This article discusses factors that shaped the initiation and escalation of the Jarso-Girhi violence that occurred two decades ago. The data required for the study were collected from community leaders, ordinary members of the communities, and administrative and political officers. The data were collected through one-on-one interviews, focus group discussions and field observations. The study shows that the inter-communal violence was the result of convergence and interaction between historical, ethnopolitical, sociocultural and psychosocial factors. The study reveals the impact of ethnically based mobilization in stoking underlying communal cleavages, in breaking trust and cooperation and in escalating communal unrests. The violence featured dynamics of ethnic competition and destruction in which ethnic competitors failed to minimize mutual harms and maximize mutual gains.

support in the form of safety net and MERET project and their indigenous social support mechanisms; petty trading especially by women; brokering on livestock trade; engagement in contraband trade; searching for daily labor, and among others. The paper also tried to assess the roles of customary institutions in social support mechanisms to the problems posed by the impacts of climate change and variability to their age old traditional ways of livelihood mechanisms.

By focusing on the case of the Jarso and the Girhi in eastern Ethiopia, this article seeks to contribute to comparative studies on the social, territorial and relational effects of the effort at political and administrative decentralization in multi-ethnic settings. The article analyses the political and social implications of the elements that constitute impediments to social cohesion and socio-economic interaction in the study area. The data required for the study were collected through fieldwork that involved interviews, focus group discussions and field observations. On the basis of the analysis, the article recommends what should be done to create a relational politics of place in which places and spaces that connect people remain open, discontinuous, relational and internally diverse.

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