Journal of African Development

Internal displacement is a global issue, but the way it is dealt with is still almost completely based on humanitarian aid, an approach which generally presents displaced people as passive recipients of aid rather than as active participants in the social changes affecting them. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in China Camp, a settlement of about 20,000 internally displaced people in Debre Berhan, Ethiopia, this study examines the way in which displacement caused by conflict alters the ethnic, civic, place-based, gendered, and generational identities of Amhara internally displaced persons. In order to see how these identities shift in the context of displacement, uncertainty, and exclusion, the study applied an anthropological theory—drawn mainly from Fredrik Barth’s theory of identity. The data were obtained from in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and field observations.The results indicate that there is a two-stage process involving identity breakdown and reconstruction. What had previously been a coherent and unified sense of self became rigid and focused on ethnicity as a result of the impact of violence; civic identity disappeared as the social contract collapsed, causing people to be left aside and labelled "Tefenaqay" (displaced person); attachment to the land was replaced by a mixed identity which includes memories of one's home together with the new relationships formed in the camp; and there was a sharp divergence in terms of gender and generation — men facing a crisis concerning economic masculinity, women gaining some degree of agency even though they were still at risk, the older inhabitants grieving over what they had created, and the younger people seeing their futures come to a standstill. Since displacement is a lengthy social process rather than a single incident, the study contends that the displacement resulted in reactive ethnicity