Content area
Full text
Peasant Revolution in Ethiopia: The Tigray People's Liberation Front,1975-1991. By John Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 270p. $59.95.
The author offers a much needed account of an ethnonational liberation movement that dislodged Ethiopia's Afro-- Marxist regime after a seventeen-year guerrilla war (197591) and received international recognition and acclaim for its pragmatic and innovative leadership. John Young's focus on the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which dominates the coalition government Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), provides the first scholarly attempt to analyze Ethiopia's second "revolution" of the twentieth century.
The author's thesis can be summed up as follows: The findings of major theorists of peasant revolutions minimize the role of the peasantry when the leaders are from the urban petit bourgeoisie. As a result, their theories do not accurately reflect the subtle ways in which peasantry's demands are addressed by the leadership and the myriad ways in which unaddressed or postponed demands permeate the postrevolutionary period. The book is divided into eight chapters. The research is based on field work and interviews collected over more than thirteen months. The title reflects the major difficulty of this work: a focus on critiquing theorists of peasant studies superimposed on Tigray's ethnonationalist movement led by the urban intelligentsia of the TPLF.
This cumbersome design forces the reader to maintain bifocal lenses, one aimed at the conditions of Tigray's peasants and the other on the origin, development, and policies of the TPLF. The author succeeds in bringing to light little known facts about the TPLF, but the not so well-defined peasantry recede to...