Society and State in the Balé Lowlands: Interplay of Divergent Interests in Center- Periphery Interrelations in Southeastern Ethiopia, 1891-1991
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Date
2020-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
For much of its scant history, Bali was known as the southern borderland of the Christian
Highland Kingdom, where the latter stationed frontier guards and Muslim sultanates sent waves
of raiding parties up to the 16th century. Bali’s relation with these states was thus characterized
by the latter’s efforts to subdue it and Bali’s effort to maintain its autonomy. Its social landscape
was diversified by the process of fusion and fission. This dissertation investigates dynamics,
local narratives, regional complexities and minorities’ role in society-state relation in the period
1891 -1991.
My findings show that since the conquest of the region in the 1880s, state-society relations were
shaped by several dynamics with the scramble of colonialists for the region, whose legacies
polarized interest of the lowlanders, changed patterns of local interactions and their collective
relation with the Ethiopian state. These dynamics had accentuated both cooperation and
competition in center-periphery relations by interplaying interest of agents of the center on the
periphery and vice versa. The study argues against writing of the history of pastoralists for
peasants, a distant view of the periphery as a homogeneous entity and silence on the audible role
of riverine cultivators in the regional history.
This history shows administration of the vast lowlands from distant garrisons that changed the
pre-existing local power relations using its agents was unable to deliver immediate social justice
and therefore the region remained socio-economiacally and politically little incorporated into the
vi
center. Despite the growth of public grievances into localized protest before the Italian interlude,
which gave it ethnic and religious catalysts imbedded in the ideology and technology of
violence, the restored regime that was incognizant of these emerging dynamics had pursued
coercive rule. Consequently, the Oromo and Somali pastoralists, who had conflicting interests,
created strategic alliance rallying shared Islamic faith, pastoral livelihood, history of domination
and lowland ecosystem. They waged the jagahir, dhombur and sowra wars against the imperial
and Därg regimes respectively in which some governors cooperated with them and loyalists
among them served the state, which enjoyed also the partnership of some riverine societies.
Somalia, backed by long foreign hands, had intervened in arming and training the insurgents and
worsened the violent state-society relations since 1960. These resistances therefore contributed a
lot for the 1974 and 1991 revolutions but brought little reform on the periphery. In the 1990s,
politicization of ethnicity brought new trends in identity competitions though unable to pacify
the Balé lowlands. Consequently, instability, famine, insurgency and underdevelopment have
dominated its history.
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Society and State in the Balé Lowlands: Interplay of Divergent Interests in Center- Periphery Interrelations in Southeastern Ethiopia, 1891-1991