In a new book, Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia, Davide Chinigò argues that social change drives state formation in ways that are consequential for politics, economic change, and, particularly, changes in social identity formation. These intertwining themes are highly relevant to Ethiopia, a country with a constitution that seemingly privileges certain identities (ethnic groups) while the political system has remained mostly authoritarian and party- and state-led. Chinigò’s analysis focuses on state formation and social change by bringing in the “mundane practices that describe how people live alongside and despite the constraining power of state policies, and development programmes, when their claims for recognition are dismissed or remain unacknowledged” (p. 3). The acquiescence, resistance, and negotiation of these relationships help shape a new form of state power.
Chinigò’s work is both a theoretical and an empirical exercise, although his contributions are perhaps more substantial in the empirical sense. He shapes his argument by responding to three influential approaches to state building in the Ethiopianist literature, each of which illuminates some parts of everyday politics and obscures others. For instance, the center–periphery approach is crucial to highlighting those voices in Ethiopian history that are neglected and understudied, but it tends to freeze the analysis in time and to trap actors in relationships of power that are not as simple as the powerful versus the powerless (p. 8). Similarly, the developmental state framework picks up on a central vision of the modern state in Ethiopia, one that draws from the experiences of socioeconomic transformation in East Asia. Finally, Chinigò considers the political culture line of argument, which sees much of what is consequential in Ethiopian politics as the result of distinct historical and sociological foundations.
In place of these approaches, Chinigò draws from Judith Butler’s seminal works on performativity (including Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, 1993) to point out the ways that much of our politics takes place through “knowable effects” that are performed, institutionalized, and “reiterated.” It is the reiterated practices of power, rather than the structures per se, that matter. This is particularly true for the discussions of group mobilization for development tasks in Ethiopia, where we see that institutions or even laws do not matter as much as the way that the state targets and mobilizes the citizenry to particular reforms and tasks. Chinigò also focuses on how state power, and its use of repressive techniques, then creates political subjects both in the creative and generative sense. The agency of citizens in responding to state power emerges from this attention.
All this foregrounds the most exciting and significant contribution of this work, which is Chinigò’s development of the cases. Demonstrating the power of qualitatively rich data to tackle variation in political context and outcome, the case studies focus on five regions of the country and several distinct topics central to the state-building project. These topics include the politics of land resettlement, decentralization and land registration, agricultural commercialization, small business development, and industrialization. Each chapter has a discussion of the histories of these political questions and introduces compelling data to point to the everyday negotiations around various political reforms and processes. For instance, the discussion of mass political mobilization and subvillage structures is threaded throughout the chapters, with examples from the Oromia region focused on the gott, shanee, model farmer (MF) programs, and the “one to five” networks. Chinigò notes that “they [beneficiaries] could rarely avoid enrolling in state promoted schemes for fear of losing tenuous opportunities” (p. 151), yet in all cases, these schemes and programs rarely yielded the economic opportunities recipients were promised or hoped for. The beneficiaries therefore performed participation and compliance while creatively pursuing their own objectives. In the case of the peri-urban entrepreneurship programs, this involved using the access to microcredit for individually productive activities outside the sanctioned and preferred collective entrepreneurship forms.
Similarly, the discussion of the rural land resettlement program points to the subversion and risk-diversification strategies of rural farmers, virtually all of whom had kept connections to and eventually returned to their original land shortly after initiation of a government-sponsored land resettlement program. Land resettlement and land titling did little to resolve fundamental land insecurity issues in these communities yet had the potential to create greater social conflict as ethnic groups were moved or land was reallocated or marked for title. For instance, participants were required to participate in land registration in the Oromia region but, in the end, “had too little incentive to obtain accurate land measurement. They wanted to avoid border disputes with their neighbors” and avoid contact with government administrators (p. 108). These forms of creative subversion of government activities in a state that is generally understood to be an effectively repressive regime demonstrates precisely what the politics of the everyday can offer to our analysis of authoritarianism and development interventions.
There are two areas that I wish Chinigò could have taken up with greater clarity. He writes that his focus is on what he terms the “becomings” of social identity formation, instead of “belongings” (2). In Ethiopia these identity formations are most often about ethnicity. And yet, in my view, Chinigò does not do enough to draw these themes out from the data. Several of the case studies point to the potential of or purported instances of ethnic identification, change, and “becoming” but do not explore what they mean in political terms. In his conclusion he points out that. despite the constitutional structures, ethnicity is only one of several important identities for his respondents, the others being land, place, and work (228).
In light of the recent war in Ethiopia, which Kjetil Tronvoll calls four separate civil wars (“The Anatomy of Ethiopia’s Civil War,” Current History, 121 [835], 2022), one would hope to see more discussion of how these developmental interventions and processes shaped the “belonging” and identification of particular groups. If inequalities and contestations over land, place, and work are as central in Ethiopia as ethnicity, what impact did these everyday interactions have on ethnic identification? The Wolaita region has just recently held a referendum for statehood within the federal system, but the case study on commercial agriculture does not do more than point to the politics of land. Most importantly, the Tigray case focuses on the politics of labor and offers illuminating new data to complement the more typical economistic studies that have been conducted; for instance, pointing to the politics of gendered labor in industrial factories. Yet, one wishes Chinigò had plumbed the ways in which internal migration, formal employment, and labor identification shaped ethnicity and other “belongings.”
In addition, more could have been done to discuss the implications for other contexts. Although the empirics are a welcome contribution to the study of Ethiopia, there is a sense that Chinigò is unwilling to commit any of these insights to anything broader, and that is a lost opportunity. Many states in Africa and elsewhere are now implementing land-reform projects, industrialization, and urban youth entrepreneurship and educational programs. These findings surely tell us something about similar possibilities and challenges elsewhere, and a broader consideration of the theoretical implications of the book would have been productive in this regard. How are land-titling programs and commercialized agriculture shaped by the vagaries of historical land claims, and how much are they technocratic processes in which the state could intervene? Does the collective push by the government and the preference for more individual-level action shape outcomes in other places seeing similar processes of industrialization?
Despite these criticisms, this book is an outstanding contribution to the emerging literature on developmental states and the everyday practice of politics, which the discipline would do well to attend to more. It points to the way in which qualitative data can be used to interrogate cross-national, quantitative, and experimental methodologies.
