This chapter lays out the book’s contributions to the literatures on state-led development and authoritarian durability. The book provides a detailed examination of the case of Ethiopia in which the EPRDF regime sought to maintain power through rapid development and the structural transformation of the economy. In particular, rapid development was intended to create mass industrial employment in order to gradually replace access to land as the main tool for mass distribution, and thereby maintain political order. The failings of industrial policy amidst rapid population growth resulted in extreme shortages of land and employment for younger generations, an important factor fuelling the mass anti-government protests that eventually forced regime change. The Ethiopian case therefore suggests that the contemporary global economy and the delayed demographic transition present major challenges to state-led development; and that analyses of authoritarian durability need to consider the dynamic challenges of mass incorporation, as well as elite politics.

Chapter 5 examines the EPRDF’s changing approach to agricultural development and the agrarian question. The EPRDF’s initial strategy was rooted in the TPLF’s focus on the peasant majority as its political base. The government sought to secure the acquiescence of the peasantry through the distribution of land, while agricultural inputs would raise agricultural productivity and generate a surplus that could finance industrial expansion, creating mass employment and alleviating pressure on rural land. The political crises of the early 2000s forced a re-evaluation of this agriculture-first approach, however. Faced with growing land shortages, the government sought to raise productivity at the cost of inequality and differentiation. The chapter examines, first, the government’s focus on high potential smallholders; and, second, the selective expropriation of peasant producers to make way for agricultural investments. While this strategy ultimately delivered rising agricultural productivity, a combination of population growth, displacement for investments and growing market forces eroded the main means of mass distribution and political control – access to land.