Land, the Politics of Development and Protest in Ethiopia

In 2013, Ethiopia unveiled a plan to expand its capital, Addis Ababa, by appropriating over 1 million hectares of rural land—almost seven times bigger than South Africa’s metropolitan city of Johannesburg—from the surrounding Oromiya region. The plan, commonly known as the Addis Ababa Master Plan, was the then-ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front-dominated Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (TPLF/EPRDF) regime’s signature developmental state project and aimed at doubling down Ethiopia’s aspiration for structural transformation by establishing new urban and industrial centers. Nevertheless, farmers initially and subsequently students, youth networks, civil servants and other social groups from the surrounding Oromiya region resisted the plan because they believed it was the ruling elite’s strategy of land annexation. This article broadly assesses the interplay between the politics of land and development in post-1991 Ethiopia. Specifically, it explores how the protests against the planned expansion of Addis Ababa fed into fragmentation within the ruling elite and aggravated the structural tension within Ethiopia’s ethno-federal system and ultimately led to the collapse of the TPLF/EPRDF (1991–2019) regime—which was one of Africa’s strongest authoritarian regimes in the post-Cold War era. Ethiopia’s experience demonstrates the circumstances and implications of the perennial topic of “the land question” in contesting despotism and authoritarian political control by underscoring the significance of the interplay between national institutional factors, subnational identity politics and the contingency of intra-ruling elite dynamism.