Ethiopia's contested national identities and security policy towards the horn of Africa, 1941-2012

Despite the ancient and non-colonial history of statehood, the modern Ethiopian state has been in recurring episodes of violent national identity contestations since the 1960s. Nationalist movements claimed to represent Eritrea, Oromo, Somali, Tigray, and other noncore identity groups waged wars of inclusion, autonomy, or independence against the exclusionary nation-state project. These internecine wars were further compounded by Somali irredentism and other external support for nationalist movements. Existing literature has gaps in understanding how precolonial discourses and legacy constituted contemporary national identity contestations and how they shape Ethiopia's regional security policies. This study aims to understand how Ethiopia's national identity has been constituted, contested, and reconstituted and how these contestations affected its regional security policies throughout the reign of the Haile Selassie, Darg, and EPRDF regimes. A framework of analysis is developed to bridge the analytically separate but functionally linked phenomena of national identity contestations and regional security policy using a two-stage qualitative research design. First, data collected from primary and secondary sources were analyzed and interpreted to establish the dominant discourses of constructing a nation-state out of a multiethnic society and counter-discourses. Second, five longitudinal dyadic cases were selected and analyzed to understand links between domestic resistance against nation-state projects and regional security policies across periods of the Haile Selassie, Darg, and EPRDF regimes. Empirical analyses of these cases revealed three main findings. First, national identity contestations were principally the function of exclusionary nation-building policies grounded in the cumulative product of the exclusionary myth of origin and the history of domination, exploitation, and marginalization. Second, Ethiopia's security policies toward states with which it shared boundaries were primarily shaped by the willingness and capacity of these states to support or allow nationalist movements to access external support. Third, Ethiopia's external relations were geared towards alliances to acquire arms and active involvement in international organizations to secure diplomatic cover for its territorial integrity against secessionism and irredentism.