Brewing Development: Multinational Alcohol Companies, the Neo-Concessionary State, and the Politics of Industrialization in Ethiopia

Abstract

This dissertation examines the politics of industry and industrialization in Ethiopia. I analyze how multinational alcohol companies and the Ethiopian state are brewing development, meaning spurring the creation of industrial linkages through the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of commercial beer as well as their corresponding socio-cultural consequences as the Ethiopian people respond to such processes. An ethnography at the nidus of corporate supply and value chain management and the state’s industrialization policy, the following pages examine how state and companies are making industry to meet the developmentalist goals of an Ethiopian ruling party and the needs of capital, respectively, albeit not without local collaboration and resistance.