Resource frontiers in Ethiopia have served as spaces of state power consolidation and wealth accumulation and as manifestations of asymmetrical power relations between state and society. Successive Ethiopian regimes pursued high-modernist development models under broader narratives of civilizing ‘backward’ societies and ‘transforming’ ‘unproductive’ spaces into productive resources. Although much of state intervention in the pastoralist frontiers was effected through large-scale commercial farming, extractive industries have become another dimension of frontier expansion. Ethiopia's liberalization of its mining economy in the 1990s has attracted private investors to the politically marginalized peripheries in the country. Accordingly, MIDROC Laga-Dambi Gold Mine, the largest private gold-producing company in the country, was in 1997 granted a 20-year lease over 485 km² of land in Guji zone, Oromia National Regional State. The company soon developed an exclusionary approach in its relations with local communities with little investment in social services, local employment and environmental sustainability. On the contrary, its strong link to the macro-political order and reliance on coercive power in subduing local resistance enabled it to create an enclave where it operated without accountability for two decades. This paper analyzes the interplay between the macro-political order and local practices and power constellations at the mining site, and how such interplay reconfigured state-society relations, leading to conflict and eventual suspension of the mining company's license in May 2018. The paper argues that the company's exclusionary approach was rooted within the political formation of the Ethiopian state that considers such territories as resource frontiers (full of resources but empty of people). The paper asks how questions of entitlement at the local level, mining micro politics, and the national political order are entangled and produce different forms of contestation and negotiation. It concludes that this entanglement shapes how mining companies operate and also how states formulate mining policies.

埃塞俄比亚的资源前沿是国家权力整合和财富积累的空间，也是国家与社会之间权力关系不对称的表现形式。连续的埃塞俄比亚政权在文明的“落后”社会和将“非生产性”空间“转化”为生产性资源的更广泛叙述下追求高度现代主义的发展模式。尽管国家对牧区边境的干预大部分是通过大规模商业化农业实现的，但采掘业已成为边境扩张的另一个方面。埃塞俄比亚在 1990 年代对其矿业经济实行自由化，已将私人投资者吸引到该国政治边缘化的外围地区。因此，该国最大的私营黄金生产公司 MIDROC Laga-Dambi 金矿，²奥罗米亚国家地区古吉地区的土地。该公司很快就在与当地社区的关系中形成了一种排他性的方法，在社会服务、当地就业和环境可持续性方面几乎没有投资。相反，它与宏观政治秩序的紧密联系以及对压制地方抵抗的强制力的依赖使其能够创建一个飞地，在那里它在没有责任的情况下运作了 20 年。本文分析了宏观政治秩序与采矿现场的地方实践和权力星座之间的相互作用，以及这种相互作用如何重新配置​​国家与社会的关系，导致冲突并最终于 2018 年 5 月暂停采矿公司的许可证。本文认为该公司' 这种排他性方法植根于埃塞俄比亚国家的政治结构，该国家将这些领土视为资源边界（资源丰富，但没有人）。本文探讨了地方层面的权利问题、挖掘微观政治和国家政治秩序是如何纠缠在一起并产生不同形式的争论和谈判的。它得出的结论是，这种纠缠影响了矿业公司的运营方式以及各州制定矿业政策的方式。