This book is important for three reasons. The first is its focus. It seeks to determine how meaningful citizenship can be fostered within Ethiopia. The second is its applicability to other nations. Because of Ethiopia’s history of repression, its multiplicity of ethnicities, and its artificial regional boundaries, the challenge that it faces of forging a national identity among equal citizens is replicated in many other Sub-Saharan nations. The third reason this book is valuable lies in its methodology. The author uses an anthropological approach based on extensive fieldwork and focus groups to support her conclusions.

Lahra Smith’s definition of citizenship goes beyond the legal and electoral spheres. For her, citizens are not merely subjects but meaningful and effective participants in an ongoing political process. Constructing this ideal is a challenge for multi-ethnic, hierarchical societies that are based on communitarian and traditional values. This text contends that language policy can play a role in reconciling regional and national loyalties while creating more equal citizens. The Constitution’s recognition of ethnic language rights in Ethiopia’s federal states (killiloch) allows group based identities to serve as a resource for structuring citizenship.

The first two chapters lay the groundwork for the study. In chapter one, the author reviews the legacy that colonialism and authoritarianism have had in creating unequal citizens and multicultural challenges in Sub-Saharan nations. In Africa, institutional and constitutional reforms alone often fail to produce a democratic polity but rather result in hollow democracies whose political institutions do not deliver on their promises. Smith concludes that democratic political institutions are a necessary but not sufficient condition for both citizenship and a national sense of identity to flourish. However, she never clearly defines exactly what she means when she uses the term democracy.

The second chapter provides a brief history of Ethiopia. This history as well as the maps, glossary, and tables included in the text enable the reader to understand the challenges that face Ethiopia in constructing equal and meaningful citizenship opportunities. In order to mitigate Ethiopia’s unequal religious, ethnic, and class divisions, its 1995 Constitution acknowledged both individual and group based rights and created a federated system including the right to secession for its constituent states. Although many scholars believe such divisions hinder the creation of a national identity, Smith illustrates how the multilingual language policy the Constitution creates provides an opportunity for citizens to participate in the political process.

In chapter three, the author focuses on language choice in education. She believes that, in the past, having one official language generated both educational and social inequality in Ethiopia. Since 1991, rather than using one national language, Amharic, each region now determines the language it will use to educate its population. The 1995 Ethiopian Constitution formalized this multilingual policy. According to Smith, this aids the process of assimilating and integrating Ethiopian citizens into a national polity for three reasons: it grants states further self-governance and autonomy; it provides recognition to the different ethnicities that make up Ethiopia; and it enhances citizens’ access to communication and information channels that foster democratic participation. Literacy in their local language promotes citizens’ involvement in politics and social discourse and their access to the information the media provides.

The author uses carefully structured focus groups of parents, teachers, and school administrators in selected regions to support her hypothesis that, in Ethiopia, the use of regional languages in education can serve as a tool to foster egalitarianism and democratic participation and need not threaten the national unity of the country. This research design is well suited to gathering information on multi-ethnic societies in developing nations and allows the researcher to garner detailed information on sensitive topics in a natural setting. Although one cannot generalize from this study’s findings to all Ethiopians or to all of its regional subdivisions, it does generate hypotheses that can be further tested using research methods that allow for broader generalizations. By clearly delineating how she structured the focus groups, the author also provides a guideline that researchers can replicate in other policy areas and in other multi-ethnic societies.

Two of the next three chapters offer additional support for the author’s contention that local self-determination can foster citizenship development and need not pose a threat to national unity. Chapter four relates the history of the local referendum that granted the Siltie recognition as a separate nationality; chapter five outlines the Oromo people’s quest for local recognition. The sixth chapter, however, offers little support for the hypothesis that Ethiopian women can use federalism and its guarantee of ethnic rights to gain equal citizenship. This would require that women who challenge violations of their rights use aspects of the ethnic, religious, and cultural traditions that have served as instruments of their repression. The author does enumerate some of the resources that different ethnic traditions provide to women. However, none of them appear powerful enough to successfully combat the severe violations of human rights such as female genital mutilation, bridal abduction, domestic violence, and slavery that many Ethiopian women face.

More effective transformative tools for women are available, however. These tools include Ethiopia’s revised family-law code. The Ethiopian Women’s Lawyers Association provides a resource to help women challenge customary or religious law provisions that conflict with this new code. In addition, civic associations that focus on economic cooperatives and health initiatives that empower women could be expanded. Ethiopian women can also look to international organizations and NGOs for assistance in their quest for equal citizenship. An examination of these tools lies outside the scope of Dr. Smith’s text. In the future, she could expand her focus on Ethiopia to include assessing their effectiveness.

The findings suggest that allowing Ethiopia’s federal subdivisions to determine what language their educational systems use can aid democratization. In addition, ethnic identities can be democracy-enhancing since they serve as the foundation of citizenship and community. According to Dr. Smith, the regional subdivisions that exist in Ethiopia provide links of recognition and inclusion as well as opportunities to engage in social discourse on contentious political issues. Thus, they enhance the possibility of equal citizenship (195).

The responses of the focus groups on language policy support the concept that Ethiopia’s federal system provides an avenue to power sharing and can foster groups’ attempts to contest the reality of unequal citizenship. In the area of equal citizenship for women, however, this text reveals the limitations of Dr. Smith’s anthropological approach. She has immersed herself in Ethiopian culture through extensive fieldwork. This has prevented her from making the mistake of attempting to superimpose Western values on Sub-Saharan cultures. However, in this work, her empathy for the ethnic groups she studies has affected her objectivity in the area of women’s rights.