Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia: Undermining National Sovereignty or Tool for State Building?
Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT The media discourse on recent agricultural investments — frequently referred to as the ‘global land grab’ — has been quick to label these deals as ‘neo‐colonial’, implying that these kinds of investments undermine national sovereignty. For the most part, the emerging academic literature on the ‘land grab’ has not critically examined this assumption. This article draws on the literature on state building and agrarian relations in Africa to construct a framework that can be used to analyse the impact of agricultural investment on state–society relations and state sovereignty. The article then uses this framework to examine the case of Ethiopia, illustrating how the Ethiopian state has directed investors to peripheral lowlands and, in doing so, has enhanced, rather than diminished, state sovereignty. As such, while the erosion of sovereignty is certainly one possible outcome of agricultural investment, it is by no means the only one, and is an assumption that should be subjected to critical analysis.
Source: Development and Change
DOI: 10.1111/dech.12256
Author: Tom Lavers
Language: English
Subfield: Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2561612013