Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface & Acknowldgements
- Selected Glossary
- Acronyms
- 1 Introduction Making Enemies & Allies
- 2 Land, Hierarchy & Alliances in Highland Ethiopia
- 3 Historical Trajectories of Enemy Images
- 4 Alternating Enemies & Allies Ethnicity in Play
- 5 War Behind the Front Lines Individual Approaches
- 6 Reconstructing ‘Ethiopianness’ Competing Nationalisms
- 7 Ethiopia & its Malcontents Purifying the Nation
- 8 Conclusion Arresting Ethiopian Nationalism
- Postscript: After War, New Enemies
- List of Official Interviews
- References
- Index
- EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES
8 - Conclusion Arresting Ethiopian Nationalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface & Acknowldgements
- Selected Glossary
- Acronyms
- 1 Introduction Making Enemies & Allies
- 2 Land, Hierarchy & Alliances in Highland Ethiopia
- 3 Historical Trajectories of Enemy Images
- 4 Alternating Enemies & Allies Ethnicity in Play
- 5 War Behind the Front Lines Individual Approaches
- 6 Reconstructing ‘Ethiopianness’ Competing Nationalisms
- 7 Ethiopia & its Malcontents Purifying the Nation
- 8 Conclusion Arresting Ethiopian Nationalism
- Postscript: After War, New Enemies
- List of Official Interviews
- References
- Index
- EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES
Summary
War destroys the cultural web of significance as it existed until the outbreak of violence. However, as this book has illustrated, the outcome is not a cultural vacuum, since war concurrently spins new webs of significance – created by and fitted into the new socio-political environment caused by the war. Furthermore, the new cultural understandings created by war are of no less ‘cultural’ significance or value than the socio-political dynamics created during peace-time.
The Eritrean-Ethiopian war was ostensibly fought over a sliver of land. But, as perceived by peasants and politicians alike, the war had everything to do with notions of identity: who ‘we’ were; how ‘we’ were distinct from ‘them’; the connection with and the perception of land; how a ‘brother’ turned out to be an enemy; and how enemies became allies. At the same time, variously situated actors perceived the overarching metaphor of ‘who is the enemy?’ differently in relation to a consciousness of boundaries – their own and those of others. The resulting ‘sedimentation of stories within stories’ has provided the framework for this book (cf. Donham 1999: 177).
The overall narrative in the preceding chapters has tried to be true to the context of war and the metaphor of the enemy. As described, the war unfolded and impacted with various degrees of intensity on different localities throughout Ethiopia. The outcome of this might appear as fragments of war narratives – variously related and disjointed, incomplete, fluid and contradictory.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- War and the Politics of Identity in EthiopiaThe Making of Enemies and Allies in the Horn of Africa, pp. 197 - 207Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009