Making and unmaking the state in the Horn of Africa: A deep-time perspective

Abstract

In this article, I intend to use archaeology’s understanding of deep time and infrastructure to explore the ways in which state-making has been challenged in the Horn of Africa during the last two millennia. I will take a long-term approach to state ecology and state resistance so as to eschew the presentist bias that is all too frequent in political analyses, particularly in Africa, and that prevents us from understanding some of the deep undercurrent that explain contemporary phenomena. The Horn is an ideal case for this kind of inquiry because it has some of the oldest state polities south of the Sahara; state trajectories in the region are non-linear and fraught with obstacles, though surprisingly persistent, and small-scale, stateless societies have proved to be extremely persistent, both in the periphery and at the heart of the state. Here I will explore three themes that are illustrative of the relationship between state-building, infrastructures and resistance in the borderlands of the Horn of Africa: the anti-infrastructural ethos of nomadic pastoralists; internal frontiers or zones of difference, and liminal ecologies, such as swamps and escarpments, which defy state control, technologies and imaginaries.