Reid argues that this modern warfare is not solely the product of modern political 'failure', but rather has its roots in a network of frontier zones which are both violent and creative. Such borderlands have given rise to markedly militarised political cultures which are rooted in the violence of the nineteenth century, and which in recent decades are manifest in authoritarian systems of government. Reid thus traces the history of Amhara and Tigrayan imperialisms to the nationalist and ethnic revolutions which represented the march of volatile borderlands on the hegemonic centre. He suggests a new interpretation of Ethiopian and Eritrean history, arguing that the key to understanding the region's turbulent present lies in an appreciation of the role of the armed, and politically fertile, frontier in its deeper past.
Prologue: The Past in the Present
Part I: Setting and Approach
1. Interpreting the region
2. The Shadows of Antiquity
Part II: Violence and Imperialism: The 'long' nineteenth century
3. States of Violence, to c.1870
4. Borderlands, Militarism and the Making of Empire
Part III: Colonialisms, Old and New
5. Demarcating Identity: the European colonial experience, c.1890-c.1950
6. The Empire of Haile Selassie, c.1900-1974
Part IV: Revolutions, Liberations, and the Ghosts of the Mesafint
7. Revolution, 'Liberation', and Militant Identity, 1974-1991
8. New States, Old Wars: Violence, frontier, and destiny in the modern era Epilogue: Armed Frontiers and Militarised Margins Bibliography
Overview
Northeast Africa has one of the richest histories in the world, and yet also one of the most violent. Richard Reid offers an historical analysis of violent conflict in northeast Africa through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, incorporating the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands and their escarpment and lowland peripheries, stretching between the modern Eritrean Red Sea coast and the southern and eastern borderlands of present day Ethiopia. Sudanese and Somali frontiers are also examined insofar as they can ...