The Future in a Frontier City
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2025
In August 2018, ʿAbdi Moḥamoud ʿUmar, president of Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State, was ousted and arrested by federal security forces. ʿAbdi had led an unprecedented decade-long push to securitize the Ethiopia-Somaliland border, to “Ethiopianize” Somalis, and to entice Somali migrants living abroad to return to Ethiopia and collaborate with the regional government. Yet a significant number of those who collaborated with and benefited from the regime also celebrated its downfall. This concluding chapter describes these more recent events as an entry-point to reflecting on the broader implications of the book’s argument that city-making and border-making are deeply intertwined in today’s world. It addresses three specific possible counterarguments, which serve to highlight the themes of the book and link them to broader debates in economic anthropology, border studies, migration studies, and urban studies.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.