The densely populated northern highlands are the traditional crisis area of Ethiopia. They have been the scene of famine, civil war and heavy-handed government intervention. Partly due to the hardships that used to be part of fieldwork in rural Ethiopia, not least for the reasons mentioned above, there is a great lack of high quality studies, especially studies seeking to capture the spirit of peasant society, seeing the challenges through peasant eyes. This book brings together a number of empirically grounded accounts, all with a strong ethnographic flavour, located in various parts of the Amhara region. The book has a critical tone, as we seek to contrast the theory that may be constructed from our fieldwork material with the standard accounts.

The land issue dominates peasant life. It also refuses to go away at the national political level despite many attempts to reach a final settlement. There have been periods of reform when it appeared that land tenure might receive the attention it deserves in a society still dominated by its rural economy. Later on the issue has tended to disappear from the national consciousness, only to reappear when it became clear that the cost of current policy was enormous. Due to this on-and-off appearance, the debate on land tenure has often been based more on political ideology than on an understanding of peasant land tenure. There is an urgent need for an informed debate of land tenure issues in Ethiopia – and the current book is our modest contribution. If the new government formed in April 2018 follows up on its promises, this critical development issue may again receive the attention it deserves.

The book started with a workshop to take stock of ongoing research on peasant society and land tenure, ‘The Biennial Colloquium in Social Anthropology: Land Tenure and Development in the North Ethiopian Highlands’, which took place in Trondheim on 27–28 October 2011. Three of the papers, focusing explicitly on land tenure, were later developed into chapters for this book (Chapters 3, 4 and 7). At the workshop, we also decided to propose a land tenure panel at the 18th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies in Dire Dawa on 29 October–2 November 2012. Two of the chapters in this book (Chapters 5 and 6) originate from papers presented at that conference.