Description
Ethiopia is known among development practitioners and academics for its strong developmental agenda, its commitment to programme implementation, and its resistance to foreign development policies and to foreign mischaracterisations of its work. In the recent years, academia has linked it to the authoritarian nature of the state (Brown and Fisher 2020; Dereje 2011; Furtado and Smith 2009; Hagmann and Reyntjens 2016). Building on postcolonial and queer readings of international development aid (in particular on Kapoor’s 2008 and 20015 works), however, this paper argues that past Ethiopian states have systematically performed a form of combative queerness, through stigma reversal and reappropriation of international power narratives.
This paper is constructed as a comparison of three different regimes: the imperial rule of Haile Selassie, the Derg regime and Meles’ EPRDF, the longue durée erasing the notion that development aid empowerment is the sole success of the EPRDF. The paper’s findings are based on a large compilation of archives from the Ethiopian states’ discourses aimed at the international community (public speeches, letters, clippings state-owned newspaper).
Keywords: International development, queer theory, discourse analysis, Ethiopia
