Building on recent work by Timothy Mitchell, this article interrogates the concept of capitalization, understood here specifically as models of extracting or capturing streams of future revenue for the present. In the context of urbanizing Ethiopia, national political and business leaders, international-development actors, and academics leverage agrarian–industrial transformations to persuade and justify monetizing the future through capitalization. I argue that far from a speculative mechanism to gain competitive advantage and accrue more investments later, Ethiopian development projects reveal how capitalization has a very physical and tangible footprint, serving to commodify the future, now. Ethiopian capitalization requires deep political and juridical continuities, revealed in institutional and developmental through lines from the country’s Derg regime to present governance by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Drawing on historical and contemporary archival analysis, I conceptually interrogate the process and effects of capitalization in Ethiopia first theoretically, and then through two spatially distinct cases of agrarian–industrial transformation in Ethiopia—the Gibe III Dam and the ongoing transformation of the New Ethiopian Sustainable Town (NESTown) initiative by private developers and government actors. Gibe III echoes past large-scale hydroelectric projects and NESTown echoes a history of villagization, “planned cities,” and high-modernist state-building. The cases show how historical and contemporary visions for “development” in Ethiopia steer toward models of greater capitalization, with outcomes that destroy ecosystems and livelihoods. These findings reveal capitalization’s presence and footprints, and suggest more radical institutional arrangements that do not force Ethiopia to financialize its future.
Although Lebanon and South Africa are often treated as exceptional cases, the use of geographic analogies like ‘bantustans’ and ‘Lebanonization’ signals their relevance to many other places. These analogies point to the recognition of a spatial mode of mnemonic war in which struggles over the past are also struggles over land. Such analogies signal recognition but also require forgetting: as narrative chronotopes, they are limiting. To look beyond these limits, we name this shared condition ‘mnemonic land war’ and trace its workings through territorialization, property regimes and planning in South Africa and Lebanon. Understanding these processes as memory-work allows us to see what the places analogized to Lebanon and South Africa share in their mnemonic land wars, and link them into a transnational memory constellation. Understanding this constellation can guide a comparative understanding of mnemonic war ‘on the ground’.
Social life in Mexico's state of Michoacán is consumed by a crisis of violence. Highlighting critical planning, this paper presents a grounded, local history of the municipality of Tancítaro, Michoacán, which has the highest concentration of avocado production globally. It analyzes violence in Tancítaro in light of the production of space, uneven development, and the spatial politics of land. This quantitative and archival research, coupled with theoretical explanations of violence, suggests that considerations of crisis and planning require situated analyses with ethnographic methods and embedded fieldwork that cross geographic scales and disciplinary boundaries emphasizing perspectives of affected community residents.
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