Trade Makes States highlights how trade and the circulation of goods are central to Somali societies, economies and politics. Drawing on multi-site research from across East Africa's Somali-inhabited economic space--which includes areas of Kenya, Djibouti, Uganda and Ethiopia--this volume highlights the interconnection between trade and state-building after state collapse. It scrutinises the 'politics of circulation' between competing public administrations, which seek to generate revenue and to control infrastructures along major trade corridors. Connecting classic debates on state formation with recent scholarship on logistics and cross-border trading, Trade Makes States argues that the facilitation and capture of commodity flows have been instrumental in making and unmaking states across the Somali territories. Aspiring state-builders are thus confronted with the challenge of governing the flow of goods in order to rule over lands and peoples. The contributors to this volume draw attention to the ingenuities of transnational Somali markets, which often appear to be self-governed. Their dynamism and everyday administration by a host of actors provide important insights into contemporary state formation on the margins of global supply-chain capitalism.

This book takes stock of political reform in Ethiopia and the transformation of Ethiopian society since the adoption of multi-party politics and ethnic federalism in 1991. Decentralization, attempted democratization via ethno-national representation, and partial economic liberalization have reconfigured Ethiopian society and state in the past two decades. Yet, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, 'democracy' in Ethiopia has not changed the authority structures and the culture of centralist decision-making of the past. The political system is tightly engineered and controlled from top to bottom by the ruling Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Navigating between its 1991 announcements to democratise the country and its aversion to power-sharing, the EPRDF has established a de facto one-party state that enjoys considerable international support. This ruling party has embarked upon a technocratic 'developmental state' trajectory ostensibly aimed at 'depoliticizing' national policy and delegitimizing alternative courses. The contributors analyze the dynamics of authoritarian state-building, political ethnicity, electoral politics and state-society relations that have marked the Ethiopian polity since the downfall of the socialist Derg regime. Chapters on ethnic federalism, 'revolutionary democracy', opposition parties, the press, the judiciary, state-religion, and state-foreign donor relations provide the most comprehensive and thought-provoking review of contemporary Ethiopian national politics to date. This book is based on a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.