Smugglers, Speculators, and the City in the Ethiopia-Somalia Borderlands

Daniel K. Thompson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009556279
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For a century, the Ethiopian city Jigjiga was known as a dusty hub of cross-border smuggling and a hotbed of rebellion on Ethiopia's eastern frontier. After 2010, it transformed into a post-conflict boomtown, becoming one of Africa's fastest-growing cities and attracting Somali return-migrants from across the globe. This study examines Jigjiga's astonishing transformation through the eyes of its cross-border traders, urban businesspeople, and officials. Daniel K. Thompson follows traders and return-migrants across borders to where their lives collide in the city. Analysing their strategies of mobility and exchange, this study reveals how Ethiopia's federal politics, Euro-American concerns about terrorism, and local business aspirations have intertwined to reshape links between border-making and city-making in the Horn of Africa. To understand this distinctive brand of urbanism, Thompson follows globalized connections and reveals how urbanites in Africa and beyond participate in the "urban borderwork" of constructing, as well as contesting, today's border management regimes.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Connective Borders and Divided Cities
• 1 Urban Borderwork: Unexpected Coalitions in a Chat Den
• 2 Smuggling and Judgment: (Un)making Livelihoods in the Cross-Border Cultural Economy
• 3 Borderland Urbanization: Exchanges and Identities on the Urban Frontier
• 4 Connective Borders: Federalism’s Transnational Topologies
• 5 Contraband Urbanity: Urban Egalitarianisms Amid Autocracy
• 6 Transactional Frontiers: Urban Exchanges That Make Borders
• Conclusion: The Future in a Frontier City
• References
• Index