Identity Jilted, Or, Re-imagining Identity?
Identity Jilted, Or, Re-imagining Identity?

Author: Alemseged Abbay

Publisher: The Red Sea Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9781569020722

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In this bold study of modern ethno-regional nationalism, the author examines the divergent paths taken by the nationalist insurgencies in Tigray and Eritrea. The author argues that Tigrayans, south of the Mereb River, and Kebessa (highlands) Eritreans, north of the Mereb, are ethnically one people, tied by common history, political economy, myth, language and religion. Both fought against a common enemy, an oppressive Amhara ethnic state, for a period of seventeen and thirty years, respectively. In the process of the armed struggle, however, each evolved separate political identities and, after jointly marching to military victory in 1991, they followed separate political paths - Eritreans created the newest state in Africa and Tigrayans remained within the Ethiopian body politic.

Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War
Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War

Author: Martin Plaut

Publisher: Hurst Publishers

Published: 2023-02-16

Total Pages: 509

ISBN-13: 1805260634

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The war in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray began in November 2020. It inflicted more casualties than any other contemporary conflict in the world. It has also been among the least understood. The fighting and accompanying blockade led to an estimated 600,000 deaths – more than the number who died in the 1984-5 famine. International journalists were banned as the region was sealed off from the outside world by Ethiopian and Eritrean governments prosecuting a strategy designed to crush Tigray at almost any cost. Hatred of Tigrayans was stoked by senior advisers to Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed: they have called Tigrayans ‘weeds’ who must be uprooted, their place in history extinguished. Their language was reminiscent of that which preceded the genocide in Rwanda. The war was also orchestrated by Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki, who came to wield increasing influence over Ethiopian affairs. It drew in Somali troops as well as Eritrean forces. Peace agreements signed in November 2022 ended the worst of the violence, but without resolving the war’s underlying drivers, which continue to feed a tense and uncertain situation. This book provides the first clear explanation of the factors that led to the conflict, unravelling their roots in Ethiopia’s long and complex history. It describes the battles that were fought at such terrible cost and the immense suffering, particularly of women, who were brutally abused.

Subnationalism in Africa
Subnationalism in Africa

Author: Joshua Forrest

Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781588262271

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This examination of the politics of ethnicity and nation-building in Africa stresses the trend towards subnationalist autonomy and away from a singular, state-centric system based on the Western model. Forrest ranges across the continent to explore a variety of subnational movements.

National Identity and State Formation in Africa
National Identity and State Formation in Africa

Author: Manuel Castells

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-03-17

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 150954562X

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This book examines how the interplay between globalization and the assertion of local identities is reshaping the political landscape of Africa. While defending their values against external forces, people simultaneously – and paradoxically – use the interconnectivity of global networks to maximize their particular interests. Focusing on the relation between national identity and state formation, the authors explore the far-reaching consequences of these contradictory dynamics. Although Africa shares many common trends with other parts of the world, it also displays distinctive features. A region characterized by the increased mobility of people, goods and ideas challenges some conventional assumptions of statecraft and also highlights the advantages of federalism – not merely as a constitutional option, but as a pragmatic device for managing diversity and holding fragile states together. The book further explores emerging types of state formation in the same political space, as exemplified by the combination of elements of a kingdom, an independent state and a national power base in the province of KwaZulu-Natal and the careful crafting of an alternative state within a state by the Solidarity Movement in South Africa. Informed by examples and case studies drawn from different parts of Africa, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Africa, politics, sociology, media studies and the social sciences more generally.

Unity in Diversity
Unity in Diversity

Author: Christophe van der Beken

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 3643901720

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This book argues that the development of federalism in Ethiopia fits in with a global trend towards increased attention to ethnic minority rights and to federalism as a mechanism for ethnic conflict prevention and management. The Ethiopian federation is designed as a framework within which the Ethiopian ethnic groups can protect their rights and within which they are stimulated to develop a cooperative relationship. To put it differently, the constitutional objective of the federal structure is the creation of 'unity in diversity.' The book evaluates the capacity of Ethiopian federalism to achieve this objective by investigating the relevant historical, political, and legal aspects. (Series: Recht und Politik in Afrika/Law and Politics in Africa - Vol. 10)

Seeking Salaam
Seeking Salaam

Author: Sandra M. Chait

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0295801808

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Prolonged violence in the Horn of Africa, the northeastern corner of the continent, has led growing numbers of Ethiopians, Eritreans, and Somalis to flee to the United States. Despite the enmity created by centuries of conflict, they often find themselves living as neighbors in their adopted cities, with their children as class-mates in school. In many ways, they are successfully navigating life in their new home; however, they continue to struggle to bridge old ethnic divisions and find salaam, or peace, with one another. News from home fuels historical grievances and perpetuates tensions within their communities, delaying acculturation, undermining attempts at reconciliation, and sabotaging the opportunity to reach the American Dream. In conversations with forty East African immigrants living in Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, Sandra Chait captures the immigrants' struggle for identity in the face of competing stories and documents how some individuals have been able to transcend the ghosts from the past and extend a tentative hand to their former enemies.

Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa
Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa

Author: Richard J. Reid

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-03-24

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0191615927

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Northeast Africa has one of the richest histories in the world, and yet also one of the most violent. Richard Reid offers an historical analysis of violent conflict in northeast Africa through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, incorporating the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands and their escarpment and lowland peripheries, stretching between the modern Eritrean Red Sea coast and the southern and eastern borderlands of present day Ethiopia. Sudanese and Somali frontiers are also examined insofar as they can be related to ethnic, political, and religious conflict, and the violent state- and empire-building processes which have defined the region since c.1800. Reid argues that this modern warfare is not solely the product of modern political 'failure', but rather has its roots in a network of frontier zones which are both violent and creative. Such borderlands have given rise to markedly militarised political cultures which are rooted in the violence of the nineteenth century, and which in recent decades are manifest in authoritarian systems of government. Reid thus traces the history of Amhara and Tigrayan imperialisms to the nationalist and ethnic revolutions which represented the march of volatile borderlands on the hegemonic centre. He suggests a new interpretation of Ethiopian and Eritrean history, arguing that the key to understanding the region's turbulent present lies in an appreciation of the role of the armed, and politically fertile, frontier in its deeper past.

Violence and Belonging
Violence and Belonging

Author: Vigdis Broch-Due

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-06-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1134437889

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Modernization in Africa has created new problems as well as new freedoms. Multiparty democracy, resource privatization and changing wealth relationships, have not always created stable and prosperous communities, and violence continues to be endemic in many areas of African life - from civil war and political strife to violent clashes between genders, generations, classes and ethnic groups. Violence and Belonging explores the crucial formative role of violence in shaping people's ideas of who they are in uncertain postcolonial contexts where, as resources dwindle and wealth is contested, identities and ideas of belonging become a focal area of conflict and negotiation. Focusing on fieldwork from across the continent, its case studies consider how routine everyday violence ties in with wider regional and political upheavals, and how individuals experience and legitimize violence in its different forms. The Zimbabwean and Sudanese civil wars, Kenyan Kikuyu domestic conflicts, Rwandan massacres and South African Truth and Reconciliation processes, are among the contexts explored.