In her book Making Citizens in Africa, Lahra Smith presents us with a refreshing new study regarding the interplay between institutional politics and informal political practices in Ethiopia. Sophisticatedly moving beyond the established discourse on Ethiopian politics, Smith employs the lenses of political ethnography and identity politics to examine the differing methods used by ethnic communities to contest the often alienating formal political institutions and elite leadership structures. Smith provides an alternative to the state-bound definition of formal citizenship, one that many authors continue to use when discussing African political studies, with her concept of meaningful citizenship. For Smith, meaningful citizenship is a practice-oriented view of African political identity that describes citizenship as the way in which rights are exercised.

The book is divided into two main parts. First, the author identifies the critical moments for citizenship creation in Ethiopian history and presents an overview of the normative literature on citizenship creation in Ethiopia. This thorough outline examines the conflicting views regarding the establishment of Ethiopian citizenship, and how the dominant political discourse emerged from these views in the Abyssinian Empire, and later, in the Ethiopian state. From this discussion, Ethiopia emerges as a politically and structurally distinct entity when compared with other post-colonial African countries.

The second part of the book discusses the formation of Ethiopian citizenship through the complex and often contradictory relationships between education, gender and language policies. Smith argues that it is the politics of language – rather than linguistics, aesthetics or educational aspects of language – that dictate the curricula in the Ethiopian state. Specifically, Smith asserts that the government administration uses an Amharic-dominated language policy in its education system as a way to control non-Amharic speaker communities in the country. This hegemony of language in Ethiopia appears to serve as a display of bureaucratic efficiency in a country which has a very rich linguistic landscape (seventy-three different languages) and where bureaucrats are forced to mediate through cultural divides on a daily basis. In the last section, Smith explores citizenship formation through micro-level studies of the Siltie, Gurage and the Oromo people. Through detailed case studies, Smith explains how these ethnic groups have differing visions of citizenship, and how these divergent visions are a result of competing institutional arrangements throughout the country. Most of the ethnographic data that Smith collected during her fieldwork in Ethiopia are presented in this section, and create a more authentic tone for the book. However, while reading Smith's text, some might feel that her argument might have been stronger still if it included more ethnographic detail, and contained even more personal voices – including hers – throughout. Yet, it does not lessen the relevance of the work and the overall conclusion: that by using the concept of meaningful citizenship, we can better elucidate how existing formal political institutions in Ethiopia often fail or are less effective than informal ethnic institutions.