ABSTRACT
This article highlights dynamics and long-term legacies of state violence – namely, counterinsurgency campaigns – in the Ethiopian Ogaden over the past half-century. It does so by combining historical and contemporary accounts of the region with primary data collected among members of the Ogaadeen Somali diaspora in the USA in spring of 2012. Ethiopia’s western and southern frontiers are sites of historic state violence dating back to imperial state expansion.1 The southeastern Somali inhabited lowlands of Ethiopia have experienced highly escalated conflicts over the last 125 years, ranging from various rebellions by local armed groups to full-scale international war during the EthioSomali conflict of 1977-1978.2 These cycles of violence have shaped Ogaadeen Somalis’ subjectivities and have forged a distinct temporality that connects past and present trauma resulting from state violence. Successive periods of revolt and counterrevolt in the Ethiopian Ogaden have thus, it will be argued, become formative for the collective identity of Ogaadeen Somalis in the region and abroad.
