ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the state is imagined and makes its appearance in people’s lives in multiple and divergent ways as a dysfunctional and failed institution, authoritative and bureaucratic organisation, etc. depending on how individuals are situated and placed within a complex social setting. It argues that one cannot experience the state as a unified whole. Rather, individuals engage with it fragmentarily in different domains of everyday life, and, as a result, differently positioned people develop different understandings of a unitary state idea. This chapter, therefore, shows how these constructions of the state in Borana Zone of Ethiopia follow the practices and talk of development promoted by NGOs and the state. The overall aim of this chapter is to show how localised and fragmented development practices create a unified state idea at ‘the periphery’, and also how ‘the periphery’ is hierarchically interconnected, rather than geographically disconnected, to the centre.
