ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an analysis of the manner in which the state comes to be constituted in people’s imaginations in the context of everyday social life and seeks to capture the idea of the Ethiopian state in the imagination of the people who inhabit it. It shows that political imagination, in Ethiopia, particularly, has taken root in development discourses and their imbrication within a culturally specific normative ideals of the state. The chapter suggests that the specifically local ways in which discourses about development in Ethiopia are articulated elicit the diversity of lived practices, experiences, and social interactions, which simultaneously relate to contextualised knowledge, moral idioms and cultural values that carry the social and political life of people in contemporary North Ethiopia. It examines corruption discourses found in kebele public domains as a means of understanding the ways in which the state is constructed and imagined.
