SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis explores a series of middle-range hypotheses concerning the interrelation of law and development. These hypotheses are made concrete enough to serve as policy prescriptions by applying them to the problems of Ethiopia, a country which displays most of the development constraints that have been identified in other Third World countries. Development is best understood as a dynamic process, as the broadening of subsistence and small-scale economic, political, legal and social 'markets' that effects a cumulative growth in a wide variety of resources. In Ethiopia, given her highly stratified and fragmented societies, this entails a socio-economic equalisation and integration, a wholesale structural transformation rather than the narrow policies of an economic growth advocated by many development theorists. The magnitude of this transformation, the manifest need for extensive and intensive development planning and the socialist predilections of Ethiopia's revolutionary military rulers (the Derg) suggest that massive state intervention in the economy is both inevitable and the only feasible path to an Ethiopian development which is, nevertheless, fraught with many hazards. It is therefore impossible to segregate economic activity from what is, in Ethiopia, an undifferentiated mass of law, politics and administration. The largest single bottleneck to Ethiopian development is the virtual absence of any political development registered under Haile Selassie or the Derg. The role of law in eliminating an Ethiopian "soft state" (Myrdal's term), which is far from soft on the poor and powerless, is surveyed and law's role in the aggregation, allocation and delegation of a variety of resources, in the formulation and implementation of interrelated policies, and in the amelioration of species of injustice is analysed in detail.