Global Development Institute podcast
Global Development Institute podcast
Tigray war: Modern geographies of mass violence and the invisibilization of populations
In this episode, GDI's very own Tekle Weldemichel discusses his recent paper, 'Tigray war: Modern geographies of mass violence and the invisibilization of populations'. The paper critically examines the strategies and tactics employed by the Ethiopian government and its allies to sustain a “zone of invisibility” around the Tigray war.
Read the paper here: Tigray war: Modern geographies of mass violence and the invisibilization of populations - ScienceDirect
Tekle recently joined GDI as Lecturer in Environment and Development. Read more about Tekle's work: Teklehaymanot Weldemichel - Research Explorer The University of Manchester
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Speaker 1 [00:00:02] Welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. Based at the University of Manchester, we're Europe's largest research and teaching institute addressing poverty and inequality. Each episode, we'll bring you the latest thinking, insights, and debate in development study.
Speaker 2 [00:00:32] Hello and welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. I'm Louisa Hann, research comms officer here at GDI. And I'm really pleased to be sitting here today with Tekle Weldemichel, who recently joined us as a lecturer in environment and development. Tekle is a human geographer with an interdisciplinary focus on how politics, the state and market actors shape the relationships between people and their environments. His research spans social and environmental justice, politics of violence, humanitarianism and conservation, with a particular emphasis on how policy and power dynamics influence lives and livelihoods in contested landscapes. Tekle, thanks very much for taking the time to tell us more about your work.
Speaker 3 [00:01:14] Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2 [00:01:16] So we're gonna be discussing a recent paper you published in the journal, Political Geography, titled 'Tigray War: Modern Geographies of Mass Violence and the Invisibilization of Populations', which examines the strategies the Ethiopian government and its allies have deployed to cover up what many have characterized as a genocide in Ethiopia's Tigray region. And I've learned a lot from the paper and I encourage audience members to go and read it for themselves. I'll just add a link to the, um, show notes afterwards. But before we get into the paper and the events that have unfolded in recent years, I think it might be helpful for those who may not be familiar with Ethiopia's regional politics to outline some of the historical and political geographies that have shaped the country. So what are some key contextual points that will help us understand the situation?
Speaker 3 [00:02:04] Yeah, thank you. First of all, thank you for inviting me to this conversation. And thank you for picking my articles for the GDI podcast. And Ethiopia is like, before I go to the Ethiopia story, I would like to introduce myself and who I am. And I think that's important when we discuss a paper like this. My name is Tekle. As you said, I'm originally from Tigray. I was born and raised in Central Tigray in a farming village before I moved to Norway for studies and worked there for a while now. To go back to Ethiopia, Ethiopia is an empire. For the audience, they probably know that Ethiopia has had this monarchical state until the 1970s. It's one of the last remaining imperial powers, not comparable to... imperial powers of russia for example but it's um it has a long history uh of like statehood and but the current ethiopia that as we know today has uh draws its roots from the 19th century when the british and the french and the italians and the other european colonial powers moves southwards to that region to carve territories for themselves and concurrent with the expansion of European colonial expansion in that region, Ethiopia also took the new form that it has today, which included expansion of its territory to the south of what's now Addis, the capital, in the process, like incorporating. ethnic groups and communities that have never identified themselves as Ethiopians before. So when we talk about Ethiopia, we're talking about this Ethiopia that was formed in the 19th century. And the Ethiopia in the past, which is what used to be the Abyssinian Empire, even though it's an empire, it has a state, it was constituted by territories that were more or less self-governing. of those entities was Tigray, what's now the Tigray region which historically governed itself, it has its own kings and the king of Ethiopia would be the king of kings, the king of the different kingdoms which is sort of like a strange way of federation in the past. But this former federation was undermined when Ethiopia took the new form following the footsteps of the French and the British. whose governments are usually centralized, for example, for the French, Paris is the center and everything is just revolving around it and that's the kind of state that Ethiopia also sort of embraced since that time. And the result is that you have sort of like a growing tension between the peripheries and the center, for example, what used to be the center in the north. sort of became a periphery, which subdued to the center, to Addis, which led to a lot of frictions between these two parallel forces, which means the last 150 years, 100 years have been struggled between the center and the peripheries, which led to the 1970s, 1980s where you had like incredible fights between liberation movements that were trying to liberate their constituents from the central government and to sort of like to create autonomous territories. And that includes Eritrea, for example, which declared its independence in 1991. But also, like Tigray, for example, was at the center of the struggle against the central sort of imperial Ethiopia. So that's where the current shape of the country comes from and the struggle in the 1980s and 1970s led to the collapse of the central government in 1991, which led to the formation of a transitional government that drafted and adopted a constitution in 1995. which is what the current state is based on which is a federation federation of like different regions which mainly based on ethno-linguistic characteristics but also recognizing the the autonomy of regions and regions being able to decide for themselves about how they how they want to govern themselves I don't know if I should go forward in terms of discussing what happened since then.
Speaker 2 [00:07:18] We can kind of get into that, I suppose, throughout the rest of the conversation, but that was really helpful, very succinct.
Speaker 3 [00:07:26] That was the shortest version of what I could say.
Speaker 2 [00:07:28] description of a very complex history, so thank you for that. So let's talk a little bit more about the War in Tigray, which, as you explained in your article, is considered to be one of the deadliest in the 21st century, which I had no idea about, to be honest. So could you provide some background and explain how events have unfolded since its eruption in 2020.
Speaker 3 [00:07:49] Yeah, so the war started on the night of the 3rd of November 2020, which is strangely coinciding with the American election that was taking place that night. And it's not a coincidence. It was by design. You could see that from a lot of what was going on. It was a deliberate moved by the Ethiopian government to do this, to declare war. when the the whole the world's attention was in Washington so the the in the middle of the night of the 9th the 3rd of November I was chatting with with colleagues in different places and we we were like talking about the American election for example and we were talking about all that like chatting about different things and suddenly one of our colleagues that was based in Mekele in Tigray. So I was like, she could hear gunshots in the suburbs and then like a few minutes later she disappeared from the chat and we realized that something was going on and I went to bed like with all this in mind I went to bed and I woke up at 2 o'clock really scared of like a lot of things because of that news from her. At 2 o'clock I woke up and I checked the social media and the Prime Minister was there declaring war. like live on television in the middle of the night. So the claim was that the Ethiopian authorities had attacked army bases in the region and that the full scale invasion of the region was declared by the Prime Minister. And within the next three weeks, the Tigray was invaded from all kinds of sides like from Eritrea. The Eritrean army and the militias allied to the Ethiopian government from all sides and the Ethiopian army, full scale of the Ethiopian army as well. And on November 28th, the Prime Minister appeared on TV again to declare that they have won the war because they captured the Tugray's capital city. And in that speech he said like we have succeeded to capture the to put the region under control without any civilian casualty which we would later find out that that wasn't true. soldiers were going from village to village, towns like destroying and killing and like all kinds of atrocities on the civilian population. And that was, of course, obvious. We could see the evidence appearing. Immediately, a lot of people were fleeing to Sudan and we could see that there was a lot of stories of atrocities. So for the next six, seven, eight months until June, 2021. The region was under control of the Ethiopian Eritrean and allied forces, but on the 28th of June 2021, the government pulled out its forces from Tigray claiming that it was declaring a ceasefire, but it wasn't a ceasefire. We know that there was a lot of atrocities, there were a lot of at a scale that a lot people started describing as genocide. Which drove a lot of people to the field to fight including my my colleagues academic colleagues went to join to fight fight back Or that was the only option that was they were left if they if they were in the streets They would be they would be killed so which was the reason why they tip in our government pulled out its forces in June because there were like heavy battles that Left that uprooted the Ethiopian army I mean, from a lot of the central Tigrayan territories. Since the start of the war, there was almost a full-scale blockade of the region in terms of like both internet and road access and media access to the region, especially in territories outside the capital and some of the major towns. But after the 20th of June 2021, the region was placed under full full scale seige like basically you have no communication you have no road access, you have no humanitarian supply going into the region, banks were shut down. Which means civilians were left to die basically. You don't have access to your own savings, you don't have access to all kinds of services that you need to survive. On top of that there was constant bombardments like a blanket, like carpet bombing of cities and settlements, marketplaces that went on for a long time. And there were several rounds of heavy battles and fights which ended with the signing of a peace agreement or a ceasefire agreement in two years later on the 2nd of November 2022, which is the ceasefire that's still in place. The situation sort of like continues, regardless of like the signing of a peace, like a ceasefire agreement.
Speaker 2 [00:13:21] Yeah, maybe you could talk a little bit about kind of what's happened since then, a little bit later. And but first kind of, I think maybe some kind of people here listening might be surprised at the scale of the atrocities that are kind of described in your paper, which is kind of obviously part of this invisibilisation that you talk about. So I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about your central thesis and how you kind of came to write the paper.
Speaker 3 [00:13:46] Yeah, so I think that for the first one year, one and a half year, it was almost impossible to have an analytical vision of what's going on. You see a lot of short reports about what's happening, but you don't see anything that's longer, something that shows the broader picture of what's happening. And that has been like a thing that was there for me. Like somebody has to do something about this. Like how did a war, a lot of people are now describing it, the forgotten world, the hidden genocide and all that. But there is not like many people explaining how this ended up. For example, you didn't know that a crisis of this scale happened in a place like that. So the easiest explanation for that usually is to say this is because it's black people that are dying or it's a remote place that has no connection to the world, where people are being killed. That's not a sufficient explanation for that. First of all, Tigray and Ethiopia isn't far from the world. It's a diplomatic hub of Africa. It's where I think it's a surge of forced diplomatic cities in the world, which means that the diplomatic community has a lot of access to what's going on. And it's also at the center of the world in many ways, geopolitically, because this is a Red Sea, it's a lot of things going on. doesn't necessarily explain the broader context within which this became very invisible. So you have to look into what was in place to make it invisible. So that could be racism and geopolitical insignificance could be something, but there is more than that. So you have to look into the kind of tactics that the Ethiopian government used to make it invisible. So you have the context, the broader context within which this war was being fought. For example, I mentioned that the region was fully blockaded, like you have no, like no journalist could access Tigray for almost the entirety of the time of the war. But also until now, like a lot of places in Tigray are inaccessible to anyone from outside the places. So for example, Western Tigray, We don't know what's happening in Western Tigray or what happened since 2020 in Western Tigray. And the map, it's often like, if you see UN reports or other agencies reports on Tigray or Ethiopia, certain maps are invisible. Like there is no data on that. So it becomes invisible. So the blockade of communication and access to the place for media sort of like created a context for invisibility. And then you have, so you also have deliberate blockade of like territorial control and blockade of like migration routes, for example. The first few weeks of the war, we saw there was a lot of talks about how many refugees this will create. So there was a forecast that up to 200, 300,000 Tigrayans may flee to Sudan. And that was based on the evidence that was coming like the first two, three weeks, 17,000 Tigrayans left Western Tigray with all kind of abuses into Sudan. But that ended quickly because of first falls, because there was a lot of pressure coming from the European Union and from other actors to stop the migration of people. And the Ethiopian government understood this and they blockaded like the rock to Sudan. And with that, sort of like a corridor blocked, the entirety was circled by all kind of hostile forces to the population. So that was sort of like, it made it impossible for any kind of evidence to come out. If you don't have migration, if you don't have people running or escaping violence, it's impossible to sort of like have evidence of that. But the It's also not the physical blockade and the physical shutdown of communication that prevented us from knowing what happened there. It's also how the war and the violence was framed by the government and by actors that are associated with government. First of all, the declaration of the war during the night of the American election was a way of making the narrative of the Ethiopian state dominate the how the war is framed. So framing it as a law enforcement operation that's small, that is so like that controlled kind of like a enforcement operation which wasn't the case but that was how it was framed. And then you have also the framing of the Tigrayan population as a certain like monsters, unruly savage actors that need to be eliminated in order Ethiopia to be united, to be glorious as often is presented as in the past, as weeds that have to be taken away in order for the crop or the good things to grow. And that kind of framing also allows the government to portray for example the Tigrayans as rebels even though they are media. including in the mainstream Western media, as rebels. So if you talk about the killing of this number of people in a certain village in Tigray, the rebels said that this many people were killed here. But it's, so that's kind of like allowed, sort of like undermined the voices of the people that were going through that. You also have a lot of like steps, like framing steps that were taken. For example, the moment the prime minister came to power in 2018, we could see that there was a lot of preparation going on for this work. So the entire cabinet of the government, the ministers and the president, all of these people were influential diplomats from before who worked in international organizations, for example Human Rights Watch. the Ethiopian Human Rights Commissioner was chief investigator in the Human Rights Watch which makes these kind of institutions look credible when they are headed by people who are known to the outside world. You have the president who is a woman which also adds a layer that she is a woman, she is supposed to be sympathetic to the victims and she is known in the diplomatic circles as that kind of person. who was heading the diplomatic missions for the Ethiopian government to convince other governments not to intervene in when this was happening. You have all kind of ministers that worked in different sectors across the world who became ministers in this government. So who are you to criticize this government if the government is led by people who you know as your friends, if you are a diplomat for example. And that kind of like allowed the government to to do whatever it wants without international scrutiny into what was going on. And then you have, I have also mentioned in the paper how a lot of diplomatic events were used as a way of silencing. For example, there were three ceasefires, some kind of ceasefire, but ceasefire is often negotiated, but these were not all negotiated. So the first this fire was when they did and troops were when the Ethiopian troops left Mekele, the capital, in June 2021, after the military defeat in Central Tigray. One day later, the Prime Minister declared a unilateral ceasefire and this was really presented in the UN system and by the media as something that's a step in the positive direction, which wasn't. It was for anyone that follows the Ethiopian politics. and discourse within the country, you could see that this was actually in the making of a siege, but sort of like prevented people from questioning the broader context within which suffering was taking place and just celebrated the fact that the ceasefire was declared. And then you have 2020, 2022, the beginning of 2022 when the Ethiopian government said, I will issue a human Italian truce. like some kind of a ceasefire to allow human Italian aid to come into the region, which didn't happen. I mean, it was also the same celebrated, but it didn't lead to any meaningful human Italian aid access. It didn't allow any kind of negotiations to take place to settle the problem, which means it was only a preparation for another round of fighting and attack on the region. which ended in the last round and the most horrific kind of battlefield fights but also attacks on civilians between August and November 2022. And then we have the current ceasefire agreement which was signed in Pretoria, South Africa in November 2022, which is the only ceasefire agreement that was negotiated where there are like written terms. But from the start you could see that this was also problematic and I think that has led, I think as I see it and as I write in the paper, it's a form of violence, a violence of different form from the actual like bombing of towns and settlements and all that. So yeah we could maybe look into that afterwards.
Speaker 2 [00:24:17] Yeah, I think it would be helpful to talk kind of more of this kind of theoretical grounding between kind of contextual and epistemic forms of violence. So you differentiate between these two things, contextual and epistemic forms of violence. So yeah, how do they, these forms of invisibili- invisibili- invisibili-
Speaker 3 [00:24:35] I'm sorry that was a very complicated word to use.
Speaker 2 [00:24:37] How do these forms of invisibilisation differ and kind of interact?
Speaker 3 [00:24:42] Yeah, so I think it's only for analytical purposes that I have like these distinct categories in the paper. But, so for example, I categorized the blockade and communication shutdown as contextual, as creating the context for like making the violence, for concealing the violence. I also mentioned that blockade of migration routes as a way of concealing the violence, but that also overlaps with, for example, when I mentioned how the rounding up and the detention in concentration camps of Tigrayans across the country is also sort of like, it lies between the context and between the context and the episteme. epistemological being the framing of a war, the framing of violence. So by detaining the tens of thousands of Tigrayans and getting rid of them from the daily life in the country, which is a context, a context of like invisibilisation, has allowed the Ethiopian government to frame the entire Tigrayan population as problematic. So if you don't have for example I took like a colleague a neighbor, a family member or like friend or someone that you meet on the street, it became impossible for, I'm not saying that there wasn't a broader support for the war in Ethiopia, but it has also added a layer for people to know about what was going on in the life of their friends, their neighbors. And I have this conversation between two Ethiopians on Twitter, where you have like... One of them is an ardent supporter of the war, supporter of the government and the other one is not an ethnic Tigrayan but from another ethnic group who was really an opposition of the war and the opposition of the violence on Tigrayans. And at some point they would show a lot of Tigrayan, usually men but also women on television and they would present them as prisoners of war. And we know that they were not, because with the Tugrayans we could recognize that they are our friends and neighbors and family members from Addiswa and from other parts of the country that were detained from workplaces and portrayed as PAWs. And this conversation, the non-Tugrayan guy who knows what was going on, he found one of his colleagues, ex-colleagues, being presented as a prisoner of war. and he tagged one of his friends, colleagues, and asked her, like, ah, do you know this guy? You know he's your boss in the insurance company, but he's now being presented as a prisoner of war. What do you think? And she says, I can't believe this. They arrested him from the office. I was there, I saw him. But now they are shamefully showing him on TV as a prisoner of war. And they would... The conversation goes down in the in the chat and in the exchange of a conversation on the Twitter post and In the end she says well, it kind of deserved it It's sad that he is being going through this but the rest of what's being shown on TV is kind of true That's they are prisoners for so and I can see that she's sort of like sympathized with the person but also found, like, if it wasn't for him on TV... she would be still continuing denying the fact that the Grailans were being targeted. So you have like the context plus the framing of the Grailans being interacting here. But for the purpose of like analytical purposes I had to keep like this, which is also why I try to get rid of like in my writing I try to keep it as simple language as possible to try to avoid these categories. But the categories also a lot of like there's a lot of interaction. What I said, the blockade of the Tigray region itself and the impossibility of leaving it as a migrant or a refugee in other places also prevented people from knowing what the people were going through both the Ethiopians but also the world from knowing but even if you have managed to escape the region Your story will be less credible. It would be impossible to convince anyone that what you're telling is true. So you have the context and your credibility is questioned because you're a Tigrayan and you're making these claims that your family was wiped out and it doesn't. So these categories are right connected and those are love interplay.
Speaker 2 [00:30:09] So I suppose one of the aspects of kind of demonization is kind of this use of from the history of the TPLF and its kind of status in the cultural imagination both within and outside Ethiopia. So how are narratives about TPLF kind of walked and weaponized from the inner regimes efforts to kind of otherise and oppress Tigrayans?
Speaker 3 [00:30:29] Yeah, yeah, so I think that's like when I mentioned the history of the country, the formation of the current Ethiopia as we know it, the history of the TPLF has like, it's a significant history, so when the monarchical rule ended in 1974, with the overthrow of Haile Selassie, the last king of Ethiopia, by a military group. he was replaced by like a military government that was fascist, that was like really, well, it identified itself as a Marxist government, which a lot of people were hoping that when the Haile Selassie was overthrown, a lot of people thought that we would break away from the centralized monarchical aristocratic government to something that's more democratic, more representative of the people, but it went the other way. So we had even a more centralized, very militaristic government that came to power. And it is at that moment when a lot of liberation movement took off. So, for example, in Tigray, the Tigray People's Liberation Movement became a thing. So for like 17 years, between 1974 and 1991, the Tigray People's Liberation Front was at the forefront of the struggle against the central government, which was one of the main actors, but part of a coalition of different liberation movements that toppled the government in 1991. With the overthrow of the centralist militaristic government, we ended up having that later formation of a different government, a different structure of the state. So from a centralist, one unitary government to a federation that was recognized by the 1995 constitution. In this process, the TPLF played a crucial role, a very central role. And following the constitution in 1995, the TPLF formed the government that ruled it up until 2018. which was a coalition of four major parties from different regions. And the TPLF was one of the central actors in that. And both the demolition of this one Ethiopia, unitary Ethiopia myth of the 19, all the 1900s after 1991 by the TPLF and actors around it and formation of a new structure or like that recognize the difference between the different actors, constituent part of the country has made the Tigrayans and the political party that is Tigray, look like they are disintegrating it like that. That's the kind of means that was built. And the constitution in no way says it's an ethnic federation, but it has become like it has become like it's framed now often when you read academic works and journalistic reports. you see that it's framed as an ethnic federation. So with that, I think there's there's been a lot of denigration of the Grands and the support base or the supposed support base of the TPLF and that hate for the Grands sort of like evolved even harsher when the the new prime minister came to power in 2018, the current Abiy Ahmed Ali came to power and where he openly would call out on the Grands and say, these people are cancerous, these people are like. Often they refer to the political movement as TPLF, but we know that you can see it from the kind of interactions that the government has with the people of Tigray, that the blame on TPLF is a euphemism for blame on Tigrayans, which means before the start of the war, you had hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans that were kicked out of their homes in the rest of the country, particularly in the south. like in the region to the south of Tigray, the Amhara region, you also have people being laid off from work just because they are Tigrayans. And now you would be targeted in all kinds of situations. So there was already enough demonization and hate towards Tigrayans built by that myth, but also the prime minister tapping into that.
Speaker 2 [00:35:26] and some similar dynamics to that in other complex examples, like with the gaza etc.
Speaker 3 [00:35:32] Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 [00:35:35] Yeah. Should we talk about what happened after November 22, what's happened since then? As you underline in your paper, the picture is far from resolved. So how circumstances changed or existed since the signing of the treaty?
Speaker 3 [00:35:49] Yeah. So I think, uh, so look, ceasefire agreements are ceasefire. Like it's to cease fire. So, uh, which means they are supposed to lead to, they are supposed to lay a ground for a negotiated peace agreement, which is to settle what draw, what caused the conflict in the first place. Um, and that hasn't happened. So like it's two and a half years almost now, and we haven't had any kind of negotiated settlement of what the crisis that tells you a lot about the nature of the ceasefire itself it didn't it wasn't there wasn't enough guarantee from actors that were participating in the negotiation process for example the eu and the african union and the us government where the some of the key players in terms of bringing the forces into negotiation and there was no Guarantee in place. push it forward to bring it to a negotiated settlement. The ceasefire also didn't address, because it was a political resolution, it didn't address the concern of the public, like the civilian population survivors of the violence, which means a lot of the suffering continues. So you have, I think, about 1.2 million Tigrayans that were displaced. since the beginning of the war, living in really difficult circumstances in Tigray. But also, you also have refugees that fled to Sudan, about 70,000 of them living in Sudan, when Sudan itself has collapsed, which tells you the extent of the problems that Tigray has faced today, despite the ceasefire agreement. but it's also the It's very common after the ceasefires, there is always an inter-faction conflict that arises. So the moment the ceasefire agreement was signed between Tigray and the federal government, the allies of the federal government that fought and participated in the atrocities in Tigray have split. So the Amhara militia that aligned itself with the Ethiopian government is now fighting the Ethiopian government. The Eritrean army, the Eritrean government, that was the key ally in the genocide in Tigray has split with the Ethiopian government. And within Tigray itself... Tigrayans, for all purposes, are in prison now. Whether you're a politician, powerful, regional government or civilian, you are in prison, basically, because there's no decision that you can make about your life, because the government controls everything. So there is a lot of arising in fight within Tigray, which is basically a prison fight. You're under the watch of a guard. the federal government in Addis, so then you have disagreements about how to go about life here under that circumstances, which means they have sort of like an inter-faction division with integrated stuff. And over the last few days, we've seen that sort of like boil over, like there's a lot of military tension emerging. And in this process, we also see the Eritrean regime and the Ethiopian regime pulling Tigray into two directions and bringing it into the fight, their own fight. So trying to get factions in Tigray to align themselves with the federal government or with the Eritrean government. And that's the kind of situation we are in now, which means the civilian population sort of like continues under uncertainty, under a lot of suffering without resolution.
Speaker 2 [00:39:51] I was reading this morning about how the USAID cuts are also affecting Tigray, so I suppose given the situation we have at the moment, I wonder if you could just speak a bit more about how you view your role as an academic in producing work on Tigraya well as more generally about the potential for academia, you know, to make an impact on these kinds of wars.
Speaker 3 [00:40:12] I think it's been quite a struggle. I wasn't involved in any form of writing on Ethiopia or Tigray before this war started. I was actually finishing my PhD project. I had submitted my thesis just one month before the start of the war. That was about Kenya and Tanzania and I was writing about conservation politics in those countries. So I kind of completely shifted. towards this war, covering this war. And for a while, there was a lot of emotional, personal struggles with my family being in that place. And a lot of my writing was focused on sort of like firefighting, like very short pieces addressing certain orders, trying to draw attention to the crisis. like slowly I'm sort of like moving to more analytical, longer, like this paper is a little bit longer than what I used to write. And this was a cry for help, cry for drawing the academic circles to sort of like focus on this kind of crisis and to engage. And I have had like that kind of conversation with colleagues, Ethiopian studies colleagues, colleagues that have worked on the region to sort of like to get them to engage. But there is also a lot of skepticism about the complexity of the crisis and that we cannot engage on this internal complex crisis. But what is the role of academics? Like if it's not to explain complicated situations to an audience that doesn't necessarily have the tools to understand that, what's our role? Our role is to do that, to basically create, like, formulate a language. for people who may not understand, who may not have the time and understanding of that kind of situation. So that's, I think that's sort of, I have made myself, made that as my role as an academic. And I think that's a call that I would make for like a lot of colleagues and others in the scholarly circles to engage, to engage in real everyday life. everyday crisis, everyday situations that need explaining. Need, like, we need to make them legible to people that don't necessarily have the tools to do that.
Speaker 2 [00:42:43] Yeah, couldn't agree more. And keep up a good work. And I'll add the link to the paper in the show notes so everyone do read it. Thank you so much, Tekle, for coming to speak to us today.
Speaker 3 [00:42:55] Of course, thanks a lot for bringing me here.