Abstract
Within the last 50 years, Ethiopia has gone from a peculiarly feudal ancien
régime to military socialism to a post-socialist, developmental state pivoting
towards the East Asian model of political economy. Land has been a central
issue generating extraordinary energy driving these tumultuous political changes.
The slogan ‘Land to the Tiller’ fueled the popular student protest of late 1960s
and early 1970s that culminated in the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in
1974 (Chapter 2). Control over land has been a key policy issue of both the
socialist government and its post-socialist successor. Even though these two
(socialist and post-socialist) regimes proclaimed that the land question has been
settled once and for all, debates, contestations, and conflicts over land have
resurfaced in heightened intensity in recent years. At present, ordinary citizen’s
land tenure insecurity, encounters of land dispossession, and quasi-legal dislocations by the state continue alongside struggles to stop or reverse injustices
around land in Ethiopia (Lavers 2012; Rahmato 2009b; Ambaye 2015; Abebe
2016; Crewett et al. 2008).1 The recent contestations over the land question are
partly sparked by a renewed urge to address unsettled questions of historical
injustice as much as they are triggered by new laws, policy interventions, and
behavioral transgressions of current state agents.
This chapter analyses how struggles over land relate to the broader struggle
for basic rights. While my ethnographic cases presented below are primarily
drawn from the southern Ethiopian agricultural society of Dawro, comparative
examples are drawn from other Ethiopian societies and other parts of Africa. The
experiences of the Dawro and other southern Ethiopian societies (some aspects
of which are described in preceding chapters), as well as other cases of struggles
over land in contemporary Ethiopia suggest that land has become, more than
ever in the past, a battle ground of rights unlike any other. As such it intriguingly
intertwines concrete material interests with political rights (or violations thereof ),
symbolic, historical and emotional attachments.