Ethnicity across regional boundaries: migration and the politics of inequality in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

Increasing migration across the world has transformed the politics of identity in recent decades, which has influenced how people experience and narrate ethnicity. The rigid Ethiopian political system of ethnic federalism makes ethnicity an official and permanent component of individual identity and group belonging to ethnic-based regions. At the same time, the government has enabled increased internal migration and facilitated ethnic diversity on university campuses. In this article, I explore experiences of migration across regional boundaries among people from the Tigray region towards ethnically diverse urban centers in Ethiopia, such as Addis Ababa. This paper illustrates how an emic conceptualisation of identity can be understood as a response to state categories of ethnicity, but also argues that contextual and temporal politics generate conditions and experiences that in turn reshape those conceptualisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnicity
• migration
• Ethiopia
• ethnic federalism
• violence

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my former colleagues at the University of Sussex who helped me develop this paper and colleagues at the Open University for valuable feedback. Special thanks to Diana Ibañez Tirado for critical comments and suggestions, as well as to two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 BBC (2017).

2 Davison (2016).

3 Yibeltal (2017).

4 Please see the (online) appendix for a discussion of the methodology on which this paper is based.

5 I have given all informants pseudonyms.

6 Tigrinya and Amharic are relatively similar languages, but Tigrinya has certain sounds that makes it easy to distinguish from Amharic.

7 More information about the incident can be found on Ethiomedia.com (2004).