Department of Political Studies PhD candidate Fikir Haile wrote this recently published book review in The Journal of Development Studies, reviewing Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia: Power, Scale, Performativity, by Davide Chinigò (Oxford University Press, 2022).
From the introduction:
"Given the deadly civil war that broke out in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region in 2020, which has claimed thousands of lives, recent years have seen renewed academic and public interest in Ethiopian politics. Focusing on the 1991–2018 period during which the country was ruled by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), Davide Chinigò’s Everyday Practices of State Building in Ethiopia analyzes Ethiopia’s state-society interface to make sense of the construction and negotiation of state authority and political subjectivities. Examining state-led development projects across five different regions in Ethiopia, Chinigò demonstrates how public authority is exercised, negotiated, and subverted amid processes of state building..."