On the Ethiopia–Somaliland border, harsh checkpoints imposed in 2015 relegated Somali kontarabaan (contraband) traders – mainly women – to precarious livelihoods. Beginning with an ethnographic description of crossing through these checkpoints, this chapter outlines a contradictory dynamic: Jigjiga, Ethiopia’s premier smuggling hub, has become the capital of a local government bent on hyper-securitizing its borders. Intensifying border security interventions and a wave of return-migration among the global Somali diaspora have made many local merchants viscerally aware of their marginality and immobility in contrast to people with foreign passports and government connections. For small-scale traders, Ethiopia’s borders tend to operate as dividers. For government-connected elites and diaspora returnees, the same borders often enable opportunities for business connections and mutually profitable alliances. This chapter uses this observation to critique what it calls the “connective cities, divisive borders” portrait of globalization. It explains the importance of thinking about borders and cities as interconnected spaces of daily life. It introduces the book’s main arguments: that African urbanites are active agents who work to refashion geopolitical borders and create opportunities from them, and that everyday practices of exchange and mobility in the city do not just produce urban space but also resonate more broadly into border management.

After 2010, hundreds of diaspora Somalis left seemingly stable lives in cities of North America, Europe, and Australia and flocked to invest in Jigjiga, a post-conflict boomtown ruled by an unstable authoritarian administration. This chapter follows these diaspora businesspeople beyond Ethiopia’s borders and explores how their motivations for, and practices of, return-migration to Ethiopia are shaped by the experiences of migrant life in cities outside the Horn of Africa. Drawing on fieldwork among Somali businesspeople in South Africa and the US as well as Jigjiga, I show that Somali return-migrants to Jigjiga are driven by a complex mix of motivations, including responsibilities for family support, perceptions of business opportunity in the Horn of Africa, and experiences of precarity and risk in cities abroad. The implication is that social transformations in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands cannot be analyzed only at a local level. These ongoing shifts in securitization and urbanization in the Horn’s borderlands are entangled with “urban borderwork” in cities far beyond Ethiopia. This analysis not only situates Jigjiga in a broader world of cities and social relations; it also pushes us to think more deeply about the dynamic relationship between city-making and border-making in the world more broadly.

For Somali merchants in eastern Ethiopia, border securitization seems to be driving urban inequality. Ethiopia’s governing elites have instrumentalized borders, offering exclusive import–export licenses to political supporters, including diaspora return-migrants. In turn, the beneficiaries of these trade schemes speculate in sectors such as urban real estate. The “informal” kontarabaan (contraband) markets in Jigjiga are a seeming locus of resistance to these new elite collaborations. In contrast to the securitized checkpoints around the city, officials rarely try to regulate smuggling within the dense urban market. But is this really an issue of governance versus informality, political elites versus lower-class traders, and border security versus urban tolerance? Looking closely at people’s transactions in urban space, this chapter shows how expectations about obligation and reciprocity crosscut apparent social divisions in the city. In their daily interactions, both merchants and government regulators often draw on ideals of Somali nonhegemonic or “egalitarian” ethos to explain and justify their activities. Yet the way these egalitarianisms function in the city looks different than the idealized “egalitarian society” of anthropological lore. I show how people’s practices of reciprocity and exchange are spatial work that affects how “transformations of space” including walls, streets, and borders operate in daily life.

When Ethiopia aligned itself with the US in the global war on terror after 2001, top–down security interventions in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands led Somali secessionist conflict to spiral out of control. The protracted “state collapse” of neighboring Somalia spawned regional instability throughout the 1990s. In what is today Somali Regional State (SRS), the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) spearheaded Somali-led rebellion against the new Ethiopian federal government. Somali rebels massacred Chinese oil workers in 2007 and attempted to assassinate SRS’s president in Jigjiga in 2008. Why, then, did diaspora Somalis begin returning from stable lives in North America and Europe to invest in Jigjiga before these conflicts had even settled? This chapter addresses this question by tracing how SRS authorities sought to create alliances among the global Somali diaspora. Through an ethnographic analysis of the dramatic change in diaspora–homeland relations that unfolded after 2010, it argues that border securitization in the Horn of Africa is not just a matter of topography – of territorial control, walls and razor wire, and security patrols. It is also a matter of reorganizing a complex topology of transnational relationships.

This chapter offers a pathbreaking urban history of the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands. Eastern Ethiopia’s cultural distinctions and tense interethnic relations are often described in terms of broad contrasts between Somali nomadic pastoralism and the sedentary agriculture of Ethiopian highland populations. A close reading of historical accounts tells a different story. Beginning with a discussion of present-day ethnic competition and cooperation in the marketplace, I trace Jigjiga’s social relations back in time, showing how towns including Jigjiga have been crucial sites of interethnic encounters, identity formation, and cultural change. Shifting the focus away from Ethiopia’s tense history of ethno-territorial politics, I suggest that in the city, everyday interactions between identity groups are significantly shaped by expectations about transactability: who is trustworthy, who is not, and who is a legitimate target for cheating or for collaboration. This argument places urban encounters at the center of understanding the salience of ethnic and clan identities in eastern Ethiopia. I argue, furthermore, that urban encounters in Jigjiga play an important role in how distinct identity groups relate to geopolitical borders outside the city and have done so throughout Jigjiga’s history.

In August 2018, ʿAbdi Moḥamoud ʿUmar, president of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State, was ousted and arrested by federal security forces. ʿAbdi had led an unprecedented decade-long push to securitize the Ethiopia-Somaliland border, to “Ethiopianize” Somalis, and to entice Somali migrants living abroad to return to Ethiopia and collaborate with the regional government. Yet a significant number of those who collaborated with and benefited from the regime also celebrated its downfall. This concluding chapter describes these more recent events as an entry-point to reflecting on the broader implications of the book’s argument that city-making and border-making are deeply intertwined in today’s world. It addresses three specific possible counterarguments, which serve to highlight the themes of the book and link them to broader debates in economic anthropology, border studies, migration studies, and urban studies.

In the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands, kontarabaan (contraband) trade is not just a source of livelihood. Over decades of efforts to avoid Ethiopian taxation, it has become an integral part of Ethiopian-Somali identity. This chapter locates today’s cross-border trade practices in the broader context of a century-long effort by Ethiopia and foreign colonial powers to impose effective authority and taxation on the Horn of Africa’s borderlands. Following small-scale traders and other travelers across several borders and checkpoints, it ethnographically explores what Jigjigan Somalis call “the cultural economy” (dhaqan-dhaqaalaha). Examining interactions between border-crossers and border-enforcers, it argues that Ethiopian-Somalis’ egalitarian ethos, long associated with pastoralist culture, has taken specific form in the Jigjiga area through practices of evading taxation and border regulation imposed by non-Somali authorities. The lines between governor and governed, tax-collector and tax-evader, border-enforcer and border-crosser have historically been entangled with ethnic distinctions between Somalis and so-called Habesha ethnic groups from central Ethiopia. Because of this, the advent of Somali-led border security since 2010 has prompted not only new challenges for cross-border traders’ livelihoods but also new debates about what it means to be Somali in the Ethiopian borderlands.

In January 2018, I find myself racing frantically around Jigjiga with a local smuggler and a diaspora Somali known as a raucous opportunist. The two men work collaboratively to release a truck impounded at one of Ethiopia’s border checkpoints. Analyzing this situation, this chapter shows how the problems of moving goods across Ethiopia’s borders facilitate mutual interests and coordinated activities in the city. The situation ultimately scales up to involve a coalition of people from many of Jigjiga’s important social categories: diaspora (qurba-joogs) and locals (wadani), Somalis and non-Somalis, kin and nonkin, wealthy businesspeople and marginalized workers. Delving into situational analysis, this chapter introduces Jigjiga’s dynamic social fabric as it illustrates how people use urban space as a platform for managing cross-border connections and circulations. It focuses specifically on how border-related business collaborations converge in Jigjiga’s chat dens, where men create and evade social connections as they chew the mild narcotic stimulant known as chat or khat. Analyzing these locations and how they function as frontiers of relationship management, the chapter illustrates how elements of Somalis’ nonhegemonic or “egalitarian” cultural ethos converge to reinforce, rather than challenge, government hierarchies, border securitization, and urban inequalities.