Chapter one analyses the geneses of ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states by highlighting the three key elements of ethno-nationalist politics: the modernist response to primordial attachments in the process of nation-building, the active role and passive consequences of colonialism, and the influence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes under capitalism. Critically engaging with seminal scholarship in relevant fields by Clifford Geertz, Donald Horowitz, Antonio Gramsci, and Partha Chatterjee, my analysis in this chapter underscores that ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states is, to a great extent, the outcome of a combined force of all three elements. While the three elements highlighted in my analysis of ethno-nationalism are not exclusive aspects, ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states primarily draws on the elements of nation-building, colonialism, and capitalism. I substantiate this claim with the case of anticolonial nationalist movements in India. I demonstrate how conditions created by colonialism, capitalism, and the modernist vision of the nascent Indian state gave the nationalist movement an ethno-nationalist character that ultimately led to the partition of the country along religious lines.

The chapter continues the previous chapter’s discussion of the role of Christianity as part of the national narrative and the Ethiopian state’s expansionism, elucidating how the people in the southeast responded to this. In arguing that this heightened the religious dimension of antagonistic relations, the chapter underscores that acknowledging the religious dimension is imperative for the understanding of conflictual landscapes in the Horn. The chapter analyzes how the physical environment of the lowlanders was crucial for the insurgency, wherein their mobility exposed them to different currents of resistance emerging in the Horn of Africa in the 1960s. It subsequently discusses the content and nature of these currents, focusing in particular on the role of the nascent independent Somali state and Somali insurgencies having direct and indirect impacts on the Bale insurgency. A main argument in the chapter is that while the Bale insurgency and others were not directly controlled by the Somalis, the latter played an important role by presenting themselves as liberators of fellow Muslims groups across the Horn.

The chapter focuses on how the religious dimension of peoplehood complicated the insurgency movement’s interactions with other Oromo groups and movements. Firstly, it discusses the Shoa Oromo community in Bale – a group that at the outset would ostensibly be close to the Arsi Oromo and share similar antagonist sentiments toward the Amhara and assumingly side with the insurgents against the state. The fact that they did not is noticeable and can only, the chapter argues, be explained by examining the religious dimension. Secondly, the chapter investigates the nascent Oromo ethno-nationalist movement surfacing in the 1960s. As a largely urban elitist movement and dominated by Christian Oromo, it was significantly different from the Bale insurgency. Although the two movements managed to connect, the chapter claims that religion constituted a potential conflictual dimension – something teased out in the chapter’s latter part. Lastly, the chapter explores what role the embryonic Salafi movement – emerging in the 1960s – played in relation to the insurgency. It amply demonstrates that this movement did not contribute to strengthening religious boundaries or reinforcing conflictual lines, in turn pointing to the need to move beyond established assumptions and teleological perspectives when thinking of Islam and politics.

Chapter 4 presents the historical case of women’s suffrage. Though prior to the Nineteenth Amendment women were deemed unsuited for citizenship at the national level because their designated role was exclusively within the private sphere of the home rather than the public sphere of politics, they nevertheless attained the right to vote in local elections in many places because the municipality was itself perceived as a private, home-like sphere dedicated to quotidian functions like the care of children that fell squarely within women’s sphere. Granting women the right to vote in local elections was thus consistent with the idea that local citizenship was qualitatively distinct from national citizenship.

Chapter 7 brings the three case studies of women, noncitizens, and landowners together to show how, as globalization has caused the public/private distinction to come apart, the distinctively local form of citizenship has seeped into the sphere of national citizenship and threatened the meaning of citizenship. With increasing labor and capital mobility across national borders, nation-states confront the same pressures cities have long faced to confer citizenship on the basis of interest and choice rather than nationality, but there is fierce opposition to doing so on the grounds that it will undermine the basis of national citizenship by fraying the ties of ethnicity, history, and territory that supposedly link the members of the state’s “imagined community.” This opposition takes the form of growing animosity toward free trade, immigration, and the cities that symbolize an open and flexible approach to citizenship.

Chapter 1 explains how the modern state simultaneously maintains commitments to three different conceptions of citizenship that are all in some tension with each other: the republican, liberal, and ethno-nationalist models of citizenship. Liberalism stresses individual market freedom and natural rights; republicanism emphasizes collective civic activity; ethno-nationalism is based on solidarity and identity. We have managed to mute the inherent conflicts among these conceptions through the distinction, long central to the idea of citizenship, between the “public” and “private” spheres. Citizens live primarily private lives, where they are ruled by the marketplace and individual desires, but occasionally enter the public sphere to engage in politics, where they become part of an organic polity unified by a common sense of purpose and shared civic identity.