Search for: All records

Since the 1980s, analyses of African political identities have emphasized identity manipulation as a governance tool. In the Somali Horn of Africa, however, politicians’ efforts to reinvent identities confront rigid understandings of genealogical clanship as a key component of identity and political mobilization. This article explores how government efforts to construct a new ‘Ethiopian–Somali’ identity within Ethiopia’s ethnic-federal system are entangled with attempts to reinterpret clan genealogies and histories. We focus on efforts to revise the history of clans within the broader Ogaden Somali clan group and trace the possibilities and limits of these revisions in relation to legacies of colonialism as well as popular understandings of Ogaden identity. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, we show that political struggles over Somalis’ integration with Ethiopia orient around Somali clanship, but that clanship is not a mechanical tool of mobilization, as it is often portrayed. We suggest that genealogical relatedness does not equate to political loyalty, but genealogical discourse provides a framework by which various actors reinterpret contemporary events by collapsing history into the present to imbue clan, ethnic, and national identities with political significance.

 

In this article I seek to locate — in space and time, and in Somali diaspora studies — that group within the ethnic Somali diaspora that identifies its “homeland” as the eastern part of Ethiopia, which in 1995 became Somali Regional State under Ethiopia’s federal constitution. “Ethiopian Somali” remains for many Somalis a contested identifier, and yet as Hagmann and Khalif argue, the “invention” of such an identity“bears symbolic significance, as it had hitherto been regarded as something out of the question.” The analysis combines ethnographic research in the US and Ethiopia with an analysis of county-level data from the American Community Survey to assess the presence of Ethiopian-origin Somalis in the US and ongoing shifts in identification towards becoming Ethiopian Somali. 

Recent academic discussion as well as political and popular debates have increasingly centered on the growth of economic inequality both within and between national economies. Credit Suisse now reports that 50% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of 1% of its population, a group of ultra-wealthy mostly concentrated in the US, China and the UK. More generally, while there were for a time hopeful reports based on a “convergence” thesis of global economic development, the share of wealth in already-wealthy countries has increased since the 2008 financial crisis. Over these same years, international development discourses have begun to focus on the role and effectiveness of diaspora groups in redistributing wealth and driving economic development in their countries of origin, advocating for remittances and diaspora investment as an alternative to government aid or other types of foreign aid. This paper offers a preliminary assessment of the dynamics of diaspora economic involvement in Ethiopia and Somaliland and the potential avenues through which diaspora investment may work to redistribute wealth or to bring new dynamics of inequality to local settings—or whether diaspora return may be to some extent more a side effect of global inequality than a potential avenue to combat it. It draws on data from an ongoing study of the economic impact of diaspora return to Jigjiga, Ethiopia, and compares some preliminary results with secondary data from Hargeisa and other locations to develop a better understanding of the promises and pitfalls of diaspora finance.