The political and cultural inclusion of intra‐state ethnic minorities in Ethiopia: The case of the Qimant of Amhara state

Abstract

Conflicts between the Qimant communityan intrastate minority ethnic group endogenous to Amhara state in the Ethiopian federationand the state's special police forces have caused hundreds of deaths and the internal displacement of close to 50,000 people. Linked to these conflicts are the Qimants' demands for recognition as a distinct ethnic community and the establishment of local government in the territories they inhabit; demands which have not received a satisfactory response from the federal or Amhara state government and which officials view with disdain. The situation raises several questions. Do the federal and regionalstate constitutions provide the necessary framework for accommodating intra-state ethnic minorities such as the Qimant? If they do, why have the two levels of government failed to resolve the Qimant issue peacefully? What institutional mechanisms could they have used to satisfy the demands of the Qimant community? This article seeks to answer these and related questions.

Public policy responses to COVID-19 and the survival of ethnic minority businesses (EMBs): does entrepreneurial orientation (EO) matter?

“…Numerical size and political weight are two key factors that distinguish between majority and minority ethnic groups (Ayele, 2012). Accordingly, one of the most widely accepted definitions of a minority is the one developed by Wheatley: Ethnic minority businesses .…”

“…The remainder of the population consists of minority groups (Wheatley, 2005). However, a group that is a numerical minority can sometimes be the majority if it has political ascendancy (Ayele, 2012), for example, White people in South Africa during the era of apartheid (Ramaga, 1992). As such, the concurrent existence of both numerical inferiority and political lowliness is important in defining an ethnic group as a minority (Wheatley, 2005).…”

“…Numerical size and political weight are two key factors that distinguish between majority and minority ethnic groups (Ayele, 2012). Accordingly, one of the most widely accepted definitions of a minority is the one developed by Wheatley:… [a] group numerically inferior to the rest of the population of a state, in a non-dominant position, whose members – being nationals of the state – possess ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics different from those of the rest of the population and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity directed towards perceiving their culture, tradition, religion or language (Wheatley, 2005, p. 19).…”

“…Consequently, intra-regional ethnic minority communities are ethnic minorities in a province of a country because they have both numerical inferiority and political lowliness in the particular province in which they reside (Ayele, 2012; Ramaga, 1992). There are two types of intra-regional ethnic minority groups: a) people belonging to an ethnic group that is dominant in a particular province but may find itself as a minority group in the context of another province in the same country where another ethnic group is dominant; b) an ethnic group that is not dominant, regionally or nationally, called a “double minority” (Ayele, 2012; Ramaga, 1992). These intra-regional ethnic minorities are minority groups.…”

“…In this context, a subgroup of EMBs that has been largely understudied, perhaps due to a lack of data, is intra-regional EMBs. These are EMBs owned by ethnic minorities in a province of a country that have both numerical inferiority and political lowliness, such as the Cree speakers who live in Quebec, Canada (Ayele, 2012; Ramaga, 1992). Past studies in the US, the UK and China have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic has hit EMBs disproportionately more than non-EMBs (Fairlie, 2020; Prah and Sibiri, 2021).…”