Agamben in the Ogaden: Violence and sovereignty in the Ethiopian–Somali frontier

Political Geography 31 (2012) 205e214

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Agamben in the Ogaden: Violence and sovereignty in the EthiopianeSomali frontier Tobias Hagmann a, *, Benedikt Korf b a b

Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley, 648 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1950, USA Department of Geography, University of Zürich, CH-8057 Zürich, Switzerland

a b s t r a c t Keywords: State of exception Sovereignty Frontier Emergency powers Giorgio Agamben Ethiopia

This paper asks what makes the periphery or the frontier a prime locus of the “inclusionary exclusion” that is, according to Giorgio Agamben, so constitutive of the state of exception. By applying Agamben’s analytics to the Ogaden e a frontier province of the Ethiopian state e we propose an interpretation of the political history of the Ethiopian Ogaden as a recurrent government by exception that spans the Imperial rule (c. 1890e1974), the socialist dictatorship of the Derg (1974e1991), and the current revolutionary democratic regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (1991etoday). Drawing attention to the historical continuities in the exercise of (Ethiopian) state sovereignty in its (Somali) frontier, we offer a genealogy of the violent incorporation of the Ogaden into the Ethiopian body politic. We identify recurring practices of sovereign power by successive Ethiopian regimes that are constitutive of the state of exception, namely a conflation between law and lawlessness, the politics of bare life and an encampment strategy. By doing so, this paper insists on the constitutive importance of land appropriation e Carl Schmitt’s Landnahme e in performances of sovereignty and territorialization at the margins of the postcolonial state. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction When asked about human rights abuses by Ethiopian troops in the country’s volatile Somali or Ogaden region, Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi responded: “The most stupid mistake a counter-insurgency operation can make is alienating the population. If you alienate the population, you’re finished. We are not going to make that mistake” (Perry, 2007). As a leader of the former rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) that won the war against the Derg regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991, Meles Zenawi claimed that his government knew “how insurgencies succeed and how they fail”. And yet, informed observers have described the Ethiopian National Defence Force’s (ENDF) conduct as “antiquated” and markedly “counter-productive” as it motivated large parts of the local Ogaadeen population to join or support the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) (personal communication, Addis Ababa, 15 July 2008). Moreover, as the above statement by the prime minister illustrates, the ruling EPRDF and its security strategists are aware of the counter-productive effects of indiscriminate counter-insurgency

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 202 431 8510; fax: þ1 510 642 9515. E-mail address: [email protected] (T. Hagmann). 0962-6298/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.12.004

campaigns. The former TPLF rebels had fought a brutal war for self-determination during which they experienced firsthand how the heavy handed counter-insurgency tactics by the Derg soldiers strengthened popular support in their native Tigray region (Berhe, 2009; Tareke, 2002; Young, 1997). Despite this experience, Ethiopian army commanders applied very similar counter-insurgency tactics in 2007 and 2008 against the ONLF rebels and the Ogaadeen population (Alpeyrie, 2007; Gettleman, 2007a; Human Rights Watch, 2008). This begs the following question: Why did the Ethiopian army implement a counter-insurgency campaign in the Ogaden against its own better knowledge? This paper sets out to answer this empirical puzzle by considering successive historical strategies to govern Ethiopia’s Somali inhabited frontier that is commonly known as Ogaden. The protracted political instability in Ethiopia’s Somali periphery has led some observers to conclude that “governmental institutions have never been strong” (van Brabant, 1994: 21), that the “regional government is weak and ineffective” (Devereux, 2006: 15) or that the “government has made no difference” (Lister, 2004: 23). Our argument is different: When considering the state of exception apparent in the centre’s counter-insurgency activities as a manifestation of state sovereignty, one can no longer blame political turmoil in the Ethiopian periphery on the absence of the state. On the contrary, it is precisely at its periphery that a coercive Ethiopian

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state has made its presence felt periodically and most resolutely among Somali society since the end of the 19th century and by doing so has integrated the periphery in its body politic. “The notion of frontier,” wrote Donald L. Donham (2002: 4) in the introduction to the classic The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia, “(.) connects centre to periphery.” While the Ethiopian imperial administration was quite successful in adapting to and engaging with local political structures in the western and southern frontiers of the country (James, 2002; Johnson, 2002), this was not the case for the south-eastern frontier, the Ogaden, where “the Ethiopian administration (.) failed rather dramatically to adapt to local religion and politics” (Donham, 2002: 46). While many of Ethiopia’s pastoralist peripheries were only partially incorporated into the imperial and the Derg regime as their mobile life-style provided “insuperable obstacles” (Clapham, 2002: 22) to the socialist development policies of the Derg, the Ogaden remained particularly difficult to rule and control. Donham identifies reasons for this in the strategic location of the Ogaden as trade route, in the presence of Islam (as against Orthodox Christianity in the imperial highland civilization) and in the historical struggle between cultivators and pastoralists. Writings on the political geographies of African states have often identified state failure or weakness, the inability to uphold a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, as a key explanation for the occurrence of political violence (Bates, 2008; Rotberg, 2004). In Political Topographies of the African State, Catherine Boone (2003) explains the political economy of regional variations of political authority in settled agrarian societies in West Africa informed by a framework of institutional choice and bargaining. Jeffrey Herbst’s States and Power in Africa (2000) argues that Africa’s pre- and postcolonial rulers fought over labour rather than land (as opposed to European rulers). Hence they had no or little incentive to invest in bureaucracies, standing armies and engage in institutionbuilding. Herbst’s empirical material essentially reflects the Congo’s or Central African experience, which is difficult to compare with Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s state-building process since the 19th century was marked by centralization, increasing bureaucratization, a standing army and thus contradicts many of Herbst’s somewhat sweeping generalizations about the African state. Our study departs analytically from these institutionalist frameworks. Instead, it is informed by the growing literature on the geographies of sovereignty (e.g. Agnew, 2005; Elden, 2009; Sidaway, 2003). We concur with Achille Mbembe’s warning that “the modalities through which a territory becomes the object of an appropriation or of the exercise of power or a jurisdiction” are extremely varied, leading to a “plurality of the forms of territoriality” in postcolonial Africa (Mbembe, 2000, 262ff.). For Mbembe, colonies and frontiers resemble each other as they are considered to be inhabited by “savages”. Both are “zones [.] where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of ‘civilization’ . the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies” (Mbembe, 2003, 24). Mbembe alludes to the concept of (the state of) exception which has been brought to political geography by the writings of Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt (Elden 2010; Legg, 2011; Meyer, Schetter, & Prinz, 2011). Claudio Minca (2006) has drawn geographers’ attention to “the spatial architecture” of Agamben’s theory of exception. Minca alerts us to the Agambian paradox that the sovereign is both inside and outside the juridical order (Minca, 2006, 85), producing veil effects of territorializing practices that result in a container thinking of state sovereignty, or in other words, the idea of unambiguous, unitary sovereignty that a state holds over a territory. Agamben’s theory of exception encompasses a relational as well as topological framing of sovereignty, territorialization and frontier, the latter being defined as “a fault line and . a contested zone .

a zone of conflict and competition” (Reid, 2011, 22). Agamben’s work has inspired numerous political geographers’ writings on (counter-) insurgency, securitization, and illegal encampments of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Gaza (Aradau, 2007; Ek, 2006; Elden, 2009; Gregory, 2004, 2006; Korf, 2009; Minca, 2005). Other scholars have applied Agamben’s analytics to study the politics of sovereignty in non-Western terrains, most prominently, Das and Poole (2004) and Hansen and Stepputat (2005), followed by sustained Doty’s (2007) account of vigilante border guards along the U.S.-Mexican border, Fassin and Vasquez’s (2005) study of the Venezuelan government’s humanitarian response to a natural disaster, Korf’s (2006) analysis of rogue discourses in the Sri Lankan conflict and Jones’ (2009) account of the securitization of IndianeBangladeshi border geographies. These studies have highlighted the multiple and fragile geographies of the state of exception beyond the paradigmatic spatial figure of the camp. This paper scrutinizes the geographies of sovereignty that work through the state of exception in the EthiopianeSomali frontier or Ogaden. Our main argument is that the “state of exception” in Ethiopia’s Somali region is neither recent nor unprecedented, but part of recurrent interventions by which central highland rulers e from emperor Menelik to the socialist Derg to today’s ethnonationalist government led by Meles Zenawi e have been ruling the country’s south-eastern frontier. The political violence that characterized these successive emergency measures must thus be seen as emanations of state sovereignty rather than as results of local disorder, state failure or anomy. As we shall illustrate in the following pages, the state of exception in the Ethiopian Ogaden represents a particular logic of government that is based on the normalization of exceptional strategies. Rereading the Ogaden’s recent political history (ca. 1890e2009) in light of Agamben’s theory of the state of exception allows us to unearth the intricate yet constitutive relations that exist between Ethiopia’s political centre and its margins: the Somali periphery is not (only) a place where the Ethiopian state ends, but also one where disorder is internalized into the body of the Ethiopian sovereign through the state of exception. The state of exception at the (Ethiopian) state frontier What is the significance of the Somali frontier as a margin of the Ethiopian state? The Ethiopian highland elite and much of Ethiopian historiography (Clapham, 2002) perceive the Somali borderland as a largely empty space, devoid of civilization, waiting to become civilized by Orthodox Christianity and the Amharic language. It is considered as the periphery (dar äger in Amharic) at the border of Ethiopia’s centre (mehäl äger). The importance of centreeperiphery relations as well as moving centres and peripheries such as Harar, Jijiga or Dire Dawa in the evolution of the Ethiopian imperial state at the beginning of the 20th century has been documented by historian Cedric Barnes (2000). More recent research has highlighted how patroneclient relations between federal government and party officials in the capital Addis Ababa and regional dignitaries in Jijiga have shaped politics in the Ogaden since 1991 (Hagmann, 2005; Samatar, 2004). But although the Ogaden appears to be at the geographic and political margins of the Ethiopian state, it has been central to the constitution of the Ethiopian state as a sovereign body. The recurrent violence and upheaval that we observe in the Somali periphery appears to be external to the order of the Ethiopian state, but became internalized into the rule of the Ethiopian state through the state of exception and related practices of emergency rule and counter-insurgency operations. This is so because the survival of the state hinges on its ability to tame and control its frontier, to exercise sovereignty. The German constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt famously wrote that “sovereign is he who proclaims the state of exception”

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(Schmitt, 1985: 5, “Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet”, Schmitt, 1922: 1). For Schmitt, the exception defines the rule of law precisely in the formal moment of decision; the rule of law is constituted by the decision upon the state of exception. The most extreme measure of a juridical order, to suspend its rule, is, for Schmitt, the very foundation or Ursprung of the rule of law. Having in mind the declaration of emergency power in the traumatic post world war one period after the Weimar Republic (1918e1933), Schmitt defines the state of exception as the specific historical grounding of sovereignty. But the relation between sovereignty and the state of exception is more ambiguous than Schmitt’s dictum suggests. For Schmitt, sovereignty emerges from the decision that is taken in a spatially and temporally bounded space of exception. Giorgio Agamben’s approach to the state of exception transcends Schmitt’s decisionism and its implicit containerization of the state of exception. For Agamben, the state of exception has become the rule, “a paradigm of government today” (Raulff, 2004: 609) that can no longer be considered exceptional. The state of exception pervades the rules and norms of governing. It is the conflation, or indistinction, between rule and exception that defines the nomos of government. Agamben (1998: 37) concludes, therefore that “the state of exception is (.) not so much a spatio-temporal suspension (of the law) as a complex topological figure” where state of nature and state of law, exception and rule become indistinguishable. Schmitt’s state of exception is an event, a decision that grounds the rule of law; Agamben’s state of exception is a rationale that pervades all law and order as the state of exception becomes the rule (Agamben, 1998, 2005). The state of exception is thus described as a rationale of governing that manifests itself in different spaceetime contexts. Agamben (1998: 37) notes that “The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process in which, what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears in the inside (as state of exception)”. Agamben here alludes to a Hobbesian notion of state of nature. According to Hobbes’ Leviathan (1996 [1651]), a state of nature precedes the formation of the modern state and sovereign ruler. Anarchy e or a war of all against all e prevailed before humans gave up some of their freedom and assigned the monopoly of violence to a ruler, the Leviathan. But through this transmission, the sovereign continues to embody the state of nature as violence without order, as violence that has not yet been tamed, brought into the contract with the sovereign. Agamben’s reading of Hobbes’ state of nature is key to understanding his theory of sovereign power as he traces the origin of the indistinction between exception and rule to Hobbes’ Leviathan (Prozorov, 2009, 334ff.). Agamben’s goal is to “restore the state of nature to its status of the product of sovereign power” (Prozorov, 2009, 334). Instead of externalizing the state of nature outside of the polis, Agamben declares the state of nature as internal to it. What makes Agamben prolific for investigating Ethiopian sovereignty in the Ogaden is how his theory of power and order articulates the Ogaden’s particular political geography by the complex relationship that rulers develop towards their frontiers, margins and borderlands; a relationship based on practices “that seem to be on the continual refounding of law through forms of violence and authority that can be construed as both extrajudicial and outside, or prior to, the state” (Das & Poole, 2004: 13), but are internal to its constitution. Hobbes’, Agamben’s, and Schmitt’s state of nature, state of exception and herrenloses Land (Schmitt, 1950) converge into a geographical imagination of savage or empty territories, of disorderly places devoid of rule. In the EthiopianeSomali frontier, this imagination builds upon historic stereotypes about conflictprone pastoralist areas, which are contrasted to the ideal of

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sedentary highland culture, which is considered a prerequisite for state-making. Territorialization represents a key strategy by which the political centre appropriates and regulates the margins of the state (Vandergeest & Lee Peluso, 1995). The Ethiopian state has responded to its inherent geographical imagination with a project of taming the Somali and other frontiers. It has done so by penetrating “empty” space through settlements in the river basins, forced or voluntary sedentarization of pastoralists and by colonization of highlanders in the peri-urban centres (Donham & James, 2002). Highlanders, predominantly Orthodox Christian Amharas, settled in the empire’s occupied territories as settlers (akgniwoch) as well as militia (neftegnoch) in exchange for usufruct land rights. This process corresponds to Schmitt’s (1950) notion of land appropriation or Landnahme as a means of territorial imposition of sovereignty. Yet as Agamben reminds us, the state of exception pervades the territorial confines of a container space since the margins of the state become part of the logic of governing, the zone of indistinction between those who are included as “excluded” and those who are excluded as “included”. In the Ogaden, this indistinction operates as follows; Ethiopia’s Somali region has been included into the Ethiopian polity since 1991 as a (formally) self-administered region, a move by which its historic marginalization and exclusion by the Ethiopian state is redressed. Concomitantly, EthiopianeSomalis, particularly members of the Ogaadeen clan lineages, although formally Ethiopian citizens and constitutionally entitled to the right to self-determination (FDRE, 1995, art. 39), are treated as outsiders by the Ethiopian state, and are distrusted by many highland Ethiopians. The state of exception in the Ogaden is a manifestation of the nature of government and its capacity, at any time, to apply “exceptional measures” to different places or entities subject to its power. This process combines two interrelated elements: first, the political regimes at the centre present the Ethiopian Ogaden as exceptional (“unruly”, unsafe, uncivilized, etc.) and second, the capacity of the Ethiopian state to intervene in the Ogaden through emergency measures reveals the normalization of the state of exception as a technology of rule as understood by Agamben. It is this particular dynamic that makes the Ogaden a “frontier” understood as a state project of territorial penetration and encroachment of the peripheries (Geiger, 2008 based on Turner, 1893; Raeymaekers, 2009). Ethiopia’s Somali frontier can be considered as a zone of indistinction where exception and rule as well as the state of nature and the state of law appear indistinguishable. By engaging Agamben’s writings with historical and ethnographic insights into the political history of the Ogaden, we emphasize two ways of governing at the frontier of the (Ethiopian) state. The first derives from the state of emergency as declared and applied by a ruling regime (e.g. through emergency laws) in a spatially and temporally bounded entity. Thereby, an extra-legal time-space is created wherein the Ethiopian state and its security forces enact exceptional practices of rule and oppression to reassert Ethiopia’s sovereignty (within the borders of the sovereign state). The second relates to a state of exception as a topology of rule (in Agamben’s sense) that has become the norm, making rule and exception indistinguishable over the long durée. The remainder of this paper seeks to illustrate these two elements. The next chapter offers a brief chronological account of the eventful political history of the Ethiopian Ogaden after 1890, from its gradual incorporation into the Ethiopian empire to the defining 1977e1978 Ogaden war to the more recent ONLF insurgency. The subsequent chapter then documents three recurrent practices of sovereign power that are executed in the state of exception in the EthiopianeSomali frontier.

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Rule and resistance in the Ethiopian Ogaden (c. 1890e2009) The Ethiopian Ogaden is often portrayed as the archetype of a disorderly periphery where the state has failed to monopolize the legitimate use of violence and “civilize” nomadic pastoralists. Accounts of the region regularly insist on its problematic and volatile political, climatic and economic features. The segmentary kinship politics of its ethnic Somali inhabitants are lamented for their inability to provide for stable political institutions (Hagmann, 2005). The stereotype of the bellicose Somali pastoralist neglects the fact that village elders and administrators make use of elaborate conflict resolution mechanisms to solve communal disputes peacefully (Hagmann, 2007), that competition over resources at the household level may lead to either conflict or cooperation (Bogale & Korf, 2007) and that many conflicts have been amplified by the ongoing administrative decentralization (Beyene 2009; Hagmann & Mulugeta, 2008). The name “Ogaden” is strongly contested among the region’s competing genealogical groups. In this paper we use Ogaden solely as a geographical term, denoting the territory predominantly inhabited by members of the Ogaadeen clan, which is not synonymous with the administrative boundaries of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State. The Ogaadeen Somalis are composed of segmentary clan lineages that assign individuals a position on the basis of actual and fictitious patrilinear descent (Lewis, 1999). They constitute a demographic majority in five out of the nine administrative zones of the regional state, namely Wardheer, Degehabur, Korahe, Godey, and Fiq. The contested political status of the Ogaden originates in the expansion of the Ethiopian imperial state into the south-eastern Somali lowlands since the mid 19th century. The Ogaden was of economic and strategic value for emperor Menelik (1844e1913) as important trade routes connecting Harar town with Zeila and Berbera ports in northern Somalia crossed the region. The area was also rich in livestock and acted as a buffer zone with encroaching European colonialists (Eshete, 1994: 71), namely Italy, Great Britain and France (Lewis, 2002; Zewde, 2002). Between 1891 and 1906 imperial soldiers embarked on consecutive, sometimes annual, campaigns (zämächa) to exact tributes from nomadic Somali pastoralists, which eventually resulted in the confiscation of hundreds to thousands of livestock (Garretson, 2001) and numerous atrocities against local Somalis during these expeditions (Geshekter, 1985). The collection of tribute e usually one tenth of livestock was asked for the Emperor e and the “punishment of recalcitrant elements” (Eshete, 1994: 75) went hand in hand. With these military incursions, successive imperial rulers gradually extended their bureaucratic outreach and by 1927 the entire Ogaden region was under a single administration (Eshete, 1994: 78). Imperial sovereignty in the EthiopianeSomali frontier differed between three distinct Ethiopian spheres of influence. The first and strongest one consisted of fortified garrison towns (kätäma), with permanent water sources and agricultural life. The second one extended over tribute giving communities, whose traditional leaders were awarded titles of the Empire. In the third and weakest sphere, Somali clans only periodically paid tribute or were raided by imperial soldiers (Garretson, 2001: 21, 44). After 1920 imperial rule in the Ogaden evolved from a “military-fiscal” mode based on predation, tax collection and military expeditions into a tutelage arrangement that combined increasing bureaucratic control with continued violence and patrimonial relations (Barnes, 2000: 208ff). The progressive incorporation of the Ogaden into the Ethiopian state provoked violent Somali resistance and nurtured a growing Somali nationalist sentiment (Lewis, 2002: 63e91). A first wave of Somali resistance culminated in the 20 year conflict (1899e1920)

between the so-called dervish forces led by Sayyid Mahammad Abdille Hassan against Ethiopian, British and Italian troops. Dubbed the “mad mullah” by the British colonialists, the Sayyid was a charismatic leader, outstanding poet and religious scholar who became the first Somali nationalist figurehead and a veritable myth (Garretson, 2001: 3; Samatar, 1982). Some of the clashes between the dervish and Ethiopian troops claimed thousands of casualties such as the battle of Jijiga in 1900 (Eshete, 1994: 73). However, most victims of these two decades of warfare were Somalis who fought on either the Sayyid or one of the colonial armies’ side (Abbink, 2003: 342). Popular uprisings against Ethiopian rule continued after the defeat and death of the Sayyid and were brutally subdued by Ethiopian forces. Important events that marked this period are the September 1948 revolt that took place in Jijiga and the bombardment of several towns in the Ogaden by the imperial air force in 1961, killing hundreds of civilians (Keynan, 1990 cited in Ogaden Human Rights Committee, 1996: 8). In the 1920s competition between imperial Ethiopia and colonial Italy intensified as both advanced deeper into the Ogaden, establishing new garrisons and administrative centres. Despite the EthiopianeItalian treaty of peace and friendship of mid-1928 tensions erupted in the December 1934 borders skirmishes in the Ogaden town Wal Wal, serving fascist Italy as a pretext to invade Ethiopia the following year (Zewde, 2002: 151e153). Following Italy’s defeat by the allied forces in 1941, large parts of the pre-1937 Ethiopian empire including the Ogaden were administered by Britain (Barnes, 2007). Emperor Haile Selassie’s government negotiated a sequenced withdrawal by the British and a “return of the Ogaden” (Eshete, 1991: 16) to Ethiopia. In 1948 the Ogaden was transferred to Ethiopian rule, while the eastern Haud, a dry grazing area of crucial regional importance for Somali pastoralists, was handed over in November 1954 (Markakis, 1989: 160e161). Sanctioned by the United Nations, the reassignment of the Ogaden to Ethiopia was a serious blow to pan-Somali nationalists who aimed to unite all five Somali territories in the Horn of Africa. Since mid-1950, a first generation of clandestine rebel groups such as Nasirulahi (or Nasrullah) mobilized Somali nationalists opposed to Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden and neighbouring Hararghe (Eshete, 1991: 23). The Somali Democratic Republic, which gained independence in 1960, supported the irredentist agenda as well as nascent anti-Ethiopian guerrillas. Considering the Ogaden as “Somali territory under Ethiopian Colonization” (Somali Democratic Republic, 1974), Siad Barre’s government claimed Ethiopia’s Hararghe province (of which the Ogaden was part) including portions of Bale and Sidamo provinces and the two cities Harar and Dire Dawa as parts of Western Somalia (Tareke, 2000: 637). A two month border war between Ethiopia and Somalia erupted in February 1964, following Ethiopian attempts to impose a livestock tax on Ogaadeen pastoralists, which provoked an armed revolt by the Ogaden Liberation Front led by Garad Makthal Tahir (Matthies, 1977: 205e208). After Emperor Haile Selassie’s deposition by the revolution of 1974 followed a period of intense turmoil and bloody repression. In a bid to wrestle the south-eastern lowlands from a weakened Ethiopian administration, the socialist Somali government in 1976 sponsored the creation of two separatist rebel groups in Ethiopia, the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) and the Somali Abo Liberation Front (SALF). In 1977 the Ogaden or EthiopianeSomali war entered into its first phase when WSLF and SALF rebels occupied large parts of rural Ogaden and the Bale Sidamo lowlands (Tareke, 2000). Regular Somali army forces invaded the Ogaden, at the start overrunning Ethiopian positions as they advanced up to Dire Dawa. With the assistance of Cuban and Soviet advisors and armament, the Derg’s army eventually defeated the WSLF in March 1978 and restored Ethiopian military control over the Ogaden.

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The Ogaden war claimed approximately 30’000 casualties on both sides (Tareke, 2000: 665) and an estimated 500,000 displaced (Africa Watch, 1991: 76). Hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled eastern Ethiopia to take refuge in Somalia after 1978. Between 1979 and 1984 the Derg embraced a brutal yet effective counterinsurgency strategy that included the forced displacement and settlement of civilians into “protected” villages, military offensives against people outside of these villages, sponsoring insurgent groups opposed to the Somali government and the repatriation of refugees from the region (Africa Watch, 1991: 75). This policy turned the Ogaden into a vast military zone in which Mengistu Haile Mariam’s soldiers ruled over a frightened and impoverished Ogaadeen population. The toppling of the Derg by the EPRDF forces in May 1991 heralded a major reform of Ethiopia’s administrative structure, now federalized on an ethno-nationalist basis (Vaughan & Tronvoll, 2003). All predominantly Somali speaking areas of the former Ogaden autonomous province and parts of former East Hararghe and Bale provinces were incorporated into Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State. For the first time since their incorporation into the Ethiopian state, ethnic Somalis were granted self-administration, the right to elect their leadership, and to use the Somali language in schools, courts and local government (Hagmann & Khalif, 2005). With the outbreak of the Somali civil war in 1988, a reverse population movement from Somalia to the Ethiopian Ogaden had set in at the beginning of the 1990s. Ethnic-based decentralization and democratization translated into lively political competition in the Ogaden. Between 1992 and 1994 the region was administered by the ONLF, which advocated self-determination of the Ogaadeen population on a more narrow ethno-nationalist, rather than panSomali basis (Abdulahi, 2007). The ONLF was ousted from power by the EPRDF in mid-1994 when it requested a referendum on selfdetermination to decide on the future status of the Ogaden. Since the mid-1990s the Ogaden has been embroiled in a low intensity conflict between ONLF and the ENDF. ONLF rebels mostly use hit and run attacks against Ethiopian troops and convoys and concentrate their operations in the Ogaadeen inhabited heartland. Although formally administered by local Somalis, the so-called “insecure areas” after 1994 became the fiefdoms of federal military officials and security personnel in charge of quelling the ONLF insurgency (Hagmann, 2005). In April 2007 armed conflict in the Ogaden escalated following an ONLF attack on a Chinese operated oilfield in Degehabur, during which more than 70 Ethiopian and Chinese oil workers were killed. In reaction, the Ethiopian army imposed a comprehensive economic blockade on the Ogaadeen population and cracked down on all civilians suspected of supporting the ONLF (Gettleman, 2007b; Human Rights Watch, 2008). Between 1995 and mid-2007 the Ogaden Human Rights Committee (2007: 7) compiled and documented 2395 extrajudicial killings as well as 1945 rape cases and more than 3000 forced disappearances of suspected or assumed ONLF supporters by Ethiopian security forces and regional militias. These casualty figures demonstrate that Ethiopian rulers’ present-day recourse to violence is inscribed in a historical continuity of governing the Somali frontier. Recurrent practices of sovereign power This brief political history of the Ogaden reveals important facets of state sovereignty in the EthiopianeSomali frontier. Physical violence meted out by subsequent Ethiopian governments has been a constant in the past 120 years, although relations between Ethiopian rulers and ethnic Somalis have waxed and waned according to changing national and international circumstances. Through the 20th century periods of relative “indifference” by the Ethiopian state towards its Somali frontier gave way to “burst[s] of

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violence”, which at times came close to “official terror” (Reisman, 1978: 15 quoted in Geshekter, 1985: 11). The Imperial government of Haile Selassie (Clapham, 1969), the Marxist military of Mengistu Haile Mariam (Clapham, 1988) and the current ethnonationalist regime of Meles Zenawi (Vaughan & Tronvoll, 2003) have employed broadly similar policies to counter resistance in the Ogaden between the end of the 19th century and today, despite significant differences in terms of their ideology and constituency. The continuity in how power has been exercised by consecutive Ethiopian governments in the 20th century was recently remarked by Pietro Toggia (2008). In his historic overview of how consecutive Ethiopian regimes made use of the police, the criminal code and prisons, Toggia (2008: 108) concludes that “despite the characteristic political differences among these three regimes, the mode in which they exercised their powers, or the mechanism of power they applied in order to normalize or stabilize their respective body politic, is indistinguishable”. Toggia unearths how, when under political pressure, successive Ethiopian rulers resorted to emergency powers and made use of the police to imprison and torture political opponents, the poor and unemployed. Haile Selassie declared states of emergency in the 1960s and in February 1974, the Derg in September 1974 and in the late 1970s and the EPRDF in April 2001, June and November 2005 (Toggia, 2008: 113). All three regimes relied on a penal code, first adopted in 1957, that lists numerous offenses against the state and its institutions, to criminalize, arrest and punish political opponents in the name of state sovereignty. As a result, “the distinction between political activism and criminality is often erased” (Toggia, 2008, 110), allowing security forces to prosecute and punish political challengers. Most recently, emergency measures prominently shaped Ethiopian politics when the incumbent government temporarily arrested 30,000 opposition supporters whom it designated as dangerous vagrants or hooligans (adegegna bozeneh). In June 2007 Ethiopia’s supreme court sentenced 38 leading opposition figures to life imprisonment after finding them guilty of “outrage against the constitution and treason” (ICG, 2009: 10). Toggia’s observations mostly concern anti-regime contestation that emerged in urban centres, such as the Ethiopian Student Movement of the 1970s or the 2005 post-election protests. The Ogaden has been disconnected from such dynamics in the political centre. Nonetheless, we find parallels in how state officials used emergency powers to quell dissent in the Somali lowlands. In his review of imperial rule of the Ogaden between 1942 and 1960, Eshete (1991: 24) underlines the “crisis-oriented rather than institution-oriented” way in which the region was administered. According to a commemorative report by the Derg’s border police, the Ogaden was under a formal state of emergency between 1956 and 1964, the year of the first EthiopianeSomali war (Eastern Boarder Guard Revolutionary Police, 1975 Eth. C.: 65). Two years later, neighbouring Borana province and some districts of Bale province were put under martial law in response to the Bale rebellion, which was sparked by ill-conceived fiscal policies (Tareke, 1996). Following the Ogaden war of 1977e1978, the EthiopianeSomali frontier remained caught in a de facto, but not officially declared state of emergency as army officials enjoyed discretionary powers in their counter-insurgency sweeps against Somali civilians (Africa Watch, 1991), which continued after 1991 under the EPRDF. When large parts of the Somali Regional State became chronically insecure in the mid-1990s following the fallout between the federal government and the ONLF as well as the Islamic al-Ittihad al-Islaam, Ethiopian security forces imposed curfews on several towns. In addition, they “were given sweeping powers including the authority to shoot suspected members and sympathizers of rebel movements on sight” (Khalif & Doornbos, 2002: 81).

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It is this logic, practices of sovereign power as part of emergency regimes e often without a formal declaration of emergency rule e and the recurrent, permanent exercise of these discretionary powers by security and state officials, which has transformed the state of exception into a topology of rule. Emergency measures by Ethiopian commanders operating in the Ogaden have therefore become governmental norm rather than exception. The following sections distinguish and illustrate three recurrent practices of sovereign power that are constitutive of the topology of rule that is the state of exception.

Law and the absence of law In times of heightened political crisis in the Ogaden, as for example during the 2007 counter-insurgency campaign, Ethiopian officials practice sovereign power both within and outside of the law. Admittedly, a clear-cut distinction between “rule of law” and “absence of law” is difficult to draw in the everyday practices of legal bodies. While the EPRDF government claims to be committed to multi-party democracy, human rights and political pluralism, it also upholds the vision of a “rule of law” as embodied by the courts. At the same time, federal judges, military commanders and police officers embody state sovereignty. They may thus criminalize or, alternatively, legalize, any action or person they consider against the state’s interests. When governing under emergency laws, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrest, rape and torture of suspected ONLF supporters and their relatives by Ethiopian troops, which were documented in detail by human rights groups (Human Rights Watch, 2008; Ogaden Human Rights Committee, 1996, 1999, 2006, 2007), are sanctioned by the Ethiopian state. It thereby blurs the distinction between law and the absence of law through everyday practices of avoiding, bending or performing “the law”. As the following excerpt from an interview with a former judge of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State demonstrates, the targets of emergency measures are considered to be outside the realm of law. The former judge, which we shall call AM, is a member of an Ogaadeen clan lineage, and a relative of a leading ONLF official. He languished for 16 months in two prisons in Jijiga following his arrest. AM recounts the moment he was arrested by a senior regional security official in September 2006. “He [senior security official] asked me: Are you AM? e I said: Yes. He said: You are under arrest! e I said: Why? And then he slapped me in the face, and [another security official] did the same. They both beat me together. I told them that I am a judge and that I have legal immunity and he said: I don’t care. You are [an] anti-peace element, we know what you do!” AM was then taken to a military camp in the outskirts of Jijiga where he was held, interrogated and tortured in an underground cell. “A general question that I was asked [during interrogation sessions] was: Why don’t you co-operate with the government? [This was] a question that I could not answer as I had studied at the Ethiopian Civil Service College [which trains government officials], a curriculum designed for TPLF cadres, you must be a cadre to attend the Ethiopian Civil Service College. I said: I am a judge, I am implementing the law of this country! They didn’t answer, but [they] just beat me up.” (personal communication, Nairobi, 29 June 2009) AM’s experience is exemplary of the suspension of law at the hands of those who operate with emergency powers, a practice institutionalized over time in the Ogaden. As the local Ogaden Human Rights Committee (2006: 16) aptly established, “The security forces are the prison authorities, the prosecutors, the lawyers,

the judges and the armed forces in the Ogaden”. Hence, the Eastern Boarder Guard Revolutionary Police (1975 Eth. C.: 55) describes the counter-insurgency by the imperial police in the Ogaden as a “struggle for human right[s] of the Ethiopians”. At the margins of the Ethiopian state security forces are the ones who determine who stands outside of the law, who is a friend and who an enemy of the state. This is evident in the above vignette when AM is accused of being “anti-peace”. In the past decade, accusing dissenters of being “anti-peace” or “anti-development”, a euphemistic expression used by federal and regional government officials to refer to insurgent groups, has regularly led to their detention in military camps or police stations without charges or trials (Ogaden Human Rights Committee, 1999: 9). Interestingly, this rhetoric ploy used to delegitimize political opponents has a precursor in Ethiopian history. Toggia (2008: 121) notes that the Derg labeled its opponents including the former TPLF rebels, today the most powerful party in the EPRDF government, as “anarchists” and “bandits” (ser’ate albegna and wonbede). In the logic that is inherent to the state of exception, security forces are never outside of the law, even if they behave in lawless manner; state of nature and state of law thus become indistinguishable within the law. State agents who practice sovereign power act in a space of exception where they can even punish those elements (of the state) who should uphold the law but have been identified as (part of) the enemy, as rogue elements within the sovereign body. The law is nominally “in force”, but has no legal significance. This dynamic is observable in situations of a formally declared state of emergency as well as in everyday practices that form part of the state of exception as a topology of rule in the absence of a formally declared state of emergency. The politics of bare life Another recurrent strategy by the Ethiopian state to discipline “unruly” Somalis in the Ogaden consists in denying or hindering human and animal nutrition. Counter-insurgency campaigns of the imperial, the Derg and the current government have included the disruption of the local pastoral economy, starving suspected enemy populations and, more recently, withholding food aid. These measures are part of the Ethiopian army’s biopolitics or politics of bare life, aimed at weakening enemy bodies and their ability to sustain themselves by harming and mutilating members and sympathizers of rebel groups regularly during killings, torture and rape by security forces (Human Rights Watch, 2008). Famines have a century old history of being “created” or exacerbated by the state for political ends (Africa Watch, 1991: 30e31). Inspired by the “total strategy” counter-insurgency concept by French general André Beufre, the Derg pursued an all out war approach to defeat armed groups in the Ogaden, but also in Eritrea in the north of the country (Keller, 1992). As Gebru Tareke (2002: 466) remarked this was notably the case of the lash or ringworm campaign against remnants of the WLSF in the mid-1980s. As part of this campaign Derg soldiers poisoned wells, which are of key importance for herd survival and whose access determines animal and human migration patterns (Africa Watch, 1991: 79). Similar tactics were used by EPRDF soldiers, who punished villagers suspected of supporting ONFL by commandeering thousands of camels and small ruminants in December 1997 (Ogaden Human Rights Committee, 1998: 1). Under a public health pretext government troops banned pastoralists from accessing river water of the Wabi Shabelle so as to discourage the local Tolomoge clan lineage from assisting Ogaadeen rebels (Brunel, 2000). The Ethiopian Customs Authority considers all informal cross-border trading by Somalis as illegal. Particularly since 2002 customs and security officials have harassed traders, confiscated their commodities and repeatedly

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closed border posts in the name of “security” or fighting “contraband” (Devereux, 2006: 59e61). After the 1983e1984 drought, food aid deliveries to Ethiopia’s south-eastern lowlands have become a regular recurrence and part of local livelihoods (Ammann, 2005). Since the insecure areas of the Ogaden are de facto ruled by ENDF officials rather than local Somali dignitaries, food aid distribution in these areas is tightly controlled by the army (Brunel, 2000). Different observers including humanitarian workers involved in food aid distributions in Ethiopia have reported abuse of food aid by local and federal officials after 1991 (Devereux, 2006). During political crises food aid is handed out according to a politico-military rationale rather than as a response to humanitarian needs. For example, in 2007 regional and federal authorities awarded those districts who had mobilized the most anti-ONLF militias with food aid. Consequently, a long-term observer of Ethiopian humanitarian policy estimated that roughly “one forth of food aid reaches the population” in the Ogaden (personal communication, Geneva, 14 May 2008). The Derg’s strategy of denying WSLF rebels access to food, supplies and manpower by restricting the movement of the local population (Tareke, 2002: 470) was replicated by the EPRDF government in its 2007 counter-offensive. In April 2007 the Prime Minister’s advisor Abay Tsehay, ENDF general Yunis Samora and the commander in charge of Ethiopia’s eastern Hararghe division imposed a commercial blockade on the Ogaadeen heartland with the objective of cutting off ONLF from all material supplies. The blockade was ruthlessly enforced during several months and blocked not only the circulation of goods and trucks, but also rural dwellers. Food stuff prices exploded and livestock prices declined as a result of violent clashes between the army and ONLF rebels. Due to poor rains in some parts of the Ogaden, a serious humanitarian crisis had developed by mid-2007 (Anonymous, 2007). By beginning of January 2008 an estimated 953,000 people needed emergency aid in Ethiopia’s Somali region (Malone, 2008). These politics of bare life impose sovereign power by exposing segments of the Somali Ogaadeen to risk of death by starvation or direct violence. According to Agamben, bare life can be defined as life exposed to death in the form of sovereign violence. Bare life emerges from within the distinction between natural life (zoe) and political life (bios) e it is the politicized form of natural life e through its abandonment to an unconditional power of death which is the power of sovereignty (Mills, 2009). Encamping the Ogaden Since the Ogaden war of 1977e1978 and despite the prolonged disintegration of the Somali Democratic Republic since 1991, Ethiopian government policy towards the region has sought to contain irredentist claims and prevent the spill-over of conflicts from neighbouring Somalia. In times of political and humanitarian crisis, the Ethiopian army and other government agencies transform the Ogaden into what resembles a camp, effectively cordoning off the region from foreign observers, journalists, NGOs, international organizations and researchers. Concomitantly the movement of local Somalis was regularly restricted in a bid to control both persons and information that enter and leave the region. Given the chronic insecurity, dilapidated infrastructure and remoteness of the Ogaden, few outsiders have visited the region in the past three decades apart from aid workers. In places and times of acute conflict the Ethiopian government goes to great length to prevent independent data gathering and dissemination by these agencies. Efforts to control information and images that outsiders take along when returning from the Ogaden were observed at numerous occasions. For example, to generate publicity and a generous donor response to the 2000 famine, government

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officials lined up carcasses of cows along the Godey-Denan road, which was travelled by foreign journalists who reported on a famine that was partly conflict related (Brunel, 2000). End of August 2007, a UN inter-agency mission that sought to assess humanitarian needs resulting from the ENDF counter-insurgency campaign and commercial blockade was pressured by the authorities to remain silent on the political and human rights aspects of the crisis (United Nations, 2007). According to local observers, the UN team was forced to limit its assessment to the main JijigaQabridehar road, but only after officials had distributed wheat and biscuits in order to give the impression that the government was addressing the problem. Several local elders who dared to complain to the UN about the ongoing political repression were subsequently arrested (personal communication, Addis Ababa, 25 July 2008). Although knowledgeable about such incidences, Western donors have mostly accepted, if not indirectly contributed to the double role assumed by the Ethiopian government, which both punishes and “saves” the inhabitants of its Ogaden “camp”. Expulsing potential witnesses and averting inconvenient news reports allows security forces to maintain parts of Ethiopia’s Somali region in a restricted “camp” mode in areas governed by emergency rule. Following the arrest of a New York Times journalist who had spent several days in the bush with the ONLF in June 2007 (Gettleman, 2007a), federal military and regional security personnel deterred journalists and expatriates from visiting the Ogaadeen parts of the region for fear of negative publicity (Blair, 2007; Committee to Protect Journalists, 2010). With few exceptions Ethiopian authorities have succeeded in isolating the region from independent media coverage. In July 2007 regional authorities forced the International Committee of the Red Cross to close its sub-delegation in Godey for supposed collaboration with the ONLF. Humanitarian organizations could resume their work in the region after the 2007 conflict escalation in exchange for their silence on human rights violations (Benequista, 2008). Contemporary efforts to obscure the suffering of the local population have a historic corollary in the way the Derg managed to keep the 1981 war in Sidamo secret from the national and international public (Africa Watch, 1991: 78). Encampment is a practice of sovereign power that establishes a virtual wall or cordon around the Ogaden, cutting it off from the sovereign body that is the Ethiopian state in the form of an inclusive exclusion. For Agamben, the concentration camp is the prime locus or spatial form of the state of exception par excellence (Ek, 2006; Minca, 2005). The camp is the space which opens when the exception becomes permanent, becomes the rule. In the camp, law and life become indistinguishable in the sense that the rule of law no longer applies to the living body, but the living body has become the “rule and criterion of its own application” (Agamben, 1998: 173). The camp thus becomes the “nomos of the modern”, the political rationality of modernity, signifying the convergence of democracy and totalitarianism. Although we have emphasized the dialectic between highland Ethiopian rulers and lowland Somali subjects, some caveats need to be mentioned. The geographies of frontier, sovereignty and exception are more fragile and less monolithic than a focus on biopower, sovereign power and governmentality suggests (Korf, Engeler, & Hagmann, 2010; Watts, 2003). An Agambian analysis, including our own, presupposes a distinction between those who operate the state of exception on the one hand, and the homines sacri on the other hand. However, the geographies and micropolitics of rule in the Ethiopian Ogaden are more convoluted than this dichotomy suggests (see Hagmann, 2005). Two exceptions in particular deserve mention: First, not all imperial governors ruled the Ogaden aggressively. Most famously at the beginning of the 20th century Lij Iyasu and, later on, Fitawrari

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Tekle-Hawaryat pursued more benevolent policies towards the Ogaden than their predecessors and successors. Second, there have always been some segments of Somali society who have been complicit in the use of emergency powers in the Ogaden. Historically and to date selected Somali clan lineages had entered into alliance with the Ethiopian administration, which offered a career opportunity for those willing to learn Amharic (Brons, Doornbos, & Mohamed Salih, 1995). Inhabitants of the northern stretches of the region, particularly the Jijiga clans, have a long history of economic interaction and political integration with the Ethiopian highlands (Cossins, 1971). Although the state of exception has been a recurrent mode of governing the Somali periphery since 1890, at different times in history certain Somali clan lineages opted to coalesce with the Ethiopian central state (Barnes, 2000; Markakis, 1987; Reid, 2011). Conclusion We started this paper with a puzzling question: why has the Ethiopian government pursued a counter-productive counterinsurgency strategy in its Somali frontier against its own better knowledge? This paradox dissolves, if one interprets the political violence manifest in the region as the result of recurrent emergency powers by which highland rulers incorporate the Somali frontier into the sovereign body of the Ethiopian state. Drawing upon the writings of Schmitt and Agamben and a body of historical and present-day sources, we have argued that the current regime practices sovereign power in the Ethiopian Ogaden in a manner that dates back to imperial times. Hence, Ethiopia’s Somali inhabited lowlands are characterized not by state failure or anomy, but by a repeated state of exception of varying intensity. Deciding on who is within and who is outside the law, depriving the bodies of enemy populations of food and shelter and restricting who (persons) and what (information) travels out of the “encamped” region have been three recurrent elements of this topology of rule. What makes the Somali frontier constitutive of this inclusionary exclusion? If nomos is interpreted as bodily law in the (Foucauldian) sense that sovereignty is exercised over bodies that have to be encapsulated, pastoral societies’ mobility at the margins of the state poses a particular challenge to the centralizing nomos. In the frontier the exercise of sovereign power turns particularly violent as it is here that state sponsored land appropriation or Landnahme clashes with herders’ transgressive movements across several would-be sovereign spaces. By spatializing a violent state of exception in the confines of the Ogaadeen heartland, Ethiopian sovereignty is thus most forcefully present in its remote pastoral frontier. In this frontier, exception and rule become indistinguishable, which not only affects the “excluded”, but it also undermines the rule of law in the core, i.e. the Ethiopian state, and even globally. Indeed, while the Somali frontier appears to be located at the periphery, at the margins of the Ethiopian state, it is central to the constitution of the Ethiopian state as sovereign body (Das & Poole, 2004). We suggest that these frontier geographies are significant for political geographers who study sovereignty. Frontier considered territorially makes it a spatially and temporally discrete entity where a state of exception is in place. But an Agambian inspired analytics deterritorializes the state of exception; while we can locate the frontier as a territorial space, e.g. the Ogaden, the governing logic of the state of exception pervades the territorial confines of the Ogaden. While proverbially Agamben is “in” the Ogaden e in the form of the state of exception that he describes more generically e the frontier becomes part of the logic of governing, the zone of indistinction between those who are included as “excluded” (i.e. the post-1991 recognition of Somalis’ as citizens of a federal Ethiopia) and those who are excluded as “included” (i.e.

a continuity of practices and interventions by the Ethiopian state treating Somalis as subjects). Certainly, not all of Agamben’s theoretical subtleties apply to or resonate with empirical sites such the Ogaden. But it is arguable that Agamben, by bringing Hobbes fictitious “state of nature” back into the realm of actually existing situations of war and disorder, can be made productive both analytically and metaphorically to explain the nexus between violence and sovereignty in the state frontier. Seen in this light, “Agamben in the Ogaden” is not only a semantic label for Ethiopia’s topology of rule and the political geography of its Somali frontier, but signifies a de- and reterritorialization of the performance of sovereignty in the periphery that may have broader significance. Recent studies on the geographies of sovereignty have tended to qualify the territorial grounding of sovereignty and to suggest its networked characteristics (Agnew, 2005; Ong, 2006; Sidaway, 2003). Territorialization practiced through land appropriation e or what Schmitt calls Landnahme e remains constitutive, however, for the exercise of sovereignty at the margins of the state. Numerous postcolonial states are characterized by their quest to colonize and transform non-state spaces in the frontier zones into “fully governed, fiscally fertile zones” (Scott, 2009: 10), or, in other words, to incorporate the state of nature within the body politic. The study of the relational topology of sovereign power at the frontier and its (re-) territorializing effects allow Agamben’s spatial architecture (Minca, 2006) to be brought to analytical fruition. Acknowledgements We are indebted to Benedetta Rossi, Bert Suykens, Donald L. Donham, Markus V. Hoehne, Roland Bleiker, Timothy Raeymaekers and four anonymous reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments.

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