Contesting the capital: Sheger and the spatial politics of nation building
ABSTRACT
This article examines Sheger City within Ethiopia’s contested nation-building trajectory, arguing that capital-adjacent urban restructuring has become a strategic arena for negotiating competing national projects. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork including ethnographic observations, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and analysis of policy documents and political discourse, the article shows how the state deploys spatial reconfiguration to navigate, mediate and reproduce longstanding ideological tensions. While scholarship has privileged capital cities as primary sites of nation-building, this focus obscures political dynamics unfolding in urban formations that encase the capital. Sheger, a doughnut-shaped city surrounding Addis Ababa, demonstrates how non-capital urban projects recalibrate territorial authority, symbolic meaning and demographic politics of contested capitals. The article introduces pericapital urbanism to conceptualise this spatial politics, in which power is asserted not by transforming the capital but by reworking its margins through administrative consolidation, spatial reclassification and symbolic restructuring. While the ruling party frames Sheger City as a pragmatic compromise between Oromo self-determination and Ethiopian nation-building, Oromo nationalists view it as repackaged dispossession and domination, and Amhara nationalists interpret it as a project of demographic and territorial reengineering. This underscores the need to theorise capital peripheries as consequential sites in multinational states’ spatial strategies of nation-building.
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