Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula

Ethiopia was not an object that existed independently from the questions posed by students. Rather, these student articles were part of the ‘process of state-making and the political battlefield’ (p. 41). The book is not a history of the Ethiopian Student Movement, despite rich insights into its historiography. Ethiopia in Theory powerfully strikes at the ontology of the positivist social sciences as a group of academic disciplines that has often rendered the past usable, the present legible and the future calculable. Rather than reproducing this epistemological tradition in the study of Ethiopia, the book’s strength lies in its form: Zeleke’s method of personal interrogation allows her and her readers to not only engage with the past, but also with the fragmented ways through which the past is presented. Ethiopia in Theory models a unique method of expressing self-reflexive, analytical and intellectual thought without the pretence of historical neutrality. At times, however, the book is not explicit in linking the writings of the student movement to subsequent policies. Zeleke argues that the Derg’s rural land proclamations were ‘justified in the language of the student movement’ (p. 139) but remains vague in describing what it is the students specifically wrote about the land tenure systems that were adopted in these proclamations. This points to a larger challenge about tracing and disentangling the legacies of the student movement from later ideological influences ranging from Meles Zenawi’ keen interests in Alice Amsden’s work on Asian developmentalism in the early 1990s to the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front’s brief infatuation with Albanian Marxism in the 1980s. Perhaps, the substantive legacies of the student movement were not as dominant as the epistemological ones. Despite significant ideological shifts and political ruptures of various Ethiopian regimes, social scientists continue to be paraded as neutral arbiters and expert referees on irreconcilable political questions about what Ethiopia should be. While Ethiopia’s intellectuals are currently embroiled in a bitter contest of historical truth-making to justify contemporary political positions, Zeleke reminds us that the country’s hopes lie not in reformulating a usable past but recognising and acknowledging the partial ways in which it has been passed down to us. Ethiopia in Theory helps us navigate the silences and repressed narratives that erupt in times of war.