Moving People in Ethiopia is the book long awaited by the international communities of researchers and practitioners working on forced resettlement processes and eager to understand and learn from Ethiopia's extraordinary experiences. It is also the book that, in my view, and rewardingly for the reader, fully meets head-on the unusual complexity of the many interwoven processes it examines historically, theoretically and empirically.

Resettlement processes in Ethiopia over the last 30-50 years have been so massive and frequent – or better said, so continuous – so nation-wide painful, so multi-causal and multi-form, that they secured for Ethiopia an unenviable special place in the history of the world's large-scale resettlements.

Ethiopia's unusual combination of displacement causes, types, magnitudes and outcomes has attracted international attention in many ways, ranging from the foreign donors' financial, technical or political assistance to the countless studies undertaken by social scientists, both Ethiopian and international. Yet, despite these innumerable studies, the intricate interwovenness of Ethiopia's population movements has proven hard to decipher plausibly and capture conceptually. It puzzled many scholars for many years, and it generated multiple contradictory and confusing interpretations. Controversies multiplied.