From the Back Cover
The three rational actors in the region-The EPLF, TPLF and the Dergue, all of whom vied for a share of the political pie-pursued divergent policies. The author advances a highly plausible thesis to explain the Re-Imagining of Identity. Whenever available, as in Tigray, the primordial past serves a solid foundation for the social construction of identity. To say that the primordial past has a center stage in en ethno-regional conflict is not to deny the socially constructed nature of identity. Nor does it imply that the primordial past condition sine qua non for identity construction. However, mobilization was not absolutely rosy even in Tigray, because peasants could not conceptualize abstract terms such as "nationalism," "hegemony," "secession," "self-determination," etc. It was the Ethiopian state's genocidal-like policy that heralded a turning point in the process of mobilization. Once peasants were convinced that all that the state was doing was "draining the sea to kill the fish," mobilization became a foregone conclusion. Mobilization, thus, preceded identification. Victory, too, came prior to identification, giving political entrepreneurs a free hand to construct identity the way they saw fit.
