By Tom Gardner

An area confiscated from Oromo farmers. A general view shows the Yeka Abado condominium on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, October 19, 2016. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri

ADDIS ABABA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – On weekday mornings traffic on the road northeast from Jemo into the center of Addis Ababa grinds to a near standstill, as taxis, minibuses and tuk-tuks wrestle for space along the narrow arterial highway.

Situated near the slopes of the hills that circle the Ethiopian capital’s southern flank, Jemo is a colossal condominium complex, completed in 2010 and comprising over 10,000 apartments.

When it opened, Jemo was the largest such housing site in the city, and today is home to some 50,000 people, many of whom work several miles away in the city center.

Sitting in a cafe on the ground floor of an apartment block on a leafy boulevard a few streets across from the highway, Tedros Worku gestures in the direction of the traffic.

“It is too far from Addis,” he says. “It is too far from work, and the road is too busy.”

Like several of the men he sits with, Worku is unemployed.

When he moved to Jemo four years ago, as a beneficiary of the Ethiopian government’s low-income housing scheme, the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP), Worku planned to set up an informal business, as he had done when he lived in slum housing in the inner city.

But when his friends in Jemo tried to set up a small street stall, the local authorities quickly shut them down.

They were told that only formal businesses in the area’s expensive ground floor units were permitted.

Despite waiting seven years to receive his single bedroom apartment in Jemo, Worku now plans to rent it out and use the income to move back to his old neighborhood.

“I miss my friends, my social life, my work,” he says. “I have a nice house but no income.”

ETHIOPIA’S HOUSING BOOM

Worku’s predicament is one felt by many residents of the multi-storey housing units, known as condominiums, that have sprung up all across the city since the program was launched in 2005.

As governments in much of the Western world have fallen out of love with top-down mass-housing schemes, the Ethiopian authorities have been rolling out what experts consider to be the largest social housing project in Africa, and one of the most ambitious in the developing world.

“In Africa, there is nothing comparable in terms of numbers,” says William Cobbett of Cities Alliance.

Addis Ababa’s skyline is now peppered with construction and from the sky, vast estates can be seen sprawling out from the edges of the city towards the wooded hills.

In order to deal with rapid population growth and an acute shortage of affordable housing, authorities in Addis Ababa and in smaller cities across the country have been building condominium units targeting low and middle-income groups, financed entirely with public money.

Although Ethiopia is one of the least urbanized countries in the world, Addis Ababa’s population is now thought to be close to four million, and growing at a rate of nearly four percent per year.

The number of houses needed to meet supply is estimated to be as many as half a million.

HOUSING LOTTERY FOR POOR

The new housing complexes are typically four storeys high, with the aim of promoting densification and containing the city’s urban sprawl.

Poor residents like Worku, who do not own property and are instead reliant on insecure tenancies, are encouraged to register for a lottery system which allocates the units as they become available.

Those who can afford the deposit and the scheme’s generous mortgage repayment terms are then granted ownership of their units, although all land in Ethiopia is still formally owned by the government.

The aim is to transform a housing sector historically characterized by rental occupation into one based on private home ownership.

Under the previous communist regime, known as the Derg, approximately 60 percent of housing in Addis Ababa was rental accommodation and government-owned housing in the Kebele municipal divisions accounted for 93 percent of the sector.

Kebele housing today is of typically poor quality, with homes made of wood and mud and without proper sanitation and infrastructure.

According to a report produced for the World Bank in 2016, the IHDP marks a “radical departure” from previous approaches to housing in Ethiopia.

The government aims to regenerate the inner city by replacing Kebele slums with condominiums.

But many residents want to return to their Kebele homes.

Emeret Tadese, a mother and housewife whose husband is a mechanic, now lives in Yeka Abado, a new condominium site on the eastern edge of Addis Ababa that is still under construction.

The 200-acre (80.94 hectares) expanse will one day provide 18,000 apartments, according to authorities.

But Tadese, like Worku, wants to move back to her kebele neighborhood in Piazza, the old Italian quarter of central Addis Ababa, although even with an income from rent the area would be too expensive today, she says.

“I live away from my relatives and friends,” she says. “It is empty, and there are no churches around here.”

“Transport is really tough. My husband struggles to get to work.”

Some residents complain that they have been forced to downsize.

Yehaulaishet Feleke, who sells eggs beneath her apartment in an inner city complex called Balderas, says that after four years waiting for a unit she was eventually given one that, though cleaner than her old home, is much smaller.

In her kebele house she had three bedrooms, whereas now she has one, sleeping five people.

“If I had a choice I would have stayed,” she says.

IMPROVE DON’T DEMOLISH

Slum upgrading, rather than demolition and reconstruction, can be a more effective – and less disruptive – way of promoting urban development, experts say.

But upgrading programs in Addis Ababa remain piecemeal and small scale, despite 80 percent of the city still consisting of informal settlements, according to a UN report published in 2010.

However, many are impressed by the IHDP, despite its drawbacks.

“For a country like Ethiopia, being able to complete more than 200,000 units between 2005 and 2015 is a huge achievement,” says Bisrat Kifle, a PhD student at the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development.

The program has done a significant amount to address Ethiopia’s historically under-developed housing sector, he says.

And teams from neighboring countries like Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania are looking to Ethiopia to learn lessons, he notes.

The real problem is that the IHDP has failed to target the city’s poorest effectively, he says.

The 2016 report for the World Bank notes that the poorest cannot access the program because they struggle to afford the deposit.

Moreover, the lottery system does not allocate according to need, although a new rule stipulating that 30 percent of new units must be allocated to women aims to address this by targeting poor, single mothers with little education.

The UN also notes that many of the poorest beneficiaries are unable to service their mortgage repayments, and are forced to rent their units out and move to cheaper accommodation.

Well-located complexes like Balderas are inhabited increasingly by reasonably well-off professionals, while peripheral sites tend to be populated by those on lower incomes.

Gottera, also in central Addis Ababa, is known by locals as the “Facebook site” because it is popular with young graduates and professionals in the technology sector.

There is a risk of “ghettoisation”, experts warn.

CONSTRUCTION BOOM FUELS JOBS

However, admirers point out that the IHDP is about job creation as much as housing.

The sight of independent metalworkers, bricklayers, and carpenters hard at work in the building sites of Yeka Abado is testament to the IHDP’s distinctiveness as an urban planning scheme.

A study by the Cities Alliance in 2012 said it had created 176,000 jobs.

“This is one of the successes of the program: to create housing with employment,” says Mekonnen Wube, an urban planner with the Addis Ababa Housing Development Project Office.

The government says small businesses are also encouraged to set up and provide for the new estates.

Mulgugeta Sherefa, a butcher and martial arts instructor in his early twenties, rents a single-bedroom apartment in Jemo with his two brothers and sister for 3,000 birr ($135) a month so that he can work on the site.

He is not yet registered for the scheme, but hopes one day to own an apartment nearby.

Worku, sitting drinking coffee beside him, shakes his head.

“In the old housing you could always find work,” he says.

(Reporting by Tom Gardner, Editing by Paola Totaro; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

(Zegabi) — Ethiopian authorities have said that tourists are excluded from the country’s state of emergency which require foreign diplomats to seek permission before taking long trips away from Addis Ababa, the capital.

Under Ethiopia’s state of emergency, which was declared on October 8, all diplomats cannot travel more than 25 miles outside of Addis Ababa.

However, Ethiopia’s Attorney General Getachew Ambaye said tourists who visit the country can travel freely, Fana Broadcasting Corporation reported.

“The directive is not applicable to foreign tourists who come to Ethiopia to visit tourist destinations. They can travel from place to place freely as usual,” Getachew said.

The announcement comes just days after the U.S. government issued a travel advisory warning its citizens against traveling to Ethiopia due to civil unrest.

“An October 15 decree states that individual may be arrested without a court order for activities they may otherwise consider routine, such as communications, consumption of media, attending gatherings, engaging with certain foreign governments or organizations, and violating curfews,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement.

The travel warning was the second the U.S. has issued for its East African ally, which is struggling with widespread anti-government protests.

In August, the U.S. embassy in Ethiopia issued a travel advisory after confirming the death of a UC Davis researcher who was killed in the Oromia region by stone-throwing protesters.

Despite the advisory, Ethiopian tourism officials have encouraged foreigners to visit the country. Getnet Yigzae, Public Relations Director of Ethiopia’s Tourism Organization (ETO), said tourists can travel around the country without fear.

Analyst tells IBTimes UK grievances in Oromia ‘an old problem’ state of emergency might not be able to solve.

By Ludovica Iaccino

(IBTimes) — Earlier this month, Ethiopia declared a nationwide state of emergency following anti-government protests in the Oromia and Amhara regions. Members of the opposition, activists and rights groups repeatedly claimed the response to the protests, labelled as the biggest anti-government unrest Ethiopia has witnessed in recent history, have resulted in the death of more than 500 people since November 2015.

Critics of the state of emergency – which restricts, among other things, freedom of movement and the use of social media – claimed it will be used to quell the ongoing unrest.

The government, which often blamed “outside forces” including from Eritrea and Egypt for the protests, said it will use the new measures to co-ordinate security forces against “anti-peace elements” that aim to destabilise the country.

Earlier in October, Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn admitted the death tollcould be higher than 500, but denied security forces had reacted disproportionately.

Protests in Amhara and Oromia ‘different’

Protests in Amhara and Oromia were not driven by the same causes. In Amhara, people demonstrated calling for their lands to be administered by the Amhara region, instead of the Tigray state.

“Protests in Amhara are not by historically repressed groups, but by groups that historically created the Ethiopian empire and have done very well under this regime, certainly in economic terms,” Harry Verhoeven, professor of government at Georgetown University, told IBTimes UK.

Oromo people – Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group – have often claimed they are disenfranchised and discriminated against by the government. The latest spat of protests was sparked in November 2015 by a government draft “Addis Ababa master plan”, which aimed to expand the boundaries of the capital.

Protesters argued the plan would lead to the forced evictions of Oromo farmers and would undermine the survival of the Oromo culture and language. The Ethiopian government scrapped the plan, following increasing agitation.

However, protests continued, with people calling for self-rule, the liberation of political prisoners and the end of what they perceive to be a military regime in the region.

“What is happening in Amhara is about who is in charge in the state. What is happening in Oromia is about a fairer share. Grievances are different,” continued Verhoeven, whose research work focuses, among others, on the Horn of Africa.

15 December 2015: People stand near the body of a protester from the Oromo group who was allegedly shot dead by security forces in Wolenkom AFP

An ‘old Ethiopian problem’

Verhoeven explained the Oromo people have never done so well as they have under the current government, led by Oromo President Mulatu Teshome.

“However, many Oromo still feel that, despite this progress, other groups, in relative terms, have made faster progress. The government is trying to say that this is an entirely external problem, but this is an old Ethiopian problem, not something that was created by Eritrea or Egypt,” he said.

“However, this is not to deny that what is happening in the country is being instrumentalised by outside forces, including the diaspora and some members of the Oromo Peoples’ Democratic Organization (OPDO) party, who have been trying to use these protests to gain their concessions.”

Verhoeven added that the state of emergency might fail to address long-standing issues at the heart of the protests in Oromia.

“Core issues are likely to further inflame. I know many Oromo who disagree with what is happening and actually like the regime, but who are quite furious because of what just happened,” he said.

“Now that their ordinary lives are disrupted – in terms of movement, social contacts, in terms of internet access with the outside world – being opposed to the government is a lot more reasonable and attractive. And that’s another manifestation of the party being blinded by its own history and its own culture and not seeing things for what they are.”

In a statement sent to IBTimes UK, the Ethiopian embassy in London reiterated the six-month-long state emergency aims to restore peace and order in the country.

“There has been over six months of unrest that has threatened the nation’s stability. In addition to this, there have been attacks on the people of the country, against vital infrastructure, businesses, health and education centres, as well as government offices and courts, many of which have been destroyed,” read the statement.

“There have been attacks on businesses, many of them foreign-owned, including farms growing flowers for export. The EPRDF [ruling political coalition Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front] – led democratic and developmental state is self-correcting and committed to resolving grievances and demands raised by people.

“It is intent on improving people’s livelihoods by eradicating poverty and backwardness. Above all, the government is inward-looking and ready to learn from successes and weaknesses. The situation is now back to normal. The government is in discussion with a range of groups across the population, including opposition parties.”

A prayer session at Biftu Bole Lutheran Church for protesters who died in Bishoftu during Ireecha, the thanksgiving festival for the Oromo peopleTiksa Negeri/Reuters

By AP

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (New York Times) — Ethiopia’s best-selling magazine says it is terminating its print edition because the state of emergency the government imposed this month is making regular publication “impossible.”

The Addis Standard said Tuesday it has become increasingly difficult to operate during the state of emergency, which has restricted some rights and given security forces the power to detain suspects without court orders.

The magazine announced the news “with a sense of unease” on Facebook but hinted that it will continue posting articles on its website.

The Addis Standard recently published a series of articles criticizing Ethiopia’s government for its handling of the Oromo protests that began in November 2015. The anti-government protests have widened to other regions.

The Committee to Protect Journalists calls Ethiopia one of the world’s 10 “most censored countries.”

BY CONOR GAFFEY 

(NewsWeek) — One of Ethiopia’s few independent magazines has suspended its print edition after the government imposed a restrictive state of emergency in the country.

The editor-in-chief of the Addis Standard, Tsedale Lemma, told AFP that printers and vendors were afraid to be involved in producing the monthly publication in case the government interpreted it as dissent. “We have tried to convince them that the state of emergency only targets ‘inciteful material’ but they fear this can be interpreted and abused,” said Lemma.

Around half of the Standard’s 23 full-time staff are expected to lose their jobs. While the print edition is suspended indefinitely, Lemma said that the digital edition would continue and that new podcasts were in the pipeline. The English-language magazine had been in print continuously since February 2011.

Ethiopian people read newspapers a day before the country’s general election, Addis Ababa, May 22, 2015. Most of Ethiopia’s press is state-controlled.TIKSA NEGERI/REUTERS

Ethiopia’s press is largely controlled by the government. The country is ranked 142 out of 180 nations in the 2016 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by international NGO Reporters Without Borders. Ethiopia arrested ten journalists in 2015, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn brought in the six-month state of emergency on October 9 following months of deadly clashes between security forces and anti-government protesters.

The clashes had intensified after at least 50 people died in a stampede during the Irreecha festival, an annual religious gathering held by members of the Oromo ethnic group. Protesters said that security forces provoked the stampede by firing tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowd.

Under the state of emergency, Ethiopians are barred from using social media to contact so-called “outside forces” and are not allowed to watch certain television channels that are based outside the country. The government is also cracking down on gestures of dissent, including crossed arms above the head, which has become associated with the Oromo protests and was demonstrated at the Rio 2016 Olympics by Ethiopian marathon runner Feyisa Lilesa.

Protests begun among the Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, in November 2015 against government plans to expand the capital Addis Ababa. The government abandoned the plans in January, but demonstrations have continued and spread to the Amhara, the country’s second-largest ethnicity.

Human Rights Watch said in June that 400 people had been killed in the course of the demonstrations, and there have been several incidents since—including the Irreecha stampede and clashes in the Amhara region in August, in which almost 100 people reportedly died. The Ethiopian government has denied that the death toll is as high as rights groups say.

Protestors run from tear gas launched by security personnel during the Irecha, the thanks giving festival of the Oromo people in Bishoftu town of Oromia region, Ethiopia, October 2, 2016. REUTERS/Tiksa Negeri TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY – RTSQFPV

CAIRO — At a time when Addis Ababa is facing protests and calls for equality, job opportunities and economic prosperity in the Oromia region — the largest regional state in terms of both area and population — construction at the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam site continues at a quick pace. According to an Oct. 17 statement by Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister Debretsion Gebremichael, 54% of the construction at the site is now complete.

The crackdown on protests this year in Oromia has left at least 400 people dead. Residents of the region accuse the government of taking over their land and compensating them at very low prices, before selling the land to foreign investors at extremely high prices. Locals also complain about an absence of jobs.

Addis Ababa accused Cairo of supporting these protests; as a result, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Berhane Gebre-Christos summoned Abu Bakr Hefny, Egypt’s ambassador to Addis Ababa, on Oct. 9 for consultations on the Oromo issue.

According to a press release issued the same day by the Egyptian Foreign Ministry responding to accusations by Addis Ababa, Hefny said that some parties seek to drive a wedge between Egypt and Ethiopia, especially after relations between the two have witnessed noticeable progress. “Egypt will always stand with Ethiopia until ultimate stability in Ethiopia is reached,” Hefny said.

On Oct. 12, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied again the accusations reported by Ethiopian media that Egypt supports, trains and finances dissident and opposition groups in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government ruled out the accusations, as it instead accused some Egyptian nongovernmental organizations of supporting opposition groups by training them on using weapons in the past years.

Ethiopia’s Communication Minister Getachew Reda said that Egypt and Eritria are directly involved in “financing, arming and training these elements,” which he described as an armed group. However, Reda left the door ajar to the possibility that the elements he accused of supporting militants were not necessarily linked to the government in Cairo, adding, “We have to be very careful not to necessarily blame one government or another. There are all kinds of elements in the Egyptian political establishment that may or may not necessarily be directly linked with the Egyptian government.”

During the educational seminar Oct. 13 at the headquarters of the armed forces, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said that supporting an armed opposition or plotting against Ethiopia would never happen, adding that even though Egypt has the ability to confront, it has opted for cooperation.

Noha Bakr, a professor of international relations at the American University in Cairo, warned against the consequences of being misled by Ethiopia’s accusations against Egypt. Bakr said these accusations are aimed at derailing the ongoing negotiations concerning the dam.

On Sept. 20, technical delegations from Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia signed ultimate and official contracts for technical studies of the dam with two consulting firms: the French company BRL and the UK-based law firm Corbett & Co. The Minister of Water Resources described this incident as “historic.” At the same time, the construction of the dam raises many fears in Egypt as any potential drought could negatively affect agriculture, industry and drinking water.

In statements made to the press, Bakr said Ethiopia now has become obligated to many mutual agreements with Egypt — including the Declaration of Principles and the Khartoum Agreement — which pushes Addis Ababa to play the card of internal unrest to pressure Egypt and derail the process of negotiation.

In December 2015, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia signed the Khartoum Agreement, which states that they are fully obligated to the Declaration of Principles signed by the countries’ presidents in March 2015. These principles regulate the cooperation of the three states to make use of the dam and the water of the eastern Nile.

UN expert on dam design and water Ahmed El Shenawi said that Ethiopia is adopting the policy of offering contradictory information in statements made by its officials such as the Ethiopian minister of irrigation, the vice president or its ambassador to Cairo. Shenawi said the ambassador had announced that the water level at the dam is 190 meters, even though the Ethiopian government in Addis Ababa said it is 145 meters.

Shenawi also faulted Egyptian government statements. “The Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation deliberately avoids making avoids making decisive, final statements. This could harm the management of the dam file as a whole,” he told Al-Monitor.

He said that the Nile Basin countries are discussing the issue of pricing water to be sold to Egypt by the cubic meter. Shenawi said that if the dispute between Cairo and Addis Ababa escalates, the latter will resort to an international third party to solve the issue of any objection to the technical studies by the two consulting firms. “If that happens, Cairo will not have the right to make Addis Ababa commit to the recommendations of the consulting firms,” he added.

Former Ethiopian Minister of Water, Irrigation and Energy Alemayehu Tegenu denied statements made in March 2015 by Hossam El-Moghazy, Tegenu’s former Egyptian counterpart, that the preliminary agreement on the Renaissance Dam includes recommendations by the implementing consulting bureau.

Then-Minister Tegenu said in statements relayed by the Sudan Tribune last year that the discussions leading up to the signing of the tripartite agreement in Khartoum never mentioned the storage capacity of the Renaissance Dam. He also asserted that Ethiopia could never agree on anything of that sort.

• Ethiopian authorities have arrested a Kenyan police boss and five of his juniors in Ethiopia territory
• Ethiopian police officers captured Illret Police Station OCS Christopher Nalianya and his officers as they entered apparently intruded the country

(Tuko) — Tension is growing after Ethiopian police forces captured a Kenyan police boss and five of his officers.

According to reports, Illret Police Station OCS Chief Inspector Christopher Nalianya and five of his senior officers from Marsabit county were arrested by the Ethiopians on Sunday, October 23.

The Ethiopian authorities also confiscated a police Land Cruiser and weapons belonging to the officers.

The police officers had entered Ethiopia in search of a local reservist who went missing after Ethiopian police officers arrested him along the shores of Lake Turkana.

The Ethiopian authorities also confiscated a police Land Cruiser and weapons belonging to the officers.

The Ethiopian authorities also confiscated a police Land Cruiser and weapons belonging to the officers.

The Kenyan government has confirmed that six police officers were arrested in Ethiopia and gave their names as: Constable Samson Kato, Constable Patrick Juma, Constable Samson Njenga, National Police Reservist Lomide Achala and Koriye from Illret ward.

The police officers had entered Ethiopia in search of a local reservist who went missing after Ethiopian police officers had arrested him along the shores of Lake Turkana

The police officers had entered Ethiopia in search of a local reservist who went missing after Ethiopian police officers had arrested him along the shores of Lake Turkana.

Marsabit County Police Commander Kogo said negotiations for the release of the officers was under way.

“They had gone to Ethiopia to secure the release of a reservist when they were arrested. We are yet to establish why they were arrested but were trying to negotiate with Ethiopia authorities for them to be released,” he said.

Watch below a video of Ethiopian forces.

Foreign food businesses attacked during recent protests by the Oromo ethnic group in Ethiopia face a tough choice to stay or leave and lose their investment

The destroyed interior of a workshop belonging to africaJUICE, a Dutch owned, Ethiopia-based juice company, following protests near Adama, central Ethiopia. Photograph: Zacharias Abubeker/AFP/Getty Images

(The Guardian) — Ian Derry was shocked when he got the news. A group of men had ransacked his company’s factory and burned down several buildings. A decade of work, tonnes of produce, tens of millions of dollars invested in equipment – it was all gone in the span of a few hours.

Derry is the director of africaJUICE, a Dutch company whose fruit processing plant in Ethiopia was one of almost a dozen factories attacked during the most recent outburst of protests by the Oromo ethnic group. Now foreign agri-businesses like his face a tough choice: stay, despite the risk, or leave and lose their investment.

“We are still assessing the damage but the losses are massive,” says Derry. Since its launch in 2009, the company had grown its staff in Ethiopia to around 2,000 people and was bustling year-round with workers picking and processing passion fruit and mango. Now the plant looks like the set of a dystopian film. Rows of brand-new tractors are charred and unusable. The walls are black with soot and the ground is covered in dried-out juice and smashed computers. “No one could have seen this coming,” says Derry.

Workers of africaJUICE, a Dutch owned, Ethiopia-based juice company, tossing fruit that has been damaged by protestors. Photograph: Zacharias Abubeker/AFP/Getty Images

Political analysts beg to differ, saying Oromo dissent has been gaining momentum for decades. Despite constituting a third of Ethiopia’s population, Oromos feel abused and marginalised by a political regime dominated by the Tigray, who make up only 6% of Ethiopians. The nation’s economy has experienced an average 10% growth over the last decade but Oromos say development has come at their expense.

As the vast majority of Ethiopians work in the agricultural sector, their biggest grievance is the issue of land ownership. Since the mid 80s, Ethiopia’s government has embarked on what it calls a “villagisation” programme to help scattered farming communities access better services. Critics, however, say its main objective is to forcibly relocate Oromo families and sell their land to foreign agri-businesses. According to a study by the Oakland Institute, a US-based thinktank, “villagisation” has increased food insecurity and disrupted the livelihoods of tens of thousands (pdf) of Ethiopians.

When Oromos demonstrate against it, they are often persecuted and brutalised. According to Human Rights Watch, more than 500protesters have been killed and thousands arrested since last November. “The recent attacks are not aimed at foreigners,” explains Jawar Mohammed, head of the Oromia Media Network, which has been outlawed under the recent state of emergency measures, “they are only targeting companies that support the government in stealing land from Oromos”.

Yet africaJUICE and vegetable producer FV SeleQt – the other recently-attacked Dutch firm – insist their main goal is to help Ethiopia’s development. According to their government, Dutch companies alone provide 70,000 jobs in the country. “We have a great relationship with the local community,” says Bas Rensen, director of FV SeleQt. His company had only been exporting beans for a couple weeks when their farm was attacked, but was already supporting a local school. AfricaJUICE is a Fairtrade certified business and ran a free health clinic for its workers.

Still, both companies have ties to Ethiopia’s regime. The Ethiopian government owns approximately 10% of africaJUICE, while FV SeleQt’s supplying farm, says Rensen, is run by “someone very close to the government”. Both firms, however, say they were not aware of any land-rights issues where they operate and believe their political connections were not the reason behind the attacks. “It was purely bad luck,” says Rensen.

A burnt out truck belonging to africaJUICE. Photograph: Zacharias Abubeker/AFP/Getty Images

Ethiopia’s government did not respond to multiple requests for comment but Marjolein Busstra, spokeswoman for the Dutch minister of foreign trade and development cooperation, says “Ethiopian authorities have assured us that they are giving the highest priority to protecting foreign companies”. Security forces have been deployed to the site of the africaJUICE attack to provide safety during the clean up.

Experts, however, warn the unrest is far from over. “The moment the troops leave, there will be new attacks,” says Mohammed, who believes the best thing foreign companies can do is reach out to local elders and negotiate a deal for protection in exchange for land.

Others believe foreign agri-business should leave Ethiopia altogether. “If they truly want to help the country, foreign companies should leave and show the government that abusing its citizens will not attract foreign investment,” says Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute.

While everyone considers their next move, the Dutch factories remain closed. Cases of fruits and vegetables are left to rot while hundreds of workers get emergency food supplies as they wait without a paycheck.

AfricaJUICE is determined to stay and has already begun to sell some fruit in the local market. Meanwhile, FV SeleQt is sourcing more produce from Kenya and Zimbabwe to meet demands and says it’s too soon to make such a difficult choice. “We are just a business,” says Rensen, “we can’t change the world”.

Oromo protests both at home and abroad having been mounting in recent years.

(Rogue Chiefs) — IN early October the Ethiopian government started carrying out extended internet shutdowns, as it declared a state of emergency.

The country  recently faced its most widespread and sustained protests since the ruling Ethiopia People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition came to power in 1991.

The government declared a state of emergency following a week of anti-government violence that resulted in dozens of deaths and property damage across the country, especially in the restive Oromia region. Since November 2015 when the latest phase of the protests started, more than 600 have been killed, according to human rights groups.

The state’s blockage of the internet is an attempt to prevent protesters from using social media to get supporters to attend demonstrations. Internet access to all major social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, was completely denied to the general public for days, and remains erratic.

Weeks after the declaration of the state of emergency, apart from at UN compounds and some diplomatic missions, internet services are still cut in many towns and patchy in the few parts of the capital Addis Ababa where it is available.

The disruption is forcing some organisations and international businesses in Ethiopia, to move some staff to Kenya where they can gain access to critical online resources.

HISTORY OF INTERNET BLOCKAGE

The latest restrictions are not new. The Ethiopian government regularly blocks the internet.

In July, it shut down access to all major social media platforms for a couple of days, in a move it said was meant to curb examination malpractice and get students to focus on their studies.

In August, the Internet was again shut down as anti-government protests continued to mount.

The October action, however, is the most widespread and longest since 2005 following a violent post-election period.

Photographs circulating the last few days on Twitter and Facebook show Ethiopians in Addis Ababa gathered at “hot spots” where there is a strong enough mobile phone signal to enable them get to some parts of the internet.

The only way to access the internet in Ethiopia is through the state monopoly Ethio Telecom. (Photo/Francisco Angola/Flickr).

The only way to access the internet in Ethiopia is through the government-owned provider, Ethio Telecom, which has a monopoly over the telecom industry.

In a lengthy February article on the “tragedy of Ethiopia’s Internet”, the online technology magazine and video channel Motherboard (quoted at length here), examined how state control and the use of the internet as a tool for repression had hobbled the growth of the country’s digital economy. 

Neighbour Kenya’s burgeoning tech scene Kenya, which has an internet penetration rate of 69.6%, has garnered the name “Silicon Savannah.” But in Ethiopia, the monopoly on internet access has created one of the most disconnected countries in the world.

Only 3.7% of Ethiopians have access to the internet, according to the latest data, one of the lowest penetration rates in the world. By comparison, conflict-ravaged South Sudan, which lacks most basic government services, has an internet penetration rate of 15.9%.

‘TECH’ REFUGEES

There are only ten countries with lower internet penetration than Ethiopia. Most of them, such as Somalia and North Korea, are hampered by decades-long civil wars or largely sealed off from outside world.

“As one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, with one of the most storied cultures in the world”, Motherboard notes, “Ethiopia’s lack of internet access is astounding. It’s also troubling.”

Signs are that some organisations and companies in Addis Ababa, for whom access to the internet is critical for their work and business, are sending some staff to Kenya there they can get online access, in the interim.

It has not been possible to establish how widespread this response is, but an individual who spoke to Africapedia and Rogue Chiefs on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said there were quite a few “tech refugees” from Addis Ababa like him in Nairobi.

With Ethiopia already lagging behind many countries in Africa in the liberalisation of the telecommucations, it is likely that countries like Kenya could profit from the state of emergency in the Horn of Africa nation, despite its coveted population of 90 million, if its squeeze on the internet continues, and investors lose patience and put their money in already more open and innovative African technology markets instead.

Ethiopian police from the Bubua police station arrested Illret Police Station OCS Chief Inspector Christopher Nalianya and five other officers from Marsabit on October 23, police say.

The station commander was accompanied by Constable Samson Kato, who was driving a police truck, Constable Patrick Juma, Constable Samson Njenga, National Police Reservist (Inspector) Lomide Achala, and the Illret Ward administrator, Mr Koriye.

Marsabit County police commander Ben Kogo, who confirmed on October 26, 2016 that Illret Police Station commander Chief Inspector Christopher Nalianya and five other officers are being held in Ethiopia. PHOTO | KEN BETT | NATION MEDIA GROUP

They were all armed but were placed in custody after their firearms were confiscated. The vehicle, a Toyota Land Cruiser (GK B414E), is also detained there.

The Kenyan authorities said that efforts to release them were under way through a liaison officer in Moyale and that they were in contact with the local administrator at Jinga Omarate district, where the officers are being held.

Marsabit County police commander Ben Kogo has confirmed the officers were arrested.

But he said officials were yet to be told why the officers were arrested.

“They had gone to Ethiopia to secure the release of a reservist when they were arrested. We are yet to establish why they were arrested but were trying to negotiate with Ethiopia authorities for them to be released,” he told the Nation by phone.

Several incidents have been reported this year involving security agencies from both countries.

On October 16, Kenya Defence Forces soldiers from the Oda Camp were deployed to Sololo after the Ethiopian army raided a village in Marsabit.

About 100 Ethiopian soldiers entered Kenya and surrounded Golole Village, about 9km west of the Sololo Police Station.

The soldiers claimed they were pursuing Oromo Liberation Front militants suspected to have killed police officers in Ethiopia.

In the process, a herder was killed by the Ethiopian soldiers.

French police look on during the evacuation of the Calais Jungle AFP

UK (Evening Standard) — A young woman was gang raped during the destruction of the Calais Jungle, French prosecutors said today.

The attack took place on Tuesday morning when five men set upon the Ethiopian refuge.

It came as prosecutors said three suspects involved in the knifepoint rape of another woman around the squalid shantytown last week could have been people smugglers.

They may now have escaped to Paris, along with hundreds of others displaced by the destruction of the Jungle, which at one point had up to 10,000 residents.

It became notorious for a range of crimes during the past few years, including rapes and other sexual assaults.

‘The latest rapes are both being investigated as a matter of priority,’ said a source close to both investigations, which are being led by prosecutors in nearby Boulogne-sur-Mer supported by judicial police.

‘In both cases those responsible are likely to be a long way from Calais by now, but everything is being done to try and find them.’

Discussing the October 18 rape of the interpreter, who is married and lives with her husband and two children in Paris, the source said: “She has produced a description of the three men who attacked her, but it is unreliable so will not be released as a portrait.

“The men wore hoods, and there is very little chance of finding them in Calais now. It is thought that many of the traffickers have headed for Paris in the short term.”

The woman who was raped on Tuesday this week was examined by a forensic doctor but had difficulty communicating because she only speaks an Ethiopian dialect.

She is currently still staying in Calais until a translator can be found, said the source.

Massive fires were lit across the Jungle on Wednesday, hastening the end of the camp, as more than 4000 migrants were bused to centres all over France.

Today a few hundred stragglers were left in the still smouldering wreckage, as riot police wearing full body armour patrolled.

There have been migrant camps in the Calais area for at least 20 years, as thousands of residents used them as a springboard to reach the UK, where they claimed asylum or disappeared into the black economy.

But the French authorities have pledged that no more camps will be allowed, and that they will maintain a zero tolerance approach to those trying to get to Britain illegally.

Dika Godana G^*, Department of soil resource and watershed management, Gambella University, Ethiopia

Source: Arts and Social Sciences Journal
also in PDF

Introduction

Background and justification

Complex pastoral management systems have evolved from the pastoralists’ successful adaptation under the harsh conditions of arid and semi-arid rangelands [1]. Similarly Blench [2] noted that, the existing pastoral systems including their local adaptations are highly diverse, although they share common development trends. Pastoral resource management systems are influenced by natural environments with high variability in rainfall and recurrent extreme climatic conditions, associated with spatial heterogeneity. Again, the pastoralists’ knowledge and strategies in rangeland and water management are disturbed by inappropriate development policies, and this leads to environmental degradation and the erosion of important social structures.

Pastoralists in Ethiopia like the other African countries have continuously suffered from a long history of political, economic, and socio-cultural marginalization. The pastoralist’s problems have been exacerbated by recurrent and complex natural calamities such as drought, flood, disease etc. [3]. The environment is the basic determinant of the nature and productivity of rangeland ecosystems of pastoralists. Physical environmental factors, like climate, topography and soil determine the potential of rangeland to support certain types and levels of land use [4].

Since the 1990s, pastoral development approaches in eastern Africa have improved, due partly to increased support for livestock mobility, customary institutions, and pastoral livestock strategies, and partly to a greater emphasis on human development and rights based approaches. The building blocks for pastoral development, notably empowerment and governance, are now better understood and addressed, but there remains a major gap in understanding, at a practical level, of how pastoralists manage their natural resource base. Development projects have enabled pastoral communities to strengthen their tenure over rangeland resources, and to restore traditional management practices, but projects often lack the capacity to help pastoralists to benefit from scientific advances in rangeland management [5,6].

Rangeland monitoring is the process of periodically assessing the condition of the natural resources, mainly vegetation, water, and soil. During the monitoring process positive and/or negative change in the pasture composition and consequently general land condition can be assessed. This information can assist in making proper land management decisions to ensure sustainable land use. Rangeland can be monitored both in traditional and modern ways. The traditional method of rangeland monitoring and evaluation follows changes in indicators of environmental health, enabling herders to adjust their forage management and conservation strategies to the long and short term availabilities of resources [4].

Indigenous or local knowledge can be defined as skills, practices and technologies that are an integral part of the production system in a specific culture. They are area-specific skills and practices concerning natural resource management, human and animal health, etc. developed by indigenous people over centuries. Therefore, it is important to take advantage of indigenous institutions, environmental knowledge and traditional management practices [7].

Borana rangelands are one of the southern Ethiopia’s lowland grazing units in which pastoralists have been keeping their livestock for living. Cattle, goats, sheep, and camels are the dominant domesticated animals in these rangelands. According to Cossins and Upton [8], the Borana pastoral production in southern Ethiopia was considered until the early 1980s as one of the few remaining productive pastoral systems in East Africa.

Since then, there is evidence that the system is experiencing decline in productivity, associated with periodic losses in cattle populations; changes in land use; and fire ban that have resulted in the proliferation of bush encroachment and a general decline in forage production.

The present crisis might be the result of the combined effects of climatic variability and increases in bush cover that may increase the risk of drought-induced herd die-offs [9].

Traditionally, the vagaries of the natural environment can be overcome through access to and management of communal rangelands, mobility of stock, and institutions for mutual assistance. However, drought induced livestock mortality is often seen as a symptom of inherent flaws in livestock production systems; barren rangelands are taken as evidence of unsustainable grazing pressure and increasing land degradation [10].

Therefore, the rationale for this study was to identify major factors that hamper the potential of rangeland productivity and to assess the role of indigenous knowledge in rangeland management.

The Study Area and Methods

The study area

The Borana Rangeland is found in Oromia National Regional State, southern Ethiopia. It lies between 4o0’-5o30’ N latitude and 37o30’-39o20’ E longitude. It covers about 95,000 km² which is estimated to be 7.6% of the national area. Yabello Woreda is found in this category covering about 5556 km² (Figure 1)

Figure 1: Map of study area.

Woreda is located between latitude 4o30’55.81” and 5o24’36.39”N and longitude 37o44’14.70” and 38o36’05.35”E [11] (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Map of specific study sites.

The study area comes under the influence of a bi-modal monsoon rainfall type, where 60% of the 300-900 mm annual rainfall occurs during March to May (Ganna) and 40% between September and November (Hagaya) [12].

Adisu [13] also cited that, the rainfall of the area is distinctly bimodal pattern (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Annual Rainfall of Yabello Woreda.

Research design and methods

For this study partially mixed concurrent dominant status qualitative decision research design were applied.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods of data analysis were considered. Qualitative data were analyzed by discussion of the ideas, opinion, and concepts of collected data. Quantitative data were analyzed by using of SPSS software and Microsoft Excel program to present the result in form of graphs, tables and percentages.

Results

Indigenous knowledge of borana pastoralists in rangeland management

Borana pastoralists’ indigenous knowledge (IK) about range ecology, livestock resources and social organization has developed highly efficient range management strategies to deal with the high-risk environments of arid lands. Indigenous knowledge is a culture-based knowledge that is specific to certain group of peoples.

Even though some study says the utilization of indigenous rangeland management has declining, the practice is not totally lost. According to the responses of many of the respondents from study area, some of the practices of indigenous knowledge of pastoralists are discussed below (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Map of indigenous land use patterns in Borana rangelands, southern Ethiopia.

Herd mobility

Herd mobility was traditionally practiced by the pastoralists as the key strategy to make use of the scattered rangeland resources on a large spatial scale. According to the ideas of most of the respondents from study area, they have been practicing the mobility of herds. Herd movements have been reduced considerably over time. Many years ago, Borana rangeland management was organized at a large scale of the landscape. Many of the respondents confirmed that, at present day movement by home is minimized because of pastoralist permanent settlement and mobility is by stock.

Some of the pastoralists (44%) from study area leave their previous location and move to the other reera (Figure 5). The prime reason for this movement was the decision made by Raba gadaa to arrange settlement and leave the settlement encroached into grazing area for grazing. The rangeland of Dharito and Dambala Saden was fragmented and taken by settlement and farmland. It is to leave the land for livestock/grazing. In Harweyu, bushes take the area of rangeland and some of the villages are settled in the area of grazing. Unlike that of Dharito pastoralist, some of the mobile pastoralists to Dambala Saden and Harweyu leave their previous location for grazing. This movement of pastoralist by home in study area is not by willing of them. It is because of the decision made by Raba gadaa. However now pastoralists not move by home but they send their livestock to other ardaa where there they believe forages are available. Before sending livestock to the other ardaa they send abuuru scout to that ardaa to observe the availability of forages and water sources of that ardaa and assure permission from abbaa dheeda (headman of seasonal grazing) of that ardaa. During the time in which drought is hard pastoralists from study area send their livestock to Dirree grazing zone.

Figure 5: Graph showing responses of pastoralists on how long they have been leaving in their current places.

As the displacement of villages was not by their will they also choose their present location as per the decision of kebele leaders. The head of each ardaa identify the villages settled in the prime grazing area and identities the villages to be arranged with community. The decision of Raba gadaa was putted to action by kebele leader and head of each reera.

As it can be observed from the (Figure 5) some of the respondents stayed at their current location for less than one year (10%), others for one to five years (44%), about (8%) have been at their current location for 6 to 10 years and only (38%) of has lived for more than 10 years. Those who have stayed for one to five years are moved as a result of decisions made by raaba gadaa.

Many of the pastoralists (93%) have no plan to leave their present location. For instance, respondents from Dharito, if they are asked, whether they have planned to leave their current location, many of them responded they have no plan. Dharito is one of the kebeles of woreda that has been shifting from pastoralists to agro-pastoralism. Due to agro pastoralism nature of the area they cannot leave their farm land. The prime reason for them not to move is farm land and even during drought they move their livestock.

The mobility of pastoralists from Dambala Saden and Harweyu depends on the condition of rain and forage available for livestock. Dambala Saden is one of the kebeles of woreda that has been said remaining forage species are available and Harweyu is also one of the ardaa which is pastoralist, except a few introduction of farmland. Due to pastoralism nature of pastoralists they stay during the season on which forage is available for livestock at their area and otherwise they move. They move not by the home but by livestock.

The prime reason for the movement is that productivity of livestock depends on the availability of forage species which in turn depends on the rainfall availability.

The result of analytical discussion with elders and herders showed that, the most important fodder species that livestock graze during dry seasons are different grass species and leaf of different trees.

The result of (Table 1) shows those, grass species like Cenchrus ciliaris, Heteropogon contortus, Dactyloctnium species, Chrysopgon aucheruand others are highly desirable for livestocks to graze. Their life forms are perennial. The frequencies of Dychoriste hildebrandtii (11.6) is high followed by Cenchrus ciliaris and Heteropogon contortus with frequency 8.9 and 8.5 respectively. The growth form, desirability, life form and frequencies of other species can be observed from the table.

strong>Table 1: Desirability, growth form, life form and frequency (%) of the different grass and non-grass species in the study area.

According to the herder at foora livestock, of Gombo mountain during the period of hard drought when root of grass are lost, livestock graze leafy trees like Ejersa (Oea europaea subsp. cuspidata), Biiqqaa (Pappea capensis), Dhamee (Sschrebera alata), Dhitacha (Dodonea angustifolia), Gaallee (Psydrax schimperiana), Daboobesa (Rhus species), Qalqalcha (Boscia mossambicensis), Mi’eessaa (Euclea divinorum), harooressa (Grewia bicolor) and etc.

Water is a crucial resource in the lowlands of Borana. Pastoralists depend on water for household consumption and for the watering of their livestock. The mobility of livestock even depends on the availability of water for livestock. The main source of water for the pastoralist from Dharito during dry season is Dharito wells. Dharito has three wells i.e., Dambicha well, Digalticha well and Hawaticha well.

The well manager (abba herregaa) establishes watering rights for well users by fixing water rota. During rainy season livestock and people get water from nearby small ponds. Again for Dambala Saden the main source of water for livestock during dry season are Labuu wells, Digaluu and Bulee ponds. Small ponds around villages, Doloollo and haya guraacha are the main source of water during rainy season for Dambala Saden.

In Harweyu hargaasaa water pump and Yaatu well are the main water source for livestock during dry season. However, during rainy season livestock get water from Dozori, Muyatte, Madhera hidda and Didibisa ponds.

Customary institutions for rangeland management

The result of analytical discussion with elders and survey (97%) in study area indicates that Borana has a unique system (customary institution) of managing natural resources in general and rangeland and water resources in particular. Indigenous institutions includes local cultural form of organizations, for instance locally elected, appointed, or hereditary leaders and elders, customary rules and regulations relating to access to resources, indigenous practices and knowledge. The researcher has discussed the institution for rangeland management along with institution for management of water resources as they are inseparable.

Broadly speaking, the Borana customary institutions have been categorized into two forms: micro and macro institutions. Both could be further divided into many branches. Each of them has a responsibility for natural resource management and other societal issues at various levels. Management of any resource has to start at the lower level in accordance of Borana law. According to analytical discussions with elders micro level institutions for the management of rangeland are Warra, Ollaa, Ardaa, Reera, Madda and Dheeda. Again appointed and elected individuals in the community like Jaarsa dheeda, abbaa herregaa and Jaarsa madda have their own roles and rules of managing natural resources in general and range and water resources in particular.

Warra

Warra is a smallest unit in the village that includes family of one household (the father, mother and unmarried children). The unmarried son and daughter get their own ibida/warra after they have married with their couples. The roles of warra in rangeland management start from the advice of parents to their children who look after livestocks. They told to their herders not to be out of customary law of Borana. There are area reserved and not to be allowed for grazing during rainy season. For instance, kaloo (enclosure) is not grazed during early rain to allow the growth of grasses.

Livestock and calves graze open grazing areas this time. Herders or member of warra take care of resources on their side and even reports their father when he/she sees others are exploiting the resource. Then abbaa warra pass wrong doer to the concerned body or village heads.

Ollaa (Village)

The ollaa (village) is the collection of different warra. The coming together of many households forms ollaa. Abbaa ollaa (head of village) is the most popular man among his villagers in terms of his ability to organize, analyze and manage things according to aadaa Borana (Borana custom). One or more villages have kaloo in common. From the villages which has kaloo together pastoralists elect one person to take care of enclosure.

Ardaa

Ardaa is a particular site that is inhabited by a village or cluster of villages. Ardaa is a small grazing territory where its residents can commonly share water, pasture and other resources within the context of aadaa seera marraa-bishaan Boranaa (Borana customary-laws of pasture and water). Elders from a village or villages usually hold residential meetings on how to manage and share resources in their territory.

Reera

Reera is the cluster of villages which are found in a specified site, or two or more close sites inhabited by people who can use water from the same sources and their herds can use on the same grazing grounds. Abbaa Reeraa (head of cluster) is a famous man or who has ability of managing rangeland and water resource of reera area. He represents the members of his fellow cluster at the next larger territorial unit, madda. People in the same cluster have also regular meetings to consolidate the natural resource management systems in their unit.

Madda

It is a wider territorial unit than reera; its concept is derived from a permanent water source. It is made up of combination of clusters, which often surround the water well at its center. A madda is administered by the council of elders drawn from different clusters of that madda. In other words, they are heads of all clusters surrounding a permanent water source. They usually meet at water point to discuss how to manage and share water and pasture among residents in their unit, or with other new comers who come from other madda in search of better resources.

Dheeda

This is wider unit than madda. In most cases it includes in it several madda’s that are managed independently by council of elders drawn from different madda’s. The word dheeda literally means grazing. So, the word is sometime taken as grazing land limited to specific unit. The Borana land has two major grazing zones Liban and Dirree. Liban grazing zone (dheeda) further divided into two Golbaa and Gubbaa while Dirree is blends goomolee, Malbee, Golboo, Dirree (Tula wells grazing zone) and Wayaama grazing zone. Jaarsa dheeda are responsible for decisions about mobility; addressing social disputes and have an important role in conflict resolution.

When we come to the management of water resources of Borana in general and that of study area in particular, the most important water resource that are highly regulated by customary institutions are wells, hand-dug shallow ponds known as haroo. However generally in Borana deep tula wells and natural ponds containing water throughout the year are managed through customary laws. The grazing lands surrounding well are protected (laafa seera eela) during the wet season and used during the dry season.

According to discussion with elders, property right of wells to goes the konfi who initiates digging ceremony of wells. Konfi is abba eela (father of well) and he pass ownership title to his clan after retired. The management of wells belongs to all members of clan and Borana in general. Konfi assigns well manager (abbaa herregaa). The well manager (abbaa herregaa) establishes watering rights for well users by fixing water rota. The other small management may goes to abba guyyaa (father of the day) who regulates the daily function of the well. Abbaa guyyaa can be from any of Borana clan. He is appointed only for the day on which his livestock was watered from the well. He is the coordinator of the day and supervises the activity of the other groups like obaatu (those who lift water from the well) for livestock. Their responsibilities are lifting water for livestock from well and cleaning and collecting animal dung from daargulaa (well zone).

Herd splitting

Herd splitting is one of the pastoralist’s indigenous rangeland management knowledge. It is the practice of dividing the livestock into separate herds depending on their age, sex and productivity. Almost most of the respondents (96%) from the study area, responded that they spit their herd into different divisions. Pastoralist divides their herds on the bases of their ages. The reason why pastoralists divide their livestock is that small calves and large livestock cannot graze together. Herd diversity and splitting are techniques that can be used to maintain the long term productivity of the range, and in some cases to improve degraded rangelands.

The result of analytical discussion with pastoralist from study area indicated that, pastoralists divided livestock as waatiyyee, yabbiyyee, haawichaa, and loon foora (mobile herds). Calves of both sexes younger than 5 months (waatiyyee) were kept on open grazing around the encampment and were supplemented with forage cut and carried to them. Yabiyyee also graze open grazing around villages and enclosure. Cows providing milk for the households (loon haawichaa), and animals younger than three years was sent to the grazing heads. However mobile herds (loon foora) were sent to other ardaa during drought. Herd splitting allows easy management of rangelands. Livestock are grazed by their ages. When asked why not they mix all age categories of livestock, they reply that waatiyyee and loon haawichaa cannot graze together. During both season of grazing waatiyyee and yabiyyee graze around the villages and loon haawichaa (milk herds) was send to grazing head.

Traditional enclosure: Reserved grazing areas

During analytical discussion with pastoralist, all of them repeatedly raised that, the use of traditional range enclosures locally known as kaloo is widely practiced in their area for dry season grazing. Traditional range enclosures can be used as a method of rangeland restoration where rangelands are often heavily grazed to allow the herbaceous vegetation diversity to recover. Each of the study sites has their own kaloo. One site has about two to four and above reera and each reera has their own kaloo. The prime purpose for the kaloo to be designated is in order to reserve grasses for dry season grazing. Most of the time kaloo is designated for waatiyyee and yabbiyyee. However according to views of some of the elders from the study sites, beside the divisions to which the enclosure is designated for enclosure is allowed to dullacha laafaa (weak cows), qottiyyo (oxen) and livestock to be sold. This is during drought season to improve the weight of livestock.

The management of kaloo (enclosure) in the study area is by Jaarsa dheeda (elder of grazing) of that reera. It was managed according the customary institution. Each member of the village and reera has the responsibility for the management of the enclosure. If there is the misuse of enclosure the issues has first to be resolved at the village level by elders of the villages. If the issue has to be focused in-depth, Jaarsa dheeda has to make decision.

Migration of ollas and demarcation of settlement and grazing areas

As many of the pastoralists (83%) from the study area indicates, demarcation of settlement and grazing area are the recent phenomena. It was started in the Borana in general and study area in particular in 2011 by raaba gadaa. It was before some three years. This is not the indigenous knowledge that has been practicing in the past. Borana pastoralist further explained that, Borana leader at the raaba gadaa has talked on the issues of rangelands and they have reached on the decision that, the area of rangeland has been taken by expansion of cultivated land and settlement. They have reached on the decision that the area of rangeland taken by settlement and expansion of cultivated land has to be leaved for livestock for grazing.

As it was pointed out by the respondents of this study, the prime objectives of this decision were to demarcate grazing area and settlement area and to have a good grazing area by leaving out some of the farmland in strategic grazing area and migrating village settled in strategic grazing area.

Some of the pastoralists were dissatisfied with this arrangement of grazing and settlement area. They were migrated in season of bona hagaya (long dry season) which is followed by prolonged period of hot and dry season and made migration difficult to them. However, it is not totally out of benefits. They responded that, even if migration is in the long dry season (bona hagaya), during the rainy season, the area that is previously under settlement and cultivation was used for grazing.

Major constraints to Ik-based rangeland management

The outcome from the focus group discussions with most of pastoralists of the study area and result of survey (68%) indicates that, this interesting system of rangeland management (IK) has been facing a serious threat from many sides. From time to time the smooth functioning of Ik on the rangeland management has been weakening. On the views of discussions with the elders and herders, the constrains to IK-based rangeland management was from external interventions like intervention of state (kebele administration) in the power of elders, inappropriate development concepts like construction of permanent water ponds, and lack of pastoral oriented extension and ban of burning of rangeland.

On the occasion of discussion and interviews with pastoralists, they strongly asserted that, the power of elders, Jaarsa dheeda (elders of grazing) and Jaarsa madda (elders of watering) has been declining. This is again further confirmed by (73%) of survey result, which indicates as power of decision on rangeland management in not in the hands of the elders. The main reason for the declining of the power of decision making of the elder is the intervention of kebele leaders and leader of each reera in the management of rangeland. Throughout the encampments in the study areas, younger community members and abbootii reera (father of each reera), in experienced in rangeland management, were appointed and given the powers of decision making at the local level. The power they were given was the power of elders. They concentrated on public security and political control, but gave little consideration to the rangelands. The elders were excluded from decision making as if their management system is backward and hence no longer able to apply their knowledge. In all of the study sites when there is miss-management of range and water resources, reera and kebele administrations makes the decisions. This has made the networks between elders to be weakened.

As raised by many of the respondents from study area, inappropriate development concepts for instance, the construction of permanent water ponds in former rainy season grazing areas in Dambala Saden started in the early 1970s or in beginning of gadaa Gobba Bule has severely disturbed pastoralists’ herd mobilityand thereby reduced the variability in stocking densities. The assumptions for water developments were that the lowlands of Borana lacked surface water in general. The main water sources of study area are small hand-dug ponds and some deep and shallow wells in which livestock degrade rangeland surrounding the areas of the well. The aim of water development program was to reduce pressure on the dry season rangelands by creating watering points in the wet season rangelands.

The Ethiopian land use policy has favored sedentarization. The kebele administrations and extension services promoted crop cultivation as a means to settle the pastoralists on the permanent settlement. However pastoralist of the study area asserted that, dramatic expansion of cultivated land into the study area and increase of number of villages because of population increase is the main problem of rangeland management. Many of the respondents stated the reason of decline in mobility is expansion of farmland and that pastoralist can’t move by leaving their farmland. In this development concept there is ignorance of pastoral livestock production and the lack of capacity to support pastoral rangeland management. Even though crop cultivation is base for the economy of our country, the extension messages were not appropriate to the needs of the pastoralists.

The issues of the proclamation to ban the burning of highland forests have equally applied to the pastoral rangeland. The ban to the controlled burning was introduced during Gadaa of Gobba Bule. According to the results of interviews with pastoralist, before banning of burning they control the expansion of the bushes by burning. Rangelands are burned during dry season when grasses are dried well. This can kill the species of bushes and allows for the new growth of palatable grasses. Borana pastoralist informed, after the application of this proclamation, their indigenous system of burning has weakened and even failed and since then bushes has taken rangelands at large.

Conclusion

The study showed the role of pastoralist’s indigenous knowledge in managing rangeland and major constraints to IK-based rangeland management.

There is a unique knowledge of rangeland management. In the past the strength of pastoralist IK is very good. The evidence presented in this study showed that mobility of herd, customary institutions, herd splitting and management of traditional enclosure are the main IK in rangeland management. At present day movement by home is minimized because of pastoralist permanent settlement and mobility is by stock. This is because of inappropriate development policy and expansion of crop cultivation. Customary institution of natural resource and rangeland management is not functioning well. However, the dependence on customary institution manages rangeland better. The use of traditional enclosure enables pastoralist reserve the forage for the time of difficulty. Herd splitting into different categories and diversification were identified as a means in which pastoralists adopt to degrading environment and uses the declining rangeland resources sustainably. Indigenous knowledge is the most important system of rangeland management in Borana. The smooth functioning of IKbased rangeland management was disturbed. The severe disturbances to indigenous knowledge based rangeland management are from external intervention like inappropriate extension services and development polices. Power of elders, Jaarsa dheeda (elders of grazing) and Jaarsa madda (elders of watering) was intervened by kebele leaders. An extension service and inappropriate development message that does not go with pastoral community has considerable impacts on the well function of IK. Again the policy that has banned the burning for rangeland is against the traditional knowledge of Borana pastoralist in rangeland management.

Recommendations

The productivity of rangeland in the study area is declining. This is because of many interrelated factors like bush encroachment, rangeland degradation, overgrazing, recurrent drought, erratic rainfall and expansion of crop cultivation. This has also considerable impacts on the livelihoods of pastoralist and rangeland productivity. The unique knowledge of community in rangeland management is also not functioning well. Therefore, the following recommendations are made for the future interventions by the researcher.

The problems affecting the productivity of rangeland should explicitly be regarded as community and societal problems and not simply the only concern of pastoralist. This mean it should be the concern of all stakeholders: government, private sectors, any local and international NGOs, pastoralists, public and etc.

The future development direction in Borana lowland should support indigenous knowledge of pastoralist in natural resource management in general and rangeland management in particular.

NGOs, Woreda and Zonal Pastoral Development Offices should stand beside pastoralist in supporting and integrating indigenous and technical knowledge for sustainable management of rangeland.

Management of traditional enclosure, mobility and herd splitting should be inextricably linked and managed in accordance to customary institution of pastoralist.

Rangeland development and extension services of the government should be built on pastoral indigenous rangelands knowledge.

Local and regional monitoring of rangelands problems should use local knowledge to focus the problem in detail.

Any rangeland development policy and programs should take into account IK of pastoralist and policies aimed to improve livelihoods of pastoralist should consider the structure of pastoralists.

References

1. Kirk M (1999) The Context for Livestock and Crop-Livestock Development in Africa: The Evolving Role of the State in Influencing Property Rights Over Grazing Resources in Sub Saharan Africa. In: McCarthy N, Swallow B, Kirk M (eds.), Property Rights, Risk and Livestock Development in Africa. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC, USA.
2. Blench R (2001) You Can’t Go Home Again:Pastoralism in the New Millennium. Overseas Development Institute (ODI), London, UK.
3. Pastoralists Forum Ethiopia (PFE) (2002) Proposed Pastoral Development Policy Recommendations. Addis Ababa.
4. Desta H (2009b) Rangeland Resource Monitoring and Vegetation Conditions Scoring: Technical bulletin no.26. ESGPIP, Ethiopia’s Sheep and Goat Productivity Improvement Program, Ethiopia.
5. Food and Agricultural Oganization of the United Nations (2011b) Indigenous Rangelands Monitoring: Harnessing Pastoralist Knowledge in the Horn of Africa.
6. Food and Agricultural Oganization of the United Nations (2011a) Rangeland and Climate Change: Mitigation, Adaptation and Co-benefits.
7. Desta H (2009a) Management for Proper Range use: Technical Bulletin no.25. ESGPIP, Ethiopia’s Sheep and Goat Productivity Improvement Program, Ethiopia.
8. Cossins NJ, Upton M (1987) The Borana Systems of Southern Ethiopia. Agricultural Systems 25: 199-218.
9. Angasa A (2007) The Dynamics of Savanna Ecosystems and Management in Borana, Southern Ethiopia. Noragric university of life science(UMB), Noragric.
10. Tache B (2008) Pastoralism Under Stress: Resources, Institutions and Poverty Among the Borana Oromo in Southern Ethiopia. Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Norway.
11. Dessalengn G (2009) Remote Sensing and GIS Based Suitability Analysis for Livestock Production in Yabello District, Southern Ethiopia. Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa.
12. Zemenu M (2009) Bush Encroachment Mapping Using Supervised Classification and Spectral Mixture Analysis in Borana Rangelands: A Case Study in YabelloWoreda. Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa.
13. Addisu A (2009) Bush Encroachment and its Impacts on Plant Biodiversity in the Borana Rangeland. Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa.

Falmataa Sabaa (PhD)

Nowadays, it is not uncommon to hear a call for unity for struggle especially between Oromo and Amhara nations. United force sounds well not only to overthrow the TPLF led tyranny Ethiopian government but also to build envisage democratic Ethiopia in which all could co-exist. Catching phrases of unity are embedded, for instance, in Gonderian’s need to rescue Oromo by saying shedding Oromo blood is also theirs. The enlightened effort of Gonder people seemed to move forward to sending delegates who aimed to take part of Irreecha festival Har-sadi Lake of Bishooftuu. According to ESAT news, one of the delegates even became victim as part of the Oromo massacre in in Irreecha at lake Har-sadi. From such honorable effort, I learn lot about people to people sympathy and bond of unity for co-existence. On the other hand, I feel chanting such once in a blue moon slogan alone may not suffice the intended achievement.

Nevertheless, it appears that political elites are that often assume leadership to ensue tactic and strategy to achieve intended goal of the peoples, forming united liberation force in this case. In view of setting road map, however, what does the track record of Ethiopian elites tells us? In the face of explaining this, I bring two categories of elites on board and proceed to explain my thought. Obviously, setting goal necessitates remembering the past discourse, reality of undercurrents around us and necessitates precise model to predict the future phenomena. I want to emphasis on two nutshell elements as main operators in this regard. These are history of Ethiopia in the discourse of forming nation state and population size of some nations. Hence, I ask if our elites are keen to understand reality and critical to analyze available resources? If not, where will we land driven by unrealistic calculative claim for benefit over right, cheap propaganda, miserable justification of facts on the ground and trickery politics?

I couldn’t agree more on the general approach to thus far specific tactic and strategy by Oromo elites toward struggling for freedom and equality of their fellow Oromos. I have no doubt that having the right road map with properly arrayed elements assures destination at the desired ultimatum. Obviously, hindrances on the road, though predictable, might be uneasy to skip them simply. Therefore, adjustment on the part of the tactic requires being noteworthy to commensurate imperatives of unity with need to bypass blockage. Nevertheless, when the strategy demands to act on the other side of the coin, Oromo do have justifiable cause, substantial population size and unified homeland as resource to propel its struggle for freedom and equality. As these elements of success work synergistic, further internal victory will be indispensable with likely momentum on geopolitical arena of Oromia. Hence, smartness to get the benefits of the doubt is requirement as part to express of Oromo elites’ excellence.

As for me, Amhara elites need to further critically analyze the elements of setting tactic and strategy I considered. Related to population size, Wikipedia reports 19.9 % Amhara (and 34.4% Oromo) as per census of 2007. Apart from some policy level re-calculations which probably tends to minimize the census size of both populations, there might be four logical issues as a cause to expect even lesser population of Amhara nation. Firstly, for a number reasons related to the process of Ethiopian formation many citizens were often tending to be known as Amhara whatsoever blood they may have. This is regardless of where they may leave: in Oromia or not, in town or countryside. Needless to say that a person whose one of the parent is Oromo (or other nation/nationality) and the other parent is Amhara used to be automatically considered Amhara (Amharic speaker) and were numbered to Amhara. In the current trend, however, we are witnessing an eventual change to the otherwise. The overall implication of recently publishing appeals to mixed blood Ethiopians from Amhara ideology promoters seem to agree with my argument. If this would be the future possible outcome, the pretension that Amhara is populous might require re-assessment.

Secondly, some individuals who were effectively humiliated by the process of state formation tended to deny self and opted to be counted as Amhara in forgone census. This include individuals in the domain of Oromo origin or others of non-Amhara basis. In spite of such past, individuals who sought opportunity by being pseudo-Amhara would recognize the crisis of benefit at the expense of true identity leading to further reduction on the perceived Amhara population size. Here I want to reiterate by stating practical evidence of surprise. Sometime in 2007, we (I and my colleagues as non-Oromo) did open dialogue about Ethiopian population size and language issues. One of those Doctor friends is currently in USA as researcher and is frequent guest interviewee of ESAT on law related issues. I said there are many non-Oromo residents (even born) in Oromia and yet they don’t want to officially speak Afaan Oromo. My friend instinctively responded saying that his mother speaks Afaan Oromo to him at home. Note that his immigrant mother speaks Afaan Oromo but he, who was born in Oromia, can’t speak Afaan Oromo. And the family (including the native father) identify themselves as non-Oromo, he added. Think of effects of such move on census and its consequence of assuming Amhara as second populous following Oromo. Further, the circulating news of missed two million Amhara would also downgrade the above percentage.

Thirdly, the issue of rising other than Amhara nationalities in Amhara region and its bearing on the size of current Amhara population worth close investigation. Apart from non-Amhara individuals leaving elsewhere in Amhara region and yet shy to express themselves as non-Amhara for the purpose of census, the impact of localities popping for self-identification as non-Amhara would be huge. Northern Agaw, Eastern Agaw, Wstern Agaw and Southern Agaw (Agaw Awi) are likely to strictly identify themselves and seem to use their inalienable right to declare they are only their self. Further rumors were available even from many corners of Gonder per se. I have heard a word of mouth from one senior OLF person about claim of some senior Gonderians during the transitional government of Ethiopia (TGE). According to the then top official of the OLF in the TGE, some elderly delegate of Gonderians visited him to seek rescue by OLF for they are Oromo at the verge of losing their identity. Let us pend that this people are soon counted as Oromo but immediate fact is that they may not anymore want to continue contributing and be counted as Amhara.

Fourthly, we are not sure of Gojam to continue identified as Amhara. I remember about one appeal letter circulated in Addis Ababa at the eve of the TGE. The voluminous appeal letter was headed to UN including key players of the then TGE: Mr. Zenawi of TPLF and Mr. Dilbo of the OLF. The whole issue in the appeal was about Gojam is not Amhara and had never been Amhara. The appeal letter stated that Gojam with its capital city named Felegehiwot was independent nation whose country was subjugated and the people were given stigmatized name buda, its identity camouflaged as Amhara. In fact there are sentimental reminders of the past on the ground to speculate truth of such claim. Among others, one is related to nomenclature of most places of current West Gojam (Yilmana Densa, Mecha, Jarso, Biyyo, Wemberma, etc) and East Gojam (Baso Liben, Goncha, etc) of Amhara region give clue for they were once inhabited by Cushitic/Oromo people. Therefore, this leaves us with home take work to re-examine reality. However, what seem obvious is that present Gojam can only be for contingency plan to assume align with Amhara.

Therefore, confounded with traditional lore, deliberate rejection of historic truth in the course of building state and naïvely hoped capacity, elites of Amhara seem to work on imprecise predicting model of political cause and effect of struggle against tyranny. As time progress and we all would settled down to examine further historic reality and potential capability, no doubt that truth outweigh the lore based ignorance. Also it may worth notion to disseminate self-contradicting bare propaganda aimed to drag attention would eventually produce counter effect. I might have to remind you one currently hot but simple illustrative unclean propaganda contributing to the inaccuracy of their struggle model. Some Amhara elites when interviewed about the scenario of civil unrest in Ethiopia after overthrow of TPLF regime, they argue that it wouldn’t lead to civil strife. They deem it is necessary to get rid of TPLF relating regime’s operation to an internal colonization hoping to regain hegemony. When the scenario interview is under situation of the struggle led by Oromo against TPLF, they don’t want to read any word of colonization and they think of the scenario would become futile and thus cause civil unrest followed by endless battle. Both approaches seem to lack thorough understanding and shortsighted. The possibility of further massacre may not be ruled out if the struggle is not wisely and cooperatively managed. The urgency of call by the people to people demands elites’ due attention. It seems Oromo elites are scapegoat when it comes to issue of unified struggle

My purpose is no more than to solicit the elites of Amhara nation to join elites of Oromo on the ride of galloping horse to victory, though. Of course, unity demands critical self-definition in terms of the elements I considered to justify my present purpose. Unfortunately, elites of Amhara seem to tradeoff with no accurate transaction. It seem that they even want to re-orient their struggle primarily against Oromo instead of TPLF’s government. The re-orientation is not necessarily popping in connection to the current Oromo’s Charter deliberation but long ago. I read at least one article on Ethiomedia vividly proposing Amhara’s preference for collaboration with TPLF than Oromo camps. Planning based on an opportunistic resources to set the tactic and strategy would rather be costly. I submit that collaborative or united struggle of Oromo and Amhara nations against the tyranny TPLF led regime enables enhanced result. The idea of promoting unity based on fact on the ground is imperative. I intuitively state that realistic plan with some contingency is assurance for future co-existence reversing the evils of EPRDF to FDRE (FDR of Ethiopia). Therefore, I encourage fellow elites of Amhara not to trade off but to accurately re-assess their undercurrents and stay with unity of struggle for common benefit and right.

Thank you,

By Asafa Jalata, PhD

Abstract

The analysis starts by offering a critique of the existing social movement literature and by suggesting the integration of critical theories of knowledge with theories and wisdom of indigenous peoples in order to develop an alternative knowledge of critical thinking and scholarship in social movement studies. It also proposes ideas about the need to democratize knowledge for better accounting for social movement studies, including that of indigenous struggles, for the purposes of formulating approaches that are necessary for enhancing a greater understanding of social movement theories and actions on global level. In the current crisis of global capitalism and neoliberal globalization, there is an urgent need to develop new insights for advancing the prospects for global social transformation, which is articulated by the slogan of the World Social Forum, namely, another world is possible. The piece specifically develops possible ways of struggling against and replacing bourgeois internationalism by globalism from below through advancing the agenda of an egalitarian democracy.

Keywords

capitalism, neoliberalism, social movements, knowledge for liberation, indigenous movements, elite democracy, dictatorship, egalitarian democracy, globalization from below

Corresponding Author:

Asafa Jalata, The University of Tennessee, 901 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996, USA. Email: ajalata@utk.edu

Personal Reflexive Statement

In writing this article, I have been influenced by my life, political, and intellectual journey. I traveled from my birthplace, Oromia (Ethiopia), to Europe and the United States because the Ethiopian colonial government targeted me for imprisonment or elimination. My engagement in political activism when I was a college student to liberate the Oromo people from Ethiopian colonialism and global imperialism forced me to end up in exile and created for me the opportunity of pursuing a graduate study and becoming a professor in the United States. As an academic, my political activism and exile life have provided me new insights and opportunities for teaching and researching, among other areas, issues of social justice and democracy on global level.

In this age of globalization, neoliberal forces of multinational corporations, states, and interstate systems are engaging in ‘‘savage development’’ (Quan 2012) or ‘‘violent development’’ in peripheral countries (Rajagopal 1999, 2003, 2006). The main purpose of this kind of development is to accumulate more capital by dispossessing and privatizing communal or public properties for reducing the cost of production and for raising the rate of profit in order to overcome the structural crisis of global capitalism. Over all, ‘‘neoliberal globalizers’’ are attacking, dispossessing, and repressing the working classes, indigenous peoples, and other subaltern groups on global scale and causing human and ecological disasters. Progressive and humanist scholars and activists who deeply care for humanity are expressing their concerns about gross human rights violations and environmental degradation in the world, and trying to develop an alternative world system, which will be based on the principles of egalitarian democracy and social and material equality.

At the same time, social movements and all forces of social justice, equality, liberation, and egalitarian democracy are fragmented, decentralized, disconnected as well as theoretically disoriented, and lack a clear and practical guidance; they also lack sophisticated knowledge that can expose, discredit, and delegitimize the theories and actions of neoliberal globalizers and their organizations. I argue that the existing theories and knowledge are inadequate to help in mobilizing, reorganizing, and uniting all social movements on local, regional, and global levels by going beyond ethnoracial, geocultural or geopolitical, and gender–class barriers in order to empower ‘‘democratic globalizers’’ in general and progressive social movements in particular from below by envisioning a new world system that is beyond exploitation and injustice.

Broadly seen—as labor and women’s movements, national liberation struggles, and social/socialist revolutions as well as other social justice movements—social movements have been agencies of piecemeal social change or revolutionary transformation that have struggled against aspects of global capitalism and its political structures, institutions, forms of knowledge, and ideologies. The nationstates, intergovernmental organizations, dominant classes, powerful racial/ethnonational groups, multinational corporations, and patriarchal institutions have been producing false or biased knowledge and narratives to naturalize and justify all forms of inequalities and injustices. But various progressive social movements have struggled to expose and discredit them by producing alternative narratives, knowledge for liberation, and new worldviews. Consequently, there are two forms of contradictory processes of knowledge production, narratives, and modes of thought: One form is associated with a dominant narrative and knowledge for domination, exploitation, and maintaining status quo; and the other one is associated with a subaltern narrative and knowledge for liberation, social justice, and egalitarian democracy. However, because of their domination over political economy, institutional power, cultural, intellectual, and ideological resources, the nation-states, multinational corporations, the dominant groups, and elites have considerable influence over subaltern groups and other ordinary people. Despite the fact that various social movements have introduced some social reforms, they have failed to develop a necessary critical theory and knowledge for human liberation and an ideology that can overthrow the dominant worldview in order to produce a new politico-economic paradigm, one that facilitates the emergence of participatory and egalitarian democracy.

Most often, these movements have been gradually incorporated into the nation-state or captured state power and have become an integral part of the capitalist world system. As a result, social movements have been only successful in introducing limited changes and reforms that are unable to go beyond the parameters of global capitalism. Further, the failures of elite democracy and the socialist and national liberation projects in solving the problems of all forms social inequalities, massive poverty, and other forms injustice require global transformation from below in order to build a better world. The increasing crises of the capitalist world system—the possible depletion of the world’s valuable resources, global financial and ecological crises, growing social inequality, the intensification of terrorism from above and below, and the declining of material resources for ordinary people—indicate the possible paradigmatic shifts that are shaping the prospects for advancing new and system-transformative modes of thought, knowledge, and action.

Learning from the past limitations of various social movements, progressive forces and contemporary social movements need to develop an alternative knowledge and a critical ideology that can help in reimagining a new world order beyond domination and exploitation. First, this article critiques social movement literature and provides theoretical insights for the analysis. Second, it develops background information on the evolution of diverse social movements and their accomplishments and failures. Third, since the existing theories of social movements such as resource mobilization (RMT), political process (PPT), framing and social construction (FSCT), and new social movement (NSMT) are neither well integrated nor fully developed, this piece attempts to suggest how to overcome these challenges by explaining how critical academic inquiry and knowledge will be better conceived to analyze the work of social movements.

Fourth, the piece forwards the insights that emphasize the need to advance the democratization of knowledge. Such insights better account for indigenous movements and their knowledge that promote the horizontal forms of organizations and foster a greater understanding of world systemic divisions or geocultures in social movement theories. Fifth, by explaining the processes of exploitation and dehumanization, this article suggests possible ways of challenging and overcoming the theories and ideologies and practices of political absolutism or dictatorship, elite democracy, and the vertical organization of societies that maintain oppressive social systems and exploitation. Finally, the piece proposes how to envision a participatory and egalitarian democracy that can help in balancing the interests of individuals and societies in order to control or destroy the systems of repression, domination, and exploitation. It also explores how to replace vertical organizations or institutions by horizontal one by learning from certain democratic indigenous peoples and by imagining egalitarian societies based on the principles of egalitarian democracy and social and material equality.

Theoretical Insights on Social Movements

This work draws from an analytical framework that emerges from theories of social movements, the world system, and globalization. It combines a structural approach to global social change such as globalization, neoliberalism, and capital accumulation with a social constructionist model of human agency of social movements. Scholars and activists do not formulate theories in social vacuums. Social and political actions inform theories, and theories influence actions. These realities have facilitated conditions for the development of various social movement theories. As Aziz Choudry (2015:19-20) notes, ‘‘upsurges in social movement studies research itself can be attributed to periods of widespread social protest and mobilization. These include the multiple worldwide movements in the late 1960s and the emergence of global justice, climate justice, and antiausterity movements more recently.’’

But for collective behavior theorists, social movements are social problems (Choudry 2015:43). Classical scholars of collective behavior such as Neil J. Smelser (1962) and modernization theorists such as W. W. Rostow (1960) wrongly considered social movements as abnormal and irrational or deviant. These theorists believed that the collective behavior of social revolutions and movements is caused by factors such as social breakdown, strain, deprivation, discontent, cognitive dissonance, ambiguity, and psychological frustration. Such theorists blamed the victims for struggling for their own survival and emancipation. The theory of functionalism that claimed that a society was an integrated social system that would fulfill various functions, including maintaining consensus and equilibrium to manage social tensions and contradictions, became obsolete. Over all, the mainstream classical theoretical models have failed to explain how the politicized collective grievances, political consciousness, and organizational capabilities could lead to the development of social movements and collective actions.

Progressive movement scholars and activists started to use neo-Marxism and conflict theory as alternative theories to explain the relationship among political power, conflict, and domination. Learning from the struggles of the colonized and subjugated peoples and other subaltern groups and oppressed classes, progressive scholars started to develop theories of social movements in the 1960s. Prior to this decade, Orthodox Marxists mainly focused on the struggle between capital and labor and considered the working class as the savor of the world and ignored or minimized the revolutionary potential of other subaltern groups. In the 1960s, RMT of social movement emerged by challenging the classical model of collective behavior and by asserting that social movements are normal and rational actors (McCarthy and Zald 2001:553-56).

RMT as a theoretical paradigm shift challenged the collective behavior and functionalist theories, which promoted status quo in society, by developing a conflict theory as an alternative theory. The development of social movements, political protests, and cultural or political conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated how classes, ethno/racial groups, and other groups struggled over conflicting interests of economic, political, and cultural resources. RMT expressed that social movements would pool together their resources such as skills, funds, labor, time, commitment, land, technic, and expertise and form organizations to advance their common interests (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Tilly 1988). This theory is based on the principles of conflict, rationality, and preexisting organizations such as religious, cultural, ethnonational and traditional ties, and interest groups, including labor unions, political parties, and voluntary associations. RMT primarily depended on political, sociological, and economic theories and paid less attention to political interests, social psychology, and other issues (McAdam 1982; Tilly 1978).

The decade of the 1960s was an important period in the capitalist world system. National liberation movements flourished in the Rest and the West. The mainstream theoretical approaches of social movements have failed to explain how collective actions emerged. For instance, the African American movement developed in the United States in its reformist, revolutionary, and cultural phases (Jalata 2001). Influenced by the African American movement, diverse social movements emerged from progressive elements of white society. These movements included the Free Speech Movement, the Students for a Democratic Society, antiwar movement, countercultural and environmental movements, and feminist movements (Van Deburg 1992). Criticizing theory RMT, PPT emerged in the 1970s by explaining social movements in relation to capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and state formation (McAdam 1982; Tilly 1978).

PPT model criticized RMT for (1) downplaying politics and political interests; (2) deemphasizing the role of grievances, ignoring ideology, and exaggerating rationalistic roles of movement actors; and (3) ignoring group solidarity as well as social psychology (Buechler 2011:123-40). Combining the traditions of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and John Stuart Mill, Charles Tilly (1978) emphasized the importance of ideology, grievances, aspects of rationality, the importance of social solidarity and common interests, and the availability of political opportunities for social movements to emerge and develop. He integrated the Marxian tradition that recognizes conflicting interests, the existence of conflict, and the importance of organization with the Weberian tradition that stresses commitment to belief systems. PPT recognized factors such as the availability of material, intellectual, and cultural resources; the capacity for mobilizing these resources for collective action, the importance of the existence of preexisting social networks, organizations, and institutions; and the rationality of participants in weighing costs and benefits for engaging in collective action of social movements (Tilly 1978).

Similarly, Doug McAdam (1982) further developed PPT by identifying that RMT blurred the difference between the oppressed classes and groups and the established polity members, over exaggerated elite’s financial support for social movements, minimized the role of the masses in movements, lacked clarity on the concept of resources, and glossed over the issue of grievances. ‘‘PPT emphasizes the role of grassroots movement leadership, contending that there are frequently struggles between this base and middle-class supporters who see the movement as an opportunity to use or control it for their own interests,’’ Choudry (2015:46) writes. McAdam identified two necessary conditions for social movements to challenge the established political system. These two conditions are the structure of political opportunities such as political and economic crises and the strength of indigenous political organizations that are equipped by cognitive liberation and political consciousness.

Cognitive liberation has three dimensions, namely, the recognition of the illegitimacy of the established system, the capacity to overcome fatalism among the populace in order to believe in changing a social system, and the ability to believe that introducing social change is possible (Piven and Cloward 1979). Furthermore, another theory called FSCT emerged by criticizing PPT for giving a secondary role for collective grievances in the emergence and development of social movements. This theory focused on micro-level social dynamics and emphasized framing, signification, media, and social psychology. It also paid attention to both symbolic interaction and cultural theories that help in the construction of meaning and understanding of grievances, motivations, recruitment process, and identity formation.

FSCT identified three categories and focuses on them. The three categories are (1) the process through which social movements frame grievances as injustice and illegitimate and require a collective challenge; (2) the recognition of movements such as status and identity politics, religious movements, lifestyle interests, and environmental concerns; and (3) the necessity to understand the role of meaning and signification (Buechler 2011:145-59). By focusing on micro-level analysis, FSCT emphasizes the importance of cognitive liberation for politicizing grievances. Cognitive liberation allows people to integrate individual interests, values, and beliefs with the activities, goals, and ideologies of social movements.

When there is cognitive liberation or the transformation of consciousness and behavior, movements emerge. The process of the transformation of political consciousness indicates that when movement actors do not recognize the legitimacy of a given establishment, they may organize and engage in collective action. Most political process theorists focus on structural factors of political opportunity and organization and paid less attention to subjective factors such as cognitive liberation. Gamson, Fireman, and Rytina (1982:6-9) recognized the importance of micromobilization and cognitive liberation and identified the role of ideas and political consciousness in shaping collective action. In micromobilization, knowhow is very important, and it includes ‘‘a repertoire of knowledge about how to engage in collective action along with the skills to apply that knowledge’’ (Buechler 2011:144).

Framing and micro-level analyzing are important in convincing people to mobilize and organize. Organizing people requires building loyalty, managing the logistics of collective action, mediating internal conflict, and framing and politicizing grievances in relation to structural factors (Gamson et al. 1982:6-9). Referring to the theoretical framework of Ervin Goffman, Steven M. Buechler (2011:146) defines framing as an ‘‘interpretive schemata that people use to identify, label, and render meaningful events in their lives. Frames allow people to organize experiences and guide actions, both in everyday life and in social movements.’’

The dominant classes and groups in the capitalist world system most of the times can control and exploit oppressed classes and other subaltern groups because they have the know-hows, skills, and knowledge as well as economic resources for developing central organizing ideologies that can be translated into organizational capacity (Jalata 1996). The development of the three theories occurred in the United States by expanding on classical revolutionary theories (see below) because the United States, the hegemonic world power, became the hotbeds of conflicts, struggles, and ideological innovations in the 1960s to challenge and change American apartheid, sexist, and classist democracy one way or the other. Social movement theories refuted mainstream theories; they also exposed the deficiencies of modernization theory and Orthodox Marxism, which are Euro-American centric and reductionist.

Furthermore, NSMT emerged in Europe in the 1970s claiming that people consciously construct their collective identities based on their cultural values, lifestyles, and ideologies (Melucci 1980, 1989; Touraine 1981). NSMT asserted that the analysis of Orthodox Marxism that focused on the contradictions of capitalism did not adequately explain the essence of NSMT such as peace, environmental, and women’s movements that emerged from middle class rather than the working class in Europe (Choudry 2015:46). The demands of NSMT were not limited to economic issues but included issues of culture, quality of life, democracy, peace, environment, and identities.

Of course, the issue of culture is not yet adequately addressed by social movement theories. Pierre Bourdieu (1986) expanded on Karl Marx’s use of money capital from a narrowly conceived economic category of monetary exchange for profit to cultural capital and social capital to demonstrate how these forms of capital can be invested to secure material and social benefits and upward generational and intergeneration social mobility for dominant classes and social groups. Bourdieu identifies three main forms of capital, namely, economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital: ‘‘economic capital … is … directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the forms of private property rights; . . . cultural capital … is convertible … into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of [position of power] and educational qualifications; and . . . social capital, made of social obligations (‘connections’) … is convertible … into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility.’’ I believe that the issue of culture, particularly cultural capital, should be one important element in social movement theory.

Despite their weaknesses, social movement theories are relevant because they are addressing the issue of expanding democracy through the struggles and actions of groups and/or classes who have been negatively affected by the capitalist world system and its political structures. Debates among the framers of RMT, PPT, FSCT, and NSMT have enriched our knowledge on theories of social movements by focusing on different issues that are directly or indirectly related to social movements. The analyses of progressive social movement theorists are complementary despite the fact that their focuses have been different in explaining how social movements emerged, developed, and caused social changes. The critical integration of these diverse approaches to social movement theories can help in reducing the rigid focus on political economy or culture and objective or subjective factors.

Of course, some theories of social movements focus on politics and others deal with political economy or culture. In real life, these phenomena are interconnected and inseparable, and we must not confuse analysis with the social reality on the ground. Diverse theories and approaches are needed to deal with the complex societies, cultures, and the capitalists world system. Accepting the principle of the struggle for knowledge democracy, there is an urgent need to further synthesize and critically integrate progressive social movement theories. Going beyond those social movement theories that developed in core countries, democratic globalizers from below should expand the dialogue between theorists of the West and the Rest. I will come back to this issue later.

The Evolutions, Accomplishments, and Failures of Social Movements

For more than five centuries, both the agencies of capitalists and oppressed and exploited classes and ethnonational and other subaltern groups have been dialectically interconnected and changed each other. But, the capitalist classes, states, and their organizations such as multinational corporations and international institutions have played a determining role in alienating and exploiting the working class, terrorizing, committing genocide, enslaving, and dispossessing indigenous peoples both in the West and the Rest (Jalata 2013; Marx 1967). Generally speaking, the dynamic and contradictory interactions between global capitalism and diverse forms of resistance that sometimes developed into diverse social movements have shaped the current global system (Agartan, Choi, and Huynh 2008).

Starting from the late fifteenth century, mercantilism successfully developed into global capitalism through the expropriation of the European actual producers, the dispossession of lands and other valuable resources of indigenous Americans and other peoples, the domination of international trade, and the enslavement of some Africans (Frank 1978; Marx 1967; Rodney 1972; Wallerstein 1984, 1988). At the same time, as Tuba Agartan, W. Choi, and T. Huynh (2008:47) note, ‘‘examining the European capitalist world economy and its engagement with other social worlds in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries reveals a remarkable range of movements, movements directed against fundamental processes of world accumulation and increasing European political aggression.’’ Capitalism as the racialized world system created and/or consolidated two forms of social stratification systems: One is class-gender based that has allowed gradual generational and intergeneration upward mobility for peoples of European origin and their collaborators regardless of their class origins (Jalata 2001). The second one has been the racial caste system (racial slavery and neoslavery) that has allowed little or no upward social mobility.

It is clear that these two major forms of stratification have privileged the white working class in the West and discouraged them from allying with the movements of nonwhite workers and indigenous peoples in some Western countries and the Rest. Knowing these facts help us from repeating the mistake of Orthodox Marxism that lumps together the social movements of whites and nonwhites to declare the revolutionary potential of the global working class in creating a socialist paradise. Now, we know that the working classes in the West, most of the times, rather than struggling for an alternative system of socialism or egalitarian democracy have mainly developed reformist strategies to achieve generational and intergenerational upward mobility and to be integrated into the capitalist world system. Let me briefly explain the evolution of the two stratification systems. The complex processes of the capitalist deepening (the intensification of capitalist activities in the West) and broadening (colonial expansion to the Rest) led to socialization and racialization/ ethnicization of labor through separating the actual producers from their means production such as lands in order to reduce the cost of production and increase the rate profit for the purpose of capital accumulation and concentration in the hands of the capitalist class.

Karl Marx (1967:17) explains how feudalism was dissolved in Western Europe via the process of original capital accumulation: ‘‘The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of expropriation, in different countries, assume different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and different periods.’’ Through the processes of broadening and deepening, capitalism has demonstrated its global nature from the beginning. Consequently, the colonial expansion to the Americas between the late fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, to Africa and Asia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, to Australia in the eighteenth century, the domination of international trade by Western Europeans, and the practice of racial slavery facilitated the emergence of the industrial revolution (Marx 1967; Rodney 1972). The development of Euro-American countries and other powerful countries was made through war, state terrorism, genocide, and massive human rights violations (Jalata 2016).

Before continuing the discussion on the impact of the industrial revolution, it is important to briefly explain the ways racial and other forms of exploitation have developed over time and impacted the operation of the capitalist world system and contributed to the development of social movements, as we shall see below. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, capitalism consolidated itself on the global level. But after facing structural crises in the first half of the twentieth century, global capitalism reestablished and strengthened itself under U.S. hegemony. Since the 1970s, with the intensification of the crisis of the process of capital accumulation and the declining of the U.S. hegemony, the West has started to promote a policy known as neoliberalism to revitalize global capital accumulation (Arrighi 1994; Harvey 2005, 2006; Quan 2012). As David Harvey (2005:7) demonstrates, through the policy of neoliberalism the neoliberal state has intensified the process of capital accumulation by dispossession of the economic resources and rights of the world population; the ‘‘fundamental mission [of the neoliberal stat] was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital.’’

Despite the fact that neoliberalism has negatively affected ordinary peoples in the West and the Rest, it has more severely affected nonwhite peoples. Peoples beyond the West are more targeted by what H. T. L. Quan call savage development because, more or less, they lack official or elite democracy that is practiced in the West. Quan (2012:4) asserts the following: ‘‘By savage [development] I am referring to a type of [development] that centers on expansionism, order, and anti-democracy, [and] . . . malnutrition, disease, state-organized violence, and environmental degradation. This is a symptom of a savage mind and a civilization, that can neither control itself [nor] define its destiny.’’ Neoliberalism intensifies the need to increase profitability through global expansion, dispossession, war, and state-organized terrorism. These practices involve diplomacy and war policies; therefore, Quan (2012:10) considers the U.S. war in Iraq as a neoliberal development strategy. Particularly, accumulation of capital by dispossession has involved state terrorism and genocide as the case of indigenous peoples illustrates (Jalata 2013).

Of course, the processes of capital accumulation by displacement as well as state terrorism and genocide have been integral parts of global capitalism from the beginning. The emergence of the industrial revolution that I have mentioned above consolidated these complex and interrelated processes. This revolution technologically, organizationally, and militarily empowered Western Europeans and their collaborators in the Rest and helped in finalizing the colonization of Australia in the late eighteenth century and Africa and Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Marx (1967:763) notes that further socialization and racialization of labor through dispossession of the means of production and through colonialism resulted in ‘‘the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime.’’ All these factors involved state terrorism, war, genocide, the destruction of indigenous leadership, cultural and institutional destruction and the intensification of social stratification, rationalized and justified by the ideologies of racism, sexism and classism as well as the discourses of progress, civilization, Christianity, modernity, and development (Jalata 2013).

Indigenous peoples did/do not peacefully accept these abuses and crimes against humanity, and they first resisted/resist individually and collectively, and they gradually formed/form social movements wherever and whenever they could/can without developing an ideological clarity and organizational capacity that were/are essential for challenging and defeating global capitalism on many levels. More or less, states and corporations and other institutions have continued to dehumanize and exploit indigenous peoples all over the world, and their social movements have continued their struggles for liberation and social justice. Slowly, multiple forms of social movements also emerged in the West and the Rest as labor movements, women’s movements, social revolutions, and anticolonial movements. As noted by William G. Martin (2008:9), ‘‘significant clusters of movement activity existed across zones of the world-economy from at least the eighteenth century.’’ Of course, the whole world was not incorporated into the system in this century.

What did all social movements including trade unions, classic revolutions such as the American (1775–1783), French (1787–1799), Haitian (1791–1804), and Russian (1905–1917), Mexican (1910–20), and Chinese (1889–1949) revolutions and other national liberation movements or social movements accomplish? Did they fundamentally challenge the capitalist world economy in order to establish an alternative system, or did they revolt to get their own shares by removing the political structures that hindered their progress in the capitalist world economy? European colonial states and colonial settlers invented many countries by destroying indigenous peoples and dispossessing their homelands, and colonial states and later the descendants of these settlers in the Americas and South Africa revolted against their motherlands to form their racialized sovereign nation-states. The classic American Revolution was the main model for inventing such countries and states. In addition, this revolution established a sexist, class-based, and apartheid democracy.

But the famous classic French Revolution emerged in the center of the West to overthrow an absolutist monarchy by using the slogans of ‘‘liberty, equality, and fraternity,’’ that were interpreted differently by different classes and groups. For the capitalist class and its supporters, liberty and equality mean to have ‘‘legal rights’’ to own private property by dispossessing or exploiting others in order to accumulate more capital regardless of the consequences of these processes for the working classes and indigenous peoples. Social and material equality, liberty, and equality cannot be practiced in global capitalism. Despite the fact that the capitalist class and popular forces engaged in the French Revolution, far fewer radical changes occurred because of the replacement of the absolutist rights by the capitalist rule of law. ‘‘In the Classic social interpretation, the French Revolution marked the turning point in the birth of capitalism,’’ Agartan et al. (2008:15) write, ‘‘signaling all at once the vindication of the Enlightenment, the overthrow of the feudal order by a revolutionary, secular bourgeoisie, the entrance of popular masses onto the world stage, and the creation of the rule of modern nation-state and its citizens.’’

Amazingly, the French Revolution and its slogans had far-reaching influence in the West and the Rest. Paradoxically, the Haitian Revolution that was initiated by enslaved Africans and lit the beacon of hope for the enslaved and colonized populations in the West and the Rest of the world was influenced by these slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Over all, the classic revolutions left indelible marks on the world. Because of the significant impacts of these classic revolutions, scholars call the epoch of the long eighteenth century ‘‘the Age of Revolutions’’ (Agartan et al. 2008:11). In Western Europe, while the capitalist classes were struggling to break down the power of the monarchs that monopolized state power and had absolute control over economic activities (Cairns and Sears 2012:29-30), the popular forces were struggling to dismantle social hierarchies and eliminate political repression and economic exploitation. The capitalists wanted to capture state power in order to get access to the economy and to limit the power of the popular forces; consequently, the emerging liberal democracies ‘‘tended to be nondemocratic, either authoritarian or based on highly restricted franchise, meaning that only a small proportion of the population could vote. Indeed, these early liberal states feared democracy, as they were concerned that real power in the hands of the masses would threaten the unequal power structure of the emerging capitalist order. They were liberal inasmuch as they gave individuals the right to control their own wealth and property’’ (Cairns and Sears 2012:29-30).

The absolutist states were replaced by liberal democratic states in England in 1689 and France in 1789. The liberal democratization process was different from the notion of democracy that was originally associated with the struggle of popular forces that promoted the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This shows that the concept of democracy has been contested from the beginning. In France, the efforts of popular and revolutionary forces to destroy hierarchical class structures through reorganizing society horizontally and eliminating the legitimacy of private property in order to establish egalitarian communities were not successful. But, the reformist aspects of the revolution were successful in uprooting the French absolutist state that denied freedom to the capitalist class and popular forces (Anderson 1979). The capitalist class and its supporters tamed democracy through developing the concepts of nation, nationalism, and the citizen that have tied together all classes ideologically in a given geopolitical boundary called a country. Therefore, the concepts of nation, nationalism, and the citizens were invented with the emergence of the nation-states in the capitalist world system.

In the process of reimagining an egalitarian democratic world order, it is absolutely necessary to rethink about the social construction of the concepts of nation, nationalism, the citizens, and country that reify artificial social boundaries among world populations. Originally, state nationalism emerged through restructuring of the absolutist state into the nation-state and developing bourgeois democracy. The development of state nationalism and bourgeois democracy in France and in other Western countries demonstrated the victory of the capitalist class over the remnants of the feudal class, the peasantry, and the emerging working class (Snyder 1976:77). With the elimination of absolutism and the emergence of the capitalist class as the new dominant class, the popular democracy that the working class, the peasantry, and other revolutionary forces struggled for was suppressed and bourgeois democracy was established.

While declaring this democracy, nation-states in the West had intensified the process of class, racial/ethnonational, and gender oppression and colonial expansion (Jalata 2010). State nationalism and bourgeois democracy conceal the contradictions that exist among the citizens of the nation-state, and the concept of the citizenship glosses over the real problem between the ideological claims of democracy and equality of citizens and the vast material differences that are structured into socio-economic conditions of distinct social forces within the nation-state. As a result, various social movements such as labor unions and other movements had fought against exploitation and the violations of their rights in the West. At the same time, there were clusters of social resistance to the broadening of capitalist world economy via colonialism. There were indigenous and slave revolts in the Americas; nationalist movements also emerged in the Balkans. Colonized or enslaved peoples were inspired by the secular ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and engaged in liberation movements and demanded their rights. These processes led to the formation of new states such as Haiti (1804), Belgium (1830), and Greece (1831).

Similarly, the anticolonial resistances in India and Jamaica, anarchists in Europe and America, and waves of revolutions emerged. Furthermore, between 1848 and 1873, unrest emerged in Europe and social movements appeared in the United States;1 within four weeks, political upheavals in France, Germany (not yet united), Italy, and the Hapsburg Empire intensified (Bush 2008:53-56). These uprisings made many achievements such as the freedom of speech, publication, assembly, and association. Counterrevolutions and repressions stopped the progress of the 1848 revolts in Western Europe. But the struggles laid a foundation for the future more organized movements. The decades between 1848 and 1917 were significant periods for social movements; these movements immensely increased their challenges to capitalism by organizing themselves into unions, congresses, parties, associations, and brotherhoods. According to Caleb M. Bush (2008:52-53), ‘‘Beginning the period under serious repression, by 1917 movements—through competing and often contradictory strategies of reform, revolution, and all that falls in between— were vying for control of the state, even gaining state power. These developments constituted the most significant turn for movements and movement strategy.’’

The repression of 1848 revolts in Europe did not stop the further development of social movements. The second half of the nineteenth century was the period of the blossoming of social movements in Western Europe and North America. The modern labor unions emerged during these decades. For instance, independent labor movement emerged in France and Germany after 1848. In 1864, the First International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was formed and provided a platform for radicals such as Fourier, Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx. The IWA and the Paris Commune of 1871 increased their attack on capitalism. Both of them provided ‘‘an overarching ideology’’ for social movements (Bush 2008:56). Furthermore, the German General Workers’ Association was established in 1863 and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party and General Union of German Workers were formed in 1869. White workers in the United States, supported by socialists, started their labor movements in the 1860s to fight against capitalist oppression and exploitation.

The Russian revolutionary movement captured state power declaring ‘‘socialism’’ in 1917. After capturing state power, the so-called socialists began to support labor, revolutionary, and national movements around the world for sometimes. As labor and ‘‘socialist’’ movements continued their respective struggles, labor strikes intensified in France, Germany, England, Sweden, and the United States between 1873 and 1896. Also, anarchists and socialist internationalists intensified their efforts to establish an alternative system to capitalism. Reformist movements developed in Great Britain, Germany, and Australia and promoted ‘‘reformist parliamentarian socialism’’ or social democracy. The Socialist Party of America and the Communist Party of the United States were formed in 1901 and 1919, respectively. Germany’s Social Democratic Party and the British Labor Party were formed 1875 and 1906, respectively. Australia’s Labor Party that was established in the early 1890s won its majority parliament election in 1910. Between 1917 and 1968, several movements seized state power and introduced some reformist and revolutionary programs, but they gradually abandoned their lofty programs and reintegrated into the capitalist world system by consolidating it.

Consequently, social movements (radical labor, socialists, communists, and national liberation movements) had joined the capitalist world system by accepting and reifying the concepts of nation, nationalism, the citizens, and country. Despite the fact that capitalism faced ‘‘the age of catastrophe’’ between 1914 and the World War II and the Bolshevik Revolution emerged in Russia in 1917 demonstrating the systematic crises of the capitalist world system, oppositional forces failed to develop an alternative system to global capitalism and its ideological, economic, and political infrastructures. ‘‘In North America and Europe, labor and socialist struggles were fully institutionalized following [WW II],’’ Caleb M. Bush and Rochelle Morris (2008:84) note, ‘‘gaining access to state power and significant political and economic benefits at the very cost of their anti-systemic nature’’ (authors’ emphasis). More or less, the most prominent social movements such as movements of workers, women, and the civil rights movement in the United States achieved some of their objectives under bourgeois democracy without defeating capitalism in the twentieth century (Amenta, Chiarello, and Su 2010).

Accepting the discourse of the so-called national interests and promoting their individual and group advantages, the workers in the West have allied with the capitalist class and nation-states against the indigenous communities and other dominated and exploited peoples in the West and the Rest. As socialists and social democrats gained access to state power and political and economic benefits, they pursued their personal, class, and group interests within the capitalist world system. Similarly, despite the fact that the liberation struggles of the colonized peoples for independence put some strain for sometimes on core countries and powers, their achievement did not go beyond ‘‘flag’’ independence and their movements lost their antisystemic characters. In the mid-twentieth century and after, some former colonies achieved their flag independence and gained the status of neocolonial states to enrich their government officials and local and international capitalists at the cost of the dehumanized and exploited indigenous and other subaltern groups.

In the current era of neoliberal globalization, in the name of democracy, development, and human rights, the state, multinational corporations, and international organizations in the Rest are engaging in dispossessing lands and other resources while repressing and terrorizing indigenous peoples and their social movements. Balakrishnan Rajagopal (2003:3) explains that ‘‘it is not the lack of development that caused poverty, inflicted violence, and engaged in destruction of nature and livelihood; rather it is the very process of bringing development [to indigenous peoples] that has caused them in the first place.’’ The brutality of neoliberalism is causing massive poverty, famines, wars, terrorism, and massive migration in the peripheral world. Using the so-called international law and its political economic hegemony, the West has continued to dominate and exploit its former colonies; on their parts, neocolonial states have ‘‘come to colonize all life spaces in civil society and [have] effectively championed the interests of the global elite that runs the world economy. The democratic deficit experienced by global governance processes has been exacerbated due to the democratic deficit of [neo-colonial states] that act as the agents of the globalitarian class’’ (Rajagopal 2003:12).

Most peoples in the Rest did not even receive the benefits of bourgeois democracy and the rule of law because the West and their collaborators in the Rest have been against democracy in most countries. With the emergence of neocolonial states, capitalism and dictatorship have been integrated again by the alliance of Western imperialism and the intermediate class in the Rest. ‘‘The intensification of sharp inequalities within and between nations has been the reality of capitalist expansion in the Global South,’’ Cairns and Sears (2012:34) write, ‘‘and that has often been associated with brutal authoritarian regimes, not liberal democracies.’’ Furthermore, the NSMT or the ‘‘new’’ left that emerged in 1968 also failed to establish an alternative system to capitalism.

So social or revolutionary or national movements could not go beyond introducing some reforms in the capitalist world system. Generally speaking, social movements have introduced limited social changes in the capitalist world system without facilitating the emergence of egalitarian democracy, which can contribute to the development of a fundamental social transformation by eliminating or reducing all forms of social inequalities and injustices. In former revolutionary countries like the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and others, peoples have even lost their civil and political rights and forced to live under total dictatorship. Betraying its revolutionary position and following the footsteps of the West, presently China has engaged in neoliberal agendas to loot the resources of Africa and others (Quan 2012). The past experiences of social movements teach us that human liberation is impossible under systems that practice exploitation and injustices while claiming the ideals of democracy, national liberation, and socialism. Then, what is next?

Theoretical and Intellectual Challenges in Studying Social Movements

We know more about global capitalism than about various forms of social movements that have struggled against its exploitative and repressive aspects. Marxist and neo-Marxist scholars and other critical scholars have adequately studied the development of the global capitalist system and its various stages from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries (Frank 1978; Harvey 2005; Marx 1967; Wallerstein 1976, 1983, 1984, 1988, 1989). Orthodox Marxism theorized that capitalism would create the whole world after its own image; that means industrialization would take place all over the globe dividing the world populations mainly into the capitalist and the working classes and resulting in two forms of revolutions: a bourgeois revolution and a socialist revolution.

According to this version of Marxist theory, the capitalist revolution would be necessary for a socialist revolution to emerge, and the proletariat dictatorship was prerequisite for the socialist revolution to occur. Karl Marx’s study of capitalism was based on critical social scientific research, but his idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not based on social scientific research. His theoretical assumption that the working class would play a leading role in individual and social emancipation and fundamental social transformation did not become reality. History and social praxis demonstrate that Marx’s prediction of the revolutionary role of the working class and its international solidarity to promote a global socialist revolution proved to be wrong. The opposite of what he predicted happened. The capitalist class has created global solidarity. Of course, the working class did not develop well in the Rest because the West limited the possibility of industrialization there.

As neo-Marxists theorized, imperialism would not necessarily lead to industrialization in the Rest, and there would not be industrialization and a capitalist revolution in this part of the world. Consequently, the weak capitalist class in the Rest was reactionary and incapable of leading a capitalist revolution. Therefore, they theorized that revolutionary intelligentsia and the peasantry would lead a socialist revolution instead of the working class. Despite the fact that countries like Russia, China, Cuba, and others engaged in the so-called socialist revolutions without the dictatorial leadership of the proletariat and acted as a counterhegemonic bloc for sometimes, they later reintegrated into the capitalist world system. This so-called socialist bloc could not eliminate the extraction of surplus and the exploitation and repression of the working class and the peasantry. The regimes in these countries have become authoritarian and repressive. Although Orthodox Marxists romanticized labor movements and gave them the role of liberating humanity through a socialist revolution, proletarian internationalism, and dictatorship, these movements could not even fully defend their own class interests. In the name of proletariat dictatorship, socialist revolutions were aborted in the former Soviet Union, China, and other countries, and state capitalism has flourished in these countries. In the West, labor parties and unions have become parts of the capitalist political structures, and they even could not struggle beyond their economic interests. Currently, neoliberal policies are attacking their interests and forcing them to be disorganized and weakened. The working class has also failed to overcome the ideologies of racism and sexism and could not even form the unity of the working class within a given country.

One of the shortcomings of social movement studies is their focus on the experiences of Western societies. However, recently, a few scholars by going beyond Western experiences have started to study the role of transnational social movements and their organizations. For instance, Jackie Smith (2008) calling them democratic globalizers explains about transnational social movements and their struggles against neoliberal globalization and their institutions; these movements have demanded for popular control over international organizations in order to establish a democratic global system, which promotes human rights, social justice, and ecological sustainability. Her idea of conceptualizing transnational social movements as global networks that involve institutions, organizations, and individual activists that struggle for global democracy is innovative and helpful in expanding our knowledge bank by overcoming some of the current deficits in movement studies.

In addition, Smith and Wiest (2012) explore the role of global social movements and their organizations both in the Global North and in the Global South that struggle to reform and democratize intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and other institutions. Smith and Wiest (2012:17) note that these social movements and their organizations have developed the capacity to challenge ‘‘the basic logic and structure of the world economic and political system.’’ These authors have expanded the horizon of social movement studies despite the fact that international and intergovernmental organizations still mainly serve their financiers known as neoliberal globalizers and powerful states. Without any doubt, these pioneering studies advance our understanding of social movement theories and practices.

But still more research is needed to deeply understand what roles social movements play on local, regional, and global levels. Particularly, social movement studies need to focus on the understudied areas of the world. Although we can learn a lot from the experiences of Western social movements, it is impossible to adequately learn about all social movements without learning the conditions of social movements in the Rest. Seeing the West as an independent entity implicitly assumes that it has nothing to do with the Rest. Practically speaking, both the West and the Rest are two sides of the same coin. Also, the Rest is in the West, as the case of North America demonstrates. For example, indigenous Americans and African Americans are geographically in the United States, but their socioeconomic conditions are similar to that of the Rest. For these reasons, we cannot adequately understand about the issues of social movements in the West without understanding those in the Rest and vice versa.

As demonstrated above, the theories, research, and knowledge on social movements are fragmented, incomplete, and underdeveloped. There are also other problems such as shortage of cross-cultural, comparative empirical and theoretical research, and historical and interdisciplinary approaches that include critical legal studies and cross-disciplinary work. Without overcoming such monumental theoretical, methodological, ideological, and intellectual challenges, we cannot adequately broaden and deepen our knowledge on the structural and subjective factors of social movements both in the West and in the Rest. One major approach of overcoming the limitation of social movement studies is combining critical theories and knowledge with the theories and wisdoms of indigenous peoples that expose the deficiencies of mainstream theories, knowledge, and the ruling ideas of those who dominate and lead the capitalist world system. Another major approach to reduce the deficits of social movement studies is to intensify critical dialogues among progressive scholars and activists of the West and the Rest in order to build a more robust transnational social movement.

The Urgent Role of Progressive Intellectuals and Activists

There is more moral and intellectual responsibility on progressive scholars and activists in the West to advance the cause of social movements because they are large in numbers and they have relatively abundant resources than progressive scholars and activists in the Rest. The first step to advance the causes of human rights and progressive social movements is to overcome a narrow cultural thinking and to develop humanist or human-centric liberation knowledge. This step is necessary to develop theories and practices that demystify those knowledge and theories that justify exploitation and injustice in the name of modernity, civilization, universalism, elite democracy, and development. Progressive social movement scholars cannot introduce innovations to their theories and research without totally overcoming their geocultural roots and distorted ideologies.

Ideology plays many roles in a society, and its essential function is to define and promote the political, material, and cultural interests of a group, a nation, a social class, a state, or other entities; it also ‘‘offers an explanation and an evaluation of political, economic, and social condition; provides its holders a compass that helps orient them and develop a sense of identity; and tenders a prescription for political, economic, or social action’’ (Hybel 2010:1). In the ideological clothing of universalism, progress, democracy, development, civilization, and humanity, mainstream theories and knowledge have hidden the massive human rights violations of indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups and have contributed to the perpetuation of underdevelopment, poverty, and suffering for the majority of the world populations (De Sousa Santos 2007; Rajagopal 2003, 2006).

Recognizing that these problems cannot be solved in the capitalist world system, some leftist and activist scholars have started to imagine an alternative egalitarian world order in which exploitation and oppression will be minimized or totally prevented. Such scholars also theorize about an emancipatory political project for the future and the possibility of recreating community-based societies by learning from the past of humanity in which egalitarianism and participatory democracy were practiced. For example, in recent decades, critical anthropologists have started to imagine the possibility of building an egalitarian society by learning from the experiences of noncapitalist societies and by demonstrating that domination and exploitation are not natural (Solway 2006). The work of Anthropologist Richard Lee on the San community in Southern Africa is an exemplary one.2 Similarly, a few scholars who studied the Oromo society have discovered the egalitarian character of Oromo democracy known as the gadaa system that existed before the emergence of contemporary democracy in the West (Baissa 1971, 1993; Legesse 1973, [2000] 2006).

Discussing the philosophy of Oromo democracy, Asmarom Legesse (1973:2) notes, ‘‘What is astonishing about this cultural tradition is how far Oromo have gone to ensure that power does not fall in the hand of war chiefs and despots. They achieve this goal by creating a system of checks and balances that is at least as complex as the systems we find in Western democracies.’’ The gadaa system has the principles of checks and balances (through periodic succession of every eight years), and division of power (among executive, legislative, and judicial branches), balanced oppositions (among five parties), and power sharing between higher and lower administrative organs to prevent dictatorship and exploitation (Baissa 1993; Lepisa 1975).

When gadaa was an all encompassing institution of politics, military, defense, economy, religion, ethics, culture, and tradition, siqqee was used by Oromo women as a check and balance system to counter male-dominated roles in the gadaa system. The siqqee institution gave a political and social platform for Oromo women to effectively voice their concern and address their social justice issues (Kelly 1992; Kumsa 1997). The gadaa/siqqee system prevented the transformation of gender role separation into gender inequality, and women and men ‘‘had a functional interdependence and one was not valued any less than the other’’ in the system (Kumsa 1997:119). The processes and practices of gaadaa/siqqee and social development have been interconnected (Jalata and Schaffer 2013). The Oromo have a theoretical concept of social development known as finna, which explained phases and features of development in the Oromo society, and embodied the cumulative historical and recent changes that have taken place to produce a new social order.

Finna ‘‘represents the legacy of the past which each generation inherits from its forefathers [and foremothers] and which it transforms; it is the fertile patrimony held in trust by the present generation which it will enrich and bequeath to future generations . . . it describes a movement emanating from the inside, a developing of the inner potential of society based on the cultural roots it has already laid down’’ (Kassam 1994:16-40). It has seven interconnected cumulative development phases, namely, guddina (growth), gabbina (enrichment), ballina (broadening), badhadha (abundance), hoormaataa (reproduction and rejuvenation), dagaaga (development with sustainability), and dagaahoora (reciprocity, sharing, and cultural borrowing).3 Some Oromo activists and their social movements led by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) currently attempt to restore their egalitarian cultural traditions and the democratic political system that the Ethiopian colonial state and its international supporters have opposed and repressed (Jalata and Schaffer 2013).

The OLF should avoid the pitfalls of other social and liberation movements that won the war and lost the battle. It will truly achieve its objectives of defeating Ethiopian colonialism and restoring the Oromo democratic tradition by building robust civic and political institutions and by envisioning and developing egalitarian democracy. These are the only ways that this front can implement social, economic, and political justice without becoming a tool of the capitalist class and global powers. So the serious challenges that are facing those social forces and progressive Oromo intellectuals and activists and others that are struggling to establish an egalitarian democratic order are demystifying the theories and ideologies of domination and exploitation. This can be done by developing the knowledge for liberation that can facilitate alliances among all peoples to build grassroots transnationalism by challenging and defeating bourgeois internationalism and unjust globalization.

There are no blueprints in taking these steps. According to Bruce G. Trigger (2006:27), ‘‘The challenge of the present is for progressive anthropologists [and others] to draw on their knowledge of social behavior to try to design societies of a sort that have never existed before in human history: ones that are large-scale, technologically advanced, internally culturally diverse, economically as well as politically egalitarian, and in which everyone will assume a fair share of the burden as well as of the rewards of living on a small, rich, but fragile planet.’’ Tigger suggests the necessity of learning from the past to construct a better and just society where exploitation of subaltern groups and ecology will be avoided and where knowledge and technology can be harnessed to overcome the victimization of people by unjust globalization. As already mentioned, theories develop from social praxis. So it is possible to learn from precapitalist democracies such as that of the Oromo and the theoretical models of ‘‘real utopias’’ or ‘‘utopistics’’ of the current period to advance the theory and practice of egalitarian democracy.

For example, Erik Olin Wright (2006:96) explains the necessity of developing ‘‘a coherent, credible theory of alternatives of existing institutions and social structures that would eliminate, or at least significantly reduce the harms they generate.’’ He explores how capitalist ‘‘institutions and social structures generate human suffering and obstruct human flourishing, [and] how [they] distribute the conditions for suffering and flourishing unfairly’’ (Wright 2014:333). A truly precapitalist egalitarian democratic society, which controlled its institutions and public and private resources such as that of the Oromo institutions and social structures, promoted social justice and political justice. In the model of real utopias, according to Erik Olin Wright (2014:333), the claims of social justice and political justice ‘‘call for a society that deepens the quality of democracy and enlarges its scope of action, under conditions of radical social and material equality.’’

These conditions occurred under Oromo democracy from the sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Oromo democracy allowed people to receive all forms of social justice and socioeconomic equality. In Oromo democracy, everybody worked for herself or himself and in collective, and nobody was allowed to exploit the labor of others. When social justice allows all people to ‘‘have equal access to the necessary material means to live flourishing lives,’’ political justice empowers people ‘‘to contribute to the collective control of the conditions and decisions which affect their common fate—a principle of both political equality and collective democratic empowerment’’ (Wright 2006:96). In overcoming institutional harms, there is a need to design an egalitarian modern democratic society. In this effort, we can learn a lot from Oromo democracy, egalitarian social development theory and praxis, and other precapitalist democratic traditions.

Progressive social movements need to struggle for developing an alternative development model to global capitalism, neoliberalism, and violent or savage development. This alternative development model must try to maintain the balance among nature, humanity, and environment on local, regional, and global levels by overcoming the exploitation of humanity and environment. There is an absolute necessity to develop technologically advanced and politically and economically egalitarian society through preventing the accumulation of wealth/capital in the hands of a few, which exploits humanity and environment. These noble paradigms cannot be practiced without totally uprooting the false ideology of racism, sexism, classism, cultural universalism, the ideology of linear modernity, and investment in destructive military organizations and weapons of warfare and nuclear armament.

My suggestions to progressive intellectuals and activists are also to go beyond their left liberal and Marxist traditions that limit their visions to the experiences of the West and study and learn more about the indigenous peoples in their own countries and the Rest. Then, they can find ways of collaborating with them to advance the struggle for human liberation and egalitarian democracy. Almost all social theories have limitations because of the specific geocultural roots of their thinkers and framers. Also, our scientific knowledge including social scientific knowledge is not value neutral because humans socially construct it. According to Third World Network (1993:485), ‘‘Scientists are strongly committed to beliefs and certain cultural ethos, which compel them to convert diversity and complexity into uniformity. In addition to this belief system and cultural ethos—which manifest themselves in the propositions that scientists embrace—science has its own power structure, reward systems and peer groups. All of these [factors] combine to ensure that science is closely correlated with the existing, dominant and unjust, political, economic and social order of the world.’’

It is not surprising that mainstream and oppositional social theories are mainly Euro-American centric because they have been produced in the West. Sandra Harding (1993:2) describes Eurocentrism as ‘‘the assumption that Europe functions autonomously from other parts of the world; that Europe is its own origin, final end, and agent; and that Europe and people of European descent in the Americas and elsewhere owe nothing to the rest of the world.’’ While learning from the past and present, progressive and activist scholars must overcome their specific geocultural roots and equip themselves with multicultural liberation knowledge in order to build grassroots transnationalism on a larger scale. Movement theorists must help all social movements to learn about one another and develop a broad alternative vision that exposes the fallacies of capitalist globalization and its neoliberal policies and to engage in struggle to create a better future.

To accomplish all these political projects, progressive intellectuals need to improve their theoretical and empirical research and knowledge by combining historical and interdisciplinary approaches that include all social sciences, critical legal studies, cross-disciplinary methods, and critical comparative studies. Without developing the democracy of knowledge, combing these approaches is impossible. These approaches can help in appreciating and learning from indigenous movements. Several indigenous movements in southern, central, and north America have emerged and developed since the 1950s to change their resistance struggles to protests and revolutions in order to restore their humanity and collective land rights; such struggles have enabled some of them to have access to bilingual and intercultural education, to introduce constitutional reforms, and to promote multicultural democracy by emphasizing economic and social equality and justice (Hall and Fenelon 2009; Van Cott 2007, 2009). According to Hall and Fenelon (2009:91), ‘‘Over the fifty years or so, American Indians have become emblematic of movements to reestablish their legitimate status as sovereignty.’’

Native Americans in the United States and First Nations of Canada have struggled for self-determination. Other indigenous organizations such as the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, the Interethnic Association of the Development of Peruvian Rainforest, the United Multiethnic People of Amazonas, and others have participated in liberation struggles in Latin American countries to introduce some changes in individual and collective rights, in the areas of engaging citizens in public policy decision-making, and in holding leaders accountable. Some indigenous Americans in Latin American countries have rejected the capitalist model of development: ‘‘the visions embodied by Indigenous life projects entail a relationship between equals and an end to the subordination of Indigenous peoples’’ (Blaser, Feit, and McRAE 2004:4). Donna Lee Van Cott (2007:9-10) notes that Latin America’s indigenous ‘‘social movements and parties offer unique perspective for addressing democratic deficiencies, as well as the capacity to mobilize social capital for democratic ends and to forge consensus on common political projects. They are expanding public expectations of democracy by insisting on greater participation, the reduction of inequality, and the protection of collective rights.’’

Our knowledge of social movement theories, knowledge, and practices are expanding and improving. Balakrishnan Rajagopal (2003:249-53) articulates seven counterhegemonic narratives of social movements as a critique of development and sovereignty: First, social movements are challenging Western development models of rationality such as the role of the expert, progress or ‘‘catching up’’ with the West, and linear development from the so-called backward society to the so-called civilized and advanced one. Such movements are organized around liberation theology in Latin America, environmentalism, cultural revivalism in India, and Green movement in Germany; they also reject Marxist modernism. Second, there are several movements that struggle for the material well-being and culture; they struggle for cultural identity and human dignity. Examples of such movements include the urban squatters movement in Brazil, the movement of Black Communities in Colombia, the Working Women’s Forum in India, and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

Third, there are social movements that do not aspire to take state power; they are organized around cultural identity such as ethnicity, language, and ecology. ‘‘Their political agenda seems to be a democratization of their political institutions, the family, community, the workplace, and the society at large. Many identity based movements including feminist movements in India and Latin America . . . appear to organize themselves on this understanding of politics’’ (Rajagopal 2003:251). Fourth, there are social movements that use peaceful means by rejecting violence to challenge institutional politics. Fifth, the failures of liberal democracy and formal institutional politics have facilitated the development of some social movements that have struggled to refine democracy in the Rest. Sixth, there are social movements that are interconnected and formed cross-border alliances without having international legal framework. Seventh, some movements reject sovereignty-property roots of liberalism and use the liberal rights discourses. ‘‘Such struggles reflect a convergence between theory and action, that human rights scholars and activists have longed for but that has been generally unavailable. These [movements] show how individuals and communities can achieve their autonomy and self-realization by participating in shaping their own destiny without being constrained by theoretical boundaries’’ (Rajagopal 2003:253).

The Democracy of Knowledge and Knowledge for Liberation

Euro-American-centric theories and scholarship have suppressed or implicitly and/or explicitly distorted the cultures, traditions, and knowledge of indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups (McGregor 2004). Raewyn Connell (2007:368) notes, ‘‘Most theoretical texts are written in the global North, and most proceed on the assumption that where they are written does not matter at all . . . . With few exceptions, social theory sees and speaks from the global North.’’ Amazingly, mainstream theories and knowledge have presented the destructive capacities of global capitalism for more than 500 years as something positive for indigenous peoples and others.

At the same time, they have dismissed the theories, knowledge, and wisdoms of indigenous peoples and other counterhegemonic theories. Indigenous ‘‘knowledge systems have been represented by adjectives such as ‘primitive,’ ‘unscientific,’ and ‘backwards,’ while the western system is assumed to be uniquely ‘scientific’ and ‘universal’ and superior to local forms of knowledge . . . . The modern knowledge system ‘is merely the globalized version of a very local and parochial tradition’ arising with ‘commercial capitalism’ and ‘a set of values based on power’’’ (McGovern 1999:27). Euro-American hegemonic theories, scholarship, and the ruling ideas have ignored that the colonized indigenous peoples have been ‘‘a data mine for social theory’’ (Connell 2007:369) and the source of objective knowledge production. The hegemonic knowledge of the West and their collaborators in the Rest limits our understanding of the whole world by ignoring the geocultures of indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups.

Of course, there have been leftist scholars who have exposed the exploitative and oppressive aspects of global capitalism by focusing on the hierarchies based on gender, class, and race/ethnonation. However, because of their Euro-American-centric thinking and their limited knowledge of indigenous societies, and their evolutionary and modernist thinking, some of them have focused on capital–labor relations and, more or less, glossed over the problem of indigenous peoples. Furthermore, except a few cases, their works on indigenous peoples have been contradictory, incomplete, or distorted. Because of the rejection of multicultural knowledge and wisdoms and the tradition of abyssal thinking (de Sousa Santos 2007), Euro-American theoretical and intellectual knowledge from right and left could not fully recognize the full humanity of indigenous peoples.

Such scholars even ignore or gloss over their own precapitalist cultures and civilizations by focusing on their modernity. More or less, these intellectual traditions have seen indigenous peoples as social forces that cannot survive the onslaught of the process of the so-called modernity. In order to critically and thoroughly understand the problems of indigenous peoples in the West and the Rest, we need to stretch our intellectual horizons beyond the limitations of these theories, scholarship, and the ruling ideas of the dominant system. Therefore, I argue that social theories and scholarship that cannot address all of these issues are incomplete and contradictory or partially or completely erroneous. Unfortunately, most critical and progressive scholars from the West and Rest cannot see beyond their geocultural and state-centric lenses, and they just give lip service for the liberation of global humanity from exploitation and dehumanization. Liberating global humanity from exploitation and injustices requires developing liberation knowledge that incorporates the best elements of knowledge and wisdoms of all human groups and genuinely reflects multicultural and cross-disciplinary knowledge.

The state-centered knowledge elites have created artificial interdisciplinary boundaries among social sciences and also objectified indigenous peoples and other subaltern groups or have ignored them because of their subordination and powerlessness. M. A. Rahman (1993:14) asserts that ‘‘domination of masses by elites is rooted not only in the polarization of control over the means of material production but also over the means of knowledge production, including control over social power to determine what is useful knowledge.’’ The knowledge for liberation, however, attempts to replace history of domination by history of liberation by recognizing the agency of the oppressed and exploited classes and groups. ‘‘Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent,’’ D. J. Haraway (1991:198) writes, ‘‘not a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his [or her] unique agency and authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge.’’

The knowledge elites with support of states have produced ‘‘official’’ history that has completely denied a historical space for the subaltern groups in general and that of indigenous peoples in particular. Such negative views about the oppressed and exploited groups have prevented some scholars from understanding subaltern history and culture as well as their resistances and movements. According to John Gaventa (1993:27), ‘‘The power of knowledge industry is derived not simply from what knowledge is produced and for whom, but also from the growth of new elites who people the knowledge production process.’’ Some of the intellectuals who have studied subaltern groups have promoted the interests of the capitalist ruling class and its collaborators at the cost of the terrorized, colonized, oppressed, and exploited classes and groups. Others claiming that they are maintaining objectivity and neu- trality have ignored the suffering of such peoples.

Euro-American-centric scholars and their foot soldiers in the Rest have dominated the writing of historiography of the oppressed classes and groups; such scholars have an ideology of the so-called cultural universalism and a top-down approach that have completely ignored or distorted the social and cultural history of the colonized and subjugated peoples (Wallerstein 1983). Cultural universalism is an ideology that the capitalist class and their collaborators in the capitalist world economy use to look at the world mainly from their own cultural perspective and to control the economic and cultural resources of the dominated people; it also helps in creating and socializing a global intermediate class by subordinating or destroying multicultures in the name of science and technology (Wallerstein 1983:83). According to Thomas Heaney (1993:41-42), ‘‘With the writing of history, knowledge became power, or rather an expression of power and a tool for maintaining it. History, and later, science, were frequently used not merely to understand, but to legitimize historically shaped political relationships and institutions.’’

The emergent, critical, and comprehensive social movement studies can have a serious impact on developing the knowledge of liberation. Critical social movement studies must build this kind of knowledge by exposing the deficiencies Euro-American and state-centric knowledge that is called the knowledge for domination and maintaining status quo. Social movement studies must promote a better understanding of the struggles of the dominated and exploited peoples and their histories and their aspirations. Progressive scholars who are involved in studying social movements need to debate openly and honestly to transform their scholarship and suggest ways through which liberation knowledge develops and expands.

Therefore, the building of democracy of knowledge is the first step toward the liberation of global humanity from exploitation and injustices by exposing the fallacies of the knowledge for domination and maintaining status quo in the nation-state and in the global capitalist world system. Going beyond the capitalist world system and studying all experiences of humanity without being limited by a modernist mind-set can help in developing critical theories and praxis that are necessary in building an alternative word system. Furthermore, progressive social movement scholars should challenge the problems of false cultural universalism and exclusionary relativism; they need to identify all positive and humanist values of all cultures and negative, reactionary, and oppressive elements of all cultures and build on the positive ones while delegitimizing those values that dehumanize and harm individuals and peoples.

These approaches can help in truly developing progressive global cultural universalism based on multiculturalism that is compatible with inclusionary and progressive cultural particularism. The fallacy of the liberal theory and practice of political equality and its false cultural universalism must be rejected because they exclude the praxis of economic democracy and multiculturalism (Mutua 2008). Progressive social movements should struggle by combining political democracy with economic or social democracy and by promoting a genuine global human rights movement through the inclusion of the best element of cultural practices of every society in the world.

Envisioning Egalitarian Democracy

Mainstream politicians and academics (both conservatives and liberals) in the West and the Rest mainly promote policies that encourage investment and profitability at the cost of the public interest. In the Rest, global capitalism promotes fake democracy or dictatorship that allows the officials of neocolonial states and local and transnational capitalists to intensify the exploitation and dehumanization of people through neoliberal policies and programs. In the West, elections are taking place just for formality without discussing substantive issues of full employment, health care, education, environment, and social justice (Cairns and Sears 2012). Consequently, less and less people are participating in voting considering politics as meaningless and absurd.

The endless crisis of global capitalism and the widening gap between the few rich and the majority poor are making people in the West to be dissatisfied in the present democracy. James Cairns and Alan Sears (2012:3) see democracy as ‘‘one of those words that gets used so heavily that we do not often pause to think about what it means’’ and define it as ‘‘an open question.’’ These two scholars suggest that people should engage in the process of ‘‘democratic imagination’’ to expand their knowledge of democracy by including the concepts of popular power and self-government to satisfy their needs. Seeing democracy as an open question demonstrates that there are competing definitions of democracy. For those who control the major political and economic institutions, democracy does not involve the collective struggle for popular power and self-government (Cairns and Sears 2012).

For Cairns and Sears, democracy emerges from everyday life and collective action to make institutions responsive to the needs of the people; they use the concept of democratic imagination to criticize the existing democracy and envision popular democracy or democracy from below. Cairns and Sears (2012:4) suggest that this imagination must combine deliberate collective action ‘‘to improve the ways that human beings live together.’’ They also assert that democracy from below aspires to empower people to achieve collective self-government, attempts to fundamentally change society, and to promote the principle that real power emerges from genuine equity. But official or elite or liberal democracy is limited to elections, the rule of law, and certain freedoms and does not extend to workplaces, schools, families, organized sports, and personal relationships. According to Cairns and Sears (2012:4), ‘‘The idea that human beings deserve freedom, meaning that they ought to govern their own lives and communities, has indeed emerged from the resistance, in the form of collective action, and not simply the power of idea, that has led to the development of different forms of democracy at key moment in history. Regardless of the particular ways in which democracy is imagined, it is fundamentally about the daily practice of living together as humans. Safeguarding or improving democracy, therefore, involves action in the real world.’’

Bourgeois or official democracy claims that it provides citizenship rights to people and then denies them equitable living standards and substantive democracy. Currently, official democracy implements the policies of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism has started to roll back social citizenship rights that subaltern groups achieved by their collective struggles in the West. Neoliberal policies have installed lean governments by cutting public pensions and unemployment insurance programs, attacked collective bargaining rights of workers, and increased user fees in the areas of education and transportation (Cairns and Sears 2012:67-69). Neoliberals have blamed the welfare state for global economic crises, the declining rate of profits for corporations, for rigidly regulating labor market, and for increasing social benefits for subaltern groups through social programs. While claiming to become lean, neoliberal states have become more interventionist and pumped trillions of public dollars into failing private banks and corporations and engaged in massive spending on policing, prison-industrial complexes, and the military.

Most people in the Rest in general and indigenous peoples in particular are not even allowed to have official democracy. For indigenous peoples in the West, official democracies are illegitimate because they do not implement the rule of law to protect their interests. Generally speaking, many people in the West believe that democracy is in trouble, and the problem increases with the further crises of the capitalist world system. If democracy is to benefit all, it must be reinvented to solve the problems of the ordinary people rather than serving as a tool for further capital accumulation for the rich and powerful groups. This reinvention requires that people empower themselves and their social movements. In envisioning and inventing a participatory and egalitarian democracy, we can learn a lot from the experiences of noncapitalist societies that prevented exploitation and domination through collective efforts and horizontal organizations.

Discussion and Conclusion

A more critical and productive dialogue will be needed between social movement theorists and world systems analysts. As noted above, Steven M. Buechler has started such a dialogue, although more explorations and discussions are needed from scholars of these two theoretical orientations. The reductionist approaches of only focusing on political economy or cultural factors or psychological factors must be avoided by using critical interdisciplinary methods and approaches, which enable theorists to analyze chains of interrelated historical and sociological factors. Furthermore, critically and thoroughly reevaluating social movement theories and practices and building on their strengths for developing new social movement theories, which reflect multicultural liberation knowledge and egalitarian ethos, are highly needed.

Specifically, integrating the best elements of social movement theories and practices with the theories and wisdom of indigenous peoples and their movements can help in advancing the praxis of a progressive global social movement in order to reinvent international law and to build internationalism from below. Since neoglobalizers are organized internationally, democratic globalizers and their social movements need to create global solidarity such as the World Social Forum for creating a transnational social movement and taking coordinated collective actions on global level for challenging and defeating neoliberalism and its policies. Such actions are not possible without developing multicultural liberation knowledge that helps in liberating the minds of ordinary people and progressive intellectuals and activists from all forms of social evils such as sexism, racism, classism, and cultural and religious chauvinism.

Above all, without critically and thoroughly exposing and challenging the fallacies of the mainstream theories, knowledge for domination, and the ruling ideas of the capitalist class and its collaborators, social movements cannot fully play a positive role in promoting egalitarian democracy from below. Because of their immense intellectual and materials resources and geopolitical positions, if they can overcome their Euro-American-centric paradigms, progressive intellectuals and activists from the West can contribute significantly to promote and advance progressive social movements on country, continental, and global levels. They have also more opportunity to participate in the struggle for social justice because of the opportunity of official democracy.

Similarly, progressive scholars and activists from the Rest, despite their meager material resources and their hostile political conditions, can contribute a lot through their comparative theoretical and empirical research and through participating in the struggle for social justice on different levels. Both progressive scholars and activists from the West and the Rest need to have critical, deep, and broad understanding of large-scale and long-term social changes by rejecting the modernist and evolutionary approaches and by studying noncapitalist societies both in the West and in the Rest to learn more about humanity and imagine beyond global capitalism.

People have constructed societies, and they can also remake them on egalitarian democratic principles by enabling individuals and groups to enjoy the fruit of their labor without being dominated, alienated, exploited, and dehumanized. Supported by progressive scholars and activists and by overcoming their narrow interests through developing the knowledge of liberation, social movements can ally with indigenous movements and other social forces that struggle for egalitarian democracy and an alternative world order. All these require reimagining about social movements by developing cross-cultural liberation knowledge and a critical ideology that looks to the past, the present, and the future in order to build a robust organizational capacity that can help build an alternative and better world for global humanity.

Author’s Note

Paper presented at Social Movements and Global Transformation: Political Economy of the World System XXXVIIIth Annual Conference, April 10-12, 2014, University of Pittsburgh.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. News of the revolts of 1848 reached the United States and American Fourierists supported them and sent delegates to France. The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention also emerged in 1848 as the beginning of the Women’s rights movement in the United States. Later, radical feminism and suffrage movements developed on the global stage.
2. Based on more than four decades of ethnological research findings of Anthropologist Richard Lee, Bruce G. Trigger (2006:25) notes, ‘‘social and political equality in hunter- gatherer societies was not direct expression of human nature. His evidence indicates that hierarchical behavior was actively suppressed in hunter-gatherer societies, where economic and political egalitarianism had great adaptive advantages, as well as in some of the more mobile middle-range societies. Contrariwise, in more complex societies competitive behavior was supported and reinforced by the state.’
3.  Guddina is a concept that explains how Oromo society improves itself by creating new experiences and adding them to its existing cultural life. Gabbina is the next concept that explains the enrichment of cultural experiences by integrating the cumulative past experiences with the contemporary ones through broadening and deepening the system of knowledge and worldview. Without Oromo democracy, there is no sustainable and egalitarian sociocultural development. Ballina refers to the expansion of enriched cultural experiences from one society to another through the reciprocity of cultural borrowing, based on the principles of social equality, fairness, and social justice. The cumulative experiences of guddina, gabbina, and ballina lead to the stage of badhadha. This phase is the stage of wholeness and peace. According the Oromo tradition, this stage indicates the maintenance of peace among Waaqa (God), nature, and society; theoretically speaking, there is no conflict, poverty, disease, or natural calamity because of the balance between Waaqa, nature, and society is maintained. The development of badhadha leads to the stage of hoormata. In this stage, people, animal, and other living things reproduce and multiply because of the availability of conditions such as availability of rain, resources, and peace. The next stage is dagaaga, which is the phase of development cycle that is integrated to maintain an even and sustainable development of society. The final phase is daga-hoora in which full development takes place in the Oromo society and expands to neighboring societies through reciprocity, sharing, and cultural borrowing.

References

Agartan, Tuba, W. Choi, and T Huynh. 2008. ‘‘The Transformation of the Capitalist World: 1750-1850.’’ Pp. 10-49 in Making Waves: Worldwide Social Movements, 1750-2005, edited by William G. Martin, Coordinator. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Amenta, Edwin, Elizabeth Chiarello, and Yang Su. 2010. ‘‘The Political Consequences of Social Movements.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 36:287-307.

Anderson, Perry. 1979. Lineage of Absolutist State. London, UK: Verso.
Arrighi, Giovanni. 1994. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London, UK: Verso.

Baissa, Lemmu. 1971. ‘‘The Democratic Political System of the Galla [Oromo] of Ethiopia and the Possibility of its Use in Nation-building.’’ MA Thesis, George Washington University, Washington, DC.

Baissa, Lemmu. 1993. ‘‘The Political Culture of Gada: Building Blocks of Oromo Power.’’ Paper Presented at the Oromo Studies Association Conference, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, July 31–August 1.

Blaser, Mario, H. Feit, and Glenn McRAE. 2004. ‘‘Indigenous Peoples and Development Processes: New Trains of Struggle.’’ Pp. 1-25 in The Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization, edited by M. Blaser, H. A. Feit, and G. McRAE. London, UK: Zed Press.

Buechler, Steven M. 2011. Understanding Social Movements: Theories from the Classical Era to the Present. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Bush, Caleb M. 2008. ‘‘Reformers and Revolutionaries: The Rise of Anti-systematic Movements and the Paradox of Power, 1848-1917.’’ Pp. 50-81 in Making Waves: Worldwide Social Movements, 1750-2005, edited by William G. Martin, Coordinator. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Bush, Caleb M. and R. Morris. 2008. ‘‘Empires Crumble, Movements Fall: Antisystemic Struggle, 1917-1968.’’ Pp. 82-127 in Making Waves: Worldwide Social Movements, 1750-2005, edited by William G. Martin, Coordinator. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Cairns, James and Alan Sears. 2012. The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-first Century. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto.

Choudry, Aziz. 2015. Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movement. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

Connell, Raewyn. 2007. ‘‘The Northern Theory of Globalization.’’ Sociological Theory 25: 368-85.

De Sousa Santos, Bonaventura. 2007. ‘‘Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledge.’’ Review XXX:45-89.

Frank, Andre G. 1978. World Accumulation, 1492-1789. New York: Monthly Review Press. Gamson, William, Bruce Fireman, and Steven Rytina. 1982. Encounters with Unjust Authority. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press.

Gaventa, John. 1993. ‘‘The Powerful, the Powerless, and the Experts: Knowledge Struggles in the Information Age.’’ Pp. 21-40 in Voices of Change, edited by Peter Mark, Mary Brydon Miller, Budd Hall, and Ted Jackson. London, UK: Bergin and Garvey.

Hall, Thomas D. and James V. Fenelon. 2009. Indigenous Peoples and Globalization: Resistance and Revitalization. 5th ed. Boulder, CO: Paradigms.

Haraway, D. J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Harding, Sandra. 1993. ‘‘Introduction: Eurocentric Scientific Illiteracy—A Challenge for the World Community.’’ Pp. 1-22 in The ‘‘Racial’’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, edited Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David. 2006. Spaces of Global Capitalism. London, UK: Verso.

Heaney, Thomas W. 1993. ‘‘If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em: The Professionalization of Participatory Research.’’ Pp. 41-46 in Voices of Change, edited by Peter Park, Mary Brydon-Miller, Budd Hall, and Ted Jackson. London, UK: Bergin and Garve.

Hybel, Alex Roberto. 2010. The Power of Ideology. New York: Routledge.

Jalata, Asafa. 1996. ‘‘The Struggle for Knowledge: The Case of Emergent Oromo Studies.’’ The African Studies Review 39:95-123.

Jalata, Asafa. 2001. Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jalata, Asafa. 2010. Contending Nationalisms of Oromia and Ethiopia: Struggling for Statehood, Sovereignty, and Multinational Democracy. Binghamton, NY: Global Academic Publishing of Binghamton University.

Jalata, Asafa. 2013. ‘‘Indigenous Peoples and the Capitalist World System: Researching, Knowing and Promoting Social Justice.’’ Sociology Mind 3:156-78.

Jalata, Asafa. 2016. Phases of Terrorism in the Age of Globalization: From Christopher Columbus to Osama bin Laden. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jalata, Asafa and Harwood Schaffer. 2013. ‘‘The Oromo Gadaa/Siqqee Democracy and the Liberation of Ethiopian Colonial Subjects.’’ Alternative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 9:277-95.

Kassam, Aneesa. 1994. ‘‘The Oromo Theory of Social Development.’’ Pp. 19-40 in Between the State and Civil Society in Africa: Perspective on Development, edited by T. Mkandawire and E. E. Osagahae. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA.

Kelly, Hilarie Ann. 1992. ‘‘From Gada to Islam: The Moral Authority of Gender Relations among the Pastoral Orma of Kenya.’’ PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.

Kumsa, Kuwee. 1997. ‘‘The Siiqqee Institution of Oromo Women.’’ The Journal of Oromo Studies 4:115-52.

Legesse, A. 1973. Gada: Three Approaches to the Study of African Society. New York: Free Press. Legesse, A. [2000] 2006. Oromo Democracy: An Indigenous African Political System. Lawrenceville, NJ: The Red Sea Press.

Lepisa, Dinsa. 1975. ‘‘The Gada System of Government and Sera Cafee Oromo.’’ LLB Thesis, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

MaAdam, D., J. D. McCarthy, and M. N. Zald, eds. 1996. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures and Cultural Framings. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, William. 2008. ‘‘Introduction: The Search for Anti-systemic Movements.’’ Pp. 1-9 in Making Waves: Worldwide Social Movements, 1750-2005, edited by William G. Martin, Coordinator. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital. Edited by F. Engels. New York: International.

McAdam, Doug. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

McCarthy, John D. and Mayer N. Zald. 2001. ‘‘The Enduring Vitality of the Resource Mobilization Theory of Social Movements.’’ Pp. 533-65 in Handbook of Sociological Theory, edited by Jonathan H. Turner. New York: Kluwer Academic.

McGovern, Seana. 1999. Education, Modern Development, and Indigenous Knowledge. New York: Garland.

McGregor, Deborah. 2004. ‘‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainable Development: Towards Coexistence.’’ Pp. 72-91 in The Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization, edited by M. Blaser, H. A. Feit, and G. McRAE. London, UK: Zed Press.

Melucci, A. 1980. The new social movements: A theoretical Approach. Social Sciences Information/Information sur les Sciences Sociales, 19, 199-226. Retrieved from http:// dx.doi.org/10.1177/053901848001900201

Melucci, A. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Mutua, Makau. 2008. Human Rights: A political and Cultural Critique. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Pierre, Bourdieu. 1986. The Forms of Capital by Pierre Bourdieu 1986 – Marxists Internet Archive, Pierre Bourdieu, p. 1. Accessed December 24, 2014 (http://marxists.org/refer ence/subject/philosophy/works/fr/bourdieu-forms-capital.htm).

Piven, Frances and F. Richard Cloward. 1979. Poor People’s Movements. New York: Vintage.

Quan, H. L. T. 2012. Growth against Democracy: Savage Developmentalism in the Modern World. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Rahman, M. A. 1993. ‘‘The Theoretical Standpoint of Participatory Action-research.’’ Pp. 13-23 in Action and Knowledge: Breaking the Monopoly With Participatory Action— Research, edited by Orlando Fals-Borda and M. A. Rahman. New York: Apex Press.

Rajagopal, Balakrishnan. 1999. ‘‘International Law and the Development Encounter: Violence and Resistance at the Margins.’’ Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law) 93:16-27.

Rajagopal, Balakrishnan. 2003. International Law from Below. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rajagopal, Balakrishnan. 2006. ‘‘Counter-hegemonic International Law: Rethinking Human Rights and Development as a Third World Strategy.’’ Third World Quarterly 27:767-83.

Rodney, Walter. 1972. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University.

Rostow, W. W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Smelser, Neil J. 1962. Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: The Free Press.
Smith, Jackie. 2008. Social Movements for Global Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University.

Smith, Jackie and Dawn Wiest. 2012. Social Movements in the World-system: The Politics of Crisis and Transformation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Snyder, Louis L. 1976. Varieties of Nationalism: A Comparative Study. Hinsdale, IL: The Dryden Press.

Solway, Jacqueline, ed. 2006. The Politics of Egalitarianism. New York: Berghahn Books. Third World Network. 1993. ‘‘Modern Science in Crisis: A Third World Response.’’

Pp. 484-518 in The ‘‘Racial’’ Econonomy of Science: Toward a Democratic Futured, edited by Sandra Harding. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Tilly, Charles. 1988. ‘‘Social Movements, Old and New.’’ Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change 10:1-18.

Touraine, A. 1981. The Voice and the Eye. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Trigger, Bruce G. 2006. ‘‘All People Are (Not) Good.’’ Pp. 21-29 in The Politics of Egalitarianism, edited by Solway Jaqueline. New York: Berghahn Books.

Van Cott, Donna Lee. 2007. ‘‘Latin America’s Indigenous Peoples.’’ Journal of Democracy 18:127-42. Retrieved January 20, 2016 (http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth1⁄40&type1⁄4summary&url1⁄4/journals/journal_of_democracy/v018/18.4van-cott.htm).

Van Cott, Donna Lee. 2009. Radical Democracy in the Andes. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Van De Burg, William L. 1992. New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1976. The Modern World-system, Vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1983. Historical Capitalism. London, UK: Verso.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1984. The Politics of the World Economy: The State, the Movements and Civilizations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1988. The Modern World System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-economy. San Diego, CA: Sage.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. The Modern World System, Vol. 3, The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-economy, 1730-1840s. New York: Academic. Wright, Erik Olin. 2006. ‘‘Compass Points: Towards a Socialist Alternatives.’’ New Left Review 41:93-124.

Wright, Erik Olin. 2014. ‘‘Real Utopias and the University: An Interview.’’ As told to. Pp. 333-39 in Social Justice and the University: Globalization, Human Rights and the Future of Democracy, edited by Jon Shefner, Harry F. Dahms, Robert Emmet Jones, and Asafa Jalata. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

By Kimberly Curtis

(UN Dispatch) — Nearly a year of protests against land reform issues and heavy-handed government policies is starting to take its toll on Ethiopia, who earlier this month announced a six-month state of emergency. Often hailed as a rising star and economic stronghold of Africa, the growing discontent highlights the limits of authoritarian development as well as the hypocrisy of the West when it comes to human rights abuses.

The protests started last November following the announcement of the government’s new plan to expand the capital of Addis Ababa into the surrounding countryside that is mainly inhabited by the Oromo ethnic group. Despite being the largest ethnic group in the country, the Oromo have long complained that they are economically marginalized in favor of the Tigray, who make up less than 10 percent of the population but dominate the government. Because of this, the plan to expand the capital was viewed as a naked land grab by the government, designed to marginalize the Oromo even further.

Even though the government eventually relented and cancelled the capital expansion plans in January, the protests revealed the growing discontent between the people and the government’s development policies. Ethiopia has recorded impressive economic growth since ostensibly moving to a multiparty democratic system in 1991, averaging an annual 10.2 percent GDP growth between 2006 and 2015. But that growth is distributed unevenly among the population. As Dr. Awol Allo pointed out last year, economic growth has consistently pushed Oromo farmers of their land without adequate compensation or any real plan to include them as part of the new economy.

The issue is not new – Addis Ababa itself was originally an Oromo village – but more than two decades with no sign of reform are finally pushing Ethiopians to protest. And the Oromo are not alone. Protests have also erupted among the Amhara, Ethiopia’s second largest ethnic group over the administration of some of their ancestral land. Combined, the two groups make up more than 60 percent of Ethiopia’s nearly 100 million population and the protests make for a serious problem for the government.

However the government’s response to the protests has only fanned the flames further as several violent crackdowns have left at least 500 dead. After the state of emergency was declared, at least 1,600 people were detained in connection with the protests.

The state of emergency also cracks down on an already limited independent press as watching or listening to “outside forces” including Voice of America, German Radio and a handful of Diaspora stations is now illegal, as is using social media to post updates on the status of things inside the country. Any speech or use of symbols connected with the protests – such as the crossed arms gesture made famous at the Rio Olympics by Ethiopian marathoner Feyisa Lilesa – are now grounds for a three to five year prison sentence as well. And rather than acknowledge the underlying issues upsetting protesters, the government has taken to blaming outside actors such as Eritrea and Egypt for stoking the unrest.

Runner Lelisa Feyissa at the Rio Olympics. Screengrab

Because of the imbalance of economic opportunity within the country and repressive human rights abuses, Ethiopia itself is a major source of migrants. However not all choose to head towards Europe as many head to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states in search of better work while others head to South Africa. But the focus of the West on keeping Ethiopian migrants out even in the face of growing political persecution means that the West is sacrificing what political leverage it could have as its priorities are made clear.

Ethiopia has long been a “donor darling” and a popular partner in the global war on terror, but the investments made in these areas has required both the West to look away from some of the country’s less appealing realities. As the protests drag on and calls for regime change increase, it is becoming clear that such an approach is no longer a feasible option as the risk of chaos in the Horn of Africa becomes a real possibility.

By Annie Boyajian, contributor

Washington, DC (The Hill) –When Congress adjourned in September, it had failed to vote on resolutions on Ethiopia (S.Res. 432/H.Res. 861).

When it returns, it should pass them without delay.

Ethiopia, an important security partner and ally, is heading for crisis. The country is suffering its worst unrest in years in response to the government’s intensifying abuses and restrictions on freedoms, as documented by Freedom House.

On Oct. 8, for the first time in the ruling government’s 25-year history, a state of emergency was declared. Thousands of people have since been detained.

The pending resolutions condemn the killing and arrests of protestors and journalists by security forces and call on the U.S. government to review security assistance and democracy strategies for Ethiopia. They are an important first step in addressing the crisis in Ethiopia, and a needed pivot from current inaction by the U.S. government.

They should be passed for these reasons.

1. Tensions are worsening.

Unrest began in November 2015, sparked by the government’s plan to expand the capital by seizing land from farmers in Oromia.

This region produces most of the nation’s wealth and is home to the Oromo, Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group — and one of its most marginalized.

After security forces brutally responded to peaceful demonstrations, protests expanded, encompassing abuses and restrictions on freedoms and the dominance of Tigrayan elites in the country’s political and economic structures.

The ruling political coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), is led primarily by members of the Tigray ethnic group, which comprises about 6 percent of the population. Ethiopia’s constitution commits the EPRDF to uniting Ethiopia’s more than 80 ethnic groups.

Instead, the EPRDF’s policies have fueled ethnic divisions and distributed economic wealth and political power to the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and political loyalists.

Following the 2005 elections, when the opposition won a third of the seats in parliament, the EPRDF clamped down violently, jailing opposition and enacting laws effectively eliminating independent media and civil society work on human rights, governance and elections issues. The EPRDF has continued to consolidate power, “winning” all 547 seats in parliament in 2015.

Before the state of emergency, the situation was already serious. More than 500 were killed and tens of thousands injured, arrested or disappeared.

The state of emergency — the full text of which is still not public — makes tensions worse. It imposes a strict curfew, travel restrictions on foreign diplomats, limitations on social media, and prohibitions on protests and opposition-supported television channels.

Security forces are going house-to-house searching for violators.

2. U.S. policy hasn’t worked.

The severity of the situation is not disputed, but some policymakers argue private pressure would be better than public resolutions.

Unfortunately, private pressure for the last decade has yielded few results.

Instead of relaxing restrictions to allow critical voices, Ethiopia has tightened them.

The Obama administration’s shifting positions on Ethiopia have proved ineffective. The State Department’s human rights reports document intimidation of political opposition, but last year Undersecretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman praised Ethiopia as a democracy with free and fair elections.

One day later, she clarified that “there are concerns that remain about whether the election will be free and fair and credible,” before then issuing a fuller clarification stating that Ethiopia “has a long road to full democracy.”

Since then, the State Department has expressed “concern about recent clashes,” called for dialogue with the Oromo community and was “troubled” by the recent state of emergency, but has remained silent at other key moments.

The State Department’s inconsistency and frequent public silence seem to embolden the EPRDF.

In September, the government’s spokesperson bragged, “We will not hire any lobbyists to kill the draft resolution. We have many USG officials that support our government, so we do not need additional lobbyists.”

He dismissed the resolutions as “a seasonal flu that comes every now and then,” and said he would “rather US officials not put out statements about the protests [or] the loss of lives and destruction of property in connection thereof.”

3. Passage of resolutions provides clear direction for U.S. policy.

The resolutions are mild given the severity of the situation.

But they provide key elements currently missing from our Ethiopia policy: a consistent position on the violence and how to address it; clear direction for specific actions by the executive branch; and a call for the Ethiopian government to allow a “full, credible, and transparent investigation,” the results of which can be used to inform a more robust U.S. response.

The Ethiopian government’s current repression is destructive, not only for the EPRDF, but for Ethiopia’s long-term economic growth and effectiveness as a security partner. In order to thrive, it must uphold the rights enshrined in its international commitments and its own constitution.

Passage of these resolutions will send this message and will provide much-needed direction for addressing the worsening crisis after years of inaction and inconsistency from the U.S.

Boyajian is advocacy manager at Freedom House.

A man attends a prayer session at Biftu Bole Lutheran Church during a prayer and candle ceremony for protesters who died in the town of Bishoftu two weeks ago during Irreecha, the thanksgiving festival of the Oromo people, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, October 16, 2016

ADDIS ABABA (VOA News) — Ethiopian human rights activists, members of opposition parties and those working in the media say their freedom of movement has been severely limited since the government declared a state of emergency three weeks ago. Many are afraid to speak out while others had to stop working.

Ethiopia’s government has insisted the six-month state of emergency — declared so authorities can deal with protests in the Oromia and Amhara regions — does not affect the constitutional rights of citizens.

FILE – In this Sunday, Oct. 2, 2016 file photo, protesters chant slogans against the government during a march in Bishoftu, in the Oromia region of Ethiopia. But while things might seem calm in the streets of Addis Ababa, those perceived as challenging the government’s views say they are often blocked from carrying out their activities.

Assefa Habtewold is the chairman of the opposition All Ethiopian Unity Party. He says it has become almost impossible for his party members to operate.

“We cannot go from region to region and visit our members,” said Habtewold. “We cannot conduct meetings with our members at different districts. All this is prohibited. All in all we cannot make a meeting of more than two persons. Totally our movement is halted. Until the end of the state of emergency we cannot do anything.”

The party, like other opposition parties, says dozens of its members have been detained or are being harassed.

Addis Standard, a weekly independent magazine, announced last week it is suspending its print edition. No printing house is willing to print their magazine following the state of emergency, says editor-in-chief Tsedale Lemma.

“It makes everybody hung onto this unspecified fear of what’s going to happen if this material is published,” said Lemma. “Will it be misunderstood, will it be used against me? So this has a huge impact on doing journalism for us. As we have seen it now with Addis Standard, it even extends to vendors, and printers, and pretty much everyone involved in making a print product.”

Tsedale says the magazine will continue online, despite the country’s internet being mostly switched off.

Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, the Oromo, has been demonstrating for nearly a year demanding more freedom, economic inclusiveness and proper compensation for land disputes. Hundreds have been killed during clashes with police.

Ethiopia’s Simien National Park. Free to use image from Pixabay

(Global Voices) — In November 2015, residents of a small town called Ginchi launched protests against a proposal by Ethiopia’s government to expand Addis Ababa, the capital, into the surrounding farmlands in the Oromia region. The protests have since grown into a movement demanding greater self-rule, freedom and respect for the ethnic identity of the Oromo people, who have experienced systematic marginalization and persecution over the last quarter-century.

In Amhara, the country’s second largest region, protests started in Gonder on July 31 this year, and rapidly devolved from addressing localized identity questions of the Welkait community into a region-wide movement that has spread into numerous other provinces in just four months. Though the large-scale July 31 incident in Gonder marked the first  major confrontation between Amhara protest leaders and the Ethiopian government, the dispute between the Amharas and the regime can be traced back as far as the early 1990s, when the Tigrayan-dominated regime redrew the district boundaries of the Welkait community that belonged to ethnic Amharas into Tigray region. Some Amhara activists have described the ongoing Amhara protest as ‘25 years of anger unleashed’. The protesters in Gonder have also expressed slogans of solidarity for the protests in Oromia.

Although the protests in Oromia and Amhara started for different reasons, they both stem from Ethiopia’s complex identity politics. In both regions, demonstrators are challenging the dominance of elites from one group — the Tigray — in Ethiopian politics. The Tigray make up 6% of the population but dominate the ranks of the military and government, while the Oromo are at 34% and the Amhara represent 27% of the country’s population.

Since November, hundreds of protesters have been killed and thousands arrested. Early this month, at least 52 people were killed at a gathering for the Irreecha holiday in Oromia, after security forces triggered a stampede with smoke bombs and live bullets.

The protests’ amazing spread from Amhara to Oromia Oromia to Amhara seemed to represent an important turning point in the year-old movement challenging the 25-year rule of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the ruling political coalition, which is dominated by Tigrayan ethnic minority elites.

For observers and critics alike, these protests represent a watershed moment in modern Ethiopian political history. In mid-October, the government even declared a six-month state of emergency for the first time in 25 years.

State officials have continued to promise reforms, reaching out to what observers call “friendly opposition figures” like Lidetu Ayalew. Last week, however, there were mass arrests, and the authorities cut off digital communications. State propaganda and mandatory large-scale “training programs” for civil servants seem to signal that the government is struggling to contain the widespread anger and discontent.

Meanwhile, a significant number of the 251,000 members of the Ethiopian diasporacommunity who live in the United States are marking this historical moment by honoring the victims of the violence and holding vigils. More importantly, they have started to contemplate life without the incumbent regime.

As the protests gradually eat away at Ethiopia’s basic political and economic structures, the regime appears more wobbly that ever before. Consequently, the Ethiopian diaspora has convened conferences to discuss regime change, constitutional reforms, and others transitional issues. The conferences are organized by a number of diasporic political groups and individuals who are nevertheless divided along various ethno-national and ideological lines.

Of the events happening now in the Ethiopian diaspora, two prominent conferences stand out.

Oromo Conference for National Consensus, London, UK

The Oromo Conference for National Consensus was a pre-convention gathering at which political groups of the Oromos, the single largest Ethiopian ethnic group, deliberated about the Oromo Leadership Convention scheduled to take place this November in Atlanta, Georgia.

The pre-convention began in London on October 22, 2016, and concluded the following day. While the conference was underway, a division quickly emerged between the Oromo elites in the diaspora regarding the inclusiveness and the framing of the convention planned for Atlanta. The organizers of the Atlanta convention appeared to support the convention’s proceeding as planned, despite remarks by prominent Oromo activists, journalists, and academics, who raised challenging questions and proposed various and complex alternative themes and frames for the convention.

The pre-convention reached a dramatic climax, however, when Liben Wako (a representative of an Oromo political group) caused a firestorm by saying, “The struggle of the Oromos is not to democratize Ethiopia but to rip it into pieces.”

The statement was a remarkable crystallization of the country’s existential crisis, demonstrating that ethnic nationalism remains a potent and unresolved issue in Ethiopia today. In the current heightened ethno-national political climate, these kinds of statements threaten to exacerbate attitudes against non-Oromo Ethiopians who have supported the ongoing protest with the aim of democratizing Ethiopia.

Roadmap for Transition and Constitution Making in Ethiopia

This conference took place on October 22 and 23, 2016, bringing together various individuals and political groups in Washington, D.C. The October event marked the the second time the event was held this year, with the first gathering in April 2016.

Scholars and political groups based in the diaspora presented papers, concept notes, and ideas about the ongoing protests and their repercussions in Ethiopia. Reportedly, most conference participants reached a consensus on an overarching Ethiopian civic national identity, while recognizing various ethnic identities. Most of the papers presented at the conference reflected this agreement.

Broadly speaking, two opposing political groups — ethno-nationalists and civic nationalists — have dominated the rhetoric that’s shaped the two conferences. This dichotomy sometimes breaks down into conflicts between secessionists and unionists.

(NPR) — After a mother killed her four young children and then herself last month in rural China, onlookers quickly pointed to life circumstances.

The family lived in extreme poverty, and bloggers speculated that her inability to escape adversity pushed her over the edge.

Can poverty really cause mental illness?

It’s a complex question that is fairly new to science. Despite high rates of both poverty and mental disorders around the world, researchers only started probing the possible links about 25 years ago.

Since then, evidence has piled up to make the case that, at the very least, there is a connection. People who live in poverty appear to be at higher risk for mental illnesses. They also report lower levels of happiness.

That seems to be true all over the globe. In a 2010 review of 115 studies that spanned 33 countries across the developed and developing worlds, nearly 80 percent of the studies showed that poverty comes with higher rates of mental illness. Among people living in poverty, those studies also found, mental illnesses were more severe, lasted longer and had worse outcomes.

And there’s growing evidence that levels of depression are higher in poorer countries than in wealthier ones. Those kinds of findings challenge a long-held myth of the “poor but happy African sitting under a palm tree,” says Johannes Haushofer, an economist and neurobiologist who studies interactions between poverty and mental health at Princeton University.

As data builds to connect tough economic circumstances with mental struggles, scientists are still trying to answer a trickier question: Which causes which?

There is no easy answer, says psychologist Crick Lund of the University of Capetown, who studies mental health policy. Mental illness is never caused by just one thing. Poverty can be one factor that interacts with genetics, adverse life events or substance abuse.

But so far, the strongest evidence suggests that poverty can lead to mental illness, especially in cases of disorders like depression.

Because scientists can’t experimentally plunge people into poverty to see what happens to their mental health, natural experiments offer one kind of clue. When disasters or tough spells (like losing a job or enduring periods of drought for farmers) destroy financial circumstances, numerous studies show a rise in rates of depression, Haushofer says.

On the flip side, people often get happier after economic windfalls. In a new study, Haushofer and a colleague found that when families in Kenya were given cash grants averaging $700 (nearly twice the amount typically spent per person per year), they reported higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression than they did before they got the money, which they could spend on anything. The larger the cash transfer, the bigger the mental boost. It didn’t matter if the money came in monthly installments or all at once.

Despite the long-held belief that winning the lottery destroys lives as people make bad decisions about how to use the money, Haushofer adds, newer evidence suggests the opposite. In study published this year, researchers in Sweden, reported that lottery winners used fewer anti-anxiety medications and sleeping pills after collecting their payout, suggesting that they became happier.

So how does poverty “get under the skin” or into the brain, Lund asks? Stress is a leading contender. Some studies have found higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in people living in poverty. In Mexican households that received cash grants, found a 2009 study, young children had lower cortisol levels compared to kids from families that didn’t get extra money. Other studies, however, have failed to find any changes in cortisol.

Rates of violence are also higher among people who face economic tension. Living amid violence can exacerbate depression, Lund adds. And studies have found connections between mental illness and poverty-associated conditions, such as not having enough to eat, not making enough money to live on and having a greater chance of developing risks for physical illnesses.

Mental illness may, in some cases, lead people down a road to poverty, Lund says, because of disability, stigma or the need to spend extra money on health care. may play a role, with some evidence suggesting that poverty more often leads to depression while disorders like schizophrenia more often lead to poverty.

Still unclear is how best to break the cycle. Although cash-transfer programs have shown promising improvements to mental health, studies have yet to determine whether those improvements persist in the long-term.

“I think the jury is still out on the extent to which poverty alleviation interventions actually lead to mental health improvements,” Lund says. “It hasn’t been evaluated rigorously enough.”

Data is also lacking on whether mental-health interventions can make a true dent in poverty rates or why some people remain resilient even in extremely challenging circumstances.

“We don’t know whether intervening in depression is also a good poverty intervention,” Haushofer says. Because depression keeps people out of work, treating it should help, but evidence is still lacking.

Better data may be coming. Lund is in charge of an effort called PRIME, a multinational consortium that aims to implement treatment programs for mental disorders in low-resource settings. One project involves tracking efforts to improve access to mental health services in five countries, including Ethiopia, South Africa and Uganda, with preliminary results expected within the next year.

In 2013, the World Health Organization committed to a mental health action plan, with goals of increasing access to services for severe mental health disorders by 20 percent and suicide rates by 10 percent in 135 member countries by 2020.

As for why the mother in China took the lives of her children, no one can say for sure. Similar tragedies happen in wealthy countries, too.

HRLHA’s Appeal to the International Community

October 30, 2016

Crimes against humanity in the Oromo nation have escalated after the State of Emergency was declared on October 8, 2016 by the TPLF.  The Tigray People’s Liberation Front blocked  all means of  communication in order to hide the  heinous crimes it perpetrated all over the Oromo and Amhara regions. According to the unconfirmed information  obtained in Oromia regional state, over 1000 Oromos have been killed and about 40,000 Oromos detained in different places from October 8 – 30, 2016. The HRLHA  has received  a partial list of those killed and detained in the South Oromia Zone in West and Arsi Zones. According to our informants, from October 8 – 30, 2016 , 248 have been killed and 3706 were detained. Most of these were youths.

The following are the names of Oromos among the detainees in Munessa and Digalu districts of Arsii Zone , Oromia

International attention on Ethiopia has been in a continuous ebb and flow since the outbreak of the mass movement that began in November 2015 in Oromia Regional State. Lethal force has been used against the protestors. The Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa and other international human rights agencies such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have repeatedly reminded the International community to stop the vicious human rights abuses in Ethiopia. However the world community has abstained from taking concrete action.

The HRLHA again calls upon the international community to act collectively in a timely and decisive manner – through the UN Security Council and in accordance with the UN charter on a case-by – case basis to stop the Ethiopian government’s assaults on its own citizens before it is too late.The International community has a responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic,humanitarian and other means to protect populations from crimes. If a State is manifestly failing to protect its population, the international community must be prepared to take collective action to protect populations,in accordance with the UN Charter.

Copied To:

• UN Security Council
  Office of the Ombudsperson
  Room DC2 2206
  United Nations
  New York, NY 10017
  United States of America
  Tel: +1 212 963 2671
  E-mail: ombudsperson@un.org

• UN Human Rights Council
  OHCHR address: 
  Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
  Palais Wilson
  52 rue des Pâquis
  CH-1201 Geneva, Switzerland.

• Africa Union (AU)
  African Union Headquarters
  P.O. Box 3243 | Roosvelt Street (Old Airport Area) | W21K19 | Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
  Tel: (251) 11 551 77 00 | Fax:(251) 11 551 78 44
  Webmaster: webmaster@africa-union.org

• African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights
  31 Bijilo Annex Layout, Kombo North District
  Western Region P.O. Box 673 Banjul
  The Gambia
  Tel: (220) 441 05 05, 441 05 06

• The US Department of State Secretarate Secretary
  His Excellency Mr. John Kerry
  WASHINGTON, D.C. HEADQUARTERS
  (202) 895-3500
  OFMInfo@state.gov
  Office of Foreign Missions
  2201 C Street NW
  Room 2236
  Washington, D.C. 20520
  Customer Service Center
  3507 International Place NW
  Washington, D.C. 20522-3303

• UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
  The Rt Hon Philip Hammond MP
  Parliamentary
  House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA
  Tel: 020 7219 4055
  Fax: 020 7219 5851
  Email: hammondp@parliament.ukDepartmental
  Street ,
  London, SW1A 2AH
  Tel: 020 7008 1500
  Email: fcocorrespondence@fco.gov.uk

• Minister of Forenien Affairs (Canada)
  His Excellency Stéphane Dion
  Write to:
  Enquiries Service (BCI)
  Global Affairs Canada
  125 Sussex Drive
  Ottawa, ON
  K1A 0G2
  Email: Enquiry Service – On line form
  Canada

• Minister for Foreign Affairs (Sweden)
  Her Excellency Margot Wallström
  Switchboard: +46 8 405 10 00
  Street address: Rosenbad 4
  Postal address: SE 103 33 Stockhol

• Minister of Foreign Affairs (Normway)
  His Excellency BørgeBrende
  Ministry of Foreign Affairs
  E-mail: post@mfa.no
  Phone: + 47 23 95 00 00
  Address: 7. juniplassen 1, N-0032 Oslo