Abstract
This chapter discusses how the emergence of urban-to-urban migrants’ shared knowledge, skills and practices led to the formation of a middle class in Ethiopia. This formation was based both on interlocutors’ enhancement of their economic, social and symbolic capital, and shared experiences of limited changes to their cultural capital. The opportunities and constraints that these migrants faced in pursuing progress meant that they came to share social positions based on this unique combination of capital. Instead of clear-cut individual upward social mobility, it was the changes in people who engaged in urban-to-urban migration that made them distinct from returning international migrants and non-migrants. These emerging commonalities led to the formation of a group that can be described as a middle class in Ethiopia.
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Breines, M.R. (2021). A Middle Class Rooted in Urban-to-Urban Migration. In: Becoming Middle Class. Globalization, Urbanization and Development in Africa . Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3537-3_7
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