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Papers by Immo Eulenberger

BRILL eBooks, Oct 11, 2022

The current internecine war in what external observers see as the world’s youngest ‘failed state’... more The current internecine war in what external observers see as the world’s youngest ‘failed state’ is the product of structural developments. This chapter tries to question the particularities of one rather stable and prosperous region of South Sudan, Kapoeta East (EES), on possible structural reasons for the devastating and lethal crisis in others. It draws attention to the fact that destruction and disenfranchisement concentrate in zones of crucial importance for the power relations and resource flows of its minoritarian but privileged ‘modern sector’. It questions policies promoting and feeding the very institutions that under the conditions of the country sign responsible for a large part of its misery and shocking abuses of power against obligations, rights and human dignity. It raises the question if we should finally stop looking at societies through a particularly ‘modern’ matrix of institutional order and start taking ‘home-grown models’, as they have developed over centuries, serious. More than a century of insightful research as much as contemporary evidence suggest that there are, coexisting with internationally alimented ‘modern’ institutions producing crisis, alternative modes of social regulation that do, in absence of public attention, impressive jobs; that modernisation becomes an iconic remedy for ills produced by its own re-structuring patterns; that the idea of development and its interaction with social realities should be analysed as vigorously as the dialectics of enlightenment; that the modernisation narrative is a myth, protected by belief and force, that serves particular interests and produces harmful gaps between official terms and actual practices.

The Borderlands of South Sudan, 2013

Ambio, Jan 9, 2019

This paper synthesizes current knowledge on the impacts of the Gibe III dam and associated large-... more This paper synthesizes current knowledge on the impacts of the Gibe III dam and associated large-scale commercial farming in the Omo-Turkana Basin, based on an expert elicitation coupled with a scoping review and the collective knowledge of an multidisciplinary network of researchers with active data-collection programs in the Basin. We use social-ecological systems and political ecology frameworks to assess the impacts of these interventions on hydrology and ecosystem services in the Basin, and cascading effects on livelihoods, patterns of migration, and conflict dynamics for the people of the region. A landscape-scale transformation is occurring in which commodities, rather than staple foods for local consumption, are becoming the main output of the region. Mitigation measures initiated by the Ethiopian government—notably resettlement schemes—are not adequately buffering affected communities from food insecurity following disruption to indigenous livelihood systems. Therefore, while benefits are accruing to labor migrants, the costs of development are currently borne primarily by the agro–pastoralist indigenous people of the region. We consider measures that might maximize benefits from the changes underway and mitigate their negative outcomes, such as controlled floods, irrigating fodder crops, food aid, and benefit sharing.

The Borderlands of South Sudan, 2013

The current internecine war in what external observers see as the world’s youngest ‘failed state’... more The current internecine war in what external observers see as the world’s youngest ‘failed state’ is the product of structural developments. This chapter tries to question the particularities of one rather stable and prosperous region of South Sudan, Kapoeta East (EES), on possible structural reasons for the devastating and lethal crisis in others. It draws attention to the fact that destruction and disenfranchisement concentrate in zones of crucial importance for the power relations and resource flows of its minoritarian but privileged ‘modern sector’. It questions policies promoting and feeding the very institutions that under the conditions of the country sign responsible for a large part of its misery and shocking abuses of power against obligations, rights and human dignity. It raises the question if we should finally stop looking at societies through a particularly ‘modern’ matrix of institutional order and start taking ‘home-grown models’, as they have developed over centuries, serious. More than a century of insightful research as much as contemporary evidence suggest that there are, coexisting with internationally alimented ‘modern’ institutions producing crisis, alternative modes of social regulation that do, in absence of public attention, impressive jobs; that modernisation becomes an iconic remedy for ills produced by its own re-structuring patterns; that the idea of development and its interaction with social realities should be analysed as vigorously as the dialectics of enlightenment; that the modernisation narrative is a myth, protected by belief and force, that serves particular interests and produces harmful gaps between official terms and actual practices.

The vast areas along the south-eastern borders of South Sudan with Kenya and Ethiopia are dominat... more The vast areas along the south-eastern borders of South Sudan with Kenya and Ethiopia are dominated by pastoralist societies perpetuating traditional forms of tribal organisation that are only recently becoming integrated into the state system. As civil war and related cross-border development activities have substantially altered power relations and demography in the region, pastoralist resource competition becomes explosively mixed up with the ‘local politics’ of a new school-educated ‘leadership class’ and national issues. Current conflicts around the Toposa/Nyangatom-Turkana frontier and the Elemi Triangle invite a discussion of border(land) dynamics as a volatile entanglement of differing concepts of territoriality, mobility and resource rights.

Book Reviews by Immo Eulenberger

In the most recent millennia of human history, individual freedom has increasingly become a preca... more In the most recent millennia of human history, individual freedom has increasingly become a precarious matter in the face of intergroup and intra-social predation, observably the more so the more institutionalised social hierarchies dominate the scene. González–Ruibal's "Archaeology of Resistance" reminds us – using the example of an intriguing contemporary cluster of "subaltern" ethnic communities in the Ethiopia-Sudan borderlands – that successful defense against predation has long been a collective affair of cultural and organizational choices, and that people and peoples often defend egalitarian and autonomist patterns to such ends as best they can. At a time when international coalitions of transformation profiteers mount unprecedented pressure on areas like the western and southern fringes of the Ethiopian highlands – where that defense had worked for millennia even in the violent proximity of powerful expansionist ethnic and state systems –, he also reminds us that resistance to change can be progressive and that fashionable academic obsessions with change can make for biases utterly opposed to emancipatory attitudes their faithful like to parade. This book by an archaeologist specialised in the deep history of violent power, its shapes and checks has two basic strengths at levels that might come as a surprise to anthropologists. First, it offers a thorough comparative ethnography of a regional cluster of cultures and societies with different levels of cultural autonomy, and second, it is a very important and topical contribution to anthropological discourse and theory. Anthropologists might have a hard time trying to give a more convincing account of a historically deep and phenomenologically rich landscape of cultural particularities, commonalities and interplay, of durable social strategies, material arrangements and developing power relations for a region like this. While historiography conspicuously privileges the expansionist hierarchical systems engaging societies at their ecologically and socially contrasting fringes for millennia in " resource wars, " the latter are the empirical focus of this remarkable study. Sandwiched between expansionist powers from the Ethiopian highlands to their east and from the plains of the Sudan in the west, they did not develop state structures but instead paradigmatic cultural sets of material and mental strategies to cope with the threat of submission and exploitation by those powerful neighbours and invaders.

BRILL eBooks, Oct 11, 2022

The current internecine war in what external observers see as the world’s youngest ‘failed state’... more The current internecine war in what external observers see as the world’s youngest ‘failed state’ is the product of structural developments. This chapter tries to question the particularities of one rather stable and prosperous region of South Sudan, Kapoeta East (EES), on possible structural reasons for the devastating and lethal crisis in others. It draws attention to the fact that destruction and disenfranchisement concentrate in zones of crucial importance for the power relations and resource flows of its minoritarian but privileged ‘modern sector’. It questions policies promoting and feeding the very institutions that under the conditions of the country sign responsible for a large part of its misery and shocking abuses of power against obligations, rights and human dignity. It raises the question if we should finally stop looking at societies through a particularly ‘modern’ matrix of institutional order and start taking ‘home-grown models’, as they have developed over centuries, serious. More than a century of insightful research as much as contemporary evidence suggest that there are, coexisting with internationally alimented ‘modern’ institutions producing crisis, alternative modes of social regulation that do, in absence of public attention, impressive jobs; that modernisation becomes an iconic remedy for ills produced by its own re-structuring patterns; that the idea of development and its interaction with social realities should be analysed as vigorously as the dialectics of enlightenment; that the modernisation narrative is a myth, protected by belief and force, that serves particular interests and produces harmful gaps between official terms and actual practices.

The Borderlands of South Sudan, 2013

Ambio, Jan 9, 2019

This paper synthesizes current knowledge on the impacts of the Gibe III dam and associated large-... more This paper synthesizes current knowledge on the impacts of the Gibe III dam and associated large-scale commercial farming in the Omo-Turkana Basin, based on an expert elicitation coupled with a scoping review and the collective knowledge of an multidisciplinary network of researchers with active data-collection programs in the Basin. We use social-ecological systems and political ecology frameworks to assess the impacts of these interventions on hydrology and ecosystem services in the Basin, and cascading effects on livelihoods, patterns of migration, and conflict dynamics for the people of the region. A landscape-scale transformation is occurring in which commodities, rather than staple foods for local consumption, are becoming the main output of the region. Mitigation measures initiated by the Ethiopian government—notably resettlement schemes—are not adequately buffering affected communities from food insecurity following disruption to indigenous livelihood systems. Therefore, while benefits are accruing to labor migrants, the costs of development are currently borne primarily by the agro–pastoralist indigenous people of the region. We consider measures that might maximize benefits from the changes underway and mitigate their negative outcomes, such as controlled floods, irrigating fodder crops, food aid, and benefit sharing.

The Borderlands of South Sudan, 2013

The current internecine war in what external observers see as the world’s youngest ‘failed state’... more The current internecine war in what external observers see as the world’s youngest ‘failed state’ is the product of structural developments. This chapter tries to question the particularities of one rather stable and prosperous region of South Sudan, Kapoeta East (EES), on possible structural reasons for the devastating and lethal crisis in others. It draws attention to the fact that destruction and disenfranchisement concentrate in zones of crucial importance for the power relations and resource flows of its minoritarian but privileged ‘modern sector’. It questions policies promoting and feeding the very institutions that under the conditions of the country sign responsible for a large part of its misery and shocking abuses of power against obligations, rights and human dignity. It raises the question if we should finally stop looking at societies through a particularly ‘modern’ matrix of institutional order and start taking ‘home-grown models’, as they have developed over centuries, serious. More than a century of insightful research as much as contemporary evidence suggest that there are, coexisting with internationally alimented ‘modern’ institutions producing crisis, alternative modes of social regulation that do, in absence of public attention, impressive jobs; that modernisation becomes an iconic remedy for ills produced by its own re-structuring patterns; that the idea of development and its interaction with social realities should be analysed as vigorously as the dialectics of enlightenment; that the modernisation narrative is a myth, protected by belief and force, that serves particular interests and produces harmful gaps between official terms and actual practices.

The vast areas along the south-eastern borders of South Sudan with Kenya and Ethiopia are dominat... more The vast areas along the south-eastern borders of South Sudan with Kenya and Ethiopia are dominated by pastoralist societies perpetuating traditional forms of tribal organisation that are only recently becoming integrated into the state system. As civil war and related cross-border development activities have substantially altered power relations and demography in the region, pastoralist resource competition becomes explosively mixed up with the ‘local politics’ of a new school-educated ‘leadership class’ and national issues. Current conflicts around the Toposa/Nyangatom-Turkana frontier and the Elemi Triangle invite a discussion of border(land) dynamics as a volatile entanglement of differing concepts of territoriality, mobility and resource rights.

In the most recent millennia of human history, individual freedom has increasingly become a preca... more In the most recent millennia of human history, individual freedom has increasingly become a precarious matter in the face of intergroup and intra-social predation, observably the more so the more institutionalised social hierarchies dominate the scene. González–Ruibal's "Archaeology of Resistance" reminds us – using the example of an intriguing contemporary cluster of "subaltern" ethnic communities in the Ethiopia-Sudan borderlands – that successful defense against predation has long been a collective affair of cultural and organizational choices, and that people and peoples often defend egalitarian and autonomist patterns to such ends as best they can. At a time when international coalitions of transformation profiteers mount unprecedented pressure on areas like the western and southern fringes of the Ethiopian highlands – where that defense had worked for millennia even in the violent proximity of powerful expansionist ethnic and state systems –, he also reminds us that resistance to change can be progressive and that fashionable academic obsessions with change can make for biases utterly opposed to emancipatory attitudes their faithful like to parade. This book by an archaeologist specialised in the deep history of violent power, its shapes and checks has two basic strengths at levels that might come as a surprise to anthropologists. First, it offers a thorough comparative ethnography of a regional cluster of cultures and societies with different levels of cultural autonomy, and second, it is a very important and topical contribution to anthropological discourse and theory. Anthropologists might have a hard time trying to give a more convincing account of a historically deep and phenomenologically rich landscape of cultural particularities, commonalities and interplay, of durable social strategies, material arrangements and developing power relations for a region like this. While historiography conspicuously privileges the expansionist hierarchical systems engaging societies at their ecologically and socially contrasting fringes for millennia in " resource wars, " the latter are the empirical focus of this remarkable study. Sandwiched between expansionist powers from the Ethiopian highlands to their east and from the plains of the Sudan in the west, they did not develop state structures but instead paradigmatic cultural sets of material and mental strategies to cope with the threat of submission and exploitation by those powerful neighbours and invaders.