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CEDEJ Seminar : Land, party politics and violence in the Horn of Africa: insights from Ethiopia (2013-2022)

Tsegedé, march 2021

It is our pleasure to welcome Mehdi Labzaé, permanent researcher at CEDEJ Cairo. His research interests include land and contentious politics, mainly in Ethiopia, and migration in Northeast Africa.

His presentation will take place on Thursday December 11 at 10h30 in the CEDEJ premises.

Abstract:

The current Ethiopian civil war is the deadliest conflict of the early 2020s. Short-sighted journalists portray it as yet another “ethnic conflict” between Tigrayan forces and the Ethiopian federal government, denying fighting forces their own political agency and obscuring the material, organizational, and ideological aspects of the war.
In this presentation, I argue that agrarian questions are one of the key explanations of the war. Over the past two decades, agricultural policies have fuelled contentious politics in parts of the country that are now amongst the main contested areas. I draw from ethnographic data gathered since 2013 in Mettekel and Wolqayt, two regions bordering Sudan, to show how land tensions were fuelled by agricultural investment policies, land registration and party politics. Agricultural investment modified agrarian practices and demography in the peripheries, leading to new claims by migrant workers and local élites. Land investment policies created dispossession for communities whose élites used their political parties to mobilize and frame the land question as a question of identity. As ethnicity provided the basis for party structuration and political representation, land tensions espoused the same ethnonational lines – although past agricultural practices were often more inclusive and allowed more fluidity, solidarity, and transactions between groups. While the political crisis deepened at the federal level, parties and state institutions provided channels for local land claims to scale up, further polarizing political debate. Meanwhile, agricultural investors played a prominent role in the creation of armed groups that are now active on the war’s frontlines.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
cedejsudan (27 novembre 2022). CEDEJ Seminar : Land, party politics and violence in the Horn of Africa: insights from Ethiopia (2013-2022). Researching Sudan - A perspective on contemporary Sudan. Consulté le 24 mai 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mhml


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