Situated neoliberalism and urban crisis in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Abstract

The implosion of the socialist military government in 1991 ushered in a ‘new’ period in Ethiopia. This article examines the reincorporation of the country into the sphere of neoliberalism after a hiatus of 17 years of socialist experimentation accompanied by a social engineering project which brought unprecedented misfortune in the modern history of the country. The Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which assumed power, adopted market‐oriented structural and institutional reforms as a condition of getting an infusion of transnational capital and credit to resituate the Ethiopian economy which had been stagnant throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Two arguments are advanced is this article. First, the neoliberal project in Ethiopia which began in 1992 by privatizing the economy, devaluing the currency, reducing the fiscal deficit and abolishing state monopolies and price controls as a condition of the country's entry to the global system has been ineffective in addressing the structural problems facing the country. Second, these neoliberal programmes are exacerbating the existing problems facing the residents of Addis Ababa.