Mémoire
| Résumé : | Ethiopia is known to be one of the ancient countries where multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic groups have been living in harmony for centuries. Currently, the country is overwhelmingly characterized by inter-ethnic conflicts supposedly attributed to divergent interests and conflicting views among the elites about the genesis and trajectories of the Ethiopian nation state. The Ethiopian Students Movement (ESM) is said to have embraced the colonial thesis and Marxist-Leninist ideological battle in the Ethiopian system in 1960s rooting the ‘oppressor vs oppressed’ political narrative in the Ethiopian body politics whereby the ‘Amhara’ ethnic group appropriated oppressor over ‘other’ ethnic groups. Yet, the existence of primordial Amhara ethnic identity in the Ethiopian political and social organization was debatable among domestic and foreign scholars during that time. After years of dormancy, the Amhara diaspora establishes special institutions and solidarity movements. Then, the diaspora started to navigate their polity once social space prevailed. The transnational research approach is used to capture the dynamic discourse shift and the construction of the imagined Amhara nationalism. Data is collected from four transborder political activists and three key informants. Focus group discussion was also held with the National Movement of Amhara (NaMA) political leaders along with two months ethnographic fieldwork. The result indicate that the relentless media engagement appears to counter the Amhara ‘oppressor’ narrative well ingrained in the Ethiopian political landscape for half a century. This again triggers a dynamic discourse shift from the pan-Ethiopian political motive to the heighted ethnonational Amhara identity sentiment. In connection, ethnic mapping and territorial place-making appears to bounce the Amhara movement from its sluggish embarkation to the radicalized identity sentiment. In the end, the Amhara nationalism is a ‘bottom-up’ instrumental Amhara elite project rather than it is ‘an imposition from above’. |
