Six weeks after that June 2018 transit through Magaalo Qiyaamo described in the introduction, I am adjusting to life in a low-ceilinged apartment tucked into the woods between a noisy highway and the Chattahoochee River outside of Atlanta, Georgia. In the predawn darkness, I start my new routine, brewing fresh-ground Harar coffee and sitting down to code and analyze my field notes, interviews, and surveys from the past year of fieldwork in Jigjiga and the borderlands. But just as my mind begins working, my phone starts buzzing with messages and calls.
“These are the last days of ʿAbdi Iley,” a Jigjigan merchant tells me happily on the phone from Dire Dawa.
“ʿAbdi’s been arrested! Look on Facebook Live,” a qurba-joog friend in Atlanta advises me. I search the Facebook pages of DDSI officials who have friended me during my fieldwork and find a video from Jigjiga. Several high-level DDSI officials appear on the video, protesting that Ethiopia’s constitution has been violated and declaring that “the Oromos” have surrounded Jigjiga and are planning to massacre Somalis.
“If that’s true,” responds one Facebook commenter, “pick up a gun and go fight.”Footnote 2
But the hyped claims about “the Oromos” destroying the city are not true. Fighting and looting does break out in Jigjiga, and Facebook fills with videos of tires burning in the streets while Ethiopian news outlets share photos of banks and businesses with broken windows. However, the violence and chaos in the city, bad though it was, turned out to be more limited and localized than many who lived under the regime expected. A group of youth activists mobilized by DDSI takes to the streets in vocal support of ʿAbdi Iley, but most people watch and wait.
From the moment of the Awaday massacre in September 2017, and especially since Abiy Ahmed’s appointment as Ethiopian prime minister in April 2018, Jigjigan Somalis had been predicting that ʿAbdi Iley would attempt to secede, declaring SRS’s independence from Ethiopia, rather than leave office. An attempt at secession seemed likely to trigger civil war in Ethiopia, but ʿAbdi Iley was reputed to care more about his personal position than the stability of either SRS or of the country as a whole. From the perspective of many of my Somali interlocutors in Jigjiga, similar accusations could be leveled at ʿAbdi Iley’s patrons in the TPLF, who launched their own rebellion in November 2020 after being ousted from their federal positions. The new prime minister, Abiy, who had been an insider in the TPLF-dominated federal government, has also demonstrated his own autocratic tendencies.
ʿAbdi Iley evidently anticipated his potential ouster. No SRS president since 1991 had retained the position for more than three years before being removed by federal authorities. By mid-2018, ʿAbdi had been eight years in office and now saw his patrons in the TPLF and Ethiopia’s security sector being dismissed from their positions by Abiy Ahmed. Even before Abiy’s rise to Ethiopia’s premiership, DDSI had been circulating historical narratives and ambiguous phrases in speeches and news media that kept secession on the table as an option for SRS.Footnote 3 During my fieldwork, I met businesspeople in Jigjiga, including diaspora investors, who supported DDSI because they believed that ʿAbdi might eventually secede from Ethiopia, and others who supported DDSI because they believed that ʿAbdi was serious about his unprecedented push to “Ethiopianize” Somalis. Neither group took to the streets in large numbers to support ʿAbdi when he was ousted.
Faced with Abiy’s rise and his own potential ouster, during Ramadan in June 2018 ʿAbdi Iley tasked several of his loyal young followers in the DDSI administration to mobilize a youth movement they called Heego, a top-down corollary to the more grassroots Qeerroo youth movement in Oromia (see Figure C.1).Footnote 4 Regional bureaucrats at all levels of the administration were given Heego shirts and told that they would be reported if they failed to wear these shirts to the Eid holiday prayers on June 15. Two weeks later, I unexpectedly find myself tangled in the formation of Heego while I am spending time with a bureaucrat who I find to be an honest and kind person. We are riding around the city with a peer of ours (probably around thirty years old) I will call Weyraḥ who, unbeknownst to me, had just been appointed bureau head of youth and sport. Weyraḥ claims to be the creator of Heego and even asks our mutual friend and me to comment on a fitting set of English words to make HEEGO an acronym (heego is an obscure word that, according to the bureau head, means fresh rain but also sounds like the Somali word heeggan, meaning ready or prepared). Weyraḥ’s draft idea is: “Highly Effective Educated Generational Organization.” But the draft note on his phone has several other optional words for the acronym, showing that this is a post hoc effort.Footnote 5
Figure C.1 HEEGO car in downtown Jigjiga, July 2018.
Most young men I talk to in Jigjiga in June and early July 2018 wear the Heego shirts and post Heego propaganda on Facebook while scoffing at the idea in private. “Heego is something this president made to try to defend himself,” one young government health worker tells me. “If a young man has nothing, and you come to him and give him something and ask him to defend you, he will defend you,” says another. “ʿAbdi spent a lot of money to create this thing.”Footnote 6 As we sit down with some chat on a lazy Saturday afternoon, the young men continue to discuss how “interest” (self-interest) plays into the affair: Heego, a last-ditch effort to mobilize support for a waning dictatorship, is all about self-interest. Jigjiga’s Somali youth do not really believe in ʿAbdi, but they are paid to support him.
Nevertheless, when ʿAbdi is arrested by federal security forces that August, at least some Heego members mobilize to wreak havoc in Jigjiga. There is opportunistic looting of banks and businesses. Some people also support DDSI in principle as the least-worst option after decades of conflict in the region. And who knew, after all, whether the news that ʿAbdi had been arrested was true or simply another propaganda piece by the federal government?
Instability, Transactions, and Urban–Border Links
The conversation with the young men about Heego mirrors critiques of diaspora reengagement with DDSI that I described in this book’s introduction. To what extent is people’s support for – or at least acquiescence to – DDSI governance a matter of “economic” transactions as opposed to principled politics? What role does self-interest play in people’s actions? What these debates illustrate is the extent to which people’s everyday navigation of what it means to be Somali in Ethiopia is today entangled with a range of transactional practices. As I have shown, many of these practices emerge from the border’s complex history and from Somali transnational business strategies as people have worked to manage relationships amid intense mobility and unpredictability. Today these questions are potent in Jigjiga amid its transformation from a dusty kontarabaan hub to a boomtown for diaspora investment.
ʿAbdi Iley’s downfall exemplifies something of which Somalis investing in Jigjiga are intensely aware: Ethiopia in general, and Somali Region in particular, is strikingly unstable from a political standpoint. Governance is extremely unpredictable. Nevertheless, people sell their assets in Western countries and pour significant sums of their personal capital into this unstable environment. Between 2010 and 2018, a surprising number of diaspora Somalis living in relative freedom in Western countries returned to Jigjiga to collaborate with an unstable authoritarian government that was bent on two things: securitizing borders in an area where “contraband” (kontarabaan) is a key source of livelihood, and “Ethiopianizing” Somalis, many of whom wanted as little as possible to do with Ethiopian governance. This book represents a first attempt to answer the question why.
I have argued that diaspora Somalis and local urbanites are key players in new border security initiatives in the Horn of Africa and, more specifically, that Somali urbanites in Jigjiga and in diaspora participated in constructing the unprecedented hyper-securitization of the Ethiopia–Somaliland border between 2010 and 2018. I contend that their participation in new forms of governance at the border and in the city is shaped in significant part by a nonhegemonic ethos that carries (selective) egalitarian sentiments, but that enactments of this nonhegemonic ethos contribute in paradoxical ways to border hyper-securitization and urban inequality. In part, this results from the way people work to construct and differentiate spaces in which they enact reciprocities, and transactions more generally. Creating and differentiating spaces of encounter and copresence are core aspects of relationship management. As they work to create, maintain, and differentiate relationships with family, friends, business partners, and officials, Jigjiga’s urbanites also produce urban space and border space by shaping material interactions and circulations across borders and through the city. In some cases, urban borderwork involves intentional and strategic use of the city’s built environment to move goods across borders or to uphold border restrictions. In other cases, as in Jigjiga’s kontarabaan markets, urban borderwork is perhaps less strategic and more entangled with historically sedimented orientations toward the Horn of Africa’s borders,Footnote 7 and with general aspirations for opportunity in a world where politically connected elites are visibly leveraging borders to create and uphold inequalities.
To conclude, I want to expand on the implications of the argument by foregrounding three themes that emerge from my findings. I frame these by posing three clarifying questions that suggest possible alternative interpretations. I use these questions to revisit what Somalis’ transactions in an Ethiopian frontier city reveal more broadly about economic decision-making and urban–border links in the twenty-first century.
First, as a violent dictatorship that governed through fear, DDSI clearly had significant power over everyday actors’ lives – so why highlight the agency of these “ordinary citizens” rather than focus on the higher-level relationships and logics of governance in Ethiopia and elsewhere in Africa?
Second, Somali businesspeople clearly act out of their own self-interest, so why center an argument around the concept of egalitarianism or nonhegemonic principles?
Third, it might be argued that what this book actually describes is not a unique political–economic process, but simply a regional manifestation of the expansion of global capitalism into this space. Aren’t Somalis in Jigjiga, including diaspora investors, simply reacting to security regimes imposed by hegemonic Western governments and to the vagaries of inequality driven by global finance capitalism?
Everyday Agency in a World of Borders
Why highlight the agency of “everyday” actors or “ordinary citizens” in relation to a government that is clearly dictatorial and security initiatives that are driven at least in part by prerogatives emanating from Western centers of global power? Should we not focus instead on how DDSI collaborated with EPRDF/TPLF security elites and foreign-backed initiatives in the global war on terror to subjugate its own Somali citizens and their relatives in the diaspora?
My focus on diaspora Somalis’ strategies of investment helps unpack the complexities of power and agency in this context. Unlike Somalis living in Ethiopia, diaspora businesspeople operate largely beyond the Ethiopian state’s reach – they have already taken the “exit option” or “voted with their feet” to escape from Somali Region’s long-standing turmoil. DDSI uses kinship links as leverage in relations with the diaspora, but these were far from effective in silencing Ethiopian Somalis living abroad. The fact that some Ethiopian Somalis were protesting ʿAbdi Iley’s brutality while others invested in Jigjiga challenges the idea that people simply “play along” with dictatorships because they adopt the dictatorship’s ideology or because they have no other option. Some diaspora businesspeople I met, like Bedri, remained completely in vocal support of DDSI during every moment I spent with them. Most, however, put on a public face of support for the dictatorship while privately expressing their concerns and fears. The idea of “knowing complicity”Footnote 8 may be a valid explanation for the collaboration of local Somalis with DDSI. They have little or no exit option. Nevertheless, this approach assumes government hegemony and positions everyday actors’ agency as primarily reactionary. This may be the case in some contexts, but I have foregrounded the widespread nonhegemonic ethos among my Somali interlocutors to complicate notions of hegemony and autocratic power. My interlocutors’ principled support for the relative equality of Somalis, mutual recognition, and economic openness make the question of everyday agency under autocratic power in the borderlands all the more interesting.
Tracing the decision-making of an Ethiopian-Somali forced migrant who operated township shops in South Africa before eventually being resettled in the US, Jonny Steinberg discerns a “taste for extreme risk,” an appetite for “courses of action the consequences of which [are] largely unknowable.”Footnote 9 There are hints of a similar openness to intense risk in some investors’ explanations for their investments (such as Musa in Chapter 6), as well as local businesspeople like Amin who have worked to profit from links to DDSI. While DDSI elites have worked to deceive investors about the security of their investments and made false promises, at a minimum, diaspora investors in Jigjiga under DDSI rule knew that they were throwing themselves and their money largely at the chance of an unpredictable dictatorship. They might become the next maalin-taajir, gaining a rapid fortune by speculating on their political connections. They might end up chased from the country or imprisoned on false charges. Collaborating with DDSI provided a slim and risky chance to radically transform their prospects and those of family members.
In the analysis of DDSI–diaspora relations, geopolitical borders necessarily emerge as a central point of analysis where these risks take material shape as people traverse and manipulate the border. I have argued that the spatial boundaries that ostensibly limit the state’s reach have in this case become crucial mechanisms of extending government power transnationally.Footnote 10 To be sure, in an important sense, DDSI was a foreign-backed regime whose border securitization was partly initiated by Ethiopia’s federal government and their Western allies concerned about mobility and terrorism in the Horn. Such a framing aligns with analyses of “border externalization” that emphasize the extension of Euro-American security controls into new frontiers. Nevertheless, by following the practices of Somali businesspeople and local officials who engage with these borders, this book demonstrates how this borderwork has reshaped incentives and relationships within transnational webs of alliance, business collaboration, and reciprocity. Echoing geographer John Allen, this approach foregrounds how power is exercised with a range of actors in a network, rather than primarily over the network.Footnote 11 A wide range of actors with diverse motivations and strategies are involved in constructing and maintaining border security, even as they might work subtly to undermine and challenge aspects of the border in their daily lives and relationships.
While this book builds on previous theorizations of this “everyday borderwork,” it also makes an important theoretical step by linking the production of border space to the production of urban space. Through the notion of urban borderwork, I have foregrounded how practices of constructing, maintaining, and contesting borders involve spatial practices in the city. These practices of managing relationships with border regulators, smugglers, and cross-border populations also (re)shape urban space and city life. My hope is to encourage deeper exploration of how people utilize city spaces and work to manage urban encounters, unexpected collaborations, and transactions in their efforts to reshape twenty-first-century border regimes.
What does this mean for how we think about the intersections of urbanization and border management in SRS, and Ethiopia more generally? With regard to border security, one thing my analysis suggests is this: Even though Somalis have long been stereotyped in Ethiopia as smugglers and secessionists who oppose border control, many Somalis do favor a degree of appropriate border regulation, in part because the border continues to constitute a key component of traders’ livelihoods. Many Somalis are also prepared to accept their more equitable inclusion in the Ethiopian state, likely premised on a rearrangement of federalism to facilitate meaningful autonomy rather than top-down divide-and-rule and to recognize Somaliness as not simply a political identity, but one that is entangled in economic practice as well. At the crux of these shifts is the need to step back and think more thoroughly about what borders mean and how they operate differently for various interest groups, and then seek to craft management strategies that work toward aligning these diverse interests.
Small-scale cross-border trade is not going away, and efforts to completely stamp it out through strict border controls tend to delegitimize state authorities and place the interests of local populations at odds with the government. Even many large-scale traders who have profited from border restrictions favor the opening of small-scale trade. DDSI’s strategy for securing the border illustrates that power or force in itself is not sufficient to manage Ethiopia’ borders. Instead, any effective border management strategy should focus on traders’ social networks and mechanisms of “bottom-up” social control over appropriate forms of trade. This implies the need for decentralization and participatory governance in the realm of border control.
Broadening participation in border management can begin in the city. As Ethiopia’s long-standing “capital of contraband,” Jigjiga is an intense example of more general transversal relationships between borders and urban life. As Ethiopia urbanizes, the interplay of identity, inequality, and mobility as experienced by its citizens is made and remade in everyday urban interactions and transactions. While conversations are ongoing about the benefits and drawbacks of Ethiopia’s federal system generally,Footnote 12 we also need conversations about equitable urban planning and more localized socio-spatial organization that can facilitate positive encounters and cooperation across identity groups, religious distinctions, and class boundaries. There is also a need to understand more thoroughly the multisited lives of the Ethiopian diaspora and to specifically assess how their urban experiences abroad and the city-to-city links that they are creating shape the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational engagement.
Egalitarianism and Transactions in Networked Worlds
A second potential critique of my analysis is that I too easily embrace explanations of business practice and collaboration between autocrats and investors that focus on egalitarian or “nonhegemonic” orientations. Bedri and Amin, for example, might “perform” egalitarianism, but at the bottom their cooperation could easily be seen as purely driven by their individual desires to accumulate wealth. Likewise, business owners and their kastomers both see potential benefits to delayed payments.
In a different vein, an economist might simply expand the definition of self-interest by pointing out that in kinship-based societies, taking care of other people by redistributing resources also serves individual interests in terms of long-term survival and success. Why, then, center my analysis on nonhegemonic principles?
Clearly, like many economic anthropologists, I do not believe that “self-interest” is a sufficient or intellectually satisfying answer for the way people behave and make meaning out of their transactional practices. I have acknowledged and even at times emphasized when self-interest is an explicit motivating factor: Some businesspeople I interviewed were “thirsty for money” and bragged about making thousands of dollars per day. My point is not that self-interest does not exist among “egalitarian Somalis.” Nor is it that self-interest is a “new” development or a foreign intrusion on a group that is traditionally nonhegemonic. It is, first, that Somali businesspeople and officials consider many more factors in their decision-making than immediate material gain, including not only the interests of relatives but also more general social obligations. These are in turn shaped by experiences of uncertainty, the instability of material wealth in this context, and understandings about the future. At borders and in the city, transactions are shaped by expectations of Judgment Day (Qiyaamaha or Maalinta Qiyaame) and the hereafter (Aakhiro). Likewise, the interruption of kontarabaan trade to divert money toward government-linked elites prompted visions of ultimate judgment for selfish accumulators, voiced in complaints about “Magaalo Qiyaamo.”
People in Jigjiga often use Somali poetry as a means to voice such viewpoints. In 2017, I had the fortune to attend the book publication ceremony for my friend Aḥmed “Dowlo” ʿAbdi Haybe’s historical and literary analysis of the life and work of Ogaden poet Qaman Bulḥan. Aḥmed Dowlo is a diaspora returnee who spent decades in the UK and US before retiring in Jigjiga and joining the faculty at Jigjiga University. The book starts off with the poem that is probably Qaman’s most famous contribution to the epic Silsilad “poetic combat” that unfolded during Sayid Moḥammed’s anti-colonial jihad in the 1910s.Footnote 13 The first two stanzas are in this chapter’s epigraph. The first stanza observes that the real motives behind collaborative behavior may be hidden: That cooperation can serve as a veneer for vastly different interests, and in fact that apparent reciprocity (in the poem’s case, assistance in searching for lost livestock) can be a means of disempowering and marginalizing others. The message is, on the one hand, that such collaborations likely hide ulterior motives. On the other hand, it is that these hidden motives will ultimately face Allah’s judgment. And above all, people seeking wealth and power should keep in mind that in a moment, it all can collapse.
My second point is that transactions, including apparent efforts at self-interested accumulation as well as more reciprocal practices of redistribution, are social and spatial practices. The space in which exchanges and collaborations take shape is crucial in thinking through the varied dimensions of transactions and the way exchanges work to uphold or redefine social boundaries. Rather than assuming a motivation for businesspeople’s collaboration with the autocratic regime, I have foregrounded how their actions are part of a broader web of transactional practice that is heavily shaped by the urban landscape, replete with considerations of copresence, encounter, and material instantiations of inequality and separation that mean different things to people in different social positions.
Through this focus on egalitarianism and urbanism, I hope to provoke new conversations in Somali studies and the more general migration and transnationalism literature on how urban life figures in practices of transnational redistribution. My analysis suggests that in some ways, practices of reciprocity and redistribution may be easier to maintain over distant transnational connections than in the dense urban environment. People I interviewed often suggested that in the city, demands for recognition and reciprocity could quickly become overwhelming. In response to these demands, people who were relatively wealthy tended to work carefully to uphold their obligations to a degree, while also moving around the city in unpredictable ways and using the urban landscape to avoid encounters with people to whom they are obligated. Focusing on these urban strategies has the potential to bring migration studies and urban studies together in new ways to understand the dynamics of urbanization and inequality amid the growing phenomenon of return migration from the Global North to the Global South.
Again, in practical terms: What does this mean for how we think about the intersections of urbanization and border management in Ethiopia and elsewhere? My suggestion would be to look beyond current international development discourse that seeks to leverage diaspora networks and remittances to advance foreign policy and development objectives.Footnote 14 African diaspora investors have been touted in some circles as “the new developers,” a notion that migration scholars and anthropologists have aptly critiqued.Footnote 15 Instead, policymakers and development strategists need to consider the objectives pursued by diaspora investors, as well as the constraints and demands they face in their transnational lives. One rationale for return migration to SRS is feelings of exclusion and foreclosed opportunity among some Somalis in the diaspora. Their transnational remittances and investments are not necessarily a sign of economic success in their migration journeys, but may in fact be prompted by a combination of obligation and the anticipation that a return to the country of origin is inevitable due to rising costs of living and the unaffordability of long-term life (e.g., retirement) outside of Africa. Before celebrating the development potential of diaspora remittances and investment, careful attention needs to be given to its multisited causes and effects. This means that Ethiopian policymakers oriented toward diaspora reengagement could also work not only to “bring the diaspora home” to invest but also to pursue a transnational policy framework that seeks to affirm and advance the successes of the Ethiopian diaspora, including the 1.5 and second generation, in their spaces of life abroad.
In some ways, my analysis could be seen as affirming or even valorizing at least some dimensions of Jigjigan Somalis’ nonhegemonic ethos. Somalis in Ethiopia have forged resilient mutual support systems that have enabled survival when state authority has been weak or absent, and even when Ethiopian governance has been inimical to Somali pastoralism and kontarabaan trade. At the same time, this book shows how egalitarian practices involve their own processes of drawing and maintaining boundaries. In particular, solidarities are often confined within the Somali ethnic group and there seems to be less impetus to redistribute resources or exercise care for non-Somalis or for Somali clans that some consider as lower caste, such as the Gaboye in Jigjiga. Despite the parochiality of such support networks in contrast to the ideal of the liberal state that supports all of its citizens equally, neither the Ethiopian federal government nor regional governments appear in a position to fully take over the social “safety net” functions currently fulfilled by informal practices of redistribution. Rather than seeking to co-opt or replace these practices, attention could be given to how shared urban spaces and new interethnic coalitions in Ethiopia’s cities might create openings for broader collaboration and mutual support across the ethnic divisions that federalism has so far tended to deepen rather than ameliorate.
Capitalism and Inequality on Africa’s Urban Frontiers
The third potential critique I have raised is the one I regard as the most theoretically important for understandings of globalization and global urbanism. In my mind, it goes something like this: Why does this book focus on agency and egalitarianism when Jigjiga’s urbanization could equally be seen as another example of global capitalism expanding into new frontiers? With regard to diaspora Somalis’ agency, this objection might take one of two directions. On the one hand, diaspora Somalis could be seen as actors who are marginalized by the power of corporate finance in more politically stable contexts and are therefore forced to seek investment frontiers in Ethiopia due to their global marginality. On the other hand, diaspora investors could alternatively be seen as avatars of Western capitalism, bringing new values and strategies of profit-making into this market frontier. Such an approach might interpret Jigjiga’s growing urban inequalities as a manifestation of what is going on in cities around the world: gentrification,Footnote 16 the internalization of borders in ways that marginalize certain populations,Footnote 17 and transversal regimes of accumulation that favor cross-border capital over local labor.Footnote 18 More provocatively (or perhaps despairingly), I might conceptualize Jigjiga as a “global ghetto” of sorts, caught in the interstices of corporate capitalism.Footnote 19
Theories of global urbanism have proven useful in foregrounding the expansion of neoliberal logics as well as the densification of corporate and trade links across the globe, with cities functioning as crucial nodes of exchange and accumulation.Footnote 20 This framing of global capitalist urbanization has a degree of validity. Yet as many critics have observed, the blanket treatment of urbanization as primarily part and parcel of global capitalism stems mainly from a body of evidence about cities in Euro-American contexts. It also tells only part of the story of cities around the world and the processes and relationships that link them together. Over the past decade, urbanists have turned growing attention to the wide range of socioeconomic and political processes other than neoliberalism that are shaping cities, arguing that these processes need to be taken seriously in their own right.Footnote 21 While cities function as nodes of global capitalism, they also function in many other ways, and as historical formations, they exemplify their own social logics.Footnote 22 In exploring the rhythms and patterns of daily life and survival in cities of the Global South, Simone and Pieterse find numerous paradoxes and contradictions that require further exploration.Footnote 23 This book constitutes one small contribution to this effort.
My focus on urban–border links and practices of border management in urban space – what I have called urban borderwork – provides one way of linking analysis of globalization to urban life in the early twenty-first century. Anthropologists and others have traced the links between the war on terror, obsessions with border securitization and mobility management, and evolving dimensions of neoliberal capitalism.Footnote 24 In Ethiopia, border hyper-securitization certainly enables projects of accumulation, especially for the oligarchic elites at the core of the Ethiopian state,Footnote 25 which is directly backed by the Euro-American security imperative of maintaining a stable foothold in a region otherwise seemingly prone to anarchism and threatening “non-state actors.”Footnote 26
But in the city, as I have shown, businesspeople including speculators and smugglers, as well as their clients and kin, rework, appropriate, and contest border regimes. In the process, they manage and (re)create the urban built environment and the range of socially legitimate practices within it as they work to generate or foreclose transactions and the attendant forms of encounter and copresence these transactions generate. These generative transactions are social and spatial practices. I have given attention to this through the notion of transactional frontiers where transacting parties negotiate the meaning of their exchanges and encounters and, in doing so, produce space by constructing new built environments to contain and regulate degrees of privacy or by manipulating and altering the meaning of existing infrastructures to suit new purposes. This examination links the study back to emerging urban theory that problematizes the image of hegemonic capitalism and gentrification as dominant features of urban life. Specifically, against the narrative of “global gentrification” as a feature of capitalist urbanism, a strand of research on “urban borderlands” highlights how the “bird’s-eye-view” image of separation, segregation, and inequality in cities may mask a wide range of interactions, collaborations, and uncertain encounters.Footnote 27 Closer analysis of these encounters, “juxtacities,”Footnote 28 and relationships across urban spatial divides reveals that at least in some cases, division and inequality, even where they exist, are not automatically the defining features of urban life. Moreover, in my analysis I have worked to show how features of emerging inequality in Jigjiga are closely linked to Somali diaspora experience in transactional frontiers outside the Horn of Africa. Jigjiga’s urbanism is intimately linked to “elsewheres,” and numerous people work to manage these links as they simultaneously shape urban space and border management.
Understanding the links between borders and urban space is essential to conceptualizing the shifting faces of twenty-first-century globalization. While these links are particularly apparent in Jigjiga, the broad literature on migration and urbanism provides ample evidence that border space and urban space are in many contexts coproduced through everyday decisions about how to move, to circulate goods, and to define relationships of obligation and reciprocity. In Jigjiga, this transversality operates across both international and subnational borders, but transversal processes elsewhere could be analyzed across a simpler or more complex array of borders and urban spaces. By linking urban transactions to trans-local processes and geopolitical frameworks, my approach parallels critiques of the “urban encounter” literature that foreground how broader geopolitical dynamics and structural inequalities shape the terms and “value” of encounters, especially in cities marked by national conflicts.Footnote 29 Yet a transversal perspective goes farther than taking geopolitical structures as a context framing urban life.
The transversal analytic I have employed, taking Sassen’s work as a starting point, points to how the meanings and modes of enforcement at geopolitical boundaries in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands – but also likely elsewhere – do not necessarily exist prior to and independent from everyday strategies of urban life, as an “encompassing” or framing set of structures that impinge on the city. Instead, as people work to move, to create and uphold relational obligations, and to circulate things and money across the historically sedimented geographies of everyday life, they participate in producing the logics of mobility and circulation as well as everyday forms of regulation that continually reproduce border space and urban space.
Put differently, Jigjiga’s dynamism and particular brand of urbanity, like that of borderland cities elsewhere, exists because of the opportunities and closures created by shifting regimes of border regulation.Footnote 30 But the opportunities and closures created by eastern Ethiopia’s border regimes also exist in their current form because of Jigjigans’ constant struggles to make the borders work for them. This work of creating and contesting aspects of the borders’ meanings, affordances, and closures often occurs through face-to-face encounters in the micro-geographies of city life, but its effects reach across a much broader space. Urbanites produce border space through activities in security offices, market stalls, and chat dens. In doing so, they also produce urban space through their borderwork.
Kontarabaan, Freedom, and the Future
“Sometimes you see a woman crying, because all her capital is this – two bags, or one bag! All her capital! She brings that, she sells, she earns money, she goes back to Wajale, and has some money for her household. If you take that from her, she is left with zero. Right? It’s in the system design.” Yakob expounds angrily on the injustices of the DDSI economic system that is driving widening economic disparities, privileging government-connected elites at the expense of Jigjiga’s kontarabaan traders.
“For the future, I’d say I want the trade to be made free,” he continues:
The problem now is all of Ethiopia. Not only our region – it’s all of Ethiopia! Now the Oromos, the Amharas – they are demonstrating for this. Some few people around the system are working, while others are watching…. If things are changed? Now we say, “Oh, we are developed, we are developed, blah, blah, we made this, we made that.” If a lot of things were fixed, the city and the development would be ten times than this.
Changing the border regime by opening the economy, Yakob asserts, would change the city’s constitution and benefit many of its inhabitants. The vision Yakob lays out is not in fact for “free trade” in the absence of taxes, tariffs, or other barriers. “Let them be taxed,” he says. “If some people bring two – something small, two bags – let the government take a small tax from them and allow them to enter.”Footnote 31 Bashe, the former smuggler, agrees. After observing how the border regime and immobility contribute to urban inequality (see Chapter 5), he argues, “What I desire for the region, what would be good for us, is for the kontarabaan to be opened. The kontarabaan – I want it freed. Or at least for a person, whatever his position, to be taxed [fairly] by the government.”Footnote 32
Many Somali businesspeople in Jigjiga echo similar aspirations for cross-border mobility and “economic integration” in Ethiopia and across the Horn’s borders. “We act like the border doesn’t exist,” says one diaspora returnee working from his office in Jigjiga on a plan to create trade links between Jigjiga and the Puntland coast. He and others I speak with in Jigjiga sometimes argue that the political vision of “Greater Somalia” is a thing of the past and that aspirations for Somali autonomy are best pursued through cross-border transactions instead of formal politics.Footnote 33 My analysis should make clear that such visions are contested, especially by those currently profiting – even if temporarily – from restrictions on border trade. Yet they remain widespread among Jigjigan Somalis, especially those less directly “in” with SRS’s governing regimes. My analysis should also make clear that such visions do not align with neoliberal concepts of “free markets” or the utopian vision of a “borderless world” premised on a seemingly homogenous geography of movement and access. The aspiration for cross-border opportunity that favors Jigjigan Somalis emerges from a particular history of struggles to make a livelihood amid political violence and marginality, intense unpredictability, and awareness of Jigjiga’s position in a highly unequal world. It is a grounded aspiration for entrepreneurship and mobility, informed by a web of collective experiences about the most effective ways to survive, get ahead, and take care of each other in a variety of contexts from “stateless” Somalia to autocratic Ethiopia, and from the informal markets of South Africa to the trucking hubs of Minnesota and Ohio.
