Re-spacing African drylands: territorialization,sedentarization and indigenous commodification in the Ethiopian pastoral frontier

This paper traces the re-spacing of pastoral drylands in Africa. We argue that rendering pastoral resources legible and profitable occurs both within and beyond the state. Through a multi-sited case study from Ethiopia's Somali region, we excavate different mechanisms of sedentarization, whereby processes of state territorialization and indigenous commodification become mutually entangled. Sedentarization is not imposed by the state or corporate capital, but by indigenous merchants who capture the frontier's potential resource dividend. Land appropriation in the drylands is co-produced by political claims to territory, capital investment and new technopolitics through which indigenous (pastoral, Somali) merchants and politicians become complicit with the state's project of territorialization and sedentarization in a self-governing fashion. The irony of this situation is that the (Ethiopian) state has failed to consolidate sedentarization through planned interventions. Instead, capital investment by local and transnational Somali merchants has opened up a neoliberal frontier that re-spaces drylands towards increasing sedentarization.     

Cargo cult science,armchair empiricism and the idea of violent conflict

In this paper I develop a philosophical and methodological critique of ‘rationalist’—or ‘social scientific’—approaches to the study of civil war and violent conflict, especially the work of Paul Collier and David Laitin. Rationalist scholars purport to develop universal explanations for the outbreak and the protracted duration of violent conflict using econometric techniques and rational choice reasoning. My critique of their ‘scientific method’ can be summarised in two propositions: first, the scientific approach is considered to be a ‘cargo cult’ science—the cult being universal law-like causalities underpinning social phenomena. Second, most empirical research in this tradition is based on doubtful statistics enriched with anecdotal evidence rather than by empirical field work. Hence, rationalist scholars largely conduct an ‘armchair empiricism’ instead of immersing themselves in the complex nature of social mechanisms in a specific space-time context. I briefly sketch out an alternative approach based on critical realism and how such a research programme could work in practice for studying the political economy of violent conflicts.