VIRTUAL London.

Abstract

The contestations over the history of Ethiopian state formation and contemporary political conflicts over Addis Ababa’s peri-urbanisation feature parallel patterns. For Ethiopian unionists, both processes represent development, modernization, and progress warranting sustainable futures. For (Oromo) ethno-nationalists, however, they are aimed at economic exploitation and national oppression. This discursive contradiction will be further investigated by taking the recent Oromo protest events (i.e. protest against ‘Addis Ababa and the Surrounding Oromia Special Zone Integrated Development Plan’ as well as protest against the transfer of condominium units built in the urban peripheries of Addis Ababa) as an analytical starting point. Instead of falling back into simplistic framings of these recent protests as ‘anti-urban expansion/master plan/housing’, this article carefully contextualizes them within the wider political and historical power struggles in Ethiopia. Based on extensive qualitative data collected through fieldwork in the peri-urban zones of Addis Ababa, this paper demonstrates how and why contestations over Ethiopian state formation and Addis Ababa’s peri-urbanisation intersect and dynamically influence each other. By connecting original ethnographic material with literature on Ethiopia’s political history of urbanisation, the paper argues contemporary Oromo protests represent a response to larger and historically exclusionary Ethiopian state formation processes.