Governmentality in Motion: 25 Years of Ethiopia’s Experience of Famine and Migration Policy

Abstract

In the 25 years since the 1984–85 Great Sahelian Famine, the Ethiopian state has used the management of mobility as a tool to control the poorest of its citizens. In this paper I examine three cases: the forced resettlement of people during the 1980s, the repatriation of refugees during the mid-1990s and the more recent resettlement of food insecure people in the early 2000s. I argue that in each of these cases, people’s movements have been controlled so as to undermine their agency with the net effect of increasing their vulnerability. Such strategies have transformed and reinforced class, ethnic and religious hierarchies to such an extent that those being managed have become silently complicitous in their own exploitation. The paper argues that analyses of how governmentality functions should be set in motion, and that mobility management strategies may be a central tool for promoting governmentality on wider levels.

Keywords:

• Ethiopia
• migration
• resettlement
• repatriation
• governmentality
• famine
• food security

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, who invited me to give a very early version of this paper, and participants in the workshop on Forced Migration and Mobilities at Lancaster University for their comments. In particular I would like to thank Javier Caletrio Garcera and Nicholas Gill, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, for their comments on drafts of the paper.

Notes

1. Packer’s analysis is concerned with transportation and safety, but the idea of mobility being controlled so as to become disciplined, is apt for my purposes as well.

2. Ethnic Amhara refugees were brought back to Amhara region and settled in land near Metemma, another abandoned commercial agricultural area. Because my own fieldwork was conducted in Tigray, I concentrate on this case study for the purposes of the present analysis.

3. Cash grants were added to the reintegration package after 2003, when it became clear that the initial package was insufficient.

4. When it came to power, the EPRDF established a system of regional ethnic federalism, meaning that regions were established (some along older imperial boundaries, others incorporating two or more of the former provinces to form a single ethnic/linguistic region.

5. Tsetse fly transmits sleeping sickness to humans, which has a very high mortality rate, and trypanosomiasis to cattle, making ox-plough agriculture, which most people were accustomed to, practically impossible in most settlement areas in western and southern Ethiopia.