Online book presentation with Echi Gabbert, Asebe Regassa and Jonah Wedekind

15. Juni 2022, 18 Uhr, Zoom

About the Book
Rangeland, forests and riverine landscapes of pastoral communities in Eastern Africa are increasingly under threat. Abetted by states who think that outsiders can better use the lands than the people who have lived there for centuries, outside commercial interests have displaced indigenous dwellers from pastoral territories. This volume presents case studies from Eastern Africa, based on long-term field research, that vividly illustrate the struggles and strategies of those who face dispossession and also discredit ideological false modernist tropes like ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’.

About the presenters

Echi Christina Gabbert s a social anthropologist at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Göttingen University. She coordinates the international Lands of the Future Initiative that connects scholars and practitioners addressing land-, food- and climate-policies on agro-pastoral territories and is co-editor of the volume Lands of the Future. Anthropological Perspectives on Pastoralism, Land Deals and Tropes of Modernity in Eastern Africa (Berghahn 2021). Her Introduction to Lands of the Future can be read here.

Asebe Regassa is a senior researcher and teaching fellow at the University of Zurich. His research areas focus on pastoralism, political economy of mega-development projects, dispossession, land and land rights, conflict and peace building, multinational federalism, and indigenous knowledge in the Horn of Africa. He published articles, book chapters and policy briefs on these issues in Ethiopia, including in the volume Lands of the Future.

Jonah Wedekind is a political ecologist and recently defended his PhD thesis at Humboldt University Berlin on the rise and fall of large-scale investment projects in Ethiopia. His research interests include agrarian change, environmental conflicts, and the nature of the state in Ethiopia. A chapter of his thesis, on the history of a failed German biofuel investment project on the Oromia–Somali borderlands, features in the volume Lands of the Future.

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