Large-scale human population movements, characteristic of human societies throughout their history, have gained added salience with the growth of a global economy, increased pressure on resources (and especially land), and the assertion of special status by those who claim to be the original inhabitants of any particular territory. In north-east Africa, such movements have most evidently been driven by the twin scourges of famine and conflict, to which the whole region is tragically subject and which have given it one of the highest numbers of refugees in the world. This volume seeks to move beyond these two drivers of migration, without in any way neglecting them, and to integrate them into the broader understanding of displacement – especially forced displacement – within the most populous state in the region, Ethiopia. It takes much of its inspiration from the work of Michael Cornea, who contributes a preface, notably on displacements resulting from large-scale ‘development projects’, and the ‘terrible social pathology’ (p. xxix) that creates them.
After a historical and spatial overview by the editors, and a devastating critique of forced displacement by David Turton, the core of the book consists of 12 chapters appraising specific examples of the displacement process in Ethiopia, ranging from the massive ‘resettlement schemes’ launched in the mid-1980s by the Derg regime, and twenty years later by its EPRDF successor, to post-conflict efforts to assist refugees, internally displaced people, and demobilized soldiers, and developmental displacement resulting from dams, commercialized agriculture, and the dedication of large tracts of land for ‘nature reserves’, which derive their proclaimed legitimacy from such themes as conservation and biodiversity, and their economic rationale from the global tourism industry. It must be recognized that the quality of the contributions is somewhat uneven, owing to the editors' decision to include essays by Ethiopian postgraduate students whose work is understandably unsophisticated, even though its publication is amply justified by original fieldwork on important cases that have hitherto gone entirely unstudied.
The single most substantial chapter is Alula Pankhurst's revisiting of his earlier studies of the 1980s resettlement, in the light of the sudden resuscitation of such schemes by the EPRDF in the mid-2000s. Although its predecessor, the TPLF, had vigorously opposed the 1980s resettlement when it was fighting a civil war against the Derg, the EPRDF came to adopt a remarkably similar programme when it, too, faced the aftermath of famine and population pressure in areas of historically intensive cultivation. Though some of the worst features of the 1980s resettlement were avoided, in that the new scheme was at least in principle voluntary and did not take place in the midst of civil war, many of its defects were replicated. In part the result of ‘seeing like a state’, the 2000s resettlements took place on a similarly massive scale, with some 600,000 people moved on each occasion, and replicated the 1980s in demonstrating the problems of government by campaign, especially in response to an immediate emergency. On both occasions, resettlers were given shamefully misleading accounts of the resources available in the areas to which they were being sent, and large numbers of disillusioned people trooped back to their places of origin.
At the same time as studying the new settlements, however, Pankhurst re-examined the old ones, with fascinating results. Such settlements are characteristically studied at the time of their establishment, when conditions are almost necessarily chaotic, and a retrospective appraisal is extremely revealing. The 1980s settlements have certainly had their ups and downs, and have continuing problems, including environmental damage and sometimes strained relations with indigenous communities, but on the whole conditions have stabilized. Settlers who went back to their ‘home’ areas after 1991, when the Derg was overthrown and restrictions on movement were removed, have in many cases returned to the settlements, where they have adapted to local conditions and are often able to grow significant surpluses: their problems lie in getting these surpluses to market, not in famine. Many of the settlers have now grown up within the settlement and the lure of the ‘homeland’ has thus receded, while religious and other social mechanisms have been re-established. In short, these former disaster zones don't look nearly as bad as they once did.
The case studies are too numerous for individual appraisal but contain a wealth of valuable detail. Several of the most interesting deal with displacement as an urban phenomenon rather than a rural one, and include the experiences of refugees expelled from Eritrea after that country's separation from Ethiopia in 1991, or displaced by the war between the two states in 1998–2000, as well as the ‘demobilization’ of soldiers from the Derg's massive army after its defeat in 1991. Melesse Getu's study of the impact of a large-scale agricultural concession on the livelihoods of the local inhabitants is also of far more than local interest, given the disturbing level of land alienation, especially to Asian and Middle Eastern companies, that has recently taken place in several African states, including Ethiopia.
The strength of the book, indeed, lies largely in its case studies, and opportunities to link these to broader historical processes and conceptual insights have been missed. There is, for example, an underlying assumption that ‘resettlement’ is a phenomenon characteristic only of Ethiopian governments since 1974, ignoring the very extensive settlement of immigrants from northern Ethiopia (and especially of retired soldiers known as neftenya) in southern Ethiopia under the imperial regimes from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This classic colonialism, deliberately instituted in order to impose imperial rule on recently conquered lands, greatly contributed to the fraught linkages between settlement and state consolidation that likewise underlay the more recent schemes. The concentration on forced displacement similarly bypasses the population movements that have taken place in Ethiopia, as elsewhere, as part of ‘normal’ processes of economic and political change, and ignores the question of whether these either avoid or replicate the difficulties created by explicitly state-imposed migration.
More generally still, the book fails to explore the clash between the rival grand narratives of developmentalism and preservationism that underlies many of the individual studies. From a developmentalist perspective, enthusiastically (and often counter-productively) adopted by the Ethiopian state, the optimal use of resources such as land is to support the largest number of people with the greatest degree of welfare possible, and if this means destroying much of what is there already, that is a price to be paid: one need only envisage the great plains of North America as they existed two centuries ago compared with their appearance today to make the point. From a preservationist perspective, evident in the discussions here of the effects of dams, agricultural concessions, and (paradoxically) wildlife parks, existing patterns of land use and the societies that these sustain have a value in their own right, trumping (or at any rate severely constraining) any claims that might be made for alternative usage. Only within a conscious examination of these narratives would it be possible to generate a coherent analysis and critique of the various schemes that this admirable volume examines.
