From Nägarit to National Sovereignty: Lineages of Political Modernity in Ethiopia

Abstract

This study shows that modern state power in Ethiopia emerged in a historical process of change and continuity marked by the colonial transformations of Italian East Africa (1936-1941). Theoretically conceived as a transformation from nägarit to national sovereignty, this historical process shows a shift in the form of state power from the premodern right and power of military authorities to issue professionally and provincially specific commands by drumbeats to the modern juridical power of a national sovereign body to make or suspend state laws in an official gazette. The study also shows that the violent political contestations witnessed in the history of the making of national sovereignty in Ethiopia since 1942 can be conceived as a postcolonial derivative dialectic between, on the one hand, state power that represents the sovereign national majority, and, on the other hand, minority resistance emanating from groups rendered political minorities through exclusion from the postcolonial project of national sovereignty in its centralized mode from 1942 to 1991 or its decentralized mode since 1995. The study’s methodological approach can be understood as conceptual and political historiography of the present. The theoretical discourses and empirical materials examined in the study are obtained through archival and library research and ethnographic fieldwork. Accordingly, a history of an existing political concept in Ethiopia, identified as “nägarit,” is reconstructed in the long duration to show how its intellectual articulation in different modes of political thought and its institutional use in different political practices transformed from as early as the thirteenth century to the present. The result of this historical account produces three major historical lineages of modern state power in Ethiopia: the first is the premodern lineage (or what the study conceives as the Aksimarosian lineage) from around the thirteenth to the early twentieth century, the second is the colonial lineage from 1936 to 1941, and the third is the postcolonial-contemporary lineage since 1942. The study can be read as a critique of the dominant literature in Ethiopian political theory and historiography impaired by the analytical straitjackets of colonial, liberal, Marxist, and nationalist interpretations drawn mainly from Western political thoughts and practices. In showing that the conceptual and the political are inseparable, the study emphasizes the need for a combined task of epistemic and political decolonization in Ethiopia.