Refugee education as boundary making and population control: State building, resistance, and refugeehood in Gambela region of Ethiopia

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Knowledge production, displacement, and identity: Challenges, theories, and reflexive experiences from conflict and post-conflict contexts

Proposal

How does the historical context of state building, resistance, and refugee hosting in the 1960s reveal the challenges in implementing current policies aimed at including refugees into national education systems? This study examines the disjuncture between Ethiopia's current refugee policy, which emphasizes inclusion, and the realities in Gambela—a regional state in Ethiopia hosting refugees since 1960s— that might result in exclusion. By exploring the political history of state building and the resistance, the study seeks to shade light on how these historical factors influence Ethiopia's current approach to inclusion of refugee. I use archival data from the Ethiopian National Archives and Library Agency (NALA). Several rounds of readings were undertaken to understand the archival documents, and analytical memos were written. The memos mainly focused on looking into how the purposes of refugee education were framed and the reasons for the framing. Refugees from Southern Sudan started to appear in the Gambela area of Ethiopia in the early 1960s and this cohort of refugees stayed until repatriation following the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement between the Southern Sudan liberation fighters and the Sudan government. This study focuses on this time period.
The UNHCR Global Education Strategy (GES) 2012-2016 initially institutionalized the policy for inclusion shifting from the long-stayed practice of providing education for refugees in isolated, largely camp based, and refugee only schools. The current UNHCR GES has continued this shift towards inclusion. Ethiopia is one of the countries that signed to the September 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants and immediately announced what are called the nine pledges. The nine pledges Ethiopia announced required the country to explore more options to include refugees in the national development plans. Following the pledges, Ethiopia introduced multiple policy documents to facilitate the implementation of the new refugee policy. Specific to refugee education, Ethiopia signed the Djibouti declaration on refugee education in 2017 agreeing to integrate refugees into national education policies, strategies, programs, and plans of action. The most significant development, however, was the revised refugee legislation which was passed by Ethiopian parliament in January 2019 under proclamation number 1110/2019. The proclamation in article 24 (1) accords every recognized refugee and asylum seeker the same treatment as accorded to Ethiopian nationals with respect to access to pre-primary and primary education.
However, ensuring inclusion of refugees into national education system remains problematic and, so far, by and large, the parallel service provision for refugees and the host community persisted. This can be a result of multiple factors but most importantly the policy seldom takes into consideration the political histories of the peripheral regions hosting refugees.
Ethiopia, after defeating the Italian colonial force at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, expanded its authority into the Gambela (Young 1999). This move set the stage for the 1902 border agreement between the Imperial Government of Ethiopia (IGE) and Great Britain—the colonial power in Sudan (Zewde 1976). The Ethio-British border agreement of 1902 was arbitrary. In the Gambela area, the boundary agreement failed to achieve a neat ethnic division although there were discussions to follow ethnic lines (Zewde 1976). The agreement left the majority of Anuak on the Ethiopian side of the border while most of the Nuer was in the British colony of Sudan. This arrangement precipitated discontent in Gambela against the expansionist state project of the IGE. An armed rebellion for liberation from Sudan that was started in Southern Sudan in the 1950s further complicated the conditions in Gambela as the region became host for co-ethnic refugees from Southern Sudan and provided a base from where the Southern Sudanese liberation struggles were waged (Poggo 1998, Feyissa 2015). In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Gambela region continued to form a frontier between the IGE and Sudan, both aspiring to expand their version of a nation with ‘one religion, one culture, and one language’ (Poggo 1998).
In such a geopolitical context of Gambela, I explore the complex purposes of hosting and providing education for refugees. In this study I conceptualize refugee education as tool for the construction of the symbolic or mental boundaries of the state (Oh, Walker and Thako 2019) and for population control (Paglayan, 2022). Provision of education for refugees is not a neutral service; and with the arrival of refugees from neighboring countries the political considerations in the provision of education intensify (McCarthy 2018). Education serves the state-building agenda and contributes to maintaining power and control over the population by managing the aspirations of the children through mobilizing a common curriculum and medium of instruction (Paglayan 2022). Education is one of the public services by which the state creates and presents its image and practices. As such, it contributes to the integration of peripheries and consolidation of boundaries, the homogenization of the population and their experiences, and the creation of political loyalty through binding the population to the state (Van de Walle and Scott 2011). This role of education becomes particularly salient when the possibility for internal conflicts that can threaten state authority and involve mass participation is perceived by the ruling elite (Paglayan 2022), and when state borders do not coincide with cultural and linguistic divides, but rather arbitrarily cut across societies with strong ethnic, social, and economic ties (Evans 2010).
I argue that the purpose of providing education for refugees is multiple and connected to the potential of education for dealing with complex matters of boundary-making and population control. This potential of education is particularly salient in contested border areas where co-ethnic communities live in neighboring states and where refugees hosting strengthens resistance against the status quo. The provision of education was used as a technique of power (Durrani and Dunne 2010) to curb the separatist tendencies in Gambela (Abir 1971). Under the condition in which the inclusion of refugees into the national education system is currently implemented in Ethiopia, education mainly addresses the interests of the state than the aspirations of the refugees. Inclusion, in terms of promoting access to opportunities is an elusive goal.

Author

• Alebachew Kemisso Haybano, Addis Ababa University