Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Stephanie Beswick and Jay Spaulding The countries of the Horn of Africa—Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan—are among the continent's most troubled. These nations have been at war for decades. Ethiopia has been a postimperial nation-state for only a few years, yet during this interval has suffered famine, Marxist revolutionary dictatorship, liberation, and famine once again, in quick succession. Eritrea fought a long, hard war to achieve its recent and fragile freedom from Ethiopia and continues to be vulnerable to its larger, more powerful neighbor. Somalia has fallen into a fractious state of almost continuous warfare since its political disintegration in 1991; the fragments of the former nation are currently presided over by powerful clan families. The longest war anywhere in the Horn is that in South Sudan. There, a desperately fought war for independence from Islamic fundamentalists of the northern government has intermittently sputtered and raged since 1955, resulting in the cumulative death of millions. In all times of political upheaval, women suffer in ways that differ significantly from those of their male counterparts. This volume presents the first compilation of papers concerning the lives of women in the conflict zones of the Horn of Africa. During the last half-century, women's studies has proven to be a very rich source of new ideas for the social sciences and humanities; indeed, it would be hard to name a rival in the stimulation of innovative theoretical approaches, original research and analytical methodologies, and the mobilization of new forms of evidence toward comprehension of the human condition. One consequence of this very efflorescence of [End Page 1] thought, however, has been the branching of the young scholarly tradition into many pathways, not all of which seem to lead toward a single destination. A fundamental question concerns the conceptualization of the discipline's human context; some scholars have chosen to focus fairly emphatically upon women as women, while others have preferred to interpret women's lives as integral parts of various other forms of social reality. A second important set of decisions confronts those who opt for the latter approach: what scale of conceptualization and which disciplinary techniques and intellectual discourses are appropriate for the understanding of each to ensure that the very diverse situations are considered? Does one traverse the interior landscape of an individual mind, the story of the events of a person's life, or the many levels of women's cultural and historical engagement in family, class, ethnic, national, and religious traditions? Any scholar may well find the research agenda to be guided, when not dictated, by the forms of relevant evidence that happen to be available; the product of such an effort cannot fail to reflect its empirical roots, and it is not always easy to achieve a sense of what is commensurate among works rooted in radically diverse evidential bases. For all the reasons indicated, it has not been easy for women's studies to achieve consensus concerning which situations, out of all of women's experiences, are properly to be compared with which others. The papers contributed to this special issue of Northeast African Studies devoted to women and the study of women, each excellent in its own way, inevitably reflect at least some of the fertile tensions and the diversity that characterize the discipline as a whole. In his painstaking historiographical survey of writings by and about women in Ethiopia, Belete Bizuneh exposes a range of themes that also, in broad strokes, characterizes the literature of the region as a whole. Dominant among these is fragmentation; despite promising but tentative pioneer works by a younger generation of Ethiopian scholars, it is not easy to find a relevant women's literature for Ethiopia. A distinct if related theme is that of oblique reference. Much of what may indeed be read about women in Ethiopia must be extracted, through an intellectual process resembling reconstructive surgery, from studies devoted primarily to something else. A third important theme is the disproportionate [End Page 2] weight of foreign scholarship throughout; at this time, the demand for an intellectual commitment to women in the Horn is clearly of primarily alien origin. While this circumstance need...