Negotiating everyday geographies of violence: Cases from Ethiopia

Abstract

“Peace is not the absence of war, and war does not always obstruct peace”, said an elder from Borana in Southern Ethiopia. The elder expressed war and peace as mutually constituted and entangled concepts. The entanglement of war and peace can be understood through lived experiences of people who inhabit war spaces and navigate different geographies of violence in their everyday life. In Ethiopia, people encounter structural, symbolic, and mundane forms of violence either during war times or in “post-war” periods. In this paper, I argue that war and peace are conjointly constituted in spaces and can only be well understood through everyday experiences of people who live in, negotiate and contest shifting geographies of violence. By taking some cases from Ethiopia’s Oromia region, I will elaborate not only the entanglement of war and peace but also how people navigate through war spaces. The paper is built on my previous ethnographic fieldwork in war and conflict areas of Ethiopia.

Keywords: Geographies of violence, Peace, War, Oromia, Ethiopia