Acknowledgements

Researching and writing this book has been a protracted process. In the course of the last seventeen years that have, one way or another, built towards writing this book, I have accrued many intellectual and other debts.

I first went to Ethiopia for a year in 2005, arriving in Addis Ababa in the aftermath of the hotly contested elections and at a time when the EPRDF’s ‘developmental state’ was kicking into full swing. I worked in Ethiopia for a year as part of the Research Group on Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) and remain very grateful to the project leaders in Bath – Allister McGregor, James Copestake and Sarah White – and the Ethiopia country team – Alula Pankhurst and Pip Bevan – for giving me what proved to be such an influential opportunity. In Ethiopia, as a naïve ferenji, I had the chance to visit towns and rural communities across Amhara and Oromiya, and I am indebted to Alula, Yisak Tafere, Workneh Abebe, Yohannes Gezahegn and Bizuayehu Ayele for their support and guidance at different points throughout that year. I left in 2006 convinced that something fascinating was going on in Ethiopia, but I was as yet ill-equipped to understand quite what. I draw on part of the WeD research that was subsequently undertaken by the Wellbeing and Illbeing Dynamics in Ethiopia (WIDE) project that emerged from WeD in the case study of Turufe-Wetera-Elemo in Chapter 9. WeD’s funding by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.

After leaving Ethiopia in 2006, I joined the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Like many others working at UNRISD at that time, the two years I spent there was a formative moment in my thinking that has greatly informed my subsequent research on the state, late development and distribution. Particularly influential was the then director, Thandika Mkandawire, as well as inspiring colleagues including Shea McClanahan, Eleanor Hutchinson, Yusuf Bangura, Katja Hujo and Peter Utting. I left UNRISD to study for my PhD at the University of Bath, intent on bringing the ideas I had been exposed to at UNRISD to understand the political and economic changes underway in Ethiopia. This book is certainly not a standard conversion of a PhD thesis. It would perhaps be better described as a second – hopefully improved – attempt at answering a broadly similar set of questions to the original thesis. My PhD was funded by an ESRC studentship, with additional support from the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI). I am very grateful to my supervisors at Bath, Joe Devine, Graham Brown, Peter Davis and Guy Standing, the research assistants who supported fieldwork, Tolossa Mamuye, Amdissa Darge and Meressa Tsehaye, the Political Science Department at Addis Ababa University for hosting me and Tigist Grieve for putting a roof over my head while in Addis. Jun Borras and Ruth Hall from LDPI also provided very useful comments on early papers.

The majority of the fieldwork for this book was carried out while at the University of Manchester. This included two projects that I led as part of the Effective States and Inclusive Development (ESID) Research Centre, funded by the UK’s Department for International Development. I am particularly indebted to Sam Hickey and others at ESID including David Hulme, Kunal Sen and Julia Brunt, for giving me the opportunity to lead two fascinating projects that directly contributed to Chapters 8–10. Research in Ethiopia involved affiliations with the Institute for Development Policy Research at Addis Ababa University, the Forum for Social Studies and the Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA). I was also fortunate to work with excellent research assistants including Mekdes Mezgebu, Moges Belay, Senait Abreha, Dawud Mohammed, Bisrat Welde Selassie, Yerosan Mesfin and Dunyat Haile who all made an invaluable contribution to the research. The fieldwork for the case study of Adama in Chapter 7, meanwhile, was conducted in collaboration with Fana Gebresenbet and with the support of the Rift Valley Institute. Cedric Barnes was enormously supportive and encouraging throughout this project, while Bizuayehu Ayele and Shiferaw Fujie provided outstanding research assistance. Subsequently, Aberra Tadesse kindly supported the research by collecting documents and official statistics when international travel became impossible during COVID, and Sarah Redicker carried out quantitative analysis for Chapters 5 and 10.

While the book draws on a range of research over many years, it would, quite simply, never have been written were it not for the generous support of the Leverhulme Foundation, which awarded me a Research Fellowship in 2020–2021 that relieved me of teaching responsibilities for more than a year, and then extended this for several more months when COVID homeschool made a mess of my writing plans. I am also grateful to the Government Department at the University of Texas at Austin for hosting me as a visiting scholar for six months in 2021. Not only was this a key stage in producing a full draft of the manuscript, but conversations with Wendy Hunter, Kurt Weyland, Jason Brownlee, Xiaobo Lu and Annie Meng were very helpful in fine tuning the arguments in the book.

The final draft of the book has benefitted from comments from several colleagues. Fana Gebresenbet, Pritish Behuria and three reviewers assigned by Cambridge were generous enough to read the entire manuscript and provided valuable suggestions. Likewise, Cathy Boone, Sam Hickey, Edward Ampratwum, Tom Gillespie, Nick Jepson and Biruk Terrefe all provided comments on one or more of the chapters. Finally, comments from participants at seminars at Oxford University, the University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown University and the Land Politics reading group at the London School of Economics were all invaluable in honing the arguments. Moreover, conversations over the years with Fana Gebresenbet, Eyob Balcha Gebremariam, Ezana Haddis, Biruk Terrefe, Dereje Feyissa, Hallelujah Lulie, Catherine Dom, Jason Mosley, Sarah Vaughan, Cathy Boone and Lindsay Whitfield have shaped my thinking in fundamental ways. I am also grateful to Maria Marsh and Emily Sharp at Cambridge for guiding the manuscript through the review process.

Finally, I must thank my family. Shea, most of all, for being my companion, fellow traveller and critical soundboard from Geneva to Addis to Manchester and Austin; Alice and Arthur for their persistence in reminding me that there is life beyond work; Sally, John and James for making me who I am; and Banjo because I am told I must.