums up the
incorporation of the Somali regional state, particularly Ogaden, into the Ethiopian state as one that
is rooted in violence and the colonial subjugation of the Ogaden people. Despite this, he recognized
that to now fight for secession would be too costly for the already underdeveloped Somali regional
state. Thus, national participation as means to economic development was necessary. Not only
because development provides the necessary conditions for the people of the Somali regional sate
to weather the possible costs associated with future secession but could also foster a viable
economy post-independence—helping the Ogaden Somali create a new country that is not reliant
on or at risk of crumbling under the larger states of Ethiopia and Somalia. A future independent
state meant that ethnic Somali people could self-actualize and not be “second-class” citizens within
a country where their dominant religion (Islam), their culture, language, and economic concerns
are not prioritized.
Though they uphold competing views regarding nationhood and federalism, all of those I
spoke to during my fieldwork, including Ethiopian and ethnic nationalists, recognized the
centrality of the “nations and nationalities” question to Ethiopia’s failure at addressing issues
underdevelopment and poverty at the country and regional levels. Proponents of both perspectives
on nationhood recognize that the practice of “national” development and progress rely on
simultaneously answering the question of how Ethiopia can solve competing demands from
Ethiopian nationalist and ethno-nationalists—their competing claims to national difference and
belonging, rights to self-administration vs. central governance, and different perceptions on what
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constitutes equitable distribution of resources. Said differently, these are the “deep rooted”
problems and contradictions which the Destiny Ethiopia panel alluded to but swept over in its
attempt to create scenarios of future possibilities like that of “Dawn.” While interviewees agreed
that Ethiopia was poor, their discussion of poverty often presented a negotiation between regional,
ethnic, and country-level solutions to poverty alleviation. At times, some argued their people and
region were experiencing disproportionate levels of poverty and that the state needed to equalize
disparities between/among different ethnic groups. This often relied on the use of population
statistics which were exaggerated or deployed comparatively to say that their region needed more
resources because they comprised a greater portion of the Ethiopian citizenry. Other times, the
region’s economic productivity, natural resources and contributions, and territorial size were used
to justify claims to why that region deserved greater resources, development, and political
representation than other regions.
Despite the certitude with which the ideological, political, and economic proponents of
ethnic federalism and ethnic disaggregation present ethnicity and ethnic nationalism as the bedrock
for “their” people's liberatory struggles, the reductive politics and instrumentalization of ethnic
and national identity limits the possibility of any future beyond violence and clientelist ethnic
politics within Ethiopia. I argue that if we base our consideration of Ethiopia's ethnic politics on
the material realities of Ethiopia's political conflicts and what Ethiopians say ethnic federalism and
essentialist politics cannot reasonably be said to eliminate inequality—despite the moral and
primordial claims made by proponents of ethnic nationalism and nationalist projects of liberation.
Instead, the primary function of ethnic reductivism is the (re)distribution of inequality among and
between groups of people based on the codification and construction of distinct forms of ethnic
and national belonging. The reductive discourse of “national oppression” (which we saw in the
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previous chapter through the TPLF's early party documents) obscures the fluidity and contextual
variability of ethnocultural and national identity. While doing this, ethnic reductivism also
ideologically conceals issues fundamentally rooted in class and material inequality within
discourses and practices that territorialize and essentialize ethnic differences.
In other words, I maintain that ethnic and nationalist reductivist frameworks and political
formations function similarly to what Omi and Winant call racist racial formation projects and
what Barbara and Karen Fields (2006) call racecraft. In Ethiopian political discourse, categories
of difference like "nations, nationalities, and peoples," and more specifically ethnic groups, are
positioned as the points of departure and limits for forging political projects, solidarities, and
solutions that address issues of cultural, political, and economic inequality. The territorialization,
institutionalization, and explanatory power attributed to ethnicity—the use of ethnicity to explain
most of Ethiopia's social ills and material inequalities—wedges Ethiopians into a political and
ideological context that obscures how ethnically determined modalities of belonging and political
participation are constructed and reified in ways that foster inequity and zero-sum political
struggles. Thus, conditions of class and material inequity are cloaked in a politics of national self-
determination and rights in ways that limit the possibility for cross-cultural and class-based
coalitional projects because these obstructive ideologies place the group-based interests of
essentially determined (ethnonational) groups above all else even when ethnic elites and clientelist
(often speaking on behalf of an imagined nation) benefit from and maintain within-group material
and political inequities.
Nationally reductive political programs and discourses either primarily attribute Ethiopia’s
condition of class exploitation and inequality to: (a) cultural and political oppression of supposedly
distinct "nations, nationalities, and peoples" (taking place within Ethiopia) or to (b) externally
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determined and globally racializing projects of Westernization and extractivist economic relations.
While the first group tended to explain to me that Ethiopia’s problems can only be solved through
ethnic federalism and the constitutional guarantee of group-based rights for Ethiopia’s nations, the
second tended to view Ethiopia as nation-state and explained that most of Ethiopia’s national
problems are primarily due its conditions of poverty, the institutionalization of ethnic politics, and
global capitalism (which they often believed could be challenged through pan-African, Black, and
Ethiopian national solidarity). I offer this quick synopsis of findings to explain how class interests
are tied to national interests in ways that establish national boundaries but also conceal inequalities
taking place within and through categories of identification like nation or ethnic group. A
confounding myth of essentializing nationalist projects is that national imagination and organizing
can be used to lead to egalitarian change without first dealing with the ways in which inequities
are concealed and appear within the nation itself or without the commitment to participatory
politics rooted in broad-based solidarities that center the interests of working-class people.
Proponents of ethnic federalism, reinforce ethnic and ethnonational identification as the
frameworks through which Ethiopia’s citizens should make collective demands for the distribution
of power and economic resources to their region and its correspondingly distinct ethnic/national
community. In addition to the instrumentalization of ethnicity for material and economic
competition, ethnicity and nation become the strategic means through which groups compete for
cultural and psychological acceptance and even dominance over other groups. This means that
Ethiopia’s ethnic federal arrangement and nationalist contestations are not only deployed to
preserve the cultural diversity that exists within Ethiopia but as a tool to exclude, assimilate, or
defer the rights of people who are deemed to be ethnic minorities, categorized as settlers, or
otherwise strategically marginalized after through Ethiopia’s 1991 adoption of an ethnic federal
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system. A political system that incentivizes people to strategically expand and restrict the
boundaries that constitute group membership in order to collectively advance demands as members
of distinct ethnonational groups, pursue ethnonational visions for the future, and determinately
perceive Ethiopia as a container of distinct peoples who possess to distinct ethnolinguistic
attributes, myths, and grievances—ultimately de-emphasizing the shared histories, interests,
common cultures of the people who inhabit Ethiopia in order to stall the realization of the Ethiopian
nation-state which is perceived as inherently assimilationist.
Participants who held ethnonational views bolstered their support for ethnic federalism by
claiming to belong to a group that has a distinct, primordial, or essential national character; by
discursively emphasizing and sometimes inflating their ethnic groups’ population size and, thus,
political significance; indiscriminately claiming to speak on behalf of other “oppressed nations”
by constructing and “us” vs. “them” stance, and imagining their nation as one that has been
uniquely oppressed by the Ethiopian state and its supporters. These strategies allow proponents of
ethnic nationalism to legitimate their ownership of territories designated to them under Ethiopia’s
ethnic federalism, help them authenticate their claims over other (usually bordering) territories,
and ultimately justify their marginalization and exclusion of individuals deemed to be “outsiders”
or “settlers” from being able to claim land and political representation. In addition to being
instrumentalized for economic ends, these practices of ethnic distinction are used by participants
to restore or craft perceptions of their ethnic groups’ prestige and national significance. Demands
for greater representation, inclusion, “respect,” and cultural dominance challenge the existing
cultural hegemony within Ethiopia and legitimate the discrimination of minoritized groups.
In addition to these strategies for boundary-making, those who imagined themselves as part
of a distinct ethnic category sometimes erased their diverse ethnocultural heritage to construct
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single-category identities and distance themselves from groups they perceived as ideological and
political competitors. Sometimes they drew direct links to particular historical figures, events,
grievances, and cultural and religious practices—often creating national myths—to emphasize
their belonging to a primordial nation while actively distancing themselves from events and figures
(even those who shared their ethnocultural backgrounds) they perceived as antagonists to their
national interest. These strategies helped ethnonationalists make claims to single-category ethnic
identities, make sweeping claims to “indigenous” territories, and thus make collective demands
for greater political and cultural representation within Ethiopia. Often, this practice of identity
construction relied on strategically diminishing the cultural commonality among Ethiopia's various
peoples, refusing to acknowledge culpability in Ethiopia's state-formation, creating binary
victim/oppressor narratives, and a denial of how Ethiopia's politics have similarly harmed other
groups who are considered to be members of “oppressor” nations.
On the other hand, chapter four considers how Ethiopian nationalists respond to Ethiopia's
ethnic federal arrangement and its institutionalized incentivization of a politics rooted in ethnic
entrepreneurship and clientelism rather than citizenship and common concerns like poverty.
Unlike ethnonationalists, Ethiopian nationalists tended to emphasize the commonalities among
ethnic groups and argued for the de-ethnicization of Ethiopian politics to collectively alleviate
Ethiopia's poverty. While proponents of ethnic nationalism saw Ethiopia's ethnic federal
arrangement as a necessary condition for Ethiopia's survival or sought to secede their state from
Ethiopia altogether, Ethiopian nationalists often believed it was necessary to redraw the state's
boundaries and de-ethnicize political participation. Rather than seeing ethnic federalism as a
solution to cultural difference, they argued that corrupt politicians were using it to maintain power
as part of a "divide and rule tactic." While most Ethiopian nationalists recognized Ethiopians'
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legitimate grievances regarding cultural and linguistic representation, they often emphasized the
existence (and importance) of fostering formulations of national belonging rooted outside of ethnic
differences. For some, the inability to participate in Ethiopia's politics without denying aspects of
their fluid/complex heritage led them to refuse altogether identification with ethnic categories or
Ethiopia's ethnic politics, which they saw as inherently divisive. In other words, while some
ethnonationalists constructed identities to fit into distinct ethnic categories and saw ethnic political
participation as collectively beneficial to their nations, some pan-Ethiopian nationalists either
refused to identify with ethnic categories or diminished the social value of ethnic difference as a
framework for citizenship and participation—preferring instead to focus on the "common social
fabric" and shared conditions of Ethiopians. However, this attempt at imagining an open or
expansive relationship with the nation was contested by proponents of ethnonationalism, who
pointed out that there were indeed cultural biases within Ethiopia that needed to be addressed or
could not be addressed. In other words, Ethiopian nationalists' focus on commonality does not
address the specific grievances of different ethnonational groups who are underrepresented within
Ethiopian political and cultural formations and/or have different views about the Ethiopian state
and its future.

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Chapter Five
Digital Diaspora: digital practices & nationalist imagining

Digitally mediated communication and political engagement within today’s technological
landscape has not only re-shaped how people spread information and voice their views but also
changed the nature of “national” discourse by enabling diasporic communities, youth, people in
politically repressive contexts, and those otherwise disenfranchised to having greater access and
influence over national discourse. Using digital ethnographic observations and information I
garnered through semi-structured interviews I use this chapter to examine how young diaspora
from Ethiopia use social media to engage in national politics and ultimately affect Ethiopia’s
ethnic, national, and political formation. For my analysis, I provide a close reading of a semi-
structured interview and a case study of a popular Instagram account called @shadesofinjera which
played a pivotal role in shaping the early stages of youth-led political and national discourses after
the assassination Hachalu Hundessa, and ethnic Oromo singer who was assassinated in Addis
Ababa on June 29
th
of 2020. In addition to this analysis, I briefly discuss the emergence of diaspora
and youth-led online Instagram accounts and activism campaigns between June 29, 2020, and July
2021, to describe the tactics I observed diaspora youth use to influence mainstream and
international media narratives about the Ethiopian state, its national contestations, as well as debate
amongst themselves about national identity, politics, history, and the possible future trajectories
that lie ahead for Ethiopia.
On top of transmitting information, I find that the affordances and rituals of online
participation allow diaspora youth to form competing and differentiated attachments to Ethiopia
and their respective ethnonational identities. Their digitally constructed and mediated attachments,
as well as imaginaries of conflict and nationhood, come to inform the interpretive frameworks they
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use to understand Ethiopia’s contemporary national politics and ultimately help inform their hopes
for the future continuation, reformation, or fragmentation of the Ethiopian state. In addition to
showcasing instantiations of national identification in virtual spaces, I use this chapter to consider
how digital media affordances—particularly visual iconographies and hashtags—are used to give
shape to mediatized interactions, national imaginaries, and cross-platform engagements. Through
this process, I consider how diaspora youth’s engagements alter and bypass the limitations and
intended uses of platforms like Instagram and well as the nationalist discourses sanctioned by
authoritarian states like Ethiopia. Said differently, I use this chapter to show how diaspora
Ethiopians use the affordances of social media to form imagined communities, legitimize different
struggles over nationhood, power, and violence, and force the Ethiopian state to respond to the
demands of contemporary conditions like diasporification and digitally mediated national politics.
National Imaginaries and Techno-liberation
Research on communication technologies, digital cultures, and civic engagement has
pointed to the transformative and liberatory possibilities that come with technological advances in
mobile telephony and increased internet access because these technologies have the capacity to
facilitate change in the social, economic, and political conditions of those living in politically
repressive and undeveloped contexts (Manacorda & Tesei, 2020). Political landscapes and
traditional approaches to mobilization have been altered by the emergence of digitally networked
public spheres, the spread of new media technologies, and the affordances of digital media. The
rise of cyber optimism and digital utopianism in the 1990s pointed to the transformative potential
of communication technologies not only on socio-political and economic fronts but also in the
potential decentralization and unbounding of states as well as the embodied self where the ideas
was that the individual “would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines, explore its
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authentic interests, and find others with whom it might achieve communion” (Turner 2006, p. 1).
However, the technologically deterministic perspectives that emerged during the 1990s’ ‘digital
divide’ rhetoric resulted in the treatment of information communication technologies (ICTs) as
“neutral tools that can optimally contribute to a set of pre-defined indicators, including supporting
economic growth, enlarging the educated population, or democratizing institutions” (Gagliardone,
2016, 4). Some early works and perspectives regarding the introduction of ICTs and internet use
within developing countries have been critiqued for taking technologically deterministic and
utopianist approaches toward development, democratization, and social change.
Aware of the problems that come with techno-determinism, or perspectives that perceive
new technologies as neutral tools that drive socio-political and economic change, more recent
scholarship have interrogated how ICTs are appropriated and adapted by different cultures,
communities and individuals in nuanced ways and looked at how local political economies and
conditions affect the adoption and adaptation of ICTs (Stremlau, 2018; Dunbar-Hester, 2016;
Gagliardone 2016; Gagliardone & Pohjonen 2016; Bernal, 2014). Studying some of the earliest
social media protests that garnered international recognition, scholars have considered how
Egyptians and Tunisians assembled to promote social change by looking at what is commonly
referred to as the Arab Spring or “Facebook revolutions” of 2011 (Ngidi et al., 2016; Chaudhry,
2014). Adding to this, Scholars like Ethan Zuckerman (2015) have complicated our understanding
of how civic populations take up creative modes of participation in highly censored media and
political landscapes. Zuckerman, through analyses of civic engagement in the highly censored
mediascapes like China, proposes that the commercial platforms associated with Web 2.0, created
to draw in advertising money, allow activist groups and citizens of authoritarian states to bypass
some aspects of state-censorship. Henry Jenkins and those contributing in By Any Media Necessary
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show the ways in which today’s youth use new mechanisms and modes of civic participation to
assert their voice and promote political change outside of established political institutions (2016).
In Nation as Network (2014), Victoria Bernal considers how the digitally networked citizenship of
Eritreans in the diaspora transcends the formal boundaries of the nation-state and civic
participation by interrogating how conditions of diasporification, national politics, and new
communication technologies can give rise to the emergence of networked nations. In varying ways,
works like these show that while the introduction of new media technologies into developing
contexts can help facilitate civic engagement in unprecedented ways, civic participation and social
change are inextricably tied to local conditions, cultures, and political economies.
Alongside the growing body of work looking at the affordances of digital media for
constructive and bottom-up formations of participatory politics, media scholars and practitioners
have also raised concerns regarding the use of digital media for mis- and disinformation,
polarization, hate speech and “dark participation” (de Vreese, 2021; Workneh, 2019; Quandt,
2018). For instance, in 2021, Facebook whistleblower Fances Haugen confirmed during a Senate
hearing that Facebooks’ “engagement-based ranking” was fueling ethnic conflict in Ethiopia. In
other words, the structures and mechanisms for participation on Facebook—designed to encourage
prolonged engagement on the platform—not only produce the condition for phenomena like
“slacktivism” and “clicktivism” but also the condition for violent speech and identity-based
(nationalist) politics.
Adding to this, scholars focused on media policy in repressive African state contexts like
Ethiopia have studied the growing use of network shutdowns as a means for social control and
censorship as well as considered the repercussions of using network shutdowns to repress dissent
(Marchant & Stremlau, 2020; Rydzak et al., 2020). Repressive governments across Africa have
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criminalized certain uses of social media (e.g., Ethiopia), implemented social media taxes (e.g.,
Uganda), and deploying network shutdowns to limit the uses of digital media and maintain social
control. In the context of Ethiopia, researchers have looked at how the technopolitical state has not
only championed the use of ICTs to reach its developmental aspirations but has also sought to
strategically control uses of technology in order to maintain power (Gagliardone, 2006). Over the
years, the state has arrested digital media activists and journalists, blocked websites, employed
surveillance technologies, passed anti-hate speech legislation, and even used internet trolls to limit
local and diasporic deployments of digital media to contest its power (Chala, 2019; Workneh,
2019; Gagliardone & Pohjonen 2016). The state, which has a monopoly over telecommunications
in Ethiopia—through its state-owned service provider Ethio telecom—has responded to popular
social media challenges through the deployment of network shutdowns, surveillance, and counter-
protests. In response, Ethiopian social media users have deployed digital media affordances to
engage in protest, amplify nationalist causes, and spread information (Pohjonen 2022; Wilmot,
2021; Workneh, 2021)
In order to counteract diaspora that challenge the legitimacy of the Ethiopian state and
ruling regime—diaspora which are importantly outside of the state’s reach, both in regard to the
effects of network shutdowns and the state’s punitive measures—the government responds to their
online engagements and criticism by disseminating counter-narratives on social media platforms
and attempting to spread positive images of the state and Ethiopia as a whole. Tactics used range
from spreading pro-government news, offering fact-checking initiatives, spreading disinformation,
and calling on pro-government Ethiopians and Ethiopian nationalists to collectively mobilize
online. Thus, the government counters negative images of itself and the state by calling on
“patriotic” Ethiopians to fact-check and spread positive counter-narrative campaigns like
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#RisingEthiopia, #UnityforEthiopia, and #EthiopiaPrevails. The government uses these
information campaigns and image management strategies are used to justify the state’s violence
against antagonistic forces like opposition politicians, armed opposition groups, and civilians
which threaten the government’s power and integrity of the state.
During the timeframe of this study in 2020, the Ethiopian government passed a law
targeting hate speech and disinformation on social media with the aim of restricting Ethiopian
(local and diasporic) citizens’ use of digital media for dissent. While the overall stated aim of the
“Hate Speech and Disinformation Prevention and Suppression Proclamation” is to curtail the
dissemination of hate speech and disinformation—and in the process reduce the recurrence of
digitally mediated incitements of ethnically motivated attacks against civilians and violent protests
throughout Ethiopia—the law allows for the state to punish individuals with “simple
imprisonment” for two to five years or with a fine of 100,000 birr
59
for their social media
engagement (Federal Negarit Gazette, 12343). Critics of the law have argued that the
proclamation, while it aims to reduce the harmful effects of hate speech and disinformation, may
actually “do little to address these societal problems, instead serving to restrict freedom of
expression, curtail access to information, stifle the press, and silence dissenting voices” by making
“online hate speech an easy scapegoat for violence that may have deeper causes” (Taye, 2020).
Rather than remedying the problem of hate speech which one observer argues is a “matter of
politics and power” within Ethiopia, the legislation obscures the root causes of Ethiopia’s growing
ethnic violence and has “substantive, procedural, institutional, and practical shortcomings” which
will lead to human rights violations and overall poor implementation (Abraha, 2019).

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A hefty fee which amounts to about 2,500 USD at the time of the proclamations passing
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While the strategies used by the state aim to thwart both anti-government and violent
mobilization, this chapter shows, along with works like Rydzak et al. (2020) and Gagliardone et
al. (2019) that repressive actions like shutdowns may actually galvanize engagement and creative
modes of participation that circumvent the state’s efforts to curtail both peaceful and violent online
mobilization. In other words, while the state has attempted to curtail digital civic engagement, its
efforts prompt civic and national participation from outside the confines of the state’s control—
especially among diaspora communities who are motivated to speak on behalf of those affected in
the homeland. Even though there is a small body of work that looks at the role technology and
digital media play in facilitating local and diasporic Ethiopian political engagement (Skjerdal and
Gebru, 2020; Workneh, 2019 and 2021; Gagliardone and Pohjonen, 2016; Gagliardone, 2016),
little research has been done to study the negotiations and tactics used by diaspora Ethiopian youth
to deploy digital media in response to Ethiopian national politics. In the following sections, I add
to the already existing discourse by looking at how diaspora youth use digital media to engage in
homeland politics, challenge the Ethiopian state and/or opposing political interests, and mobilize
international efforts on behalf of their immediate political interests and national aspirations for the
future of the country.
Methodological Considerations. In the process of debating about and organizing against
politically motivated ethnic conflict, state suppression, and war in Ethiopia, diaspora youth used
digital media to disseminate messages and compete with one another’s narratives about the
unfolding conflicts, Ethiopian history, nationalism(s), and futurity. Before the series of events that
followed the assassination of Hachalu Hundessa on June 29
th
of 2020, a critical political rupture
that compelled this chapter, diaspora from Ethiopia primarily used Facebook, WhatsApp, and
Twitter to mobilize and engage in Ethiopia-related political discourses. In the aftermath of
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Hachalu’s death, young diaspora began to also more frequently deploy platforms like Instagram,
Twitter, Clubhouse, TikTok, Reddit and Telegram to hold conversations, disseminate information,
and organize on behalf of their national interests.
Between June 29
th
of 2020 and July 2021, I conducted ethnographic analysis of diasporic
Ethiopian youth’s political participation and discourses on Instagram. For this chapter, I focus on
@shadesofinjera, an Instagram account, because I witnessed diaspora youth who had not
previously used Instagram (or the page) for political discourse begin to deploy the account for their
ethnic and national political discourses and digital activism after the politically motivated
assassination of Hachalu Hundessa. Adding to this, @shadesofinjera was one of the most popular
accounts used and followed by diaspora youth in 2020. Before the series of political conflicts that
began to unfold in the summer of 2020, Instagram and accounts like @shadesofinjera were
primarily used by diaspora youth for cultural exchange, education, networking, and comedic relief.
Within the timeframe of this study, Ethiopia experienced political rupture where already
existing social media campaigns like #OromoProtests remerged in full force on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram and newly conceived social media campaigns like #AmharaGenocide and
#TigrayGenocide, emerged across platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and
Clubhouse. A number of notable activism, awareness, and educational pages like @jp4ethiopia
(Justice and Peace for Ethiopia), @amhara_awareness (Amhara Awareness), @stateofthehorn, and
later on @omnatigray (Omna Tigray) also materialized on Instagram to bring attention to conflicts
in Ethiopia. While some of the pages like @jp4ethiopia, @ShadesofInjera, and @stateofthehorn
aimed to provide information and represent Ethiopians across ethnic, regional, and religious lines,
many others like @oromoprotests, @amhara_awareness, and @omnatigray were created to speak
on behalf of specific ethnic groups’ grievances and interests. Though this chapter focuses on
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@shadesofinjera, contextualization and discussion I present below draw on observations of these
different pages, their coinciding campaigns, conversations with social media users, and on
interviews with social media users.
Digital Media and Nationalist Politics
On Monday June 29
th
of 2020 my Twitter and Instagram feeds suddenly became populated
with posts about the murder of Hachalu Hundessa, an ethnically Oromo singer who garnered fame
for his music during Ethiopia’s 2015-2018 anti-government protests. With mounting strains
between Abiy-Ahmed’s sitting Prosperity Party government, Oromo nationalists’ forces like the
Oromo Liberation Front
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, and the TPLF, the death of Hachalu quickly became a symbolic and
political battleground over Ethiopia’s national and ethnopolitical configuration.
Expressing shock, sadness, and fear, social media users—especially those who identified
as Oromo—not only mourned Hachalu’s death and remembered his music as the soundtrack to the
Oromo experience and protests but also drew on speculative evidence to make conclusions about
the cause of the assassination. While some reasoned that Egypt was inciting ethnic conflict in
Ethiopia to undermine Ethiopia’s plans to begin filling the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
(GERD), the most widespread conclusion implied that Hachalu’s death was an ethnically
motivated (anti-Oromo) political assassination (Allo, 2020). Mostly Oromo-identifying adherents
of the later view suggested his assassination was orchestrated by either the Ethiopian government,
Ethiopian nationalists, or more derogatorily neftegna—a term they used to single out Amhara and
other “Amharanized” Ethiopian nationalists as settlers and the “enemies” of the Oromo nation and
its collective interests. Social media users supporting this view, particularly Oromo Ethiopians,
argued that the singer was targeted for making politically critical remarks against the government

60
Oromo Liberation Front and the Oromo Liberation Army are also known as WBO/ABO
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and “Amhara” leaders like King Menlik II on Oromia Media Network (OMN) just a few days
before. Pointing to Hachalu’s last interview on Oromia Media Network (OMN, 2020), a network
established in Minnesota by the contentious Oromo opposition politician named Jawar
Mohammed, social media users claimed that Hachalu was at risk of attack because he not only
criticized and joked about Emperor Menelik II but because he had previously been vocal about
having received death threats. In other words, they reasoned that he was targeted for being a voice
for the Oromo nations and popular opponent of the Ethiopian state.
However, a more complete version of the interview (EBC, 2020) later released by the
Ethiopian government to counter this narrative showed unaired footage where Hachalu indicated
that he feared for his life not because of Abiy Ahmed’s government or neftegnas/neo-neftegnas
but because his refusal to participate (Chala, 2020) in Oromo ethno-nationalist politics had earned
him death threats from extremist groups like the Oromo Liberation Front Shane - Group (OLF-
SG). Adding to this, Hachalu’s discussion of his political views, hopes, and identification with
Ethiopia revealed a more nuanced take than advanced by ethnonationalists. Hachalu not only
professed supporting non-violent political participation in Ethiopia but blamed both the state and
opposition leaders for fueling divisive and violent political engagement.
Within hours of the singer’s death, Oromo politicians and activists like Jawar Mohammed
were calling for the burial of Hachalu’s body in Finnfinne (Addis Ababa) rather than in Hachalu’s
hometown of Ambo—where the government stated Hachalu’s family wanted the burial. OMN
televised and streamed a video of Hachalu’s body being transferred to Ambo. Crowds of young
Oromo-identifying protesters in Addis Ababa, often called Qeerroo/Qarree—meaning unmarried
young men/women or youth in Afaan Oromoo—attended the OMN televised event and gave
impassioned speeches about Hachalu’s death and the grievances of the Oromo people. In these
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speeches, protesters called for the unity of Oromo people, the dismantling of Emperor Menelik
II’s statue in Addis Ababa, the burial of Hachalu’s body in place of the statue, and even asserted
that it was time to get rid of the neftegnas.
The symbolic and political maneuvers deployed by activists and politicians are significant
for a number of reasons. First, by referring to Addis Ababa as Finfinnee, they were claiming
Oromo cultural and territorial ownership of Addis Ababa—a city inhabited by Ethiopians that have
Amhara, mixed, and other ethnic backgrounds though the territory is surrounded by Oromia. While
the city serves as the joint-administrative center for both Ethiopia and the Oromia regional state,
the language spoken most often within the city is Amharic and many of Addis Ababa’s residents
tend to favor the de-ethnicization of Ethiopian politics (often identifying as Addis Ababans or
Ethiopians). Some Oromo nationalists believe that because Addis Ababa was founded in what is
now the regional state of Oromia, the culture and administration of Addis Ababa needs to become
more Oromo.
Alongside coinciding social media discourses, Oromia Media Network’s televised
broadcast worked to immediately connect the unknown events surrounding Hachalu’s death to a
particular historical and political worldview. For instance, by calling for the unity of Oromo
people, the murder of the singer became a unifying call that further legitimized Oromo identity as
one that is uniquely separate and oppressed from other Ethiopians. By calling for the dismantling
of Emperor Menelik II’s statue, protesters on social media and on OMN attached the death of
Hachalu to a historical set of grievances and animosities–namely, animosities against Amhara
Ethiopians by projecting contemporary conceptions of Amhara identity onto Menelik II. By
claiming that Hachalu’s body needed to be buried in Addis Ababa, in place of Menelik II’s statue,
the protesters claimed that Oromos, even a singer who came from Ambo, had greater claims of
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indigeneity, and thus more rights to Addis Ababa than other Ethiopians who are imagined as
settlers. And finally, by claiming that it was time to get rid of neftegnas, protesters were able to
attach past grievances onto current day Amhara and other non-Oromo people living within
Oromia—erasing non-Oromo’s indigeneity to the region as well as positioning ethnic minorities
in Oromia as settlers that had directly benefited from the oppression Oromos.
Along with Qeerroo/Qarree protesters, Jawar Mohammed and his security team intercepted
the transport of Hachalu’s body to Ambo and forced its return to the Addis Ababa. Once back in
Addis Ababa, officials reported that a confrontation over Hachalu’s body had ensued between
opposition politicians, namely Jawar, and government officials. As a result, an Oromia special
force member guarding Hachalu’s body was reportedly killed by a member of Jawar’s personal
security detail. According to reports, Jawar and his team had attempted to topple the government
by instrumentalizing the singer’s death. The federal government used this reported incident to
respond to the conflict by arresting political opposition leaders and accusing Oromo protestors and
ethno-nationalists of instigating violence through media platforms like Facebook and OMN.
Soon after Hachalu’s death, a number of violent incidents broke out within the capital city
of Addis Ababa and in the surrounding regional state of Oromia. As hate speech and
misinformation against politically minoritized groups in Oromia like the Amhara spread
throughout Ethiopia and the diaspora, the government quickly implemented a country-wide
network shutdown to gain control over the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and violent
protests. Even though media reports gave inconsistent figures and protesters sometimes
exaggerated figures, reports indicated that hundreds of civilians were killed because of
government-led extrajudicial killings, protesters, and armed groups’ targeted attacks against
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minority ethnic groups in Oromia. Armed groups and protesters
61
targeted and killed ethnically
Amhara Ethiopians, Orthodox Christians, other ethnic minorities living in Oromia, as well as the
Oromo Ethiopians who tried to protect their non-Oromo neighbors. With the burning down of non-
Oromo owned businesses and homes, many non-Oromos living in Oromia were displaced and
forced to flee. The state responded to the growing unrest and violence by extrajudicially killing
Oromo protestors and arresting thousands more—events which further stimulated Oromo
perceptions that the Ethiopian state was against them and their national interests. Those arrested
included controversial Oromo opposition leaders like Jawar Mohammed, one of the founding
leaders of Oromia Media Network and the Oromo Qeerroo (youth) anti-government movement,
as well as non-Oromo opposition politicians and journalists like Eskinder Nega of the Balderas for
True Democracy Party.
As events unfolded, some international media reported that while the Nobel Peace Prize
winning and ethically Oromo prime minister has been commended for his initial efforts to
democratize the country, his decision to implement a shutdown was undemocratic and repressive.
His actions seemed to echo previous Ethiopian government leaders’ use of network shutdowns –
most notably during the 2016 protests when the government clamped down on protesters through
a state of emergency decree and imposition of a nine-month-long internet shutdown. However,
criticisms against Abiy Ahmed failed to account for how the technological affordances of the
internet, which enable political participation in repressive contexts, can also be harnessed to incite
violence and spread disinformation. While the government was controlling media and killing

61
This point is contested by some Oromo-identifying critics of the government as they believe that
the Ethiopian government staged the killing of ethnic and religious minorities to foment instability
and lay blame on Oromo protests and/or the Oromo Liberation Front/Army. However, available
witness testimony and evidence points to the involvement of the Oromo Liberation Army,
protesters, and regional police.
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protesters, protesters—including those on social media—were justifying the murder and forceful
displacement of minoritized civilians, especially Orthodox Christians and ethnic Amhara, that
lived in the regional state of Oromia.
Though the internet shutdown left locals without internet access and lent the Ethiopian
government to criticism, it positioned diaspora Ethiopians at the helm of efforts to shape the
narrative for Western and international audiences. During Ethiopia’s over two-week-long
complete internet blackout, young diaspora Ethiopians seized the internet’s capacity to facilitate
discourse and on-the-ground protests within places like North America, the United Kingdom, and
Germany. News of the government’s repressive actions against protester and the growing death
toll of ethnic minorities galvanized diaspora Ethiopians to respond to the violence by using social
media. They used social media to launch and bring attention to competing information campaigns,
petitions, protests, and fundraising campaigns. At times, social media users appealed to Western
and international support by influencing politicians, organizations, and media reports by authoring
opinion pieces (commentaries) and news articles as well as speaking on behalf of those living in
Ethiopia. Through this process, young diaspora Ethiopians quickly deployed platforms like
Instagram and Twitter to not only understand the events surrounding Hachalu’s death, but also
spread awareness, influence international perceptions of the unfolding crisis, and engage in
Ethiopia’s ethnic and national contestations. During this time, I began trace the discourse on
Instagram pages dealing with the unfolding conflicts in Ethiopia. Focusing on one page,
@shadesofinjera, I discuss the dialogue, images, and narratives that showed up on
@shadesofinjera and draw on interview data from the page’s owner to showcase how some young
diaspora social media users perceived the development of nationalist discourse in 2020.

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Digital Engagement and Nationalism: @shadesofinjera as a case study
Even though the initial discourse on social media following Hachalu’s death was
dominated by the circulation of emotional outcries, confusion, speculative arguments, and
misinformation regarding the possible causes and perpetrators behind Hachalu’s assassination on
Twitter and Facebook, diaspora youth also made some attempts at cross-ethnic and national
dialogue by using platforms like Instagram. As reports of rising death counts at the hands of
government police, the Oromo Liberation Front, and Qeerroo protesters in Oromia came out of
Ethiopia, diaspora youth across ethnic and political spectrums attempted to engage in a number of
heartfelt discussions on Instagram. One page that became central to these early conversations on
Ethiopian politics and nationhood was @shadesofinjera, a popular Instagram account with over
65,000 followers focused on Ethiopia, Ethiopian cultures, and social issues. At the time of the
protests, @shadesofinjera was one of the most popular digitally mediated cultural hubs created
and used by diaspora Ethiopian and Eritrean youth.
Its name “@shadesofinjera,” broken down to its component parts “shades of injera,”
alludes to the staple food commonly consumed by most people in Ethiopia, injera. While injera
has origins in the northern region of Ethiopia, the diversity of the shades it comes in and the
diversity of stews/toppings eaten with it come from across the county and reflect the
interconnected histories of Ethiopia’s peoples and cultures. In that sense, the name reflects the
diversity (shades) and commonality (injera) of Ethiopia’s different peoples and cultures.
Soon after the outbreak of violence in June and July of 2020, @shadesofinjera hosted
Instagram Live events and invited diaspora from across ethnic lines (focusing initially on those
with an ethnic Oromo background) to speak on Ethiopian history, their identities, grievances, the
events surrounding Hachalu’s death, and their desires for the future. For many of the 1.5 and
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second-generation diaspora youth who tuned in to @shadesofInjera, these conversations were their
introduction to the contentious politics of Ethiopian nationhood. I watched youth try to make sense
of the different information, feelings, and debates that surfaced during these conversations, as well
as express gratitude for the page’s attempt to expose them to the kinds of conversations they were
sheltered from or not given open space to discuss in their homes and communities.
Many of the social media users participating in these discussions acknowledged Ethiopia’s
issues with linguistic, cultural, and political representation as one of the central problems that the
country needed to address. In these talks, young Oromo participants were given space to discuss
the impact of Hachalu Hundessa’s music and death as well as educate their audiences about Oromo
peoples’ sociopolitical concerns. In their discussions and presentations, young Oromo-identifying
diaspora expressed their frustration with the lack of equitable representation and opportunities they
experienced within the broader Ethiopian society—sharing stories about having their
Ethiopianness questioned and denied in Ethiopia and diasporic spaces, as well as the frustration of
not being rightfully recognized as integral parts of Ethiopian culture and history. However,
Oromos who identified as Ethiopian, those who upheld their mixed ethnic heritage, or sought to
problematize Oromo ethnonationalism used these digitally mediated conversations to contest
Oromo and Ethiopian nationalists’ takes on identity by contributing their negotiated perspectives.
Some of those who engaged in these conversations vented that the information campaigns used by
ethnonationalist protesters in Ethiopia and the diaspora amounted to historical revisionism and
misinformation. They feared ethnic animus toward Amharas and ethnic minorities in Oromia
would only lead to more tensions and undermine any progress that had already been made within
Ethiopia. While @shadesofinjera amplified the voices of diaspora Oromo youth and activists, who
were frustrated by the speculative circumstances around Hachalu’s death and the Ethiopian
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government’s violent response to protests which had themselves turned violent, some followers of
@shadesofinjera criticized the page for not giving equal attention to the civilians victimized by
ethnonational extremists. Others argued that the protracted ethnic identity politics of the diaspora
was costing Ethiopians in the homeland a chance at a better future.
Through @shadesofinjera’s stories and Instagram Live videos, young diaspora
encountered and began to discuss, debate, and formulate their own assessments of Ethiopian
politics and its violent contestations over the “nations, nationalities, and peoples” question. While
@shadesofinjera had not shied away from posting and hosting discussions on important topics—
such as relationships and sex, sexual assault and gender-based violence,
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mental health,
depression, and colorism—which are under-discussed within Ethiopian communities, before the
summer of 2020, it primarily functioned as a digital space that visually curated and highlighted the
diverse cultural formations and groups of Ethiopia. This shift in focus is noticeable in
@shadesofinjera’s current bio, which reads, “We don’t follow the culture, we create it! Here to
inspire conversations & celebrate all shades of life & love 💚💛♥.” While the current bio
centralizes the page’s aim to “inspire conversations” as well as celebrate all shades of life, love,
and culture, it previously stated:
We don’t follow the culture, we create it 💚💛♥
Love without borders
Think without borders
Live without borders

Both bios, using green, yellow, and red hearts and emphasizing cross-cultural affinities, signify
love for the homeland rooted in a pan-Ethiopian framework. A framework that not only celebrates
Ethiopia’s diversity but also attempts to broaden and complicate its followers’ understandings of

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@shadesofinjera is also known for #MeTooEthiopia
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who and what constitutes “Ethiopia” through posts, stories, and discussions that highlight
Ethiopia’s beauty as well as educate its audience about less known cultural practices, people, and
issues which plague Ethiopian society.

Figure 17: Screenshot of @shadesofinjera
taken on June 4, 2021, using iPhone

Figure 18: examples of @shadesofinjera’s
posts from before June 2020

In the figures above, we can see the page’s engagement with an array of topics relevant to
those in Ethiopia, its diaspora, and the horn of Africa region. For example, between December
2019 to the start of January 2020, the account posted over 60 times on topics as diverse as art,
literature, holidays, cultural diversity, fashion, love/marriage, issues of colorism, and
#MeTooEthiopia, and other news events. By July 2020, there was a noticeable shift in content,
with more of its posts focusing on political conflicts and aiming to drive dialogue about those
conflicts amongst its followers and other users. In addition to being influenced by the political
conjuncture, many of these conversations and posts are driven by follower interest. The account
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admins regularly received direct messages with content ideas or requests from followers to feature
specific issues and cultures. In addition to the content created by the admin team or directly
messaged to @shadedsofinjera by followers, some content was created through crowdsourced
information and labor from followers.
After the events and political discourse sparked by the death of Hachalu, followers
requested more content showcasing less known and smaller ethnocultural groups because
mainstream Ethiopian cultural representation tends to be highly comprised of northern highland
cultures (like the Amhara and Tigrayan) or focused on the politics of larger ethnic groups (like the
Oromo, Amhara, and Tigrayans). In other words, the interests and engagement of followers
compelled the page to put more effort into creating content that reflected the interests and concerns
of its different followers. One of its projects, driven by users’ voiced desires for greater
representation, focused on highlighting less known ethnocultural groups in Ethiopia by posting
“10 facts” about these groups and featuring these groups through different posts and stories that
emphasized their cultures throughout the week. The content in these posts came from the
information volunteers supporting @shadesofinjera were able to find through research and
crowdsourced information. For instance, one Instagram group chat I was part of—created by
@shadesofinjera to help connect people from the Kembata-Tembaro zone of the SNNP—was
contacted by the admins of @shadesofinjera to help them create the post and give feedback on the
information they had already gathered. Those who wanted to help could send information via direct
message and help fill out a Google Doc the @shadesofinjera admin team created for the topic.
This participatory process resulted in creating posts like these:
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Figure 19: screen shots of an example posts taken in May 2022.

These posts, created through participation with followers and non-followers, not only
provided information but also engendered discourse around what “ethnic” identity means and
whether contemporary cultural formations and past historical events can be ascribed to distinct
categories of ethnic groups. Most users showed gratitude and interest in learning about groups,
practices, and histories they were less familiar with. While many users were appreciative for the
page’s efforts to feature information on less populous ethnocultural groups, others nuanced the
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“facts” by offering additional information or challenging the veracity of the claims being made in
the posts and by the users who commented under the posts.
Speaking to Shades. @shadesofinjera’s approach to dialogue, participation, and national
imagination in the weeks and months following Hachalu’s death, is reflected in the founder’s
explanation of what she set out to do with the page. During a semi-structured interview and
conversation, Shades
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described that while her approach and focus have shifted over the years,
she started the page to cover “topics that make us uncomfortable” and “push the limit”—listing
topics like same-sex marriage, gender-based violence, and other issues “people struggle with”—
but are under-discussed and misunderstood within Ethiopia and its diaspora. However, though she
and her “principled” understanding of herself as an Ethiopian have changed over time, she explains
that social media engagement, specifically Instagram, can be limiting because you get “branded”
and because the tensions in Ethiopian politics make it hard to openly engage in difficult discourses
that offer and interrogate different, yet important, perspectives which consequently affect the lives
of all Ethiopians.
In other words, the design, metrics, and affordances offered by Instagram, and the process
involved in curating and growing @shadesofinjera result in processes that “brand” the page and
ultimately constrain Shades’ capacity to shift the account’s purpose and content. Because of the
impressions people have about the page, Shades explains that if they post about one thing or
showcase a political perspective, she and the page are criticized or questioned about whether they
are proponents of that perspective. Balancing the competing desires of followers and Shades
herself then becomes a difficult task:

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I refer to the account’s owner as “Shades” because Shades is the name used by the account’s
followers to address the owner and the admin team who help run the page.
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There are a lot of conversations that I would like to have that I’m not having [on
@shadesofinjera], just because like, I have to balance it out. I want to talk about all the
liberation fronts. I want to talk about single moms. I want to talk about, you know, Dr.
Abiy [prime minister of Ethiopia], I want to talk about Meles [late prime minister and TPLF
politician]. Like, you know, just everything that we hide and we don't talk about but are
very important in our life.

Balancing out not only entails an immense amount of labor from her and the other young
people who voluntarily help her create content but her effort to be intentional in her presentation
of diverse perspectives, which together offer a “balanced” and inclusive portrayal of Ethiopia’s
political landscape. However, this proves to be a challenge because the extreme and violent nature
of national politics within Ethiopia and its diaspora is viscerally felt by many of the social media
account’s followers and interlocutors. Some of the young people who engage with the
@shadesofinjera have been personally affected by nationalist politics. Many others have family
and friends living in parts of Ethiopia where ethnic and politically motivated violence, often at the
hands of government forces, local armed forces, liberation fronts, or angry protesters, has
threatened their lives and livelihoods.
Though Shades wants to use the page to explore and discuss topics she thinks are important
within Ethiopian society and politics, she explains that she receives a lot of comments and direct
messages that criticize not only the content of posts but also her and the kinds of comments other
users leave on the post. This forces her to not only explain and defend herself, the posts, and her
approach to moderation but also negotiate how to foster dialogue without stirring adverse
reactions, being “blamed” for “pushing an agenda,” or risk disengaging and losing followers.
For every post that I make there are 100 comments about…not just about the post but about
me. They blame me, oh, you're doing this, so you're doing that…and I have to explain and
defend myself every time because every post is perceived differently depending on where
the person is coming. […] And I have to monitor everything.

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The account’s moderators and content creators are then forced to consider how each post
about Ethiopia and Ethiopian politics will be perceived by followers who hold competing
perspectives about Ethiopian politics and the purpose (“brand”) of the Instagram account.
Followers who held political views or were more well versed in Ethiopian politics than Shades
expected the account to moderate and respond to their concerns in ways that forced her to negotiate
between what she wanted to do with the page and what others expected from it. While
@shadesofinjera attempted to give voice to different political and cultural perspectives after
Hachalu’s death by listening to followers’ recommendations and featuring people from different
ethnic and political standpoints, she could not manage the contentious discourse, the different
demands, and criticism charged against her and the page. She explains:
So right now, I'm trying to be more intentional. If I think that something is going to cause
more drama, more chaos, even if I know it's a good conversation for us to have in order to
move on and deal with challenges, I won't have it. I will just go with, I'll just go with, like
something that would help us be more human. […] Most of the time, what happens is that
when people see something that doesn't fit their agenda, they will just unfollow and move
on. They don't get to learn from all the things that we're doing. I want to just not offend
them. So, I just focus on the things that would bring more positive…what would challenge
us, but not like hard enough where it will push us away [from each other]. I'm focusing a
lot on our culture, the different cultures, which I think a lot of people care and like to learn
about. So yeah, what I'm giving voice to right now is like things that we don't talk about,
but not the hard things.

So, digital media become hard places to have nuanced conversations about “the hard
things” not only because the divisive politics of Ethiopia are also reflected in online spaces but
because the design and incentivization to “brand,” grow, and maintain a page and its followers
constrain the kinds of content she can post. Though she and her desires for the page have changed,
its “brand” and the expectations from followers have not. Because she does not want her page to
push people away, she negotiates and limits the conversations on the account—even if she wants
to have those conversations and believes that those conversations are essential to have. The issue
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is not so much the discomfort but the violent responses that the discourse engenders from users.
Whether it is frustrations levied at the account owner or other users, she explains she wants to
avoid “chaos” in favor of “something that would help us be more human.” By focusing on content
that aligns with @shadesofinjera’s “brand”—content that provides more digestible information
regarding the different and shared cultures of Ethiopia—and thus, content her followers care about
but find less contentious, she reasons that she can avoid the “chaos” of difficult topics and focus
on issues that challenge, but do not alienate, large segments of users away from the page and the
important conversations.
The challenge, however, is that by not discussing some of the more contentious issues
which are affecting segments of her followers, the page lends itself to perceptions that is politically
and or ethnically aligned with certain interests, willing to be silent during the suffering of some
groups more than others (i.e., taking sides through its silence), or biased in its focus on topics or
perspectives that align with one “side” more than the other. If Shades does not touch on issues
concerning Oromo politics and grievances, it is seen as an “Amhara” page; if it does not amplify
or discuss the impacts of war in Tigray resolutely, it is seen as complicit in the state’s violence
against ethnic Tigrayans; if it does not speak on the ethnic violence against Amhara people it is
seen as discounting their suffering and failing to take their grievances seriously.
Though @shadesofinjera has a globally situated and diverse following, she recognizes that
users align with ideological and political “camps” and fashion their belonging to these camps
through the visual affordances of Instagram.
But social media, I would say at least the spaces that I've been on, does that give you mercy.
It's because our community online is divided by really big red lines. If you have green,
yellow, red, like my bio does. That's it. Like how you think, and how you view who you are,
is determined. It’s predetermined before people even follow you. For the most part, not by
everyone, obviously, but for the most part.

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Iconographies like the green, yellow, and red heart emojis on @shadesofinjera’s account
bio are read by observers in ways that characterize and ideologically determine the page and its
owner before they engage with the account. For instance, the heart emojis representing the colors
of Ethiopia’s flag and Shades’ love for Ethiopia distance the page from being read as pro-
ethnonationalism. These icons also distance the page from being read as pro-TPLF because the
account is not using the official state flag associated with the TPLF by some Ethiopian nationalists.
These significations likely lead the page to be read by followers and others who have encountered
it as both pro-Ethiopian nationalism and Amhara (or “Amharanized”) because the Amhara
constitute the single largest ethnic group that predominantly align with Ethiopian nationalism.
Users can then draw conclusions about who runs @shadesofinjera and what kind of content they
can expect when engaging with the page. Because the tri-colored flag without the emblem is
associated with Amhara politics and pro-Ethiopian nationalism, she says, “people call me the
Amhara page even if I’m not Amhara.” Because of this, the assumption becomes that the page will
amplify and uphold particular views on Ethiopian national politics. She explains that within this
discursive space, “you can’t flow” between groups because people are divided into “team TPLF
or something else.” Even if users find themselves agreeing with or wanting to learn about the
different views, desires, and issues that are attached to distinct political (ethnic and national)
“camps,” the divisions on social media prefigure the kinds of conversations they can have.
Although she wants to use @shadesofinjera as a space where people can engage in critical dialogue
about all things having to do with Ethiopia, she finds it difficult because the page is constrained
by these broader politics and signifiers of difference.
Speaking on how digitally mediated political engagement constrains how she and other
users can engage in nuanced political thought and participation, she says, “Even if they agree with
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you, like [an “opposing” side] they can’t show that. It’s forbidden. You stick with whoever has
your political affiliation and that is so, so dangerous.” In other words, Ethiopian political discourse
and the visual presentations of identity propagated on social media spaces become markers of
“team” membership, signifiers of allegiance to distinct national identities, and the ideological and
political commitments attributed to these distinct national identities. Visual iconographies and
markers of identification emphasize differences and result in the perception that there are “hard
lines” between groups of people, their political ideologies, and desires. A phenomenon that
ultimately limits social media users’ capacities to learn from and engage in conversation with
people of different backgrounds, experiences, and views because it encourages group-based
conformity, hidden (invisible) engagement, or complete disengagement with the conversations
being had.
Because of this, some of @shadesofinjera’s attempts at featuring nuanced dialogue and
actively including competing voices are taken to mean they have picked a “team” or are advancing
an ideology—even if the page was created to have “no political affiliation.” But because some of
the political discourses and individuals featured on @shadesofinjera engaged in victim-blaming
strategies, were not based on fact-checked information, or had underlying political motives, I
observed users having issues with the page and the varying individuals it selected to represent
different (distinct) perspectives. This led many followers, especially in the first few weeks
following Hachalu’s death, to believe that the page was being used to proliferate politically fraught
and harmful perspectives to which @shadesofinjera needed to moderate and respond to by also
presenting the “other side” or actively challenging the veracity of presentations and stories being
narrated by guest speakers on live videos. While some followers contested or showed concern by
directly messaging @shadesofinjera with questions, concerns, and suggestions, others challenged
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the narratives they found problematic by asking guest speakers challenging questions, pushing
back on guest speakers’ narratives by fact-checking in the comments or debating with other
audience members via comments.
These contestations, or the push and pull of digitally mediated and contentious nationalist
discourse and accounts inability to manage the different demands, legitimate concerns, and
determinate forms of online representation and nationalist politics, led Shades to desire and express
a need to completely disengage from the critical political dialogue she set out to highlight through
@shadesofinjera. She reflects on how at the start of creating @shadesofinjera, she did not
understand why so many Ethiopians say they “don’t do politics.” However, experiences she and
the other content creators had in 2020 and 2021 led her to understand why so many people from
Ethiopia are pushed to disengage:
One of the reasons why I've been trying to stay away from politics a lot is because it's
limiting how I move in our spaces. I don't see myself. How I move around, how I think,
and how I see things, and even my politics. But like [staying away] is giving me that
freedom. I want to be more human than like being categorized as like Ethiopian, or this, or
that [ethnicity], […]. So that's been difficult.

In other words, rather than facilitating nuanced discourse, digitally mediated participation
can lead people to feel like they have to pick “a team” by adopting specific digital iconographies,
identities, and rhetoric and engaging in the amplification of content that comes from and supports
members of their “team” (or engaging in the amplification of allies/outsiders who support their
views and disparage the views of competing groups). In this context, liking, agreeing, or
empathizing with the content of the “wrong” team may indicate support for the ideologies or
political motives associated with that group. These associations and the social consequences that
come with them—like loss of friendships or harassment—leave many young people afraid of
engaging openly with unfolding events and politics. This leaves people who want to engage in
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more nuanced discourse unable to maneuver, find, or create the right “spaces” where they can have
the important conversations about Ethiopia's political conjuncture and past events. For some,
complete disengagement becomes the only option that does not compromise their understanding
of the world and the integrity of their social circles. In this case, claiming even Ethiopian identity
becomes a politically loaded signifier because it is made to signify complicit support for the state's
actions or the dismissal of ethnonationalists’ grievances by social media user and campaigns that
seek to problematize Ethiopia and Ethiopian nationhood. Because of this, the owner of
@shadesofinjera reveals, “I want to be more human than like being categorized as like Ethiopian,”
even though she identifies as Ethiopian.
This desire to be seen as human and thus have the capacity to show empathy and relate
with others by escaping the constraints of nationalism was similarly expressed by others who
identified as Ethiopian but were disaffected by both extremes of ethnic and Ethiopian nationalist
discourses. Like those I had met in Addis Ababa who spoke of themselves as “just Ethiopian” or
“human” rather than through ethnonational or politically affiliated versions of Ethiopian nationalist
identity and belonging, the creator of @shadesofinjera held negotiated views on national identity
and politics but simultaneously felt the need to disengage and disidentify with national politics
“completely.” This wish to refuse, disengage, or focus on the common condition of “being human”
comes as a consequence of how nationalist politics determine the lives, perspectives, and modes
of relationality people can foster toward different people and their experiences, pain, and views.
The attribution of all people to distinct national containers and their attendant (predetermined)
ideological perspectives naturalize ethnic and national boundaries in ways that contain Ethiopians
and what it means to be Ethiopian. For Shades, the boundaries created through narrowly conceived
national politics limit how “we all” think, see, and “move in our spaces.” For her, this is “painful”
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because it contrasts her otherwise “principled,” ever-changing, and profoundly personal
identification with her Ethiopian identity.
She explained that while her parents come from the SNNP regional state, she was born and
raised in Addis Ababa and identifies as having a “mixed background” rather than using single
identity categories like a parent’s ethnic background. The people she grew up around and the
Ethiopia she knew is marked by multi-ethnic and cultural heritage, especially in urban spaces
where she thinks “we’re not just one thing” and each city has “its own culture.” The experience of
having spent her childhood in Addis Ababa gave her a more de-essentialized and pluralistic
experience of Ethiopian identity and allows her to relate, move, and recognize shifts in her own
identification over time as she encounters and becomes shaped by difference. While she recognizes
that there are over 80 ethnic groups, she also recognizes that “our mainstream culture is very
mixed” and “it's not just Amhara or Tigrayan.” She describes that the self-presentation tactics used
and incentivized on social media lead to “branded” identities and social movements which do not
reflect these pluralistic and complicated experiences of identification. Trying to make sense of the
relationships between identity and digitally mediated engagement, she states that “identity is
turning into a trend, depending on what is hot, what is popular, right now.” And right now, “being
Ethiopian” is difficult because fallen “out of trend.” This means that rather than dealing with the
problems of Ethiopia and contending with more difficult, itinerant, pluralistic, and contextually
specific negotiations of identity, people are incentivized to align with bounded identities and take
“sides” during moments of complicated conflicts.
Speaking more broadly about social media movements like Me Too and those that she has
seen in Ethiopian spaces, she explains that not only people’s perceptions of identity, but their
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perceptions of “truth” have changed due to how movements (campaigns) are presented and
disseminated like products:
Even like, the way we see truth changing. If you see a good movement, marketed really
well, they have the colors rights, the video rights, and they have all these influential people
participating, best believe you'll change your mind. You'll start to believe and think that
way. Because it's just like a product, just like an idea, you know?

Identity-based social movements and their “marketed” representations of issues influence
whether people appropriate aspects of the campaigns or discern the claims and goals of the
movements as objectives established in “truth.” She explains that how people use and present
themselves online feels like it is a trend. In the context of Ethiopia’s 2020-2022 conflicts, people’s
online self-presentations changed as they selected from a set of possible color schemes, images,
emojis, and markers to delineate their differentiated ideological and national positions. Often these
trends were created by members of the diaspora community or campaign pages run by them. In
the context of national and ethnic politics that has become extremely violent, this can be dangerous
because identity becomes a part of an economy that erases people’s complex and fluid
relationships with nationhood. When people begin to adopt visual markers to distinguish
themselves in ethnic and nation terms, it magnifies the perception that these political conflicts are
rooted in ethnic and national difference and makes it difficult to discussed the complexities
critically. Anyone who identifies as “Ethiopian” then assumes blame for the consequences of the
conflict or is seen as supporting government’s actions against civilians. As Shades explains, “So
like, anything Ethiopia, or Ethiopian” became “out of style” and in 2020 and 2021 “people took
down their bios and changed everything around. And it’s like, so easy to be like, very pro-Ethiopia
and I love my country to like, I hate Ethiopia. And, that happens on social media, because of like,
trends, basically trends.”
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During different stages of the conflicts that took place between 2020 and 2022, people
responded by changing their profile images and bio statements to signal their support of certain
movements, ideological commitments, and political outcomes. While those wanting to distance
themselves from Ethiopian politics removed any visual markers that could be read supportive of
Abiy Ahmed’s government, others responded by taking on Ethiopian national markers in defiance
of the biased media coverage that dominated Western news reports on Ethiopia and its conflicts.
Others, took on specifically ethnic, or more aptly symbolically ethnicized, markers to show their
allegiance to their ethnic nation and its national contestations against the Ethiopian state:
Pro-Ethiopia or Pro-Ethiopian government and
Ethiopian nationalism
Ethnic Tigrayan and/or supporter of Tigrayan
nationalism and the TPLF
💚💛❤
🇪🇹

💊
❤💛

Ethnic Oromo and/or supporter of Oromo
nationalism and OLA
Ethnic Amhara and/or supporter of Amhara
nationalism and Fano
🌳

⚫🔴⚪

The Oromia regional state flag colors are
black, red, and yellow. Most those who are
secessionist or nationalist tend to use the flag
🦅, 💚💛❤

Though Amhara region’s flag colors are red
and yellow (created in the early 1990s to show
shared history with Tigrayans) Amhara do not
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with the symbol of a Gada tree at the center.
However, this flag is commonly associated
with the OLF/OLA and its violence against
ethnic minorities by some non-Oromo.

relate to the flag or use it. They prefer
Ethiopian flag without emblem (some Amhara
associate official state flag with TPLF rule) or
use the flag with the Lion of Juddah symbol
(associated with imperial Ethiopia).

Within social media’s visual ecosystems, national and political identity become something people
signify through bio statements and iconographies, something they adopt or change depending on
political circumstances. During Ethiopia’s conflicts, this makes it difficult to present a politics and
self-identity that is fluid and in flux, multiple and negotiated, because interlocutors draw
conclusions about people based on the significations of iconographies. Even those without any
icons are read as supporting “a side” or as being complicit because they chose to remain silent or
not align with a “side” when their respective nations needed them to be vocal.
For Shades, the dilemma of wanting to support the people of Ethiopia (regardless of their
ethnic background), embrace her identity as an Ethiopian, and simultaneously stay grounded with
a “principled” stance toward national politics and its violent manifestations is emotionally difficult
because of how these conflicts play out online. Because of this process and how national political
discourse shows up online, she explains that she struggles to stay connected to her identity in ways
that are “principled” first and not in ways that advance essentialized or divisive forms of national
identification and allegiance. In other words, the divided and territorialized nationalist politics of
Ethiopia—even in its online expressions—make it hard to take on a national identity primarily
rooted in principles:
The way I see myself, the way I see Ethiopia, the way I see just everything is changing
because of social media. In a good and a bad way. Understanding that, I’m fighting back
to make sure that I stay as human as possible. Because we have like a lot of ego that comes
from being Ethiopian and we also are very prideful, and I don’t know if that is a very
healthy thing. I'm fighting hard to not just identify as an Ethiopian first. I want to be very
principled. I want to be judged by my character, I want to be seen as an individual, and
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that is becoming very hard. I actually wanted to have that conversation on Shades
[@shadesofinjera]. But I don't know if we are ready for that. I get excited when I see
another Ethiopian because I love Ethiopia, but at the same time, what if that person has no
integrity? Do I want to be associated with that person? So, I am forcing myself to see that
and not be divided by the lines that are drawn in our community.

While it is easier to identify with prefigured and distinct national identities that delineate
people into distinct categories like “Ethiopian,” “Oromo,” or “Amhara,” et cetera, she suggests
that these modes of group identification can also constrain principled identification and nuanced
perspectives. When the national category of “Ethiopian” is deployed as a predetermined and rigid
container, it can be used to prevent people from relating to the many and different parts that have
shaped and constituted their identification with Ethiopianess over time while also associating them
with individuals, perspectives, and issues they may otherwise disagree with. Overall, national
identity politics can inhibit people’s ability to claim “Ethiopian” nationality as an identifier that
affirms their negotiated understanding of identity and how they stand in relation to, or are affected
and shaped by, others from Ethiopia. National identification and traits ascribed to it can then be
all-or-nothing containers and coercive forces that restrain her from having a principled stance
against those who might also identify with the same national categories as her but are otherwise
“disgusting” or lacking in “integrity.” The manifestation of ethnic and national politics, which
often rely on “hard lined” and “branded” constructions of difference, rely not only on the
construction of the in-group’s self-identity but also of the out-groups’ who are positioned as
belonging to distinct and oppositional “camps.” National categories that result from “hard lines”
between “us” and “them” are inherently not conducive to the expression of negotiated and
individual forms of consciousness and belonging. In the case of Ethiopianess, people’s
identifications with it are often flattened and determined by those who 1) hold ethnonationalist
political ambitions and desire to position Ethiopian nationhood as an “enemy” to their rights or 2)
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by those who identify as Ethiopian but use their identification to coerce people of difference,
garner, or maintain power through processes that often involve the justification of the Ethiopian
government’s violent approach to maintaining the state’s territorial integrity.
Furthermore, Shades’ evaluation of the connection between nationalist politics and
economic/material contestations in Ethiopia are particularly interesting because she explicitly ties
Ethiopia’s problems with ethnic and national identity politics to influences emanating from
Western manifestations of identity-based movements. The political contestations that are dominant
within Western contexts like the United States—movements like #Metoo and Black Lives
Matter—often focus on single issues and distinct identity categories like race or gender to address
economic and socio-cultural inequity. In these contexts, solidarities are forged between and among
“distinct” movements and groups of people in ways that often disregard or fail to take on
intersectional frameworks that likely be better at addressing people’s lived experiences which
result from overlapping systems of oppression.
A lot of people using social media in developed countries are talking about inclusiveness,
about Black Lives Matter, and the Me Too movement. I feel like sometimes we're trying
to, like, do things the way they're doing it. And in a way, it's good at the same time, it's bad,
because we're not on that level yet. Like they, they have the support, the money, to talk
about and do a lot of the things that they're doing. Even here [USA], there is so much
struggle around how we can become more inclusive. We struggle with that, so imagine,
right now like Ethiopia. It's true we need to talk about these things in Ethiopia and we need
to be more inclusive and understanding but I feel like the is the sort of conversation that
developed countries are having. But we need to have conversations that are lot different
and more important. Like conversations about poverty. But we are not having this
conversation because our social media movements copy movements from the West and the
conversations people are having in the West.

For Shades, one of the frustrations of how national and ethnic identity politics show up in
Ethiopia and Ethiopian digital spaces is that they ultimately obscure and limit Ethiopians’ capacity
to address other, possibly even more “urgent,” issues like poverty. As Shades explains, part of the
problem with Ethiopians’ adoption of digital media for identity discourse is that social media are
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relatively new modes of communication, especially in Ethiopia. She proposes that Ethiopians’
adoption of digital media for political discourse involved skipping stages that “developed
countries” already went through. Ethiopia is not only “skipping stages” because it is not one of the
“developed” countries where digital media technologies emerged and evolved but also because the
kinds of conversations around identity and “inclusion” mimic Western identity discourse—without
first establishing economic security like the West. In other words, Ethiopian contestations over the
“nations, nationalities, and peoples” question take on Western approaches to identity-based
political mobilization—similar to the debate I presented in chapter one regarding the modality of
national containers and imagination—to make sense of the problems people face in Ethiopia but
ultimately end up bypassing questions of underdevelopment and poverty. That being said, ethnicity
and nationhood become the modes through which class conflicts are fought and fundamentally
obscure what should be a unifying concern for all Ethiopians, the pervasive effects of poverty and
underdevelopment.
While reflecting that Ethiopians are fighting over identity like the West when they have
bigger things to fight for, like ending poverty, she also recognizes that the fraught contestations
and politics over national identity are rooted in poverty and thus constrain the ability of Ethiopians
to address it. In other words, poverty and nationalist contestations (for power, representation,
territory, and resources) are a co-constituted and co-determined phenomenon. By saying, “it's true
we need to talk about these things in Ethiopia, and we need to be more inclusive and
understanding,” Shades recognizes that representation and inclusivity are important and
meaningful conversations for people in Ethiopia and its diaspora to have. However, the singular
focus and deployment of nationalist discourses are obstructive to the goal of alleviating conditions
of poverty that permeate the lives of most people in Ethiopia—regardless of what ethnic group
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they are categorized as belonging to. This means that Ethiopia's national and ethnic identity politics
ultimately leads to the neglect of the common condition most Ethiopians live under:
We forget that people in the West having these kinds of conversation have done the
groundwork to feed themselves and we haven't done that. What hurts me the most is that
we’re having these conversations about identity and all this stuff but you know...but can
we start with at least 80% of people not living in poverty? People not without health care
or out in the street? And then we can have a conversation about like other things because
right now, it is so disheartening because we are not collectively talking about important
stuff like poverty.

Shades reasons that while the western world has done “the groundwork” to afford to spend
time and resources on conversations about identity, inclusion, and representation—conversations
that have not delivered the kinds of egalitarian change they promise— Ethiopia’s engagement with
these conversations is failing because it mystifies the central problem of poverty for which a
majority of Ethiopians face the day to day consequences. However, this mystification is hard to
see because cyclical manifestations of violence, conflict, and authoritarian rule are framed and
understood through the lens of ethnic and national oppression. Questions of cultural, linguistic,
and religious representations ground much of Ethiopian politics and conflicts over national and
ethnic identification (as well as its codifications through ethnic federalism). However, the
dominance of identity politics and the ways in which identity is being fought over hide the reality
of poverty, which she conceives as “the biggest equalizer” and common ground for Ethiopians.
When I asked her why she thought we, as Ethiopians, are stuck on questions of identity, she
responded:
Identity is a big issue in the Western world. Poverty is what makes Ethiopians the same.
Poverty is our equalizer in Ethiopia. Because you can go to every part of Ethiopia and see
poverty, you can’t use poverty as a tool make Ethiopians fight with one another. Like if you
have an agenda, you pick what makes you different and then you use that as a tool or as a
weapon.

She reasons that focusing on difference, or ethnic identity, becomes a valuable mechanism
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for those with political agendas because it is more difficult to “use poverty to fight with one
another.” Because of this, those who “have an agenda” pick the things which make Ethiopians
different (cultural background, language, reliong, etc.) from one another and use that as a tool for
mobilization and political contestation. Consequently, a focus on difference distracts Ethiopians
from recognizing not only their cultural and historical commonalities but also the equalizing
condition of poverty that is experienced throughout Ethiopia, across boundaries created by ethnic
federalism to demarcate distinct national entities and interests.
Because of the violent and ethnicized nature through which contestations over class,
resources, and power take place within Ethiopia, those with an “agenda” can use violence, people’s
pain, and their affective attachments to cultural practices to establish the “truth” of ethnicity. Even
if ethnicity and nationhood are being deployed as reductive explanatory frameworks that disguise
the nature of corrupt governance, repressive state apparatus, clientelism, and globally situated and
extractive modes of economic exchange, ethnic and national “oppression” is the framework readily
used by politicians, activists, and many vocal diaspora to understand conditions of poverty and
suffering. Rather than focusing on policies and good governance, Ethiopians learn to associate
good leadership with ethnic identity:
It's almost like, people say if you have a Tigray PM, they will push Tigray agenda. And
they will do what's good for Tigray, people. So if I have Oromo leader, the same thing.
And, I think that's like, such a bad way of looking at it. How many of us would vote for an
Ethiopian from a different ethnic group right now? Obviously, a very, very small amount
of people because we look at like, where's that person from. And I think that's why we're
failing at this, because we’re not looking at what matters, which is like the integrity of
character…or a good leader is a good leader. Those that will do what's best for the people.
They will be honest and treat other people’s kids the way they want their kids to be treated,
not just because they’re from the same tribe.

Ethnic and national reductivism fortifies clientelist politics and conflicts over power by
allowing an elite few to claim to democratically speak on behalf of, or represent, entire groups of
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people simply based on their ethnic and national identity. In particular, the institutionalization of
ethnonational politics throughout Ethiopian society—from ethnic parties, ethnic media, and ethnic
ID cards to ethnic states and administrative zones—legitimate reductive ethnic/national
identification in ways that deny people’s complex identities and rights to democratic participation.
In other words, territorialized and territorializing discourse about identity, land, and belonging
while warranted at times, are being used to limit political possibilities and ultimately deny citizen’s
rights to democratically elect leaders who will represent not only their “ethnic” but their class
interests and the class interests of all Ethiopians.
As Shades describes, part of the problem is that many of these discourses are being driven
by those in the diaspora who “don’t live there” and don’t “face the consequences” these digitally
mediated movements and discourses are “creating” for the “day to day” lives of people in Ethiopia.
While @shadesofinjera initially provided the space where diaspora youth from across ethnic and
ideological lines could use Instagram to engage in national politics after the assassination of
Hachalu, the page eventually stopped hosting lives on nationally contentious issues. By the time
the war broke out in Ethiopia on November 4, 2020, the page had mostly stopped posting about
ethnic and national politics and returned to the “not so hard” yet important stuff that many of its
followers had grown accustomed to. By 2021, @shadesofinjera stopped posting altogether.

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Chapter Six
The Limits of E/utopian Imagining

ኢትዮጵያ/ዩቶፒያ : ሕይወቴ
Ethiopia/Utopia, my life

ምወደሽ : እናቴ
That I love as my mother

ሳደንቀሽ : እኖራለሁ
I will live admiring you

እስከ : እለተ : ሞቴ ::
Until the day I die.

- Unknown, sampled in Bang La Decks song “Utopia”

During the process of writing this dissertation, I have struggled between responding to the
crises in Ethiopia by 1) detaching and writing as soberly and as pragmatically as possible and, on
the other hand, 2) attempting to imagine and reflect against the very limits of possibility, against
the constraints of nationalisms and domineering rubrics of progress. In the first two chapters, I
offered context regarding how I came to think about the problematics of nationhood and
development in relation to Ethiopia. In the remaining three chapters, I provided case studies on
how nationhood and progress come to be co-constituted, imagined, deployed, and contested by
three different groups of actors–the developmental state, local civil society, and young diaspora.
In this chapter, I reflect more broadly on the concepts of utopia and eutopia and how they came to
shape the early stages and trajectory of this project and why critical e/utopian imagination may be
ever more necessary for today’s Ethiopia. Throughout, I offer some reflection on how my own
changing relationship with Ethiopia and Ethiopian identity shaped my experience of writing about
the future while witnessing and standing at the junction of multiple catastrophes.
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In the sampled lyrics above, the words Ethiopia and utopia have a way of sonically
collapsing into one another through their utterance—at least when Ethiopia is pronounced in the
accents of the many languages native to the Horn of Africa region. This sonic and definitional
collapsing, whether intentional or unintentional, is evident in Bang La Deck’s (a DJing duo from
Greece) choice to name a song they intended for the dance scene “Utopia” even though the
Amharic-speaking singers they sampled are singing of their undying love for the country of
Ethiopia. A love the singers equate with the feelings they have for their mothers and life itself.
This song was played repeatedly in my home between 2015 and 2016. Not because I liked
it, but because it was featured on the FIFA 15 Soundtrack, which my partner had the propensity to
leave on as background noise throughout the day. Though I initially passed off Bang La Deck’s
conflation of utopia with Ethiopia as an oversight, repeatedly listening to the song led me down a
path of questions that would eventually bring me to this dissertation. In particular, I was interested
in considering what connections, if any, could be said to exist between utopia and my homeland.
The word and concept of utopia date back to Thomas More’s Utopia, consisting of two
separate books published together in 1516 (Duncombe, 2012). Writing about the fictional Isle of
Utopia in book II of Utopia, there is a possibility that More punned on the word “eutopia” to create
the concept of utopia (Claeys and Sargent). The etymology of utopia has roots in the Greek prefix
“ou” (meaning not) and “topos” (meaning place). Or, more simply, u = no and topia = place. The
possibilities, or more so the impossibilities inherent in utopia are reminded to us by philosophers
like Emil Cioran in “Mechanism for Utopia,” in which he reiterates to readers that by definition,
utopia means “nowhere.” In fact, Cioran denounces the “childish rationalisms,” “theoretical
impossibilities,” and “absurdities” of utopia, or more specifically utopianism, by describing utopia
as an “illusion hypothesized,” inspired by, and written for the destitute (p. 94). Although utopia is
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no place, eutopia is briefly referenced in More’s book as “a place of felicity.” Specifically, the
Greek, eu = happy and topos = place, meaning that eutopia is a “happy place” or “good place.”
That being said, by enjoining eutopia with utopia with a forward slash (/), we might be able to
combine the forward dawning impulse and meanings attributed to both utopia (a non-existent good
place) and eutopia (a good place). In this sense, e/utopia can retain the impossibilities, possibilities,
and tensions made noticeable through the sonic and definitional collapsing of Ethiopia with the
concepts of utopia and eutopia.
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While the intentions behind Bang La Decks’ fusion of Ethiopia with utopia are unclear, I
found the concepts of utopia and eutopia (e/utopia), and their encapsulation of the inherent tensions
that exist between what is possible and impossible, as useful starting points to think through how
Ethiopians envision, contest, and work to realize what they consider to be desirable conceptions
of Ethiopia into reality. Thinking through Ethiopia in relation to e/utopia drove me to consider
questions like “what orientations toward imagining, change-making, and progress would be
necessary to realize egalitarian and nonviolent solutions to Ethiopia’s problems so that Ethiopia
could be more eutopian?” Eventually, this line of thinking made me want to study and start
mapping out how Ethiopians are imagining, negotiating, and working to enact varying (and at
times conflicting) conceptions of the “good place” while simultaneously confronting realities that
make these aspirations impossible to achieve. Or maybe more aptly, I wanted to better understand

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I intentionally use the “/” within e/utopia (rather than writing “(e)utopia”) to indicate that
tensions, possibilities, and impossibilities simultaneously exist when people work to imagine and
enact (at times competing) ideas of “good” into reality. I suggest that e/utopia, unlike the words
utopia and eutopia alone, can be used as frameworks which retain the impossibilities of utopias,
attune us to ideas and possibilities of the “good place” (eutopia), and thus maybe help us consider
how people pursue better worlds at a time in which much of the world is presented with finding
im/possible solutions to complex problems.

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why we (as Ethiopians) have failed to use collective and e/utopian imagining to engage in political
and world-building projects that may help us realize better todays and tomorrows.
This question puzzled and stuck with me because I believe that utopia and collective
imagining are politically indispensable tools for realizing any future not dependent on violence
and coercion and aimed at advancing egalitarian sociality. Despite the negative connotations
attached to utopianism and the many examples we have of political projects that have mobilized
utopian thinking for sectarian, brutalizing, and totalizing ends, the practice of desiring and
imagining e/utopian futures is inseparable from world-building because the ability to see the
problems of today and imagine different tomorrows is a necessary component of any movement
or political project that aims to change our world. For instance, Stephen Duncombe and Henry
Jenkins maintain that the constraints of the “tyranny of the possible” can only be challenged
through an active willingness to imagine and enact different realities. Without a utopian impulse
and the collective imagination of alternative realities, we risk getting stuck in a cycle of combative
criticism and negation of past and present conditions. In the introduction to Open Utopia, Stephen
Duncombe explains that “Utopia” is an image of an alternative and better world that “offers a goal
to reach and a vision to be realized” for the revolutionary. For the reformer, Utopia is “a compass
point to determine what direction to move toward and a measuring stick to determine how far one
has come” (Duncombe, 2012). Utopian criticism is not an end in itself but a “break with what is”
as we depart toward a different future. Through utopian criticism, we can ask “what if?” and begin
to engage in a process where “we can simultaneously criticize and imagine, imagine and criticize,
and thereby begin to escape the binary politics of impotent critique on the one hand and closed
imagination on the other” (Duncombe, 2012). In other words, Utopian criticism offers us a way
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out of dystopic thinking, the temptation to only look backwards nostalgically, and helps prevent
us from being limited by present realities or what Duncombe calls “the tyranny of the possible.”
Others like Ruth Levitas describe utopia as “not just a dream to be enjoyed, but a vision to
be pursued,” even if utopia suggests that the dream for the good life is “an impossible dream—an
escapist fantasy; at best a pleasant but pointless entertainment” (p. 1). To have a utopian impulse
is the “need to dream of a better life” and envision a “dramatically different form of society”
(Claeys and Sargent p. 1-2). In concert, Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish approach imagination
as a cognitive and corporeal terrain and a process of political struggle for collectively mapping,
narrating, and speculating about what is, what was, and could be. For them, radical imagining is
conceived as a critical component “of the fundamentally political and always collective” labor of
“reweaving the social world” and the ways we relate with each other through difference (Haiven
and Khasnabish. 2014, p. iii). In fact, if collectives and movements are to be oriented toward future
horizons and a shared vision of socio-political possibility as a collective struggle, Haiven and
Khasnabish contend, “we can’t do without the radical imagination, both on the level of our
movements and on the level of our everyday lives” because our ability to believe that our present
conditions can change for the better “is a key part of our social, psychological and spiritual lives”
(p. iii). Consistent with this belief, Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams historically traces black
radical social movements and the imaginations and dreams that they catalyzed and drew from to
argue that the imagination—our capacity to imagine—is a powerful social and revolutionary force.
In fact, Kelley argues that “any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New
World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire
and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality […]” (p. 193).
For Kelley, the conditions that gave rise to black radical social movements necessitated that
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participants “see the future in the present” and in imagining something different “realize that things
need not always be this way” (p. 10).
All this in mind, can critical conceptions of imagination help us arrive more democratic
future-thinking and political engagement within Ethiopia? Can a critical utopian engagement with
the future help us fashion an Ethiopia that isn't maintained through authoritarian rule and violence
but by democratic and egalitarian principals as well as our common need for understanding,
respect, and community?
Ethiopia’s possibilities and constraints. I was born in 1992 when Ethiopia, its people,
and their sense of belonging were actively reconstituted by the TPLF-EPRDF’s adoption of an
ethnic federal system that codified ethnic identification and difference. More specifically, I was
born in Yabelo, an Ethiopian small town near Kenya in what is now the Borena zone of the regional
state of Oromia. My family made Yabelo home because my father needed to frequent trips between
Kenya and Ethiopia for work. My father was from Durame, a town located in the Kembatta-
Tembaro Zone of the SNNP regional state. My mother had lived a mostly itinerant life in search
of possibility though she was from Weldiya—in the Welo Zone of what is now the Amhara
regional state.
Outside of Yabelo and Addis Ababa, I spent a great deal of my childhood in Hawassa,
which used to be the capital city of the SNNP regional state but later became the capital of the
Sidama regional state in 2020 after the Sidama people voted to leave the multiethnic SNNPR.
Because of this, I grew up speaking a mixture of Amharic, Oromiffa, and a bit of the Kembatta
language—all of which I knew as “speaking Ethiopian.” In fact, I only came to piece together this
personal history later in life when I started searching for biological family connections after
graduating from college in 2015. All this to say, I did not grow up with the awareness of being
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“ethnic” as all I had were childhood memories of the time I spent in these different areas and often
saw aspects of myself reflected in all the places, cultures, and people I met.
Leaving Ethiopia at a young age and feeling out of place most of my life in the United
States, I protected, rehearsed, and held onto my memories and imaginings of Ethiopia as an
affirming and distant place where I could find a more grounded sense of belonging. Though my
earliest memories and feelings of Ethiopia were only partial expressions of the feelings and
realities of Ethiopia’s past (or maybe Ethiopias past?), they informed how I understood myself and
moved through life as a black and African immigrant in the United States. A part of the world
where I was markedly foreign and where encounters with racial difference, racialization, and racial
discrimination eroded my sense of ever “just being” a person again. It was in the United States that
I learned to see myself and others through the regimes of racial classification and discerned that
(for others) my being and place of origin were considered markers of shame and signifiers of
human degradation.
In many ways, however, my memories and attachments to Ethiopia—a place where
encounters with racial difference did not structure my day-to-day life or sense of self—gave me
an indelible awareness of how race and racial difference were socially constructed and maintained
around me in the United States. This is not to say that Ethiopians in the diaspora or homeland are
unaware of racial difference, but that race plays a lesser role in our day-to-day interaction within
Ethiopia as our encounters with whiteness and the white gaze were—and thus our perceptions of
racial difference and discrimination were infrequent within Ethiopia.
As a young immigrant in America, I was keenly aware of difference and how I was being
actively shaped into a racial and national (American) being because everything I knew and
identified with had little cultural relevance within the United States. While my adolescence was
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spent shedding everything that made me Ethiopian and feeling a sense of shame toward my
homeland, I eventually started to reclaim my Ethiopianess. Later in my teens, I gravitated toward
salvaging and constructing an Ethiopian identity as means to affirming what I had always known
and felt: that black people had not always been contained under racist racial formations and did
not need to accept narrow and dehumanizing conceptions of racial difference to make sense of
ourselves or relate to others. Because I was too young to understand the politics of ethnic
difference, and because in my youth I experienced Ethiopia concurrently as a place of sameness,
difference, and hybridity, Ethiopianess was a point at which I could root myself and openly relate
with people who were different.
From this perceptive, I could see why Bang La Decks’ sampled lyrics and the positive
affects it attaches to Ethiopia, could be fitting descriptions of the feelings many people like myself
have toward our homeland. For many like myself in the diaspora, our desires and fixations on/in
Ethiopia are viscerally experienced as a longing for something that was and may never be again
under today’s reality of racism, ethnicized politics, and territorialization. A longing for a eutopian
future as well as our memories of futures past which we hold onto and cultivate throughout our
lives as liminal, exiled, or diaspora subjects.
On the other hand, I recognized that for the many of us who have encountered the dystopian
realities offered by the political formations, current state, and reality of Ethiopia, the longing we
have for Ethiopia is not only restoratively nostalgic but rooted in a desire to bring into reality an
Ethiopia that worthily reflects the deeply felt longing and love we have for our homeland and its
constitutive parts. In this sense, my pained longing and attachment does not come from not
knowing what suffering, cruelty, or violence feel like—what they do to our psyches and our ability
to openly relate with others of difference—but a desire to realize an Ethiopia worthy of the undying
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kind of love the lyrics in “Utopia” profess. From this perspective, the song “Utopia”—or more
aptly, the affect professed in the lyrics about Ethiopia—may truly be about nowhere. A place that
exists in the nexus of our dreams, our nostalgic fixations, and unmet hopeful desires for an
actualized good place—a eutopian Ethiopia.
To say that the song may be about nowhere is not to say that Ethiopia does not currently
possess desirable characteristics, but that the deep sense of desire and longing for a past and lost
possible futures is part of the collective imagining and affective labor that many of us take on and
which ultimately allows Ethiopia as a concept and place to capture so many of our hopes and
dreams. At the same time, however, this pained longing for Ethiopia (especially when it is made
up by nurturing partial truths) can immerse us into the depths of our feelings, imaginations, and
attachments in ways that make it hard to demystify how containers and floating signifiers like
nationhood actually work—allowing our affective and national attachments to be used against us
and our capacity to collectivize around common desires we have for the future. Furthermore,
feelings and perceptions of national (and ethnic) shame, victimization, pride, enmity, and desires
to dominate and reconstitute the Ethiopian state in the image of one’s own national identity shape
contestations over Ethiopia’s future as much as material interests do—though few are willing to
admit it. These affects enable proponents of ethnonationalism and Ethiopian nationalism to
rationalize and uphold reductionist politics which claim to be liberatory though they employ
violence and shift (or externalize) culpability for the failures of Ethiopian statehood onto
“enemies” and thus fail to fully account for their own ascribed groups’ culpabilities and the
complexities of Ethiopian history and state formation.
Though not everyone in Ethiopia desires for Ethiopia (or has Ethiopia as their common
goal), and some place their dreams in other national formations and political boundaries (a "Greater
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Tigray," a "Greater Oromia," or an independent Ogaden/Somali state), my claim here is that
attachments to both Ethiopian nationalism and ethnonationalism can be obstructive, limiting, and
even destructive if we allow these containers to become domineering frameworks and essential
truths which hold no room for critical and holistic interrogation of how we got here and how we
can find a way out of our current predicament.
Whether holding Ethiopian national or ethnonational perspectives, everyone I interviewed
and spoke to between 2019 and 2020 said they wanted to see democratization, economic growth,
an end to poverty, job creation, and peace in the future. Whether we are inclined to look toward
ethnic or Ethiopian nationhood for our eutopia, whether we desire to strengthen the Ethiopian
nation-state or disintegrate it to create new states fashioned out of ethnonational sameness, much
of our national imaginings and longings can become constraining attachments that impede our
ability to critique, relate, and find a less destructive and authoritarian paths for a future not reliant
on totalizing blueprints, self-containment, violence, coercion, and dehumanization.
Having left Ethiopia at the age of six and living there again for a year between the age of
nine and ten, it was not until my mid-twenties that I began to understand the felt, material, and
fraught realities of ethnic identification and difference in Ethiopia. I grasped how ethnic
identification permeated Ethiopian society when I started my fieldwork in 2019. Throughout my
fieldwork, whether I identified myself in ethnic terms or not, ethnicity was ascribed on my being
by most interlocutors. Sometimes this involved an interlocutor asking me mundane questions like,
“Where are you from? Where are you parents from?” The answer I gave often influenced how
people responded and related to me. For instance, if I stated my Kembata background interlocutors
assumed I would be sympathetic to ethnic federalism, ethnonational perspectives, and grievances
against “northern” or “Amhara hegemony.” This phenomenon perplexed me because many of
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those I know from Kembata are pan-Ethiopian and usually suspicious of ethnonationalists’ claims
to speak on behalf of, or represent, the interests of less populous groups like the Kembata. Many
other times, my phenotypic characteristics were ethnicized—often perceived as “highlander,”
“Amhara” or “Tigrayan,” qualities—though I often responded to these categorizations by saying
things like “I actually was born in X region” and “My father is actually Kembata and my mother
Amhara, so I am mixed.” That is, until I grew tired of explaining and nuancing my identity.
The issue with these ascriptions was not that I did not have any affinities with particular
places, identities, or cultural formations but interlocutors often used that ethnic identification to
make assumptions about what ideological and political commitments I may have and, in the
process, deny my nuanced historical background, experiences, and self-identification. The
consequence of this was that my actions and beliefs were made to be representations of entire
ethnic groups I had no right to represent and ultimately prefigured whether I was seen as a comrade
friend or enemy.
In addition to realizing how ethnic identification is ascribed to people in ways that prefigure
national, political, and ideological commitments, I also realized how the experience of ethnic
difference and belonging could become territorialized. I felt the weight of territory, land, and
belonging most acutely walking through Hawassa. Though my father’s family comes from the
southern region, I have family living in Hawassa, and most of my childhood memories of home
are in Hawassa; I felt an acute sense of dislocation and difference while visiting it in 2020. Though
I expected to feel a sense of familiarity and homecoming, what I felt on arrival was a sense of
being foriegn. I felt this way for a number of reasons. Partly because fewer people in Hawassa
speak English than in Addis Ababa, and my Amharic only allowed me to communicate the most
basic of my needs, making my “foreign” or “diaspora” status is more evident. But more
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importantly than that, my trip to Hawassa occurred after the Sidama referendum to separate from
SNNP—unravelling the regional ties I used to know between my ancestral home in Durame and
Hawassa.
On the first day I walked down the street of Hawassa, young men called out, “Amhara!”
“China!” and “corona” as I walked past them. The “China” and “corona” I understood to be
sentiments they attached to foreigners who at the time carried the threat of viral spread because
my trip took place only a few days after the first Coronavirus case was announced in Ethiopia (and
China was a term some locals applied to anyone foreign, regardless of racial phenotype at that
time). However, being identified as “Amhara” was simultaneously arresting and disorienting
because it made me aware that while they recognized I was Ethiopian, whatever affinities I had
with Hawassa were perceived as coming from “outside” of Hawassa itself. While I could
previously “claim” Hawassa because of my ancestral connections to the broader southern region,
it now felt like I was visiting somewhere I did not quite belong—one because the people there
ascribed onto me outside identity and two because the borderers and state (and thus people) to
which Hawassa belonged had changed. At this moment, I realized that whether I liked it or not,
my relationship with Hawassa had changed. The identification with the city which had helped me
feel a sense of rootedness in Ethiopia had been disconnected.
Under these conditions where borders shift and identities are strategically and territorially
refashioned, maintaining a “collective” or “common” pursuit of the future is difficult. Among
those who support Ethiopian nationalism, the desire to maintain Ethiopian unity and statehood
often push them to concede or support undemocratic leaders who proselytize on the yearning for
“unity” despite their continued failure to deliver on their promises of democracy and good
governance. In other words, authoritarian leaders are able to use people’s longing for unity and
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their fears Ethiopian state collapse to preserve political support from Ethiopian nationalists who
turn a blind eye to the contradictions of government leadership as long as the Ethiopian state is not
compromised. However, in contemporary Ethiopia, Ethiopian nationalist support for such
leadership is contributing the deteriorating sense of Ethiopian national belonging and helping
create more ethnonationalists and secessionists. That said, the constriction and expansion of ethnic
and national identity, or what Wimmer (2013) calls “ethnic boundary-making” is not just done
through the redrawing of political borders and territories but through the strategic deployment of
discrimination and violence, which engender overwhelming feelings of difference and awaken
national consciousness. This means that even those who support pan-Ethiopian nationalism can
end up abandoning or distancing themselves from Ethiopian nationalism in favor of ethnic politics
and advocacy because their experiences of ethnic-based discrimination and suffering—often
inflicted on them by the state, rebel groups, regional officials, and protesters—are ignored or
silenced by Ethiopian nationalists who at times prioritize the maintenance of the Ethiopian state’s
boundary over the wellbeing of its inhabitants. Even when well intentioned, and often more
expansive than ethnic nationalism, Ethiopian nationalism can limit its proponent’s abilities to
realize a e/utopian Ethiopia.
To reiterate, though some are more likely to find hope in Ethiopian nationalist discourse
and socio-material commitments because Ethiopian nation-building presents the possibility for
broader or more expansive application of national boundaries, Ethiopian nationalism can also
constrain imagination and political engagement. For example, uncritical attachments to Ethiopian
nationhood can be used by both Ethiopian nationalists and ethnocratic politicians to forestall
people's criticism and demands for political accountability. In other words, people's affective
attachments to Ethiopianness or their commitment to protecting the integrity of the state can be
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used by corrupt state leaders and politicians whose main interests might be power even though
they position themselves as guardians of the people and state. In addition to this, narrow forms of
Ethiopian nationalism leave those who are committed to Ethiopia but also identify with otherwise
minoritized identities feeling marginalized or unheard in mainstream Ethiopian nationalist
discourse.
Furthermore, ethnicized and nationalist politics can be used to foster politics that uses
national and ethnic “representation” as means to steal democratic rights from every-day, especially
poor and working-class civilians. Ethnic and national clientelists can claim to speak, dream, and
know on behalf of “groups” of people as well demonize segments of society for the actions of a
few. In this climate, the politics that is advanced is not interested in advanced the class interests of
the disenfranchised but that of the elites’ which control the state or serve as representatives and
politicians on smaller administrative levels—the regional state, zones, districts, or neighborhoods.
Adding to this, the current political structure and available forums for dialogue in Ethiopia foster
hegemonizing and power-sharing politics that enable political elites to continuously transfer and
reconfigure the state in their image rather than enabling citizens to have a greater role in shaping
the future.
In the end, both forms of nationalism constrain the modes of participation available to
Ethiopians, limit the political criticism, and curb political solidarities that are not rooted in national
containers but in shared marginal relationships to power on both local and international levels.
People’s commitments to the maintenance of national containers rather than the possible good that
might come from opening up national belong (or looking at solutions that might come outside of
your nationalist imagination) inherently makes it impossible for Ethiopians to engage in the kinds
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of critical and future oriented, collective and dialogic, imagining necessary for finding workable
solutions.
Adding another layer to this issue, the constraints of national politics are difficult to
transcend in contexts like Ethiopia because national containers (including ethnic) are also
constituted and determined by contemporary conditions of globalization, development, and their
domineering regimes of inclusion they offer to the Third World. In other words, modular and
dominant forms of nationhood and progress ultimately prevent the Third World’s chances at
forging transnational solidarities, socio-material political commitments, and principles of non-
alignment, which might help realize pluriversal and protean relationalities. Even in digitally
mediated contexts, national containers are mobilized to contest and determine the future trajectory
of Ethiopia. Rather than facilitating discourse and participation which transcends political and
national borders, digitally mediated engagement enables for the visualization and digital
territorialization of the diaspora who engage in zero-sum contestations that end up prioritizing the
lives and rights of some while dismissing others in the homeland are brutalized. All this to say, the
constraints to Ethiopians’ imagining and participation are not only coming from the external
imposition of an unequal economic world system and regimes of knowledge but a politics of
nationhood that can also be found in the diaspora and its tactical deployments of nationalist visions
and agendas for political and social gain.
Within this context, what approach to future-thinking and world-building would we need
to prioritize in order to realize a eutopian future within Ethiopia? Though I started this project
believing in the political capacity of criticism and imagination, the observations I made between
2019 and June 2022 forced me to contend with how nationalist and developmental rubrics limit
the capability of Ethiopians to imagine and collectively pursue futures that prioritize wellbeing for
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all of Ethiopia's inhabitants. One of the central findings of this projects is that when nationalism
or ethnicity become the primary modes for relating and forging political attachments, they can
become containers that mystify and constrain political possibilities. National containers limit
critical utopian imagination because participation and identification within national politics not
only determines who can belong to that category but also requires participants to reconstitute and
determine their being—as well as that of others—to fit within rigid boundaries which flatten
human complexity and contradiction. For many of those I encountered between 2019 and 2021, in
order to participate in nation-level imagining, they engaged in practices that shaped and reshaped
who they were in relation to their chosen nation and the groups which they perceived as enemies.
Through this process, they denied parts of who they are, disconnected from family and friends who
complicated their national identities and politics, and engaging in reimagining ties to certain
histories, ancestors, and political projects while casting out others that did not fit their views and
political ends. Ultimately, this is a process that narrowly confines who you see yourself to be, who
you relate to, how you perceive the complex issues plaguing Ethiopia, and what you imagine as
solutions for Ethiopia’s problems. In other words, national and ethnic identification are limiting
starting points for imagining future possibilities and addressing questions of human difference and
wellbeing because they do the work of mystifying our realities.
E/utopia as methodology allows us to critique the present conditions permeating Ethiopia
and Ethiopian politics because it affectively orients listeners to feel and know not only what was
once good but also what is at stake if things don’t change for the better. Throughout Ethiopia’s
past political formations and contemporary political projects claiming to be eutopian have offered
totalitarian roadmaps that aim to shape and reshape the imagination and the imaginings of
Ethiopians. In many ways, the nationalist and development-oriented projects and debates are
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material and political projects that mandate, roadmap, and try to locate specific iterations of eutopia
and often do so through dictatorial practices that fashion their subjects or force people to choose
from a set of prefigured visions—an allusion of choice and democracy. The ultimate effect
however of these nationalists and developmental visions and utopias is that they are containers
which restrict imagining, relationality, and being. While the nationalist dreams of a developmental
state professed equality and progress, they ultimately failed from the start as the visons of progress
they road-mapped were not participatory, protean, and open to change. Furthermore, the
individuals who took part in reconstituting the state and formulating the visions of the future
ultimately sought state dominance by making their visions doctrines which could be used to limit
competition for power. While professing equality, the end to national oppression, and prosperity,
consecutive regimes within Ethiopia have been marked and centered on individuals who seek state
power and dominance rather than democratic governance.
However, I argue that it is now more necessary than ever to seriously orient ourselves
toward e/utopias if we are interested in engaging in the kinds of civic imagination, debates, and
change-making that advance an egalitarian politics of difference and center equity and equitable
futures rather than domination. The immediate necessity for critical utopian imagining has been
made clear with the recent rupture of crisis across Ethiopia. Many young people like myself have
had to reckon with the brutal awareness that what many of us had understood to be Ethiopia, and
thus what many of us understood ourselves to be, was either unraveling in front of us or maybe
never really existed. At the beginning of the climax, or maybe the beginning of what felt like the
end, we witnessed massacres, political complacency, and rising ethnic and national sentiments
which were often used make light of, or justify, atrocities committed against “opposing” ethnic
and national groups. In some ways, our witnessing helped us realize that the future is constituted
245
by the predominantly dystopic realities found in the here and now, embedded somewhere within
today’s social practices which range from mundane to catastrophic. But without a critical sense of
hope, I also find it impossible to imagine alternatives to the cyclical violence and state of crises
that is Ethiopia. But because of this alarming reality, it is even more necessary to use radical and
democratic imagination to envision, negotiate, and debate what a better future might look like,
how we might best attain it, and what kinds of national identification we need to advance to reach
the eutopian visions we actually have in common.

246
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263

264
Appendix A

Maps of Ethiopia

The maps below showcase the ways in which Ethiopia has been mapped and remapped over the
years and how ethnic identity politics has influenced how different administrative regions have
been carved out, named, re-named, and absorbed into ethnically demarcated territories at different
political moments.

Figure A1: Current map of Ethiopia with eleven ethno-regional states (from creative commons).
This map includes the eleventh state (South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region) which was carved
out of SNNP regional state in 2021. Addis Ababa, the capital city, is located at the center of the
country and center of the Oromia regional state. The contested area of Wolqait-Tegede is part of
the Tigray regional state as the Western zone (demarcated in Figure A2 below).
265

Figure A2: 2020 map of Ethiopia with ten ethnic regional states (from creative commons). This
map includes the regional state of Sidama which gained statehood after a 2019 referendum to
separate from the SNNP state. The other nine states include Afar, Amhara, Benishangul-Gumuz
Region, Gambela, Harari, Oromia, Sidama, Somali, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and
Peoples' Region (SNNP), and Tigray.

Bale
Guji
Borena
Arsi
West Arsi
West
Hararghe
East Hararghe
East
Shewa
South West
Shewa
North
Shewa
(Oromia)
West
Shewa
Horo
Guduru
Welega
East
Welega
West
Welega
Kelam
Welega
Illubabor
Jimma
Addis Ababa
Gurage
Yem
Hadiya
Silt'e
Alaba*
Kembata
Tembaro
Dawro
Wolayita
Sidama
Gamo Gofa
Segen Area
Peoples Zone South Omo
Konta*
Basketo*
Keffa
Sheka
Bench
Maji
Anuak
Nuer
Mezhenger
Asosa
Kamashi
Metekel Agew Awi
West
Gojjam
East Gojjam
South Wollo
North
Shewa
(Amhara)
Argobba*
Oromia
Zone
South Gondar
North Wollo
North Gondar
Wag
Hemra
Agew
Awi
Western
Northwestern
Central
Eastern
Southern
Kilbet Rasu
Fanti Rasu
Awsi Rasu
Gabi Rasu
Hari Rasu
Sitti
Dire Dawa
Harari
Fafan
Jarar
Nogob
Korahe
Shabelle
Afder
Liben
Gedeo
Hadiya Dollo
Tigray
Afar
Regions
Amhara
Benishangul-Gumuz
Somali
Oromia
Gambela
Southern Nations,
Nationalities and Peoples'
Special woreda
Harari
Chartered cities
*
Sudan
Eritrea
South
Sudan
Uganda
Kenya
Somalia
Djibouti
Yemen
Sidama
266

Figure A3: 2005 UN OCHA map of Ethiopia representing Ethiopia’s nine administrative
regional states and two chartered cities of Addis Ababa (capital) and Dire Dawa found at
https://reliefweb.int/map/ethiopia/administrative-regions-ethiopia (a version from 2003 found
here: https://reliefweb.int/map/ethiopia/ethiopia-regions-and-zones and a UNDP version from
2000 can be found here: https://reliefweb.int/map/ethiopia/administrative-regions-and-zones-
ethiopia-march-2000)

267

Figure A4: Map of Ethiopia from 1987-1991 including autonomous regions.

268

Figure A5: Map of Ethiopia in 1960 (from creative commons)

269

Figure A6: 1935 Map of Ethiopia and its provinces (map at time of 1935 Italian invasion)

270
Appendix B

Visual Representations of Development

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank

271

272

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth

273
Appendix C

DESTINY ETHIOPIA
SCENARIO TEAM MEMBERS

Abraha Desta, Chairperson, Arena Tigray
Addis Haregewoine, Chair of the National
Council, NAMA
Adem Farah, Executive Committee Member of
Somali Democratic Party (SDP) and Deputy
President of Somali Regional State
Alemayehu Areda, General Manager, ANDBC
Consultants
Almaz Mekonnen, State Minister of Peace
Andualem Arage, Deputy Leader, EZEMA
Arka Abota, Teacher, Addis Ababa University
Asma Redi, Director General, Ministry of Peace
Aster Bedane, General Manager, Fontenina Arts
Awol Allo, Senior Lecturer and Director of
Internationalization, Keele University
Ayele Degaga, Businessperson and blogger
Bedilu Wakjira, Academic, Writer, and Poet,
Addis Ababa University
Berhanu Nega, Leader, EZEMA
Beyene Senbetu, Chairperson, Oromia Abageda
Office
Changkouth David, Officer, Gambella Meles
Zenawi Academy
Dawuud Ibssa, Chairperson, Oromo Liberation
Front (OLF)
Dessalegn Chane, Chairperson, NAMA
Desse Tilahun, Central Committee Member,
Amhara Democratic Party (ADP)
Fanta Woldemichael, Private development
practitioner
Filmon Hadaro, Assistant Professor, Addis
Ababa University
Firealem Shibabaw, Director, Ethiopian School
Meal Initiative
Fiseha Haftetsion, Central Committee Member,
Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF)
Gebre Yntiso, President, Jinka University
Girma Seifu , G/Manager, Private firm
Hailu Adugna, Party Deputy Spokesperson,
Oromo Democratic Party (ODP)
Hassan Moalin, Foreign Secretary; Head of
Addis Ababa Office and Federal Issues, Ogaden
National Liberation Front (ONLF)
Henok Aklilu, Executive Committee Member,
Addis Ababa Balderas Council
Hikmet Abdella, G/Manager, of a private firm
and Harari people representative
Juhar Hassen, G/Manager, Private Firm
Kejela Merdasa, CC Member and Public
Relations Division Head, Oromo Liberation
Front (OLF)
Kydaki Gezahegn, Member of Southern Ethiopia
Peoples Democratic Movement (SEPDM)
Leta Kene'I, Instructor and Poet, Rift Valley
University
Meaza Birru, G/Manager, Sheger FM Radio
Mebrahtu Siyoum, Coordinator, Baytona Tigray
Merara Gudina, Chairperson, Oromo Federalist
Congress (OFC)
Merhatsidk Mekonnen, With a rank of Attorney
General, Chief Legal Advisor to the President,
Amhara National Regional State
Mesfin Negash from the Diaspora Community
Meskerem Abera, Lecturer at Dilla University
and blogger
Moges Edaye, Central Committee Member,
Oromo Democratic Party (ODP)
Olbana Lelissa, Central Committee Member,
Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC)
Rahel Baffie, Vice Chair and Head of External
Affairs, Ethiopian Social Democratic Party
(ESDP/MEDREK)
Sedika Semie, Chairperson, Gamo Elders Group
Sehin Teferra, Founder and Managing Partner,
Setaweet Movement
Simeret Girma, Central Committee Member,
Southern Ethiopia Peoples Democratic
Movement (SEPDM)
Sintayehu Woldemichael, Central Committee
Member, Amhara Democratic Party (ADP)
Sofiya Almamun, Member of Parliament
representing the Benishangul Gumz Regional
State
Te'amrat Gebregiorgis, Managing Editor, Addis
Fortune Newspaper
Tsegaye Mamo, Academic Affairs Vice
President, Meles Zenawi Leadership Academy
Yassin Mohammed, Coordinator, Democracy
and Rule of Law Centre, Policy Studies Institute
Yeshiwas Assefa, Chairperson, EZEMA

274
Appendix D

Interview Tools and Participant Information

INFORMATION SHEET FOR EXEMPT RESEARCH

STUDY TITLE: E/utopia in Practice: the practice and politics of Ethiopian Futurity
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Azeb Madebo
FACULTY ADVISOR: Francois Bar, PhD.

You are invited to participate in a research study conducted by Azeb Madebo, doctoral candidate
at the University of Southern California (USA) because you are 18 years of age or older and of
Ethiopian descent. Your participation in this research is voluntary. You should read the
information below before deciding whether to participate. Please take as much time as you need
to read the consent form. Someone will be made available to read or translate the consent form
and questionnaire if needed. You may also decide to discuss participation with your family or
friends. If you decide to participate, you will be asked to continue with the interview or focus
group.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY: The purpose of this study is to explore how Ethiopians imagine
and negotiate the future of Ethiopia and Ethiopia’s relationship to development.

PARTICIPANT INVOLVEMENT: If you volunteer to participate in this study, you will be
asked to respond to a series of questions. You will be asked to respond to questions about how
you envision Ethiopia’s future, how you and others you know use social media to participate in
shaping Ethiopia’s politics and future, and how the changes you have seen taken place in
Ethiopia have affected you and your communities. Interviews will take between 60 and 90
minutes to complete and focus groups take between 90 and 120 minutes.

CONFIDENTIALITY: The members of the research team, and the University of Southern
California Institutional Review Board (IRB) may access the data. The IRB reviews and monitors
research studies to protect the rights and welfare of research subjects.

When the results of the research are published or discussed in conferences, only identifiable
information ok’d by participants will be used. The data will be stored in a password-protected
file on the researcher’s work computer indefinitely. Participants can opt out of having names or
identifying information collected for this study.

The researcher will audio record interviews for later transcription. Only the researcher and
professional transcribers will have access to audio recordings. The audio files will be erased after
the transcription of the audio is complete. The audio files will be stored using file names that
don’t include the names of participants.
275

Due to the nature of focus groups, your confidentiality cannot be guaranteed if you’re
participating in a focus group. However, in order to maintain the confidentiality of the group,
you are asked not to discuss the content of the group with anyone not in the group, or to discuss
who participated in the focus group.

INVESTIGATOR’S CONTACT INFORMATION: If you have any questions or concerns
about the research (including receiving information about study results), please feel free to
contact Azeb Madebo at Madebo@usc.edu.

IRB CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have any questions about your rights as a research participant, please contact the
University of Southern California Institutional Review Board at (323) 442-0114 or email
irb@usc.edu.

276
Interview Call for Participants

IMAGINATIONS AND PRACTICES OF FUTURITY AND CHANGE IN ETHIOPIA

We are looking for individuals above the age of 18 to take part in study about the future of
Ethiopia and the changes taking place in the country. The study aims to understand people's
perspectives about the social, economic, and political changes taking place within Ethiopia.
Discussions will enable participants to talk through their imaginations, hopes, and the possible
scenarios they see taking place within the future. Interview sessions will take between 1:30 and
2:00 hours and each participant will be given 150 Birr for participation (covering the costs for
transportation and lunch).

To sign up as a potential participant please go to Addis Ababa University’s School of Journalism
and Communication building (Nelson Mandela Building) or contact the researcher using the
number and email below.

Researcher: Azeb Madebo
Email: Madebo@usc.edu
Phone: [removed]

SIGN UP SHEET/የምዝገባ ቅፅ
(Only to be used by admins at AAU’s School of Journalism and Communication)

NAME PHONE NUMBER

277
Call for Interview Participants (Amharic Translation)
በኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ተስፋና ለውጥ ላይ ግምቶችና ተግባሮች

IMAGINATIONS AND PRACTICES OF FUTURITY AND CHANGE IN ETHIOPIA

ለቃለ- መጠይቅ ተሳታፊዎች የቀረበ ጥሪ (call for interview participants)
ስለኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ዕቅድና በሀገሪቱ ውስጥ እየተካሄደ ስላለው ለውጥ በሚደረገው ጥናት ላይ ተሳታፊ ለመሆን
እድሜአቸው ከ18 ዓመት በላይ የሆኑ ሰዎችን እንፈልጋለን፡፡ ጥናቱ ዒላማ ያደረገው ህዝቦች ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ በመካሄድ ላይ
ስላሉት ማህራዊ- ኢኮኖሚያዊና ፖለቲካዊ ለውጦች ያላቸውን አስተያየቶች ለመገንዘብ ነው፡፡ ውይይቶቹ ተሳታፊዎቹ
ግምቶቻቸውን ተስፋቸውንና ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ በዓይናቸው ሥር እየተካሄዱ ስላሉት ሊደረስባቸው ስለሚችሉ ሁኔታዎች
መናገር እንዲችሉ አቅም ይሰጣቸዋል፡፡ ቃለ-መጠይቁ የሚወስደው ጊዜ ከ1፡00- 1፡30 ሲሆን እያንዳንዱ ተሳታፊ 150.00
ብር ይከፈለዋል(የትራንስፖርትና የምሳ ወጪውን የሚሸፍን ይሆናል)፡፡
ተሳታፊ ለመሆን የምትችሉ ወደ አዲስ አበባ ዩኒቨርሲቲ የጋዜጠኝነትና ኮሙኒኬሽን ት/ቤት (ኔልሰን ማንዴላ ህንፃ) በመሄድ
ወይም ከዚህ በታች የተቀመጡትን የተመራማሪዋን ስልክ/ኢ-ሜይል በመጠቀም መመዝገብ ትችላላችሁ።
Researcher: Azeb Madebo
Email: Madebo@usc.edu
Phone: [removed]

Focus Group Call for Participants

IMAGINATIONS AND PRACTICES OF FUTURITY AND CHANGE IN ETHIOPIA

We are looking for individuals above the age of 18 to take part in a focus group study about the
future of Ethiopia and the changes taking place in the country. The aim of the focus groups is to
understand people's perspectives regarding the social, economic, and political changes taking
place within Ethiopia. Discussions will enable participants to talk through their imaginations,
hopes, and the scenarios they think are possible for Ethiopia’s future. Focus group sessions will
take between 1:30 and 2:00 hours and each participant will be given 150 Birr for participation
(covering the costs for transportation and lunch).

Where: focus groups take place at School for Journalism and Communication (Nelson Mandela
Building)

When: [Date] between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM

278
To sign up as a potential participant please go to Addis Ababa University’s School of Journalism
and Communication building (Nelson Mandela Building) or contact the researcher using the
number and email below.

Researcher: Azeb Madebo
Email: Madebo@usc.edu
Phone: [removed]

Focus Group Call for Participants (Amharic Translation)
ለትኩረት ቡድን ውይይት ተሳታፊዎች ጥሪ
በኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ተስፋና ለውጥ ላይ ግምቶችና ተግባሮች
ለትኩረት ቡድን ውይይት ተሳታፊዎች ጥሪ (Focus Group Call for Participants)

በኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ተስፋና በሀገሪቱ እየተካሄዱ ባሉ ለውጦች ላይ በሚካሄደው የትኩረት ቡድን ጥናት ውስጥ የሚሳተፉ
ዕድሜአቸው ከ18 አመት በላይ የሆኑ ሰዎች እንፈልጋለን፡፡ የትኩረት ቡድን ውይይት አላማ በማህበራዊ በኢኮኖሚያዊና
በፖለቲካዊ መስኮች ረገድ ሰዎች ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ በመካሄድ ላይ ስላለው ለውጥ ያላቸውን እይታ ለመረዳት ነው፡
ውይይቶቹ ተሳታፊዎች በግምቶቻቸው በተስፋዎቻቸው በኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ተስፋ ውስጥ ባይናቸው ስር እየተከናወኑ ባሉ
ሊሆኑ የሚችሉ ሁኔታዎች አማካይነት ሀሳባቸውን እንዲገልፁ አቅም ይሰጣሉ፡፡ የትኩረት ቡድኑ የውይይት ጊዜ ከ1፡30 -
2፡00 ሰዓት ሲወስድ እያዳንዱ ተሳታፊ ለተሳትፎው 150 ብር ይከፈለዋል፡፡(የትራንስፖርትና የምሳ ወጪውን ይሸፍናል)፡፡
ቦታ - የጋዜጠኝነትና ኮሙኒኬሽን ት/ቤት (ኔልሰን ማንዴላ ህንፃ)
ጊዜ - [date]

ተሳታፊ ለመሆን የምትችሉ ወደ አዲስ አበባ ዩኒቨርሲቲ የጋዜጠኝነትና ኮሙኒኬሽን ት/ቤት (ኔልሰን ማንዴላ ህንፃ) በመሄድ
ወይም ከዚህ በታች የተቀመጡትን የተመራማሪዋን ስልክ/ኢ-ሜይል በመጠቀም መመዝገብ ትችላላችሁ።
Researcher: Azeb Madebo
Email: Madebo@usc.edu
Phone: [removed]

*Note: focus groups were canceled due to emergence and spread of COVID-19

279
IMAGINATIONS AND PRACTICES OF FUTURITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN
ETHIOPIA
QUESTIONNAIRE TOOL
Interview Outline:
Script
Questionnaire on imagination and futurity Questionnaire on development
Additional Questions for Diaspora Ethiopians Amharic translation of questionnaire
SCRIPT
[Researchers to meet participants in public locations, participants home, or location of
participants’ choosing]
GREETING AND PROMPT:
Hello, my name is Azeb and I am a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Southern California
and an affiliate of Addis Ababa University. I am interviewing Ethiopians living in Ethiopia and
in the diaspora to learn more about how Ethiopians imagine, negotiate, and put to practice
different ideas about the future of Ethiopia. In other words, I am conducting a study to
understand how different Ethiopians imagine the future of Ethiopia, how they debate and
negotiate what the future of the country should be, and how they enact (or put into practice)
different ideas about change and futurity within Ethiopia.
We are here today because you previously indicated interest in being part of this study. Are you
still interested in participating in the study?
• YES – If yes, continue with information sheet for exempt research. Once participants
have been given time to read it and ask questions, begin focus group.
• NO – If no, thank them for their time and end the interview.
• DON’T KNOW – If don’t know, thank them for your time and end the interview.

Collect the information below on separate file*
Interview Date: _____________________________________________________________
Interview Location: __________________________________________________________
Interviewee Information:
Interviewee Name/s: ____________________ Sex/Gender: ___________________________
Age range: ____________________________ Nationality: ___________________________
Residency: ____________________________ Occupation: ___________________________
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IMAGINATION & FUTURITY QUESTIONS:
I am going to start by asking you some questions about the future of Ethiopia, the changes you
see taking place, the changes you hope to see, and what changes you don’t want for Ethiopia.
Again, the questions are aimed at getting to know what you think about Ethiopia’s future, there
are not right or wrong answers.
• When you imagine the future of Ethiopia, what do you think of or see?
o What do you imagine Ethiopia will look and be like in the next 10 years? In the
next 30 years?
§ In the future, Ethiopia will look like_______________________.
§ In the future, Ethiopia will have more of ____________________.
§ In the future, Ethiopia will still have ________________________.
§ In the future, Ethiopia will have less of these issues__________.
o Can you give me three words to describe Ethiopia right now?
• Please complete these sentences:
o I generally feel [very, somewhat, not at all] optimistic about the future of
Ethiopia.
o I generally feel [very, somewhat, not at all] optimistic about my future in Ethiopia.
o I generally feel like the quality of my generation’s life will be [better/worse off]
than that of the previous generations’ life.
• Do you think Ethiopia is currently experiencing a period of significant change? If yes,
can you describe this change?
• Who do you think is influencing the kinds of changes that are taking place in Ethiopia the
most? Politicians [regional, national, international], international interests stakeholder
groups and organizations, locals, diaspora, other stakeholders?
• Who is driving Ethiopia’s official plans for change?
o What do you think their imaginations/visions are?
o Do you think the visions and plans for change will materialize?
o Do you think these imaginations and plans for change will benefit (all)
Ethiopians?
o Are these plans for the future the same/different than what the Ethiopians you
know want?
• Do you think Ethiopians’ voices are being listened to when creating these visions and
plans for the future?
• Is it important for public opinion to be considered when creating these visions and plans
for the future? Why, or why not?
• Do you think there are limitations to achieving the goals of the country? If so, what are
these limitations?
• Do you think the past of Ethiopia, and imaginations about its past, play an important role
in imagining the future of the country?
o How does the past influence the future?
o How is the past influencing the present?
• How do you think traditions and religion influence the present and future of Ethiopia?
281
Do you think that religious institutions and traditions need to play a greater or lesser role in
imagining and creating the future of the country?
What do you think other people from outside of Ethiopia [from other African countries, Europe,
USA, etc.] think of Ethiopia? When they think of Ethiopia, what do you think they think of?
DEVELOPMENT QUESTIONS:
Now, I am going to ask you some questions about development in Ethiopia. [When I talk about
development, I am referring to social, economic, and political development.] It is ok if you don’t
know how to answer the specific questions. The questions are aimed at getting to know what you
think about Ethiopia’s relationship to these kinds of development.
• How often and in what context do you hear people talking about development in
Ethiopia?
• What do you think development means? What do you think the concept of development
is referring to? Where do you think the concept of development comes from?
• What do you think other people mean by development when they talk about development
in Ethiopia? What values are attached to development when you hear people talking
about development in the context of Ethiopia?
• Who do you think is influencing, trying to influence, or taking an important part in
Ethiopia’s development?
[If the interviewee does not understand the question or is having a hard time you can say
“this can be international orgs, other states or governments, individuals...”]
• Do you think you are included in the process of development? In what ways?
• Overall, what do you think of development in Ethiopia? Has development been beneficial
to Ethiopia or do you think Ethiopia should use different approaches for creating change
in the country?
• Has Ethiopia’s relationship [or involvement in] development impacted you? In what
ways has development impacted your life?
• How has Ethiopia’s relationship [or involvement in] development impacted Addis
Ababa? How has it impacted the other regions in Ethiopia?
• Do you think the impact of the changes taking place under ‘development’ are benefiting
all Ethiopians equally? If not, who is experiencing the most benefit and who is not?
The following set of questions are for diaspora Ethiopians. For the purposes of this study,
diaspora Ethiopians are defined as those who hold permanent residency, citizenship
status, or live in other countries. Those that hold residency or citizenship status elsewhere
but currently reside or work in Ethiopia are called ‘returning diaspora.’

282
EXTENDED INTERVIEW TOOL FOR ETHIOPIAN DIASPORA:
• Do you think living outside of the country has influenced the way you imagine the future
of Ethiopia?
• How do you hope to participate in the future of the country?
• How do you presently participate in the future of the country?
• What role do you think diaspora Ethiopians play in imagining and enacting the future of
Ethiopia?
• Do you think that Ethiopia needs diasporic participation for it reach some of its goals for
change?
• How has Ethiopia [government] asked diaspora Ethiopians to participate in the present
and future of the country?
• Do you feel limited in how you can participate in the future of the country?
DIASPORA AND SOCIAL MEDIA USE

283
Interview Guide (Amharic Translation offered to participants who wanted it as addition aid)
የኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ተስፋና ልማት ግምቶችና ተግባራት መጠይቅ መተግበሪያ
IMAGINATIONS AND PRACTICES OF FUTURITY AND CHANGE IN ETHIOPIA

የቃለ መጠይቅ ዝርዝር (Interview Outline)
ፅሁፍ
መጠይቅ - በግምትና በወደፊት ተስፋ ላይ
መጠይቅ - በልማት ላይ
ለዲያስፖራ ኢትዮጵያውያን ተጨማሪ ጥያቄዎች
የስምምነት ቅፅ
ፅሁፍ (Script)
[ተመራማሪው የጥናቱ ተሳታፊዎችን ህዝብ በሚገኝባቸው ቦታዎች በተሳታፊው መኖሪያ ቤት ወይም ተሳታፊው
በሚመርጣቸው ቦታዎች ያገኛቸዋል]
ሰላምታና ማስታወቂያ (Greeting and Prompt)
ሰላም! ስሜ አዜብ ይባላል የአዲስ አበባ ዩንቨርሲቲ ተባባሪና የደቡብ ካሊፎርኒያ ዩንቨርሲቲ እጩ ዶክተር ነኝ፡፡ ኢትዮጵያውያን
ለኢትዮጵያውያ የወደፊት ተስፋ የተለያዩ ሃሳቦችን እንዴት በሃሳባቸው እንደሚስሉ እንደሚደራደሩና በተግባር ላይ
እንዲሚያውሉ በተጨማሪ ለማወቅ በኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ የሚኖሩ እትዮጵያውያንና በውጭ የሚኖሩ የዲያስፖራ አባላትን ቃለ
መጠይቅ እያደረኩላቸው ነው፡፡በሌላ አገላለፅ የተለያዩ ኢትዮጵያውያን እንዴት የኢትዮጵያን የወደፊት ተስፋ በሃሳባቸው
እንደሚስሉ የሃገሪቱ የወደፊት ተስፋ ምን መሆን እንዳለበት እንደሚወያዩ እንደሚደራደሩ ለለውጥና ለኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት
ተስፋ የተላያዩ ሃሳቦችን እንዴት በተግባር ላይ እንደሚያውሉ ለመረዳት ጥናት እያካሄድኩ ነው፡፡
ዛሬ እዚህ የተገኘነው ከዚህ በፊት በዚህ ጥናት ውስጥ ተሳታፊ ለመሆን በገለፃችሁት ፍላጎት መሰረት ነው፡፡ አሁንስ በዚህ ጥናት
ለመሳተፍ ፍላጎት አላችሁ?
• አዎ- መልሳቸው አዎ ከሆነ የስምምነት ቅፁን ማስሞላትህን ቀጥል፡፡ አንዴ ከፈረሙ በኃላ ቃለ መጠይቅ ማድረግህን
ቀጥል፡፡
• አይደለም - መልሳቸው አይደለም ከሆነ ስለጊዜአቸው አመስግነህ ቃለ -መጠይቅ ማድረግህን አቁም፡፡
• አላውቅም -መልሳቸው አላውቅም/እኔ እንጃ ከሆነ ስለጊዜአቸው አመስግነህ ቃለ -መጠይቁን አቁም፡፡
የቃለ -መጠይቅ ሰጪው - ስም/ስሞች በተለየ ክፍል የሚያዝ
284
የቃለ - መጠይቅ - አድራጊው ስም
ቃለ - መጠይቁ የተደረገበት ቀን
ቃለ - መጠይቁ የተደረገበት ቦታ
የቃለ - መጠይቅ ሰጪው መረጃ

Interviewee Information:
ፆታ
የዕድሜ ክልል
ዜግነት
የመኖሪያ ቦታ
ስራ
የግምትና የወደፊት ተስፋን የተመለከቱ ጥያቄዎች (Imagination and Futurity Questions)
አሁን ስለኢትዮጵያውያ የወደፊት ተስፋ፣ ሲካሄዱ ስለምታያቸው ለውጦች፣ ልታያቸው ተስፋ ስለምታደርጋችው ለውጦች
በኢትዮጵያ ሲከናወኑ ልታይ ስለምትፈልጋቸው ለውጦች ዓይነት አንዳንድ ጥያቄዎች ልጠይቅህ ነው አሁንም ጥያቄዎቹ
የሚያነጣጥሩት ስለኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ተስፋ ምን አንደሚታሰብ ለማወቅ ነው እናም ትክክል ወይም ስህተት የሚባሉ
መልሶች የሉም፡፡
o ስለኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ተስፋ ስትገምት ምን ታስባለህ ወይም ምን ይታይሃል ?
• በሚቀጥሉት አስር አመታት ኢትዮጵያውያ ምን ትመስላለች ብለህ ትገምታለህ ? በሚቀጥሉት ሰላሳ አመታትስ ?
• ወደፊት ኢትዮጵያውያ ትመስላለች ?
• ወደፊት ኢትዮጵያውያ በኣብዛኛው ይኖራታል
• ወደፊት ኢትዮጵያ ገና ይኖራታል
• ወደፊት ኢትዮጵያውያ እነዚህ ጉዳዮች በትንሹ ይኖፘታል
o የአሁኗን ኢትዮጵያ ለመግለፅ ሶስት ቃላትን ልታስቀምጥ ትችላለህ ? እና
እባክህ እነዚህን ዓ.ነገሮች አሟላ፡-
• በጠቅላላው የኢትዮጵያውያን የወደፊት ተስፋ በተመለከተ (በጣም፣ በመጠኑ፣በፍፁም) የተስፈኝነት/አዎንታዊ ስሜት
ይሰማኛል፡፡
• በጠቅላላው በኢትዮጵያውያ ውስጥ ስለሚኖረኝ የወደፊት ተስፋ (በጣም፣ በመጠኑ፣በፍፁም) የተስፈኝነት/አዎንታዊ
ስሜት ይሰማኛል፡፡
• በጠቅላላው የኔ ትውልድ የህይወት ጥራት ካለፈው ትውልድ የህይወት ጥራት (የተሻለ/የባስ) ይሆናል፡፡
• ኢትዮጵያ ባሁኑ ሰዓት በጉልህ የለውጥ ወቅት ውስጥ እያለፈች ነው ብለህ ታስባለህ? ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ እየተካሄዱ
ያሉትን የለውጥ ዓይነቶች በአብዛኛው ተፅዕኖ የሚያሳድርባቸው ምንድነው ብለህ ታስባለህ?
285
• ፖለቲከኞች(ክልላዊ፣ብሔራዊ፣አለማቀፋዊ)፣ የአለም አቀፍ ጥቅሞች ባለድርሻ ቡድኖችና ድርጅቶች አገር በቀሎች
የዲያስፖራ አባላት እና ሌሎች ባለድርሻ አካላት
• የኢትዮጵያን ይፋዊ የለውጥ ዕቅዶች የሚገፋው ማነው?
• ምናቦቻቸው /ራዕዮቻቸው ምንድናቸው ብለህ ታስባለህ?
• የለውጥ ራዕዮችና እቅዶቹ ተግባር ላይ ይውላሉ/እውን ይሆናሉ ብለህ ታስባለህ? መልስህ አዎ ከሆነ ልትገልፀው
ትችላለህ?
• እነዚህ የለውጥ ምናቦችና ዕቅዶች ሁሉንም ኢትዮጵያውያን ተጠቃሚ ያደርጋሉ ብለህ ታስባለህ?
• እነዚህ የወደፊት ዕቅዶች አንተ የምታውቃቸው ኢትዮጵያውያን ከሚፈልጉት ጋር ተመሳሳይ/የተለያዩ ናቸው
• እነዚህ የወደፊት ራዕዮችና እቅዶች ሲዘጋጁ የኢትዮጵያውያን ድምፅ ተደምጧል ብለህ ታስባለህ?
• እነዚህ የወደፊት ራዕዮችና እቅዶች ሲዘጋጁ የህዝብ አስተያየት መካተቱ ጠቃሚ ነውን? ለምን ወይም ለምን አይሆንም?
• የሀገሪቱን ግቦች ለማሳካት እጥረቶች አሉ ብለህ ታስባለህ? መልስህ አዎ ከሆነእነዚህ እጥረቶች ምንድናቸው?
• የኢትዮጵያ ያለፈው ዘመንና ስላለፈው ዘመን ያለው ግምት የሀገሪቱን የወደፊት ተስፋ ለመገመት ጠቃሚ ሚና
ይጫወታል ብለህ ታስባለህ?
• ያለፈው ዘመን መጪው ዘመን ላይ እንዴት ተፅዕኖ ያሳድራል
• ያለፈው ዘመን እንዴት ነው ያሁኑ ዘመን ላይ ተፅዕኖ የሚያሳድረው?
• ልማዶችና ሃይማኖት እንዴት የአሁንና የኢትዮጵያ የወደፊት ተስፋ ላይ ተፅዕኖ ያሳድራል ብለህ ታስባለህ?
• የሀገሪቱን የወደፊት ተስፋ በመገመትና በመፍጠር ረገድ የሃይማኖት ተቋማት ትልቅ ወይም አነሰተኛ ሚና መጫወት
ይገባቸዋል ብለህ ታስባለህ?
• ከኢትዮጵያ ውጪ ያሉ ሃገራት (ሌሎች አፍሪካ ሃገራት፣አውሮፓ፣አሜሪካ ወዘተ) ስለኢትዮጵያ ምን ያስባሉ ብለህ
ታስባለህ?
ልማት ላይ ያተኮሩ ጥያቄዎች (Questions on Development)
አሁን ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ ስላለው ልማት አንዳንድ ጥያቄዎች ልጠይቅህ ነው፡፡ ስለልማት ሳወራ ማህበራዊ፣ ኢኮኖሚያዊና
ፖለቲካዊ ልማትን መጥቀሴ ነው፡፡ የተጠቀሱትን ጥያቄዎች እንዴት እንደምትመልስ ካላወቅህ ችግር የለውም፡፡ ጥያቄዎቹ
ያነጣጠሩት ኢትዮጵያ ከነዚህ የልማት አይነቶት ጋር ስላላት ቁርኝት ምን እንደምታስብ ለማወቅ ነው፡፡
• ሰዎች ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ ስላለው ልማት ምን ያህል ጊዜና በምን አይነት ሁኔታ ሲያወሩ ትሰማለህ?
• ሰዎች ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ ስላለው ልማት ሲያወሩ ልማት ሲሉ ምን ማለታቸው እንደሆነ ታስባለህ?
• ልማት ምን ማለት ነው ብለህ ታስባለህ? የልማት ፅንሰ ሃሳብ ምንን ያመለክታል ብለህ ታስባለህ? የልማት ፅንሰ ሃሳብ
ከየት መጣ ብለህ ታስባለህ?
286
• በኢትዮጵያ ልማት ውስጥ ማን ተፅዕኖ እያሳደረ፣ ማን ተፅዕኖ ለማሳደር እየሞከረ ወይም ማን ጠቃሚ ድርሻ እየወሰደ
ነው ብለህ ታስባለህ?
• [ቃለ - መጠይቅ ሰጪው ጥያቄውን ካልተረዳ ወይም ከተቸገረ “አለም አቀፍ ድርጅቶች ሌሎች ሃገራት ወይም
መንግስታትና ግለሰቦች” ልትል ትችላለህ]
• በአጠቃላይ ኢትዮጵያ ውስጥ ስላለው ልማት ምን ታስባለህ? ልማት ለኢትዮጵያ ጠቃሚ ነበር ወይስ በሃገሪቱ ውስጥ
ለማምጣት ኢትዮጵያ የተለያዩ አግባቦችን መጠቀም አለባት ብለህ ታስባለህ?
• ኢትዮጵያ ከልማት ጋር ያላት ቁርኝት(ተሳትፎ) በአንተ ላይ ተፅዕኖ አሳድሯል? በምን ዓይነት መንገዶች ነው ልማት
በህይወትህ ላይ ተፅዕኖ ያሳደረው?
• ኢትዮጵያ ከልማት ጋር ያላት ቁርኝት(ተሳትፎ) እንዴት ነው በአዲስ አበባ ላይ ተፅዕኖ ያሳደረው? በሌሎቹ የኢትዮጵያ
ክልሎች ላይስ እንዴት ነው ተፅዕኖ ያሳደረው?
• በልማት ስር በመካሄድ ላይ ያሉት ለውጦች ሁሉንም ኢትዮጵያውያን በእኩልነት እየጠቀሙ ነው ብለህ ታስባለህ?
መልስህ አይደለም ከሆነ ትልቁን ጥቅም የሚያገኘው ማነው? የማያገኘውስ?

287
DESCRIPTION OF PEOPLE INTERVIEWED

1) Abdulahi (Oromo, Qerroo activist)
2) Alemayehu (diaspora youth and organizer for Justice for Ethiopia)
3) Anonymous (Organizer for Oromo Protests)
4) Ayalew (Qerroo)
5) Aynalam Addis Ababa University, Comm/Journalism school)
6) Bekele (Chair of Dept of Philosophy at AAU)
7) Biruk (Diaspora businessman from Berkeley, Ca working in Ethiopia)
8) Daniel (Tigrayan, Amhara, attorney)
9) Dereje (retiree/pension, 60s, 32 years in Hawassa of mixed ethnic origin)
10) Ephirem (Oromo, in media industry, Qerroo)
11) Ermias (Ethiopian educator and activist of Oromo and Amhara background)
12) Eyasu (Hosanna, engineering recent grad)
13) Felake (Amhara, business owner in Addis Ababa)
14) Hassan (Somali, ONLF)
15) High-level Prosperity Party Member and Somali region official
16) Hoda (Somali, diaspora, women’s rights advocate)
17) M. M. (Tigrayan, Amhara, business owner in Addis Ababa)
18) Melate (diaspora, phone interview)
19) mixed ethnic background, Hawassa, journalist and lecturer
20) Mohamod (Jijiga University faculty)
21) Mustafe (OYSU advocate, ONLF, diaspora Somali)
22) Mustafe (Somali student, Jijiga University)
23) Nahom (Addis Ababa resident)
24) Nathan (Addis Ababa University, Comm/Journalism school)
25) Natnael (Oromo, lawyer, Ambo region)
26) Omar (OYSU)
27) OPC and OFC senior leader
28) Shades (diaspora youth, popular social media account)
29) Taddesse (Ethiopian Studies)
30) Tasama (Historian)
31) Tesfaye (Tigrayan from Amhara region, engineering recent grad)
32) Tsedeniya (Hawassa University, mixed background)
33) Young diaspora activist for Amhara Awareness
34) Zegeye (Bonga/Kafa, SW Ethiopia)

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Madebo, Azeb (author)

Core Title E/Utopia in practice: the practice and politics of Ethiopian futurity

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 08/01/2024

Defense Date 06/06/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag development,Ethiopia,ethnicity,futurity,imagination,nation,OAI-PMH Harvest,progress

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bar , Francois (committee chair), Frazier, Taj (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member)

Creator Email Azebmadebo@gmail.com,madebo@up.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375982

Unique identifier UC111375982

Legacy Identifier etd-MadeboAzeb-11055

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Madebo, Azeb

Type texts

Source 20220802-usctheses-batch-966 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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