‘Civilizing’ the pastoral frontier: land grabbing, dispossession and coercive agrarian development in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes frontier dynamics of land dispossessions in Ethiopia’s pastoral lowland regions. Through a case study of two sedentarization schemes in South Omo Valley, we illustrate how politics of coercive sedentarization are legitimated in the ‘civilizing’ impetus of ‘improvement schemes’ for ‘backward’ pastoralists. We study sedentarization schemes that are implemented to evict pastoralist communities from grazing land to be appropriated by corporate investors. It is argued that frontier imaginations of pastoral lowlands legitimate coercive practices of ‘emptying’ the lowlands for investments. ‘Improvement schemes’ enroll private investors and enterprises affiliated with Ethiopia’s ruling party in the politics of ‘thickening’ state presence in the pastoral frontier. Agricultural extension packages serve to expand state control over sedentarized pastoralists and make lowland resources more extractable, for investors and for the ruling regime.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethiopia
• frontier
• sedentarization
• pastoralism
• improvement
• development

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Muriel Côte, Rony Emmenegger, Tobias Hagmann, Stephan Hochleithner, Timothy Raeymaekers, Rory Rowan, Christine Schenk and Christoph Vogel, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper and long-term conversations on Ethiopia and its pastoral frontier more broadly. Dilla University, Ethiopia, generously funded fieldwork for this study. We furthermore gratefully acknowledge support from a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for Asebe Regassa. Author contributions: Asebe Regassa conducted the field work, contributed to the conceptualization and co-wrote the paper; Yetebarek Hizehiel contributed to data collection; Benedikt Korf contributed to the conceptualization and co-wrote the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Asebe Regassa is an assistant professor in indigenous studies at Dilla University (Ethiopia) and researches the political economy of large-scale agribusiness projects in Southern Ethiopia. In addition, Asebe’s research interest includes the political ecology of nature conservation, mining, ethnicity and inter-ethnic conflict and peacebuilding along Ethiopia’s and Kenya’s borders. His most recent publication is ‘Competing epistemologies: conservationist discourses and Guji Oromo’s sacred cosmologies’ in the Journal of Religion, Nature and Culture (vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, 249–67). Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

Yetebarek Hizekiel is a researcher at the Institute of Indigenous Studies in Dilla Univeristy, Ethiopia. His research interests pivot around social capital and sustainable development, cross-border relations and state society relations. Over the last few years, he has been researching sedentarization in pastoralist areas in southern Ethiopia; conflict; and peace-building and indigenous practices of conflict resolution. E-mail: [email protected]

Benedikt Korf is a professor in political geography at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research seeks to understand what, if anything, produces political order in the midst of violence, crisis and disasters. His most recent publications include: Violence on the margins: states, conflict and borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; co-edited with Timothy Raeymaekers) and Checkpoint, temple, church and mosque: a collaborative ethnography of war and peace (Polity, 2014; co-authored with Jonathan Spencer, Jonathan Goodhand, Shahul Hasbullah, Bart Klem and Tudor Silva). Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Ironically, in this civilizing narrative, the Prime Minister portrayed Omo River as a threat to the indigenous pastoralist communities in the region, although several scholars have documented the cultural and economic entanglements of pastoral societies with the rhythms of the Omo River, a coexistence that has been lived for centuries, long before the advent of the Ethiopian state to the lowlands (Turton 2002; Strecker 2014).

2 Carl Schmitt, whose deeply reactionary and racist politics as ‘Crown Jurist’ of the Nazi regime needs mentioning here, used the term ‘herrenlos’ to explain the legitimation of colonial land appropriation (what he called Landnahme). While we do not share Schmitt’s normative project, we nevertheless think that the term ‘herrenlos’ denotes succinctly the frontier dynamics through which intruders or colonisers deny indigenous populations the status of being legitimate rights holders – the land is without a legitimate ‘master’, and can therefore be forcefully and violently appropriated from these indigeneous inhabitants.

3 In line with this logic, some scholars even went to the extent of depicting the people in the south, including those in South Omo Valley, as being close to nature, the ‘Noble Savage’ having only culture without history, in contrast to the north that had history (Ullendorff 1965). Of course, that resonates with Eric Wolf’s critique of colonial representations of certain ‘People without History’ (Wolf 1997), only in this case, it is Ethiopians describing groups of their own Peoples as being without History.

4 The ’villagization’ program in Ethiopia is officially called Mender Masebaseb, which literally means ‘collecting people to villages’. However, in the context of pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities, it denotes both villagization and sedentarization because by first collecting people to villages (villagization), it transforms or aims to transform pastoralism into sedentary agriculture (sedentarization).

5 Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ Region (SNNPR).

6 Part of the difficulty in verifying the data is related to government authorities’ reluctance to provide documents related to such programs.

7 Our informants insisted that, in the early 1990s, Tsemay pastoralists initially thought the resettlement was genuinely intended for their betterment and they moved to the village (anonymous informant from Enchete Village, May 2015). Local government officials and Omo Shekele promised to provide infrastructure and social services to improve their ways of living. Once they left their homes, local authorities told them not to graze their livestock in their former customary grazing area because it was given to the investor, which deprived them of their ability and right to derive benefits from the grazing land.

8 The ‘1 to 5’ groupings and ‘development groups’ are organized by clustering all residents of a village into smaller administrative units. Accordingly, the ‘1 to 5’ are composed of five to seven members whereby the leader of the group (commonly called ‘ternafi’, which literally means hook), catches disobedient members within the group and reports them to the ‘development group’, locally called ye limat budin/ye limat serawit. ‘Development groups’ are formed when seven to 10 clusters of ‘1 to 5’ arrangements come together. The leaders of a development group and of ‘1 to 5’ groups are always members of the ruling party (EPRDF). The party structure, on the other hand, begins from the smallest unit, called ‘hiwas’, which literally means cell. The number of hiwas members ranges from seven to 45 individuals, with each hiwas having its leaders. Different hiwas groups form meseretawi dirijit (roughly translated as ‘party pillars’), which also constitutes the village administration. While Chinigo (2014), Emmenegger (2016), Lefort (2012) and Segers et al. (2009) all report from the highlands, we found these structures now being implemented in the pastoralist lowlands.