Local War and Its Impact on Ethnic and Religious Identification in Southern Ethiopia

After the fall of the Mengistu regime in 1991 the extreme south of Ethiopia first went through a period of relative peace in spite, or because of, the total absence of state institutions. The structures of local societies, among them the gada or generation set system, and the local forms of food production appeared to be sufficient for the needs of the local population. Then a variety of parties and liberation fronts started to compete for the control of state institutions which were expected to reappear. This led to a local war in which group identities were re-drawn to fit the patterns of'ethnic'movements or'micro nationalisms'. The paper examines primarily the examples of "Oromo" and "Somali" identity in this context.