Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia: Undermining National Sovereignty or Tool for State Building?

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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.