Asnake Kefale

Fana Gebresenbet

At a time when policies are increasingly against it, international migration has become the subject of great public and academic attention. This book departs from the dominant approach of studying international migration at macro level, and from the perspective of destination countries. The contributors here seek to do more than 'scratch the surface' of the migration process, by foregrounding the voices and views of Ethiopian youth-potential migrants and returnees-and of their sending communities. The volume focuses on the perspective and agency of these young people, both potential migrants and returnees, to better understand migration decision-making, experiences and outcomes. It brings together rarely documented cases of young men and women from several communities across Ethiopia, migrating to the Gulf and South Africa. Explaining the agency of local actors-prospective migrants, brokers and sending families-Youth on the Move illuminates the pervasive, persistent failure of state attempts to regulate migration. Moreover, it examines the financing of migration and the sharing of remittances, within a culturally situated moral economy. While accounts centered on economics and political violence are important, the contributors demonstrate compellingly that these factors alone cannot provide a full understanding of migration's complexity, nor of its social realities.

Views from Below on Ethiopian International Migration

Youth on the Move

This book examines the impact of the federal restructuring of Ethiopia on ethnic conflicts. The adoption of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia was closely related with the problem of creating a state structure that could be used as instrument of managing the complex ethno-linguistic diversity of the country. Ethiopia is a multinational country with about 85 ethno-linguistic groups and since the 1960s, it suffered from ethno-regional conflicts. The book considers multiple governance and state factors that could explain the difficulties Ethiopian federalism faces to realise its objectives. These include lack of political pluralism and the use of ethnicity as the sole instrument of state organisation. Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Ethiopia will be of interest to students and scholars of federal studies, ethnic conflict and regionalism.

A Comparative Regional Study

Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Ethiopia

At a time when policies are increasingly against it, international migration has become the subject of great public and academic attention. This book departs from the dominant approach of studying international migration at macro level, and from the perspective of destination countries. The contributors here seek to do more than ‘scratch the surface’ of the migration process, by foregrounding the voices and views of Ethiopian youth–potential migrants and returnees–and of their sending communities. The volume focuses on the perspective and agency of these young people, both potential migrants and returnees, to better understand migration decision-making, experiences and outcomes. It brings together rarely documented cases of young men and women from several communities across Ethiopia, migrating to the Gulf and South Africa. Explaining the agency of local actors–prospective migrants, brokers and sending families–Youth on the Moveilluminates the pervasive, persistent failure of state attempts to regulate migration. Moreover, it examines the financing of migration and the sharing of remittances, within a culturally situated moral economy. While accounts centred on economics and political violence are important, the contributors demonstrate compellingly that these factors alone cannot provide a full understanding of migration’s complexity, nor of its social realities.

Tomasz Kamusella

Christophe Van der Beken

This book is a contribution to the global history of the transfer of political ideas, as exemplified by the case of modern Ethiopia. Like many non-European nation-states, Ethiopia adopted a western model of statehood, that is, the nation-state. Unlike the postcolonial polities that have retained the mode of statehood imposed on them by their colonial powers, Ethiopia was never successfully colonized leaving its ruling elite free to select a model of ‘modern’ (western) statehood. In 1931, via Japan, they adopted the model of unitary, ethnolinguistically homogenous nation-state, in turn copied by Tokyo in 1889 from the German Empire (founded in 1871). Following the Ethiopian Revolution (1974) that overthrew the imperial system, the new revolutionary elite promised to address the ‘nationality question’ through the marxist-leninist model. The Soviet model of ethnolinguistic federalism (originally derived from Austria-Hungary) was introduced in Ethiopia, first in 1992 and officially with the 1995 Constitution. To this day the politics of modern Ethiopia is marked by the tension between these two opposed models of the essentially central European type of statehood. The late 19th-century ‘German-German’ quarrel on the ‘proper’ model of national statehood for Germany – or more broadly, modern central Europe – remains the quarrel of Ethiopian politics nowadays. The book will be useful for scholars of Ethiopian and African history and politics, and also offers a case in comparative studies on the subject of different models of national statehood elsewhere.

Asnake Kefale

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