Competing Claims over a Presumed No Man's Land: the Agropastoral Tsamako Experience in Southwest Ethiopia

Melesse Getu, Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Addis Ababa University (AAU) and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Social Work, AAU. Currently, he is a guest researcher at CMI.

Melesse Getu will discuss how the alienation of high potential valley resources (dry season grazing area) and undue outside interventions and threats, armed with those unsubstantiated assumptions about resource use by pastoral societies, have eroded the legitimacy of customary property-rights systems and have resulted in converting common-property regimes into non-property regimes. He will try to single out reasons why there was a marked rise in land and other resource use conflicts and tensions between the local people and Commercial Farmers (CFs) and to identify the effects of the CFs on the socio-economic lives of the people in general and on resource use regulation in particular.