Governing the economy: rule and resistance in the Ethiopia-Somaliland borderlands

Abstract

Ethiopia has a long history of economic relations in its borderlands. Since the early 1990s, the Ethiopian state began to earnestly entrench its authority in the Ethiopia-Somaliland borderlands. This study examined the governmentalization of the Ethio-Somaliland borderlands in the post-1991 period. Drawing on official data and key informant interviews, the study identifies several techniques of governance that the Ethiopian state instituted to govern and control economic activities in these borderlands. The analysis reveals that the manner in which economic relations are governed is directly shaped by the exceptional nature and logic of borderlands in general and the Ethiopia-Somaliland borderlands in particular. The Ethiopian state has sometimes used ‘informal’ mechanisms and this particular way of governing economic activities in the border region is analyzed in this paper, which highlights five prominent techniques, but also looks at how people in the region circumvent some of these government techniques. There is a mutation of governance in which the distinction between what is formal and informal is often blurred.