The border as temporal horizon: a borderlands massacre and the contested futures of federalism in eastern Ethiopia

Abstract

In 1995, a coalition of former rebel groups redrew Ethiopia's map, establishing an ethnic-federal system. By 2017, internal border conflicts signalled federalism's potential unravelling. This article analyses expectations about federalism's future among Somalis in Ethiopia, drawing on anthropologies of time to understand how everyday processes of border-making orient around the ‘future in the present’. Anthropologists and historians concerned with political time have focused largely on how the ‘past in the present’ shapes state-building and political identity formation. Meanwhile, political scientists and commentators, as well as many Ethiopians living amid uncertainty, prognosticate about the future of identity politics in Ethiopia and attempt to discern whether decentralization is paving the way to state fragmentation. Foregrounding how people work to manage time at borders and through borderwork, this article analyses the roles borders play in people's collective constructions of political futures – and the role anticipations about the future play in people's engagement with borders.