Dynamics of institutionalized competition in the geography of inter-ethnic rivalry: The case of the Jarso and the Girhi in Eastern Ethiopia

Historical and socio-political precedents

Prior to the referendum, the Jarso and the Girhi had a longstanding history of conflict and peaceful relationships. Their conflict is generally rooted in the politics of asymmetry that the imperial agents introduced in the area following the incorporation of the Jarso–Girhi territory into the Ethiopian empire at the turn of the twentieth century. The imperial agents reorganized the traditional socio-political system of exploitation and exaction. In this process, the imperial rulers constituted a political administrative structure that allowed the Girhi traditional chiefs to gain dominance over both the ordinary Jarso and Girhi community members. This order of dominance and subordination was somewhat changed during the Italian occupation when the Jarso were able to have their own garad (appointed clan chief or leader). With the downfall of the imperial regime, the Jarso and the Girhi entered another phase of inter-communal disturbance. The Dergue system destroyed the feudal landholding system that provided the Girhi chiefs with the upper hand in controlling land and running local socio-political affairs. The relatively better positions that the Jarso community members obtained during the Dergue period made the Girhi feel alienated and excluded. While living in a social context full of discontent, frustration and grievances, the two groups were drawn into the Ethio–Somali War of 1977 to 1978 that disrupted their area. With Somalia’s invasion of Ethiopia, the Jarso and the Girhi entered another critical phase of violence connected to the predatory behaviours of the insurgents then operating in their territory. The consequence was the 1982 to 1983 Jarso–Girhi violence that caused considerable damage to the life of both communities. The two communities experienced more violent encounters in 1992, which caused massive destruction including deaths, displacements and the destruction of properties (Hussein et al., 2014). The community members’ estimate of the total number of deaths from both groups is upto 700. The 1992 violence took place over six to nine months, but the effort to effect inter-communal reconciliation took over a year.

The contested Jarso–Girhi territory was, both during the imperial and Dergue regimes, under the administration of the Jijiga province. With the downfall of the Dergue regime in May 1991, the Ethiopian administrative provinces were re-drawn into ethnically-based regions. Two of the regions formed through the process were Region Four (Oromiya) and Region Five (Somali Region). All of the territories under the Dergue’s Jijiga sub-province were incorporated into Region Five, including the Jarso–Girhi territory. The Jarso–Girhi territory became part of the Jijiga District. The formation of regions following the downfall of the Dergue regime created ethnic frontier areas and new identity concerns, on the basis of which controversial ethno-territorial claims were made. The situation revealed the role of historical processes, institutional environment and elite actions in shaping ethnic schema and cueing their activation (Hale, 2008). The Jarso are Oromo, but as a territorial community they had long lived in close proximity with the Somali clans, mainly the Girhi. Changes in the political order of the country evoked in them new demands framed on the view that they are people with their own identity and a history of economic and political trajectories. They expressed the desire to improve their political and administrative conditions through the self-determination framework that they, like other people in the country, were granted in the constitution. They did not only re-articulate their identity, but advanced an ethno-political demand that contained expressions that reflected their vision to gain a powerful hold over ‘an ethno-geographical space of their own’ and the re-allocation of that space into the Oromiya Regional State, predominantly inhabited by a group with whom they had identified themselves. It is this social and political pressure that generally made the Jarso–Girhi frontier area a site of identity-based contestation. The identity-based territorial disputes that occurred in the area necessitated dispute resolution through a local referendum arranged in October 2004. This ultimately resulted in the formation of the Chinaksen District of the Oromiya Region and the Tulli-Guled District of the Somali Region (See Kefale, 2010).

The Jarso–Girhi referendum-based competition over administrative localities is fundamentally rooted in historical encounters and their interpretations. The two communities have long lived together. At the same time, they crossed various critical junctures at which the strength and continuity of their coalition and solidarity were tested. The referendum was arranged and carried out within post-conflict societies with fresh memories of a violent past. For the Jarso–Girhi people the framing of historical narratives about the past and the repositioning of it in relation to the present (McGrattan, 2014) became dominant. The clan members’ narratives about their past history of violent conflicts generally suggest that their problems are complex and multilayered. Profound inter-group prejudices rooted in a long-lived history of conflict generated inter-group mistrust. The two groups sometimes use incompatible historical frames to evaluate past encounters. For example, the Girhi see the garad-based land management in the imperial period as a unifying practice; for the Jarso, the feudal land management system was oppressive. For the Jarso clan members the downfall of the imperial and Dergue regimes and the introduction of ethno-federalism and the subsequent local referendum are seen as opportunities towards socio-political and economic improvements, but for the Girhi those conditions are seen as circumstances that jeopardized the unity and harmony between the two groups.

Like other aspects of a competitive electoral environment, the fact that the fate of the disputed localities would be determined by the actions of the voters posed practical and moral challenges. The respondents’ narratives about the situation revealed that each group had to rethink what should be done to utilize its internal and external resources to constitute a strong challenger in the competition. This reveals how an ethnic schema is shaped and their cues activated (Hale, 2008) with the help of cognitive mechanisms, such as through collective action frames and framing processes (Snow et al., 2004). During the local referendum, the communities resorted to past memories that set histories of conflict into motion and created new conditions for problematic inter-group relationships. The movement organizers from both groups re-activated those memories as important instruments of struggle in the new context of competition. Though the communities’ history of past injustice, inequality and fears were important in evoking popular incentives for collective action, it was their contemporary concerns that proved more important in activating the social psychology of contention. This is suggestive of the view that changes including creating institutional conditions for competitions and for expression for group interest may intensify the situational availability of ethnicity to grasp uncertain situations (Hale, 2008). Their situations during the competition were built from a mix of threats and opportunities. Again, their threats were connected to a struggle for privileged access to tangible resources and symbolic power in what can be generally framed as an environment of competitive ethnicity (Bergmann, 2003), while their opportunities were connected to the legitimizing ideologies behind the socio-political and institutional recognitions of their identities and the freedom to engage in claim-making competition; hence, the role of institutionally embedded provisions in shaping collective action and nurturing the contenders’ competitive framing processes (Klandermans and Roggeband, 2007; Snow et al., 2004).

This study, like other similar studies on inter-ethnic relationships in Ethiopia (see Adugna, 2011; Feyissa, 2010), suggests that what are usually seen as positive changes such as a shift in regimes and new opportunities or possibilities that ensued from those changes evoke identity concerns and provide frames that can serve mobilizational purposes. In support of this, Olzak (2004: 676) states that: ‘Political shifts in regimes or power arrangements that offer new opportunities for formerly disadvantaged ethnic minorities within the newly democratizing states can encourage further fragmentation of ethnic movements’. It was noted during this study that the political and social processes that drove historical dynamics and tied the present with the past continue to bear on the current relationships between the two competing communities.

The Oromiya National Regional State’s claim to regain the Jarso-dominated localities from the Somali National Regional State can, however, be taken as a claim based on the principles of corrective justice (Meisels, 2009). It is a demand for corrective justice because the claim was made on the principle that the Oromo people are being administered under the regional state where they became a minority and are potentially or practically subjected to unfair administration. On their part, caught in a long-accumulated sense of inter-communal mistrust, the Jarso clan members expressed their fear that they would suffer economic, social and political disadvantage under Somali-dominated political-administrative structures. They felt that the past history of conflict and unhealed wounds such as a sense of longstanding injustice would make them more vulnerable in the socio-political contexts where the Somali had been placed at a commanding level within the political, legal and economic institutions of the regional state. On the basis of social dominance theory (Verkuyten, 2005), one can assert that the Jarso’s fear of vulnerability situated in a climate of uncertainty and confusion is logical because, in a situation where social systems are likely to place groups at asymmetrical positions, the privileged group is likely to exercise dominance in cultural, social, political and other essential spheres. According to this theory, the dominant groups are likely to control the processes and mechanisms for establishing and maintaining a differential hierarchy since in most conditions the political, cultural, social and economic institutions are invariably identified by them. The Jarso had to raise historically based and contemporarily informed concerns about their vulnerability, and justifications as diverse as possible, to escape from the chance of getting caught up in what they termed ‘sustained exclusion’. At the root of their communal arousal was the role of a sense of sustained exclusion in enforcing collective identities. On the Girhi or Somali side as well, claims over territory were set in historical claims such as the Jarso–Girhi territory’s historical placement within the Jijiga province during the country’s imperial and military regimes. The territorial restructuring of the polity through an ethno-federal arrangement fuelled identity-based divisions and raised the stakes or values of inter-communal conflict. As Starr (2005) puts it, the situation raised the salience, importance and symbolic value of the occupied territory, and discursive as well as practical competitions with visible compatible claims of interests and preferences.

Institutional preconditions for regulating contentious episodes

The government seems to have had an adequate awareness that the referendum meant to decide the fate of the administrative localities might be affected by identity factors. Because of this, it made multiple constitutional and security preparations to make the referendum as peaceful and smoothly run as possible. The timetable allocated for the entire referendum process extended from 20 Meskeram 1997 (30 September 2004) up to 23 Tikimt 1997 (2 November 2004). This period of time was set to accomplish various activities. The activities include training on the local referendum, facilitating conditions for the registration of voters, displaying the registration for the public, providing clarification to the voters at their localities about the local referendum, running the local referendum, counting voters’ voices, announcing the outcome of the voting at polling stations and announcing the voting outcome at the national level.

The community members as well as officers representing the two regions generally agreed that the referendum set to settle Jarso–Girhi contestation met fundamental institutional preconditions and technical procedures. Among these were pre-referendum identification of disputed localities; preparation and distribution of registration cards for electors issued by the National Electoral Board of Ethiopia; provision of time between the registration and election time; supervision of the overall technical and procedural issues of the electoral process by a federal committee constituted of citizens who did not belong ethnically to either of the contesting ethnic groups; and posting posters that illustrated procedures, the cares to be taken and the symbols representing the two regional states that laid claim to the localities. The referendum deadline was also set. In addition, rules that governed the decisions and measures to be taken over the constituencies for which disputants had not registered and appeared for competition were also clearly established prior to the voting date. The provision made was that, in the event of one or both of the disputing regions not making an electoral claim over one or the other localities in the disputed territory, the concerned locality would be maintained by the district that was governing the locality prior to the referendum. For example, the Oromiya National Regional State declined its claim over two localities, Karadile One and Karadile Two, prior to the election date and that decision automatically placed the declined localities under the Somali National Regional State. The national federation document suggested also an automatic decision to cancel the referendum outcome or rerun the referendum over two contested Jarso–Girhi localities, Golmayyo and Galbed Jidle, because the electoral board believed that the voting at these localities lacked some points of credibility. To protect the security of the people and to prevent electoral violence, the federal government enforced disarmament and deployed the security forces so that the people would turn out and vote freely and confidently. Policing the voting areas was a worthwhile act of statutory responsibility that inherently implicates the government’s understanding or fear that a local referendum conducted in an environment of politicized ethnicity (Wimmer and Schetter, 2003) and ethnicized territory can lead to violence.

Interaction of movement structures and processes with contextual constraints

The Jarso–Girhi competition during the 2004 referendum created an environment in which identity issues, territorial questions, socio-political structures in the society, collective interests and movement strategies interacted. The constitutional provision to settle the disputes through a local referendum fuelled micro-dynamics of claim-making and mobilization in which each party in the competition took actions and selected strategies that it thought would afford its movement leverage and influence within the communities. The event revealed a popular arousal in which grievance framing, goal setting and movement mobilization showed dynamic interactions. Each group is said to have appealed to the constitutional provisions to justify its movement and to increase its bargaining capability. To deal with the tensions, ambiguities and contradictions, a high-profile political delegation reportedly composed of Hassen Ali, the first president of the Regional State of Oromiya, Tamirat Layne, the prime minster of the transitional government, the late Dr Abdulmejid Hussein and Hassen Mohammed, the former head of the East Hararghe Zone, gathered the Jarso community at Chinaksen’s football field. The political officers thought that the community members would raise petty matters of administration and governance. In contrast to their expectation, they met a gathering that hailed the need to be incorporated into the Oromiya Regional State.

To balance the vast array of grievances and demands expressed by the Jarso, the political officers emphasized the long history of inter-communal relationships between the Jarso and other Somali clans in the area. The Jarso representatives are said to have refused to accept the political proposal to keep them within the Somali Regional State on cultural and linguistic grounds, and the meeting ended without fulfilling its mission. Some of the Jarso elders were then reportedly called to Addis Ababa and asked to accept the reunification proposal. Having heard the political discourses of unification and many promises regarding political and economic inclusion, the elders reportedly convinced their community members to accept political-administrative placement under the Somali Regional State. Three traditional elites from the Jarso community, reportedly including Ibrahim Abdi Elemo from the Wolebu sub-clan, Takko Abdillahi Hamerre from Dhanqa and Abdulhakim Hassen from the Sayo sub-clan, reportedly managed to make their way into the Somali Regional State’s House of Federation. This is said to have created temporary satisfaction and calm, but grievances continued to appear regarding a lack of infrastructure, justice, good governance and accountability. Towards the end of 2004, the clans again entered another politically motivated and ethnically-based phase of inter-group rivalry. An ethnically-based mobilization of people and resources continued to move the ethnic clans into the political and administrative structure of the regional states where their major ethnic groups are found. In the case of Jarso, the desire was to move the Jarso-dominated localities into the Oromia Regional State. This happened during the same period when disagreements, dissatisfactions, clashes and a sense of independence grew at other frontiers where ethnic clans disputed over administrative, institutional and identity issues. The key Jarso leaders who represented the Jarso people’s desire for political-administrative relocation into the Oromiya Region reportedly included Abdullahi Abdi Bahadon from the Sayyo sub-clan, Musa Abba Kaya from the Oromo sub-clan, Fuad Ahmed Bakkal (Fu’ad Jarso) from the Wollabu sub-clan and Ibrahim Ali Boss (Faras) from the Dhanqa sub-clan. These community leaders reportedly travelled to Addis Ababa and met with senior political authorities regarding their peoples’ political administrative standing. This can be taken as a movement process that aimed at ‘creating sympathy, support, and goodwill that may convert into useful, practical resources of various sorts’ (Gamson, 2004: 249). The Jarso elders’ actions were aspects of conscious strategic outreach meant to create linkages between the macro factors such as political opportunity and discursive fields, and local processes and practices (Olzak, 2004). They are said to have employed framing strategies that contained ranges of justifications for ‘separatisim’ as the sole measure to escape what Hale (2008: 161) captures as ‘a perceived danger of exploitation in a union’.

Fears about being dominated created in the Jarso a social-psychological burden that exerted an adverse influence on inter-group relationships. The pervasive ethno-political conditions are said to have conditioned the development and maintenance of negative attitudes towards the potential impacts of the Darood-based socio-political dominance on their collective material, social, political and economic existence. To become competitive over material and psycho-social resources, they thus had decided to strengthen and promote in-group identification and engage in other positive ethno-social comparisons that would raise their social and political self-esteem in the competitive environment. In general, their identity-based competition simply suggests that a group’s conditional sticking to identity and identity-based struggle shows that, in the context of uncertainty, ethnicity has a survival value not only because it provides access to material resources, but also because it enhances social-psychosocial resources.

As contenders, the two groups used framing, the main goal of which was influencing the collective actors’ interpretation of the world by ‘selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequence of actions within one’s present or past environments’ (Snow and Benford, 1992, cited in Della Porta, 1999: 137). For instance, the Jarso’s incentives for a referendum were based on a sense of relative deprivation; and their motivation towards relocation into the Oromiya Regional State was framed on the belief that the relocation would provide them with better access to economic resources and other opportunities. This shows the role of distinct concerns, dynamics and mechanisms in identity-based dispositions and processes (Sarigil and Fazlioglu, 2014). Their experiences generally suggest that creation of collective identity and mobilization of fears or concerns and engagement in framing, re-framing and counter-framing of issues are among the strategies that the contenders generally develop to overcome the potential adverse impacts of constraints on the outcome of the competition (Benford and Snow, 2000). Theories of social movement help to illustrate the factors involved in the process of contention and the mechanisms selected such as framing of issues, mobilization of resources, taking advantage of internal and external opportunities, and aligning of frames to increase participation in competition (Opp, 2009).

The Jarso informants suggested that, in a context in which groups compete over the holding of economic and political dominance, the minority groups had to think of survival and adaptive strategies. Their action suggested that ethnic movement is an adaptive reaction to uncertainty, and the perceived success or power of the group that competes with one’s group evoke reactive mobilization, which is a form of self-adjustment driven by the desire for uncertainty reduction (Hale, 2008). They claimed that the equal opportunity and rights of survival implicated in the constitution provided them with the political opportunity and discursive framework to advance their interests and to express their concerns. In this and other Oromo–Somali frontier areas, the dominant factor that increased the salience of ethnic identity was the changing dynamics of majority-minority status and the potential impact of the situation in creating a setting for socio-economic and political power differentials. Analysis of the social behaviours before and during the referendum suggested that the greater concern was not only an issue of locating and relocating groups into an administrative region or ethno-federal unit by which they preferred to be administered.

The community leaders are said to have regularly appealed to what we call the discourses of possibility enshrined in the national constitution to come out of structural deprivation and inter-communal tension. The constitution that allowed the ethnic groups in the country the right to self-determination and development opportunities seems to have lent a theoretical input for political processes and a favourable ideological repertoire for collective mobilization. The community leaders are said to have referred to the constitutional provisions to actualize what was then described as collective dispositions for change. This is true of social movement leaders and activists who, after accessing institutionally embedded relevant frames, attempt to effectively actualize the legitimacy to set them in motion (Morris and Staggenborg, 2004). This is indicative of how in the event of identity-based movements and in the effort to bring about social changes, norms of permissive institutional context and the movement’s identity or rhetoric interact dynamically (Van Cott, 2005).

Interactions between institutional structures and societal strategies

In the Jarso–Girhi competition over territory, various social processes, identity issues, symbolic and institutional practices, repertoires of contention and framing intersected and influenced one another to cause what students of social movements conceptualize as complex episodes of contention (McAdam et al, 2004). As in southern Ethiopia, where it was set similarly to resolve the long-standing disputes over resources between the Boran and Somali clans such as the Garre (Adugna, 2011), the referendum arranged to settle the Jarso -Girhi disputes over the status of administrative localities dominated the local political and social rhetoric and stirred up the local elites representing the competing groups. The situation obliged the local political-administrative offices to take up the issue seriously. The connection between ethnicity and territory interacted dynamically and served as tools of mobilization. Again, collective attribution of threat or opportunity prevailed. The political opportunity structures perceived by the competing communities as being supportive of their case were constituted predominantly of the democratic policy statements full of discourses about ethnic rights to determine their fate and the corresponding local political climate that tolerated them. The social-psychological base of mobilization, for example, on the part of the Jarso was a general sense of deprivation and alienation and the determination to overcome the perceived causes of their deprivation through organized movement. Analysis of the respondents’ reflections suggested that these were done to furnish the community members with a sense of identity and purpose. The related ideological and moral base of their mobilization was that they can enhance their competitive capacity via collective means. Mobilization was generally seen both as a means of organizing social movement and as a mechanism to exhibit the extent of their strength and determination, to both their perceived challengers and supporters. The situational context, that is, competition over administrative localities, seems to have boosted the symbolic value of territory and the value as well as intensity of identity. It also revealed the existence of a fascinating interplay of issues, framing structures and mobilization strategies.

Inquiry into the nature and process of competition revealed that elements of the political opportunity structure and social-psychological base available for the Jarso and the Girhi included the national policies regarding decentralization, constitutionally based entitlement of ethnic groups to resources, and the availability of institutional and political environment to translate the provisions into practice. These political and discursive conditions provided the groups with ideas and concepts to name and frame their movements. It is important to point out that the respondents’ retrospective memories suggested that once the groups entered the ‘zone of competition’, the political opportunity structures and processes available for the Jarso were perceived as a threat by the Girhi, and vice versa. The interactions and processes that ensued intensified the emotional and motivational foundations of competition. The reality was generally supportive of the view that an institutionalized recognition of ethnic groups’ access to natural resources such as land, ethnic groups’ control over local political affairs and other aspects of devolving power from the centre to the periphery opens the window of opportunity for the expression and mobilization of old as well as new ethnic grievances that make popular political and social practices intensively competitive (e.g. Alonso and Ruiz-Rufino, 2007). A deeper analysis into the socio-political cultures and dispositions that gained dominance in the system of competitive interactions (Zuber, 2012) strongly suggests that identity-based political conflicts, interests and competitions become collectivized and gain the power to trap the community members in competitive and conflictive processes.

The competition involved community actions, i.e. the formation and mobilization of identity groups through discourses rooted in and generated from the social and historical memories of inter-communal relationships and from the discourses of the political opportunity structures. The grassroots manifestations of movements included the demands made, objectives set, strategies chosen, political-administrative discourses reiterated to reinforce communal demands and the social-political orientations shaped as tools of mobilization. The community actions that involved identity-based mobilization and counter-mobilization were found to be examples of popular engagement in extra-institutional action strategies in favour of their demands (Alonso and Ruiz-Rufino, 2007).

Though the principal protagonists were the Jarso and the Girhi, there were also other Oromo and Somali clans that had minority status in the area. In addition, there were citizens who are neither Oromo nor Somali in the Jarso–Girhi towns such as Chinaksen and Qochar. These were internal minorities caught in the political theatre of the competitions between relatively mainstream protagonists that advanced competing historical and indigenous claim over the territory they have long shared. Since the governments of the two regional states were directly or indirectly involved in the competition processes, both the Jarso and the Girhi were trapped in the security dilemma created by what can be generally called ‘a threat posed by the majority dominance’. The very nature of putting people in the mind-set of going into one or the other regional state through a referendum generally kindled a sense of competition over fundamental issues such as territory, identity, values and symbols. The social and political milieu of the competition revealed that conflicts over such socially constructed and emotionally challenging issues increase the saliency of ethnicity. It was this situation that seems to have generally made the competition to become more profound and controversial than conflicts over substantive issues such as land and other resources of economic and social significance (Oberschall, 2007).

The role of indigenous networks and values in the inter-ethnic competition

In addition to the political opportunity structures, the role of the local social and institutional structures was great. Particularly, clanship and customary values are said to have played a significant role in governing the social, economic and political concerns of the two communities. During the referendum, clanship and other kinship factors pre-determined the cleavage structure and served as a powerful organizational framework for mobilizing community members along clannish lines. The event made both communities take an interest in ensuring their survival security through an effort that aimed at achieving a relatively gainful outcome. During the referendum, the contenders thus included not only the mainstream contenders, but also other minorities in the area. They participated in community actions to win as many localities as possible into their ethnically-framed respective regional states. The desire for relocation into the Oromiya Regional State was initia-ted by the Jarso movement organizers, and the Girhi movement organizers followed with a counter-mobilizational project to hold back the impact of the Oromo-motivated political activities in their territory. In the Somali context, the effort was not only to preserve the Jarso-dominated localities, but also to claim such other localities, for example, in the Gursum and Babillie districts, from Oromiya. To win as many localities as possible, the competing communities tried to draw on two forms of resources for mobilization: the internal and external resources. The internal resources involved mobilization of values, stakes and procedures inherent in the long-established bonds of communality. The responsibility was taken by the community-based movement leaders and awareness raisers. The external resources included conditions created by the political opportunity structure such as the political legitimization of the public participating in the referendum and the availability of political-administrative support from the respective regional states. The two forces are said to have reinforced each other. In the Jarso–Girhi territory, the community leaders and the youth are said to have played a central role in mobilizing the other members of the community in the disputed localities to give their votes for the preferred regional state. The local leaders’ decision to approach the political opportunity structure seems to have emerged from the expectation that appealing to pan-ethnic concerns and political legitimization of competition for territorial resources would provide their struggle and competition with more organizational impetus. This thus shows the thrust of symbolic politics theory (Kaufman, 2001), that uncertainty about the outcome of the process of inter-group competitions harnesses the attitudes and actions of the members of the competing groups with political overtones (Hale, 2008).

Interactions between contingent events and precipitating processes

In the Jarso–Girhi competition, the most important elements of community actions were mobilization strategies, framing processes and symbolic practices used to present and justify demands. The context helps explain why and how social movement organizers give social and political problems an ethnicized frame of interpretation and why they foster ethnic identity to rally potential supporters around a goal (Oberschall, 2007; Soeters, 2005). Mobilization was generally based on articulation of grievances, revitalization of identity and provision of incentives. The data suggested that the movement organizers both explicitly and implicitly tried to reach out and gain votes from as diverse community members across the competing clans as possible. In addition to structuring grievances and expressing their causes, social mobilizers identified incentives to persuade the potential followers to approve and reinforce their mobilization. The respondents suggested that in some conditions the movement went to the extent of instrumentalizing electoral or voting incentives to come out advantaged from the contestation. In the framing process, the activists reportedly imposed an incentive structure generally composed of economic, social, moral, political and psychological wellbeing.

The other essential component of the competition process was the framing of issues of territory and identity, and the attempt to increase the powerfulness of its resonance. The mobilizational practices seem to have formed and extended the discursive realm of the competition. Expressions like ‘we compete to save our territory’ were used to coordinate clan members and offer the competition a self-protective tenor. On the Somali side, claim-making on Jarso-dominated localities was framed on sentimentalist discourse of the Jarso as long-standing brothers of the Somali clans: mainly the Girhi. The fact that land ownership and land-based economic dominance were largely under the control of the Girhi elites lent historical legitimacy to their claims over the contested territory. The Jarso seem to have considered the Girhi’s or other Somali’s actions or behaviours during the time as acts of imposing politico-cultural hegemony on them and their own counter movements as acts of escaping or reducing their vulnerability to being trapped in the world of marginality. According to competition theory, conflict and competition arise in a situation where members of ethnic groups make an effort to ‘increase their access to similar sets of political, economic, and social resources’ (Olzak, 2004: 675). The elders clearly remember the psychological, social, cognitive and moral strategies used to influence the way the ordinary people perceive their past, present and future situations. The clan members gave their day-to-day complaints a more political meaning to lodge demands towards better political, economic and societal self-reorganizations. It should be noted, however, that despite efforts at ethnicization of the mobilization process, there were cases where members of the communities emotionally and practically challenged forces of political ethnicity and acted. The influence of other moral and practical forces was immense in affecting decisions. Two indicators of this were the decisions to avoid participation in the local referendum after official registration for voting, and voting for the regional state while clearly knowing that they would become ethnic minorities in that region. This may have happened due to what we call constraining or disorienting dilemmas.

Figure 1 tries to reveal the process towards the local referendum that created self-reinforcing dynamics of its own in a goal-oriented and competitive environment. We call the way the movement organizers framed their past and present situations ethnicized cultural framing simply because the contents of the framing and their intents had ethnic overtones. By implication social institutions, values and practices in the community are activated and re-mobilized to ‘provide the source for collective identity grounded in a sense of communalism’ (Stanfield, 2008: 283). The clans’ respective collective identities also became politicized ethnicized collective identities simply because the clans portrayed themselves as ethnic strugglers and emphasized their ethnic distinctness in the competitive environment that called for goal-oriented actions in a way that reinforced sustained interaction between diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framing (Giugni et al., 1999).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Interactions between contingent events and precipitating processes.

The community-based social institutions and processes are said to have been activated to serve the communities’ competitive interest that was an ‘ethnicized interest’. Our perception is that since they were re-engineered to serve competitive interest, the community-based structures became what we call ethnicized network structures embedded in community. The ethnicization of collective identities, cultural framing and mobilizing structures served the purpose of enhancing the rival clans’ competitive capability. We use the concept constraining and or disorienting dilemma to refer to a significant mixture of diverse uncertainty causing situations that crowded the minds of the competing community members and became a vital catalyst in causing emotional, social and psychological disorientation. The issue of territory was heightened and the threats posed on territorial and social survival were intensified with the aim of evoking and harnessing what can be called ‘a moral, cognitive and emotional package of attitudes’ (Klandermans, 2004: 365) towards the issue. They include troubles and confrontations with the past actual or perceived history of conflict and reconstruction of the past history of grievances and its decisive connection with the present. This tendency to link the past to the present is said to have been practiced more by the Jarso than the Girhi, as the former had to accumulate as many robust justifications and explanations as possible to increase their leverage against incorporation into the Somali Regional State. The data indicates, for example, a situation where due to a lack of confidence in the process and the outcome of the competition, some community members who had registered for selection were unable to make their choices. This situation was also reflected when some community members, mainly the Jarso community members, decided to opt for the Somali Regional State because of deep linguistic, cultural and economic factors that tied them more with the Somali Regional State than with the Oromiya Regional State. In social movement theories, this situation emerges from the interactions between the structural and dynamic opportunities. The structural opportunities included mainly constitutional provisions about the right of groups to raise questions and claims about administrative and political problems. In the context of the Jarso–Girhi competition, dynamic opportunities included ambiguities, contradictions, indecisiveness and strategic dilemma that are said to have affected how individuals as well as groups had to perceive, interpret and react to the intention and behaviours of the competition. ⁴ The groups’ movement behaviours as well as the concerns they raised during the referendum-based competitions revealed that in the context of identity-based competitions identity groups are concerned not only with the past and the present, but also with the future.

Institutional practices and their impact on the symbolic ecology of community

To guide where the community members in the disputed localities should give their vote, the socio-political symbols of the two regional states were used at the referendum sites. On the Somali side, the symbol was a camel. On the Oromiya side, it was a sycamore tree. Deployment of the respective regional administrations’ political symbols in the contested micro-territory, however, reportedly kindled the politics of ethnic identity and revitalized the long-standing inter-clan prejudices about the intention of one to dominate the other. The symbols were, in other words, simply reified into an ethnic designation. For the local people, these symbols literally represented the names of the two major ethnic groups in the regional states, the Somali and the Oromo, and evoked a symbolic, cognitive and emotional frame for political mobilization and the existence of ethnic groups. In other words, the referendum meant for regulating discontents over governance and development concerns stimulated what Adler (2012) captured as collective identity formation and collective action framing. The ethnic movement actors reportedly warned their people against making mistakes that may put at risk their ethnic interests. Overall, the movement and agitation seem to have brought the issue of ethnic identity into the spotlight, a process that in turn seems to have affected conceptions of ethnic identity. What happened virtually validates Kaufman’s (2001) assertion that ethnic politics is largely about manipulating public emotions through symbolic deployments. According to Kaufman, symbols (both discursive and material) offer compelling mechanisms for such manoeuvring. The Jarso–Girhi experience suggests that politicization of cultural and institutional symbols disrupts what has come to be called ‘the symbolic ecology of community’ (Hunter, 2008: 27).

Strong as they are, symbols, according to Kaufman, have both cognitive and emotional impetus. In conditions where elections are staged for people to compete for ensured access to resources, people are certainly exposed to emotion-provoking circumstances that inform their decisions. When entangled in such competitive conditions, ‘people choose by responding to the most emotionally potent symbol evoked’ (Kaufman, 2001: 28). The community-based structures of social and ideological mobilization also interacted with and framed their mobilizational efforts on what was going on in their areas, both with statutory institutions and other actors in the competition. The process is said to have somewhat changed the disputed localities into ‘breeding grounds’ where concerns about who they were as groups were reconceptualized, contested and manoeuvred. The social and political mobilization context created an atmosphere of collective action where the local people entered social-psychological and cognitive processes of re-defining their personal and group identification. The event thus created a situation where the primordial foundation of ethnicity and its instrumental utilization interacted to intensify mobilization and shape collective action, and conditioned the politics of difference framed on ‘we’ and ‘they’ categories. The primordially founded social identification as a member of one or other ethnic group was activated and reactivated to prepare people for collective action. Signs of societal arousal for collective action to determine the fate of their clans in turn served to shape the members’ social identification. The respondents revealed that the creativity of the movement organizers lay in making strategic choices of multiple types. The ethnic movement actors reportedly informed those they mobilized how to act and the timing of their action. For example, one of the strategies that the community movement organizers allegedly used was advising their community members to give positive responses to the lobby-makers in favour of the competing region, but to act the right way at the right time, i.e. on the day of the referendum. An aspect of adversarial attribution in politicized collective identity processes (Simon and Klandermans, 2001) is that the competition is said to have evoked tension and ambivalence in the community members as they dealt with the emotional and identity connotations inherent in assorting oneself with evocative symbols and the future consequence of such self-categorization. Regarding this, ethnic competition theory tellingly asserts that in an inter-group competition context, ethnic mobilization intensifies ‘the levels of competition for valued resources’ and causes group boundaries to become heightened, thereby ‘leading groups to engage in collective efforts to gain access to or defend resources’ (Wilkes and Okamoto, 2002: 2). For their part, Citrin et al. (2001: 87) emphasized that ‘broad attitudes, including feelings of national and ethnic identity, are more likely to determine preferences on specific issues when those predispositions are central to an individual’s self-definition and when they are cued by stimuli associated with the objects of these attitudes’. This is particularly true when ethnic symbols and framing repertoires are systematically used to evoke a connotation of common fate (Hale, 2008).

The social elites who assumed the role of movement organizers are said to have framed their concerns in a manner that reverberated with the community’s past and present societal and political conditions. This is an aspect of sharing grievance or injustice (Rennick, 2013). They seem to have deployed political and social frames to provide interpretative schemes to the community’s lived experiences to mould the opinions and positions of potential followers and to direct their actions. The struggle involved construction of discursive frames and strategies to mobilize public support and legitimize actions. For example, the Jarso complained that their deprivations were rooted in their ethnic distinctness and past asymmetrical relationships, and can be rectified only if they are relocated into the regional state whose political-legal functioning they trusted better. The discourses of democratization and decentralization inherent in the government’s political and developmental discourse also served as strategic framing devices and became an evocative force in the effort to re-orient the community members’ socio-political stance and in shaping a common perception about the causes and consequences of deprivations. It is the nature of principles and processes that promote democratization to create new collective interests and to promote formation of, as well as proliferation of, social movements that usually become contentious politically when they are incompatible with the interests and expectations of other groups (Tilly, 2004). In addition to striving to shape collective awareness about the past and the present conditions of existence, the movement organizers tried to get their constituents to look forward with hope for the outcome of their movement and to maintain internal cohesion to achieve their collective goal. This shows that the culture of framing focused not only on the past, but also dealt with building the motivational foundation of the movement and ensuring the formidability of the mechanisms used to institute the culture of collective action.

The referendum and its outcomes

Issues that remained unresolved through the referendum

The referendum was arranged to resolve disputes over territorial and administrative issues through institutionalized processes that evoked conscious involvement of the local people and political-administrative institutions. However, the referendum could not resolve the problems and created conditions for the emergence of new dimensions of contestation. As elsewhere, where it was implemented (See Fiseha, 2012; Kefale, 2010), the referendum did not achieve the task of matching regional state boundaries with ethnic boundaries. In the study area, and throughout the places where the referendum was conducted, complaints and accusations proliferated against the physical outcome of the referendum. The Somali accused their administrative officers of betrayal as they transferred the Somali’s indigenous territories to Oromiya (see Hagmann and Khalif, 2008). On their part, the Oromo complained that the referendum deprived them of access to their traditional sources of economic, social and symbolic survival such as the Borana indigenous wells and sites of ritual practice (see Adugna, 2011; Tache and Oba, 2009).

Complaints of a similar nature prevail in the Jarso–Girhi area. The identity-based intra-state boundary conflicts between the Jarso and the Girhi sub-clans at Mulisa Iggu and Kalla Rogga are attributable in part to the referendum’s inability to sharply match ethnic boundaries with territorial boundaries. Informants complained that there is a lack of commitment to respecting the physical and administrative boundaries. Demarcation of agricultural areas and other contended physical boundaries evolved to lead only to a new dimension of inter-communal tension. There are enduring historical, economic, social and geographical factors that continue to enforce the continuity of disputes between the two groups and the two regional states that represent them. The Jarso and the Girhi have deep cultural and economic interactions and have settled with each other. In most conditions, it is difficult to distinguish a Jarso from a Girhi particularly in Dida Walled area where the Jarso predominantly use Somali as their mother tongue. This is the result of long years of economic, social and cultural interaction partly generated by the political history of territorialization and control over the people and their territory. At the heart of the longstanding communal tensions between them is the centre-periphery relationship that defined power asymmetry between the centre and the periphery not only through direct control over the periphery, but through local agents who participated in the structuring of centre in the periphery. The imperial system of control over the territory that elevated the Girhi elites created institutional and administrative contexts that caused social structural divisions to occur. The genesis and dynamics of conflict between the two groups are strongly linked to and influenced by state practices (i.e. political and administrative measures) in the area. The successive regimes in Ethiopia took various measures that have changed power relationships, and caused redefinition of economic relationships and the structure of status differences. It is the same underlying tensions that have become more politicized and have ethnicized contestation today. As elsewhere, where similar problems prevail, competition over scarce resources creates uncertainty about future economic and social conditions making territories contentious and the territory a breeding ground for motivation to engage in collective action (Adugna, 2011; Feyissa, 2010; Tache and Oba, 2009).

Inter-regional boundary making in the Oromo–Somali frontier areas is an aspect of accomplishing institutionalized politics of conflict governance and societal control. On the part of the administrative officers, including district administrators and their subordinates, the main factors that offered a justification for promoting boundary making are given here. A stringent physical boundary on the territorial resources that lie between administrative localities regulates spheres of existence, imposes rule of law over property ownership, limits disputes over resources and helps control both organized and petty crime that may be committed by elements that straddle the boundaries. As Feyissa (2010) noted in his analysis of the Anuak’s perception of the territorial boundary, this view accentuates the old English adage that ‘good fences make good neighbours’.

The community members are uncertain about the potential role of boundary making between community members. Some say that though they belong to two regional states, the two communities are culturally, economically and ethno-territorially intertwined. Others admire the effort to carve the boundary and see this as a measure that can resolve incessant conflicts and transgressions. These are similar in their position to some Anuak community members who see boundary making between the Anuak and the Nuer as the source of an infallible solution to conflicts between groups from different territories (Feyissa, 2010). Those who cast doubt over the role of boundary demarcation as a mechanism to maintain peace and order emphasize that the most serious challenge the system (ethno-federalism as a political administrative system) should guard itself against is the potential danger in elites’ and other social actors’ manipulation of institutions to their advantage. They adhere to the view that this problem (elite manipulation) emerges from and is inherent in the system that provides incentives to cement the importance of identity politics in the context of decisions regarding distribution, participation and representation (Crawford and Lipschutz, 1998). In line with their view, Snyder (2000) tellingly states that though it may not necessarily produce ethnic violence, ethno-federalism has the potential to heighten the likelihood of (ethnic) conflict as it usually creates strong incentives for (ethnic) elites ‘to mobilize mass support around ethnic themes’ (cited in Erk and Anderson, 2010: 4). An uncontrolled permission of identity politics’ dominance over political process in ethnically diverse country may cause damage to some of the fundamental provisions of liberal democracy that ethnic federalism is based on (Lecours and Moreno, 2010). The diverse views that the community members hold about the role of the demarcation-setting effort reveals the limitations of institutional solutions to ethnic disputes in general and those disputes that involve competition over territory (Toft, 2003).