The State of Emergency

Pietro S. Toggia
Additional contact information
Pietro S. Toggia: Pietro S. Toggia is an Associate Professor with the Department of Criminal Justice at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. [email: toggia@kutztown.edu]

Journal of Developing Societies, 2008, vol. 24, issue 2, 107-124

Abstract: This article examines how Ethiopian governments have periodically declared a state of emergency in the country; these effectively turned out to be police and carceral regimes during periods of political crisis. Each of the three Ethiopian governments claimed legitimacy for their respective body politic as a derivation of the ‘consent’ or the ‘general will’ of the Ethiopian people in the last hundred years; Haile-Selassie as the rightful successor tracing the legendary Solomonic Dynasty for his modern Christian autocracy; Mengistu as the head of a socialist state with the will of the working people; and Meles as the head of the federal democratic state with the will of nations/nationalities. Nonetheless, the mode in which they exercised their powers or the mechanism of power they applied in order to normalize their respective body politic is indistinguishable. Furthermore, this contrived idea of the ‘general will’ and its empirical derivative, that is ‘public order’ has become the ‘norm’ in modern Ethiopian politics. These governments have also utilized similar institutional and legal mechanisms that remained intact, such as the police, the criminal law, the prison and the army, as variegated power of normalization despite radical regime changes in September 1974 and May 1991.

Keywords: Africa; Ethiopia; police regimes; political crisis; state of emergency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0169796X0802400202 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jodeso:v:24:y:2008:i:2:p:107-124

DOI: 10.1177/0169796X0802400202

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Developing Societies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().