Beyond ethnic federalism. Agrarian relations, land registration and conflict on the Ethiopian coffee frontier

Despite a considerable body of scholarly work taking issue with its claimed benefits, land registration and certification continue to be presented by international institutions and governments as a tool for conflict resolution. By securing tenure and favouring agreement on spatial boundaries, titling would limit contention over land. In Western Ethiopia, the ethnicization of land conflicts has been blamed on the ethno-federal structure of the state, favouring local minorities over other citizens. Drawing on ethnographic work in the Majang zone, this paper argues that, on the contrary, land registration has fostered conflict and increased dynamics of dispossession of the Majangir, a historical minority enjoying special rights under the current Ethiopian Constitution. If local elites first saw land registration as a tool to redress historical injustices, an ethnographic account of titling reveals that it confirmed historically rooted unequal relations between communities, favouring non-Indigenous groups. Bureaucratic implementation of land registration reworked constitutional protection of minority rights by privileging actors with the appropriate administrative skills and agricultural practices: namely, settlers engaged in coffee production. On commodity frontiers shaped by migration and unequal agrarian relations, land registration operates as a state project of frontier stabilization. While producing legibility, it aligns landholding claims with development priorities – in this case, coffee.