Displacement and Resistance Strategies of the Pastoralists Afar in Ethiopia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the resistance strategies of the displaced pastoralist Afar people in Northeast Ethiopia, focusing on the Lubakubo clan of the Dobi area. The Afar have historically practiced transhumant pastoralism, sustaining their livelihoods through the herding of livestock across arid and semi-arid landscapes. In 2004, a local “big man,” backed by the Ethiopian government and private investors, forcibly displaced members of the Lubakubo clan to facilitate commercial salt mining in Dobi, disrupting their socio-economic systems, cultural ties to the land, and traditional pastoral routes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and archival research, this paper documents how the Afar mobilized lineage members, customary institutions, and strategic alliances to counter and contest the dispossession. These resistance strategies ranged from legal petitions and engagement with Afar traditional governance and conflict resolution structures to confrontation and symbolic acts reinforcing territorial claims. By situating these strategies within the broader political economy of resource extraction and displacement in the Horn of Africa, the paper contributes to scholarly debates on Indigenous resistance, land rights, and state–local power dynamics. The findings highlight the agency of displaced pastoralists in asserting their rights against state-backed commercial interests, while underscoring the resilience and adaptability of pastoralist systems under conditions of protracted displacement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".