At the International Conference of Ethiopian Studies in Japan in 1997, scholars proposed a book that would reflect on the transition from the Derg to the EPRDF era, and what the transitions meant for communities across the country. The result was a 2002 book, “Mapping Ethiopia: Socialism & After”, published by Ohio University Press and Addis Ababa University Press (a key partnership for knowledge production on Ethiopia). This edited volume has contributions from well-known academics in Ethiopian Studies (Pankhurst, Abbink, Clapham, Donham) and presents cases from across the country (many from southern parts of the country). The editors set out to “trace the way in which the centralizing policies of the socialist government, and then the regional devolution policies of the new government, actually affected and are still affecting the lives of people in specific localities across the country” (p. ix). The chapters are qualitative and the audience for this book is likely niche, particularly so today. Nonetheless, the book provides a unique window in the 1980s and 1990s. As an edited book, it is hard to draw out overarching conclusions. One quote from the Introduction:

“While the Workers’ Party was still the internationally recognized power in Ethiopia, the United States, in contradiction with international law, began to funnel food aid into Tigray across the Sudanese border. USAID granted funds to a Norwegian Christian church-supported NGO based in the Sudan, Emergency Relief Desk, who then transported aid across the border to the Relief Society of Tigray, another NGO created by the TPLF. This flow linked thus a bureaucratic and conservative USAID, a left liberal Norwegian church group, and the then-Marxist TPLF – links that no doubt played some role in bringing the TPLF to power within Tigray and thence within wider Ethiopia. Politics has always created strange bedfellows, but these juxtapositions illustrate well what some observers have called the ‘postmodern’ aspects of our current world order. What seems especially notable in this case is the savvy with which Ethiopian political actors have begun to exploit its possibilities.” (p. 7)