From “Subject to Citizen”? History, Identity and Minority Citizenship: The Case of the Mao and Komo of Western Ethiopia

ion of multi-cultural realities. Accordingly, conflicts over ownership of territory have become a noticeable feature of the negotiations of political power in the new regions. The federal boundaries became contested spaces between regional states. As we have seen in the case of the Berta Oromo confrontation over Begi, federal boundaries are the product of majority groups’ claims over territory. The dispersed minorities on the other hand have to negotiate their political agency across these boundaries, which, in fact limits their effective representation in the current federal framework. 44 Paragraph four provides for the right to self-determination up to secession. This is yet another pattern of the interplay of ethnicity and development in Ethiopia and has to be omitted here. 45 Richard Yarwood, Citizenship, Key Ideas in Geography (London – New York: Routledge, 2013), 18. 46 For an interesting critique of the concept of territorial autonomy and ethnic conflicts, see Shaheen Mozaffar and James R. Scarrit, ‘Why Territorial Autonomy Is Not a Viable Option for Managing Ethnic Conflict in African Plural Societies’, in Identity and Territorial Autonomy in Plural Societies, ed. Ramón Máiz and Safran William (New York: Routledge, 2000), 230–53. 47 Yonatan Tesfaye Fessha and van der Beken, ‘Ethnic Federalism and Internal Minorities’.