The Mursi Encountering the Other: mediating representation, research and influence

A Mursi-led coalition will create better relationships and political processes between their community, their neighbours and the outside world. Like most indigenous minorities, their encounters with outsiders have been mostly painful and often violent. The Mursi are a community of around 11-12,000 agro-pastoralists living in the Lower Omo Valley of southwestern Ethiopia. Famous for their lip-plates and stick duelling, from their perspective outsiders attack them, steal their land, damage their environment and film them with disdain, while their duelling is mainly a mechanism for peaceful dispute resolution. They have had allies but to date attempts to promote their rights, and improve relationships with local government and neighbouring groups, have been thwarted. This coalition of Mursi, Ethiopian and UK scholars and filmmakers will research new forms of representation of and by the Mursi/the Other and learn about the process of using arts to influence policymakers in Ethiopia.

This initiative builds on the Mursi's extraordinary recent success at communicating with the outside world. By putting on a multi-media theatrical performance at the National Theatre of Addis Ababa on 31 July 2022, also broadcast on national TV, the Mursi and allies drew national attention to their political and economic situation for the first time. This has laid the foundation from which dialogue with the Ethiopian government becomes more possible than it has been in the past.

Our approach will be to: (a) subvert hierarchies of knowledge by valuing Mursi expertise, (b) ensure the Mursi are the key decision-makers in grant-making and advocacy, (c) assume that the Europeans participating support rather than control, (d) aspire to the highest quality research, creative methodologies and scholarly outputs, (e) create new alliances with neighbouring groups, international agencies and foreign governments. The objectives are: 1.To research and publish about collaboration and policy-influencing by a Mursi-led coalition of indigenous and non-indigenous researchers and creative artists; 2. To enable the Mursi community to research and reflect on what works and what doesn't, for whom and why; 3.To scale-up and research the Mursi's campaign to educate policy-makers about their way of life, challenges and development aspirations. The coalition will engage with neighbouring pastoralist groups, pastoralist networks and national NGOs, government officials and politicians in Ethiopia, and policymakers in New York, Washington, London and Brussels. We will produce an edited volume, two journal article, a webinar series, and three short documentary films to be shown at a major exhibition and conference in London as well as in New York, in celebration of the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists 2026.

The innovative elements in this research involve scaling up from the use of film and theatre to educate the world about the Mursi, to combining this with a broader range of collaborative strategies and networks to generate persuasive evidence with which to persuade policymakers to implement their policies on pastoralism in full and with more generosity. Rather than technical or methodological innovation, more creative and more equitable partnership are the imaginative foundation of this project. Whether creating music with the neighbouring Bodi group, with whom relations have been conflictual in the past, or persuading the European Parliament's MEPs and UN officials to engage in diplomacy with the Ethiopian government, alliances are central to our research design. Our collective capacity for making this coalition successful rests on well-established partnerships between the institutions involved - the Mursi community, South Omo Theatre Company, the Institute of Peace and Security Studies at Addis Ababa University and SOAS University - and the track record of the core team to lead research and creative coalitions.