Interrogating Dispossession for Development in Ethiopia

Abstract

In this article, I explore some of the implications of state land policy as an approach to analyzing the double dispossessionland and labor dispossessions. Despite a growing interest in the study of land dispossession in the global South, especially after the post-2008 financial crisis, examining the complexities between the land policy, land and labor dispossessions have relatively been overlooked. I discuss how the state's land policy contributes to coercive land dispossession and how this aspect of dispossession becomes the precondition for the second dispossessionlabor. The people who lost their land to investments concurrently lost their employment, and a new class of landless and jobless farmers is emerging.

A framework for understanding land control transfer in agricultural commodity frontiers

“…As illustrated by Eilenberg (2014) using the case of agricultural commodity frontiers of the Indo‐Malaysian boarder, the classification of areas with newfound extractive potential as unused ‘wastelands’ effectively creates the illusion of squandered potential. Maps often then serve to indicate where those wasted spaces lie waiting to be put to productive use (Li, 2014b; Tesema, 2022).…”

“…Banking on the counter delegitimization of existent environments and occupants (as a tactic discussed previously), ‘development’ becomes the rational counter‐solution for a condition of ‘underdevelopment’ that is said to characterize those ‘backwards’, ‘uncivilized’ spaces (Munarriz, 2008). The appropriation of land and resources by agribusiness is thus cast as a ‘public cause’ (Li, 2015; Tesema, 2022), a mission grounded in a greater moral project (Korf et al, 2015; Regassa et al, 2019).…”