Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia. Power, Scale, Performativity

Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia interrogates the question about how to reinstate movement to our conceptualization of state formation in Africa at a time in which the continent witnesses profound social and political transformations inscribed in increasingly globalized and localized dynamics. This book revisits key theories of the state, adopting a detailed empirical approach that studies how state power operates in the everyday. It locates the mutual constitution of state and society in the wide set of scalar processes that articulate how state power structures social life and, simultaneously, creates the conditions of possibility for new openings and social formations. Drawing on five qualitative fieldworks in Ethiopia between 2006 and 2018, the book identifies some important challenges that the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has encountered in institutionalizing power through the developmental state, an ambitious model of state-mediated economic liberalization intended to fulfil the broader re-organization of the Ethiopian state alongside Ethnic Federalism since 1991. The case studies discuss how policies of resettlement, decentralization, agriculture commercialization, entrepreneurship, and industrialization inscribed dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in both rural and urban areas. Against these profound transformations beneficiaries casted new meanings to land, place, and work, alongside struggles to secure reproduction. Interrogating the notions of scale and performativity, the book revisits dominant approaches that in African studies read state formation together with centre-periphery relations and ascribe cultural interpretations to the work of state power in the everyday, ultimately contributing to important discussions about authoritarianism and ethnonationalism in contemporary Ethiopia.