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Understanding Contemporary Ethiopia: Monarchy, Revolution and the Legacy of Meles Zenawi , edited by Gérard Prunier and Éloi Ficquet London : Hurst , 2015. Pp. 416. £19·99 (pbk).
Reviews
This is probably an indispensable book on today's Ethiopia, giving us an original and well-written overview of the country and its recent transformations. It addresses recent history but also the current social, economic and political developments as well as the demographic and 'religious' situation. As so often noted, Ethiopia indeed has gone through dramatic changes in the past decades since the take-over of power in 1991 by the former insurgent movement, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (with at its core the Tigray People's Liberation Front, TPLF). This is despite the baseline of strongly authoritarian political governance being maintained and reinvented in new forms. The title of the book covers the scope and contents quite well, but some readers wondered if mentioning the late PM Meles Zenawi so prominently as having bequeathed a dominant personal 'legacy' is not overdoing it a bit: certainly such a legacy is cultivated by current rulers for political-symbolic reasons, but the policies inaugurated were broader than just the role of one man.
This book is loosely based on the French collection L'Éthiopie Contemporaine, edited by Prunier and published by Karthala (Paris) in 2007, with a number of the same authors and subjects retained. But it has become a very different publication in style and substance, with seriously rewritten texts and new contributions. In the 16 chapters, of differing quality, we...