Big projects, strong states?

Large-scale investments in land and irrigation are a cornerstone of the Ethiopian government strategy of state building, through agricultural modernisation and job creation. Drawing on fieldwork in the government-owned Beles Sugar Project, we analyse the processes of state territorialisation, as well as the socio-spatial reordering of people through resettlement and redistribution of land, water and labour. Our analysis points at the contradiction of these processes in terms of state formation: on the one side the central government increases its capacity of resource extraction and accumulation at the periphery of the country; on the other side increasing social and spatial mobility make the society less intelligible to the government and undermine its political legitimacy.