The Peasant and the State

This volume brings together a number of studies on rural Ethiopia written by the author in recent years and offered as a contribution to the emerging debate on agrarian change in the country. The broad time frame for the work is the last half-century of modern Ethiopia, from the 1950s to the beginning of the 2000s, a period which coincides politically with the country's three regimes, namely the imperial regime of Haile Sellassie, which was replaced by a military-Stalinist junta known as the Derg, and the present regime which came to power after overthrowing the latter. Over this half century much has changed in the country but much also remains the same. Similarly, while the three political regimes differ radically in a number of significant respects, they also have many things in common, particularly in their relations to the peasantry, their quest for a strong presence in the countryside, and, in some respects, in their approach to development management.