Border diplomacy and state-building in northwestern Ethiopia, c. 1965\u20131977

In the first half of the twentieth century, the north-western lowlands of imperial Ethiopia were the typical interstitial frontier of the Ethiopian\u2013Sudanese borderlands. Starting in the early 1960s, a cash crop revolution paved the way to the transformation of the Mazega into a settlement frontier and the emergence of a dispute with Sudan for demarcation of the international border. This article explores the entanglement between the political economy of frontier governance and border diplomacy in the contested area. It highlights how the management of the border dispute was deeply affected by the contradictory interests of the various layers of government and \u201ctwilight\u201d entities that projected Ethiopian statecraft at the periphery. \ua9 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group