Abstract The toub, Sudan's most emblematic women's garment, serves as a strong and dynamic medium for expressing identity, signaling hierarchies, and preserving cultural heritage. This study explores the cultural significance of the toub through ethnographic fieldwork in the rural Mahas community of Miseeda and the ethnically diverse suburb of Soba. In Miseeda, the white toub indexes elder authority in Sufi gatherings and ceremonial supervision, while in Soba it marks professional respectability for teachers and health workers as well as solemnity at funerals. Across weddings and domestic contexts, the toub mediates relationships between kin and neighbors, its meanings read through color, fabric quality, and wrapping style. Generational shifts are visible as younger women increasingly adopt the abaya, experiment with synthetic fabrics, and integrate new beauty practices, reframing tradition as fashion. By focusing on the toub as both repository of continuity and site of invention, this research situates women's attire within the longue durée of cultural adaptation in Sudan and contributes to debates on women's agency, material culture, and sartorial authority in Africa.
Abstract Cultural heritage is central to shaping national identity and historical consciousness, serving as a repository of collective memory. Ethiopia's 1966 Antiquities Proclamation, enacted during political modernization and international engagement, marked a decisive step in heritage governance yet remains underexamined. This study employed a qualitative historical-legal approach to situate the proclamation within its broader historical, legal, and sociopolitical context. The law's preamble framed heritage protection as both a moral duty and a national obligation. It defined key terms, centralized state ownership of antiquities, and granted exclusive authority over archaeological exploration. Its state-issued permitting system underscored the primacy of public interest in protecting sites and regulating historical interpretation, affirming Ethiopia's cultural sovereignty. However, issued amid political modernization and the post–Italian invasion nation-building process, the law's practical impact was constrained by the absence of detailed regulations, limited institutional capacity, and minimal community participation.
Abstract This study examines Ethiopia's mid-twentieth-century foreign policy shift, highlighting its embrace of Pan-Africanism and proactive engagement with newly independent African states. Before the mid-1950s, Ethiopia pursued a cautious and largely detached approach to continental liberation movements, maintaining close alignment with the United States and limiting its support for anticolonial and racial justice initiatives. This position drew sharp criticism from the socialist bloc—most notably the Soviet Union, which denounced Ethiopia as an “African imperialist.” A decisive shift occurred between 1955 and 1958, catalyzed by Ethiopia's participation in the Bandung and Accra conferences. These diplomatic milestones deepened Ethiopia's engagement in Afro-Asian and Pan-African initiatives, repositioning the country as a key mediator in tribal and territorial disputes and as a vocal advocate for racial equality. Simultaneously, the scholarships initiated at the 1958 Accra conference fostered intellectual networks among African and Ethiopian students, facilitating the exchange of ideas and experiences rooted in revolutionary struggle. The paper argues that Ethiopia's foreign policy evolution from 1958 to 1963 not only reaffirmed its leadership in Pan-African discourse but also established its role as a foundational architect of Africa's postindependence political order.
Abstract The study examines the interactions and relationships between Muslims and their Christian compatriots in the province of Gondar, Ethiopia. By exploring the dynamics between these two religious communities, this research aims to shed light on the ways in which craft, in particular cloth-making, has played a role in shaping their relationship throughout history. To this end, a qualitative research method and descriptive analysis were employed. Data was also obtained through the analysis of primary and secondary source documents, as well as through interviews aimed at gathering social memory on the subject. Among the creative activities of Ethiopians, weaving, with its classical style and wonders, dates back to antiquity. However, this art has been conventionally labeled as the occupation of certain segments of society such as Muslims and the Betä Ǝsrael. However, these craft industries remain pillars of coexistence thanks to the interaction of communities regardless of social, cultural, and religious differences. The results of this research also indicate that creative technology in these fields in general remains embryonic for the fundamental reason that this sector has received little encouragement over the country's long history.
Abstract Sudan has experienced long periods of war since its independence in 1956. As a common denominator, Sudanese armed conflicts have included a deep-rooted and highly contested identity dimension in the context of nation- and state-building. The protracted conflicts have been primarily interpreted as a struggle of essentialized identities for national identity and the nature of the state and have featured a historically established cultural perception of race and accompanying social hierarchy. Scholars emphasize this attitude and social structure, manifested in identity-based marginalizing political dynamics and repressive, assimilationist, but at the same time exclusionary state policies, mainly along north-south and center-periphery divisions. Scholarly frames of analysis based on this understanding give rise to various narratives of the protracted armed conflicts that are perpetuated by their protagonists and adopted by foreign actors involved in peacemaking. This generates competing views of Sudanese wars and undermines the coherence of efforts to resolve them. The article discusses the role of the major frames of analysis and narratives emerging from them in understanding the complexity of war in Sudan. It argues that the protagonists have perpetuated competing narratives about the essence of the conflict, while external actors have selectively adopted them. This has hindered peacemaking and contributed to the persistent failure of building comprehensive peace.
Traditional Somali society is a large stateless society where social order is obtained in the absence of formal hierarchy and authority. Drawing on the concept of strong reciprocity, this article unpacks the factors fostering cooperation in traditional Somali society. It argues that cooperation is best understood through the intersection of ubiquity of pro-sociality and the xeer-regime. The former is principally the result of socially rational behavior whereas the latter can be construed as both a shared normative order and a regime governing sociopolitical relations. The xeer-regime conforms to the shared beliefs of a homogenous society and further derives its greater legitimacy from society's external and internal ultimate source of authority. This allows the xeer-regime to exert moral constraint upon behavior, enabling sustained voluntary cooperation without overt coercive political authority. The Somali case suggests that when a considerable proportion of people exhibit positive reciprocity, cooperation may be sustained with virtually no need for formal punishment.
This article brings a wide range of perspectives to bear on a fifteenth-century Ethiopian processional cross kept at the Bargello Museum in Florence, bridging the disciplinary divide among scientific, historical, philological, and art historical approaches to this type of artefact. Despite being the subject of several articles, the Bargello cross remains an enigmatic artefact. It has a complex stratigraphy, and it conveys tantalizing if vague information about the patronage of the emperors of Ethiopia and the devotion of local Christian communities within the territories they sought to control through various means. In visual terms, the cross displays different formulas for representing the human figure that can be taken as evidence of the movement of objects and visual ideas between Ethiopia and Europe at the time of its making. As an artefact that certainly reached Europe before the colonial period, the cross turns our attention to those moments in history when the exchange or gifting of objects between these territories could occur on more equitable grounds. From a material perspective, the features of the cross manifest dynamics of continuity and discontinuity with previous practices. For these and other reasons, the cross continues to elicit interest and to elude interpretation.
The question of Hebraic-Biblical elements in Ethiopian religious culture has long been an important topic of discussion in the study of that country's religious history. Nevertheless, it is certainly worthy of reexamination. In this article, I argue that in contrast to the claims that these entered became part of northern Ethiopian culture very early and, in some cases, pre-Christian (Ullendorff) and the counterclaims that they date overwhelmingly to the Middle Ages, they can be shown to have arrived or been adopted over many eras and periods as a long-term process rather than an event. Moreover, I also demonstrate that in most cases these “Judaic” features came, not directly from Jewish sources, but rather arrived through the mediation of Syriac and Arabic Christian sources. These points are illustrated through the examination of both Christian Orthodox sources as well as the literature of the Betä Ǝsra᾿el.
Using hitherto unexploited archival documents kept in Gondar, this study attempts to investigate a history of the Ethiopian People Revolutionary Army (EPRA) and its insurgency in eastern Gondar and the counterinsurgency campaigns of the military regime to wipe out the guerrillas. To substantiate the archival documents, attempts have been made to extract oral information through interviews from peasants in eastern Gondar who were involved in EPRA's insurgency. Among other things, the study shows that EPRP's resort to urban terrorism led to the liquidation of the EPRP in the major towns and the incapacitation of the rural armed resistance in East Gondar. When government militias launched counterinsurgency operations between 1978 and 1980, EPRA guerrillas could not rally the rural population behind them and defend their base areas. Their failure to protect peasants from government punitive measures finally alienated EPRA fighters from the rural population and that eventually led to their undoing.
This article examines the nature and impacts of the 1974 Ethiopian revolution on pastoralists who live on Ethiopia's southern periphery. By focusing on Boräna subprovince, the article discusses how the revolution reshaped the everyday life of the region's predominantly pastoralist populations. I argue that although the pastoralist economy of the region shielded it from the major socioeconomic and political dislocation that were seen in the agrarian parts of southern Ethiopia following the outbreak of the Revolution, the Revolution opened up space for local contradictions that had remained latent under the imperial regime to resurface with intensity. In particular, the weak political and military power of the early Därg government created a political vacuum that encouraged the outbreak of pastoralist violence, which had devastating consequence for the life and livelihoods of the people of the region. Furthermore, interethnic violence during the early days of Därg rule intersected with a pastoralist insurgency supported by neighboring Somalia. This rebellion would further disrupt the economy and life of the people and delay the implementation of the Därg's encadrement project.
This study critically engages with the assumption that factory jobs will benefit both women themselves and overall development in Ethiopia, whose industrial policy is dedicated to labor-intensive light manufacturing. Drawing on fieldwork data collected in and around an export-oriented garment factory, it delves into the impact of women's employment on their intra-household decision-making power, agency, and well-being. By taking a feminist political economy approach centered on the dynamics of social reproduction in the everyday, the findings add nuance to mainstream policy discourses by showing that despite miserable working conditions, different kinds of agency emerge and are mediated by gender norms and various worker identities beyond the factory floor.
“The production lines in the factory are a showcase of biher biheresaboch [nations and nationalities] . . . giggles. . . . They are full of female workers. Of the fifteen of us working in one finishing line, some are from southern region, some are Amhara, Oromos and there is a Garage and a Tigrean as well. You can hardly find someone who is originally from Addis Ababa as most workers in the industrial park are metes [migrants]. Stepping onto the service bus ferrying workers to and from the factories, one is greeted by a symphony of languages.” This excerpt from a focus group discussion (FGD)help in Addis Ababa on October 11, 2023, aptly captures two key characteristic features of the garment manufacturing industry in contemporary Ethiopia, namely, the female face of the industry and the migrant background of workers. Despite the significant presence of female migrant workers in the textile and garment manufacturing industry in Ethiopia, there is an observable gap of research examining the gendered industrial jobs and labor migration associated to the sector. By drawing on the lived experiences of female migrant workers in Bole Lemi industrial park, the article expounds how the interplay of various factors account for the gendered labor-migration patterns existing in the industry. The article examines how multitudes of structural factors ranging from labor demand, policy regime, to sociocultural factors come into play in shaping the gendered employment pattern and migration trajectories of female migrant workers employed in the industry.
Ethiopia's quest for export-led industrialization through manufacturing is seen by many development economists as a test case for the larger potential of developmental states in Africa to benefit from global value chains. In recent years this quest has run into difficulties, prompting other scholars to question the social and economic advantages of this strategy. This article takes a novel approach to this question by examining the rise and fall of one prominent international investment that failed, namely the Turkish textile/apparel firm Ayka Addis. It does so through the lens of agency in global production networks (GPNs), arguing that a multistranded understanding of the constraints and opportunities faced by different actors related to the case can shed light on possibilities for economic and social upgrading. Drawing on interviews with these actors, as well as on multiple primary and secondary written sources, it finds a variety of complex and overlapping levels of agency between and within actors such as the government, consumers, the main buyer, the firm management itself, and workers. An initial alignment in goals increased the agency of many of these actors, putting the GPN on the path to social upgrading. But economic upgrading was more difficult to achieve, especially when key actors’ ambitions began to diverge in later years. Although the responsibility to create durable value chains is diffuse, GPN actors cannot “parcel up” the work required: just as economic actors such as firms must increasingly work to ensure worker well-being and social upgrading, actors occupied with social progress must also concern themselves with economic sustainability. This calls in particular for a more nuanced understanding of the limits of supplier agency among both global sustainability advocates and aspiring developmental states.
Investors from various origins in FDI employ a large number of female workers in Ethiopia, but one of the areas where there is lack of research is the well-being consequences of such jobs and whether these are uniform across investors from various origins. To address this gap, this study examined how investor origin is associated with the multidimensional well-being and mental health of female workers using survey data on 2,515 workers employed in foreign-owned flower and apparel sectors in Ethiopia. The investor's origins are classified in the study into those who come from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or non-OECD countries. Our findings revealed investor origin was not associated with the multidimensional well-being and mental health of female workers. This suggests that investors from both OECD and non-OECD countries, despite differing corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices, still operate within global value chains that homogenize production systems and working conditions across various investors. This study also shows other findings: Having adequate income for daily sustenance was strongly and positively associated with worker multidimensional well-being and mental health. Besides, having larger financial social support network and higher education levels were associated with better workers’ multidimensional well-being whereas longer years of work in a farm or a firm and frequent migration were negatively associated with their mental health. These findings raise a policy dilemma regarding worker well-being in industries reliant on cheap labor.
In the context of economic globalization, global apparel brands play a dominant role in price and lead time negotiations, exerting significant cost and time pressures on their supplier factories in late-industrializing countries like Ethiopia. This dynamic often strains relationships between suppliers and their workers, because the drive to meet deadlines and reduce costs compromises labor rights within the industry. Despite this, there is a lack of scholarship examining the implications of this hyper-competitive environment on the labor rights of local industrial workers. This article argues that the pursuit of low prices and accelerated production and delivery schedules by global brands has led to labor rights abuses. Findings reveal that global brand buyers impose downward pressures on prices and timelines, forcing apparel-supplying firms to compromise minimum labor standards for local workers. In addition, poor planning and delayed payments from brands contribute to persistent low wages, oppressive labor practices, denial of associational rights, and violations of overtime and occupational safety and health standards by exporting firms. Without tangible measures toward viable global economic governance, the existing corporate-led labor compliance management mechanisms of global apparel brands and individual supplying factories are likely to further deteriorate the fragile labor rights landscape in these multinational apparel-exporting industrial sites.
abstract:The Afar region, one of the hot spots of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, has attracted several international and local anti-FGM campaigns including the longitudinal global UNFPA-UNICEF joint initiative. The region is often praised as a showcase for the acclaimed social norm change brought by intervention projects. Religious leaders and traditional birth attendants (TBAs) were among the key local actors targeted as agents of change and norm mediators. The declaration passed by the religious leaders outlawing FGM, and the numerous community public declarations made all applauded the success in social norm change. Such accounts are often in tune with a narrative of linear progress of norms whereby global norms of gender equality successfully diffuse to local settings. The discourse pronouncing the diffusion of global norms often overshadows the norm contestations and resistance happening at the grassroots level. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in the Afar region, this contribution examines the different aspects of norm contestation and resistance happening at the grassroots level throwing light onto the resurgence of FGM in the region where the practice continued beyond the observational gaze of the government and other stakeholders. Furthermore, the article discusses the discursive strategies that the local community adopted ranging from performative compliance, negotiation for a milder form of the practice to devising alternative ways and platforms for performing FGM. The article critically reflects on the direct and subtle forms of resistance, the framing of the debate and the interplay of several factors that undermined the efficiency of the interventions.
abstract:This article focuses on the impact of the war on people of mixed Yemeni-African descent in Yemen. These so-called muwalladin have been the target of discriminatory practices for decades. Since the start of the civil war in Yemen, stigmatization and discrimination on the basis of one's family background has increased. Based on a qualitative study among muwalladin in Yemen we argue that discrimination on the basis of race and gender is highly prevalent in Yemen, even though many interviewees were of the opinion that differences between Yemenis had decreased as a result of the war because "everyone is suffering equally." Indeed, the daily lives of the Yemeni population are affected on many different levels, yet those who are considered second class citizens based on the intersection of their gender, race, lineage, and skin color, are suffering more than others.
