Battles over State Making on a Frontier: Dilemmas of Schooling, Young People and Agro-Pastoralism in Hamar, Southwest Ethiopia

Abstract

Compulsory schooling has been promoted globally through the United Nation's Development Goals and is widely understood as a "global good". Assuming that schooling minimizes poverty and supports development and social mobility, the politics of "schooling-for-all" is rarely examined critically. However, in Hamar District in southwest Ethiopia the attempt to implement compulsory schooling turned into a violent conflict in 2014/15. This conflict over education, in particular girl's schooling, throws doubt on the universal implementation of 'Western'-style schooling. In this dissertation, I look beyond the ideology of schooling and analyze what it means in practice and how it leads to conflicts in a rural area. In this case, schooling literally constitutes an arena in which various political actors fight over their claims to power. The conflict shows how schooling is entangled with an ongoing process of state making. The Ethiopian state, which can be called a developmentalist state, tries to enlarge its power on the frontier through schooling and by seeking to achieve (inter)national development goals. Agro-pastoralist societies, which live by mobile animal husbandry and slash-and-burn cultivation, try to secure their existence and co-determination. Students who are related both to their agro-pastoralist kin and to the government, live at the interface of these competing claims to power. This intermediary position puts them in the middle of the conflict and creates dilemmas, which I conceptualize as crossroads and points of difficult decision-making between multiple life paths. During my fieldwork, in which I witnessed the outbreak of the violent conflict, I focused on the perspectives of young people. The lives of students are affected by schooling but their voices are rarely heard. In a multi-sited ethnography, I follow first-generation children and young people as they move from agro-pastoralist homesteads to schools and hostels in towns. I study education in and outside schools, and understand young people as actors whose lives are interwoven with larger processes that shape them, and which they also co-create. The dissertation identifies dilemmas of schooling in five fields: (1) in regard to schooling and its effects on agro-pastoralist household economies, (2) in the ideology and practices of teaching and learning in rural schools, (3) in relation to the (dis)connections between urban and rural lifestyles, (4) in regard to marriage and initiation and their underlying gender relations, and (5) in the fight over multiple claims to power. Looking at these dilemmas, the phenomenon of high unemployment rates among school-educated youth, and the decreasing land that is available for agriculture and pastoralism, the dissertation shows the dilemma of giving recommendations for the future: schooling appears to be one possible path into the future for some children, but not a sustainable way for every child. The conflict raises the question of who has the right to decide about the education of children. Is it the state, the parents, or the girls and boys themselves? My discussion of the dilemmas arising from these decisions shows how young people negotiate competing ways of living which shape personal and global processes of transformation.