Questions of ethnicity are always urgent in contemporary Ethiopia. The recent publication of Terje Østebø's Islam, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Ethiopia: The Bale Insurgency, 1963–1970 is thus timely. Østebø revisits an understudied insurgency against the Ethiopian Empire waged by lowland pastoralists — Somali and Oromo Muslims — of the former Bale province in southeastern Ethiopia between 1963 and 1970 as a historical case study for understanding the complex interplay and intersection of ethnic and religious identity in Ethiopia. To this end, he proposes the use of ‘peoplehood’ as a theoretical frame which ‘encompasses kinship groups, clans, ethnic groups, religious communities, or nations, being inherently elastic to allow for the intersecting of multiple and simultaneous boundaries and identities’ (7). The focus on ‘peoplehood’ enables a historical examination of the Bale insurgency that moves away from one-dimensional analyses that interpret conflict as either religious or ethnic, and recognizes the multi-faceted identities that simultaneously informed the actions of the insurgents.

Islam, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Ethiopia is organized into twelve chapters. The introduction lays out the conceptual architecture of the book, providing a broad theoretical discussion of the literature on ethnic and religious identities with a focus on conflict. The chapter both situates the author's interventions within a wider body of scholarship on ethnicity and religion as idioms of belonging as well as historiographical debates in Ethiopian Studies, including existing work on the Bale insurgency. Chapters Two and Three are, in many ways, extensions of the introductory chapter insofar as they continue to set the stage for a detailed study of the insurgency itself. Chapter Two examines the Bale landscape and how Arsi Oromo identity — the focus of Østebø's narrative — is ‘emplaced’ and shaped by and through interaction with the environment. Chapter Three offers a historical narrative of Ethiopian imperial expansion with a focus of the Arsi Oromo experience of conquest and resistance.

Chapters Four and Five are dedicated to the Bale insurgency. Chapter Four provides the most detailed narrative account of the insurgency: the root causes that triggered the communities of Bale to take up arms against the Ethiopian state in 1963, their battles and operations in the various fronts of the conflict, the government counterinsurgency against the rebels, and the ultimate defeat of the insurgents. Chapter Five takes a deeper dive into the structure and composition of the insurgency to analyze the trajectory of events. Chapter Six further develops the question of who the insurgents were by taking on the historiographical representation of the Bale insurgency as a peasant rebellion, a convincing and welcome revision that emphasizes the agency of pastoral lowlanders.

Chapters Seven and Eight examine how conquest introduced new hierarchies and stratifications, and how this in turn affected the Arsi Oromo sense of communal self and other. Chapter Seven focuses on the relationship between land use and communal identity, and how this was ruptured by the process of privatization and commodification of land. Chapter Eight explores how the Ethiopian Empire encountered by the Arsi Oromo was a distinctly Amhara Christian one. Chapter Nine situates the Bale insurgency within a wider context of insurgency and war in the Horn of Africa. Chapter Ten returns to the Amhara Christian character of the Ethiopian state and the ways in which Arsi Oromo overlapping identities were understood as the antithesis, generating local tensions with the state and its settler class that would contribute to the insurgency. Chapter Eleven looks at the development of Oromo nationalism and the challenges of class, religion, and regional context in mobilizing and sustaining a shared movement, while Chapter Twelve closes with a reiteration of the book's key points and a discussion of the contemporary political landscape regarding ethnicity and religion.

Islam, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Ethiopia is a sprawling text, ambitious in its aim to contextualize and examine the Bale insurgency as a multi-faceted event in time and space. This is also, unfortunately, the primary weakness of the book. Original analysis is muddied by extensive background discussion that would be more appropriately summarized in footnotes, which are generally sparse and underused in the book. Chapter Eight, for instance, relies entirely on secondary sources to discuss the ethnic and religious hierarchy of imperial Ethiopia and the normative Amhara, Christian identity of the nation, rehearsing an interpretation that has been well-established in Ethiopian Studies since the mid-1980s. The introductory chapter, while interesting at times, is overly convoluted and statements such as ‘cultural theory needs . . . to overcome our fear of building larger ideas’ and ‘we have become so focused on deconstructing to the extent that construction becomes impossible’ (15) betray a superficial engagement with theory. The utility of ‘peoplehood’ as an analytical frame dissipates with the acknowledgment that religious and ethnic identities can be similarly dynamic, capacious, and overlapping. An in-depth discussion of sources and methodology would have benefitted the introduction greatly.

Terje Østebø's primary interlocutor is Ethiopian historian Gebru Tareke, who has written about the Bale insurgency in his book Ethiopia: Power and Protest: Peasant Revolts in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1991), an expanded version of his 1977 dissertation also cited by Østebø. While Tareke's research on peasants and social protest is notable for its class analysis — reflective of both the preoccupations of African Studies at the time as well as the Ethiopian Revolution — Østebø minimizes Tareke's attention to non-class factors such as ethno-regional identities and kinship, when in fact, Tareke concludes that the insurgency could not be explained by a framework that only accounts for class alienation. Moreover, Østebø ought to have given a more generous reading to the Oromo scholars, such as Abbas Gnamo and Gadaa Melbaa, whose scholarly perspectives Østebø dismisses as ‘clearly colored by ethno-nationalist sentiments’ (3) and belonging to an ‘ethno-nationalist camp’ (4).

The strength of Islam, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Ethiopia lies in its use of oral interviews with Arsi Oromo informants conducted during the author's extensive fieldwork periods in Bale. The interviews work to provide a decidedly Arsi Oromo vantage point for the Bale insurgency, a necessary corrective for state-centered histories as well as historical analyses that fail to take the specificity of Bale — and Arsi Oromo identity — into account. This is most evident in Østebø's carefully argued sixth chapter which, through interviews and detailed data on land distribution, succeeds at showing that the insurgency in Bale was not a ‘peasant rebellion’, as commonly narrated, but an uprising of pastoralists largely unaffected by land alienation. Also notable to this reader is the discussion of religious shrines, particularly the shrine of Sheikh Hussein, which captures the important interplay of the Bale landscape, localized Islamic religious practice, Oromo communal identity, and political action, the key issues that Østebø seeks to illuminate in his book.

Islam, Ethnicity, and Conflict in Ethiopia: The Bale Insurgency, 1963–1970 is a timely text offering critical insights on the nature of ethnicity, religion, and conflict in Ethiopia, and a necessary focus on the oft-ignored eastern lowland periphery. Though the book is not without problems, readers will have much to gain from Terje Østebø's analysis.