Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia: Power, Scale, Performativity

Everyday practices of state building interrogates the question about how to reinstate movement to our conceptualisation of state formation in Africa at a time in which the continent witnesses profound social and political transformations inscribed in increasingly globalised and localised dynamics.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 18 August 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

The everyday practices of state building raise critical questions about how to revitalize our understanding of state formation in Africa, particularly in the context of profound social and political transformations unfolding on the continent. These transformations are intricately linked to increasingly globalized and localized dynamics. The book aims to revisit key theories of the state by adopting a detailed empirical approach that explores how state power operates in the everyday. It seeks to locate the mutual constitution of state and society within the broader set of scalar processes that articulate how state power structures social life and simultaneously creates the conditions for new openings and social formations.

Drawing on five qualitative fieldworks conducted in Ethiopia between 2006 and 2018, the book identifies significant challenges faced by the ruling Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in institutionalizing power through the developmental state, an ambitious model of state-mediated economic liberalization aimed at fulfilling the broader reorganization of the Ethiopian state along Ethnic Federalism since 1991. The case studies presented in the book shed light on how policies of resettlement, decentralization, agriculture commercialization, entrepreneurship, and industrialization have inscribed dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in both rural and urban areas.

Against these profound transformations, beneficiaries have sought to redefine their meanings of land, place, and work, engaging in struggles to secure reproduction. The book interrogates notions of scale and performativity, revisiting dominant approaches in African studies that read state formation along center-periphery relations and ascribe cultural interpretations to the work of state power in the everyday. By doing so, it contributes to important discussions about authoritarianism and the broader dynamics of power and governance in Africa.

Weight: 568g
Dimension: 242 x 163 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192869654