Capital in the Borderlands: Economies of Power in an Ethiopian Frontier City Restricted; Files Only
Thompson, Daniel (Summer 2019)
Published
Abstract
In 2010, officials from Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State (SRS) began organizing meetings with diaspora Somalis in Minneapolis, London, Dubai, Melbourne, and other world cities. They asked “the diaspora” (qurba joogta) to stop supporting a decades-long secessionist rebellion against Ethiopia and instead to redirect their finances towards investment in the war-torn region. By 2013, diaspora returnees were flocking to SRS’s capital city, Jigjiga. They brought with them business plans and foreign connections, ready to remake what one returnee called the “way-behind little town” into a globally-connected city. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jigjiga as well as participant-observation among Somalis in Atlanta, this dissertation examines the political and economic transformations surrounding diaspora return and “post-conflict” reconstruction in the Ethiopia-Somalia borderlands. The analysis contests the category of return migration as an isolatable phenomenon, showing the ways in which Ethiopian Somalis have dealt with uncertainty through constructing multiple forms of obligation and dependence that span a transnational context fraught with wealth and power inequalities. I demonstrate how Jigjiga has become an increasingly central site in a transnational web of socio-economic relations through political realignments, investment incentives, and new modes of commanding social activity—power created in large part by new practices of governance over Ethiopia’s borders and urban space. The work focuses on businesspeople’s understandings of, and responses to, new modes of governance and intensifying claims for redistribution as they navigate new terrains of taxation, trade regulation, and the governance of mobility. Their perspectives offer fresh insights on the ethical relevance of international inequality and the commensurability of money, goods, and relationships that move across a transnational landscape of deepening disparities in wealth and mobility.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction: Cities, Borders, and Economies of Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Strands of globalization theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2 Urbanism in Ethiopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.3 Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.4 Outline of the argument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
I Constructing authority in Somali-Ethiopia 21
2 Notes on the Nature of Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.1 Cross-cultural encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.2 Somali modes of command. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.3 Borders and towns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
2.4 Frontiers of dis/possession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3 Genealogies of Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.1 Clan, ethnicity, state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
3.2 Landscape of power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
3.3 ,Abdi Iley’s rise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
3.4 Ogaden identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
3.5 The mafia state. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
3.6 Rethinking clan politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
4 The Diaspora State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
4.1 Diaspora place-making as state-making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
4.2 Space and identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
4.3 Diaspora trajectories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
4.4 Re-spatializing Diaspora Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
4.5 State and market frontiers of the future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Interlude 150
5 The Fraying State? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
5.1 The Awaday massacre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
5.2 State power play? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
5.3 Scalar politics in the borderlands city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
5.4 Life goes on amidst the fray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
5.5 Uncertainty and unraveling authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
II The Borderlands City 175
6 Contraband urbanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
6.1 From state space to urban opportunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
6.2 The borders of Somali-Ethiopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
6.3 Contraband in the city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
6.4 On the legitimacy of markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
7 Urban borderlands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
7.1 Somali-Ethiopianization of urban space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
7.2 From ethnic to class segregation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
7.3 Ethnicity in the marketplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
7.4 Entrustment in urban space and time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
7.5 Capital, time, and trust in urban space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
8 The Social Contract in a Frontier City. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
8.1 Contractuality and moral orders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
8.2 Space: the contracts federalism enables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
8.3 Time: the process of “buying in” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
8.4 Beyond capital: politics of value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280
8.5 Requiem for an arbitrageur? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
9.1 Constructing authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292
9.2 Borders and cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294
9.3 Concluding reflections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
Acronyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299
A Note on language and transliteration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
B Representation of clan lineages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
C Place preference analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
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