Ethiopia Findings
Key findings from PeaceRep research in Ethiopia (2021 – 2026)
PeaceRep’s Ethiopia research was led by Conciliation Resources, Coventry University, LSE CCRG, and the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University.
Ethiopia underwent a political transition after Abiy Ahmed became Prime Minister in April 2018, initiating reforms that affected the national landscape for peacemaking. These included normalising relations with neighbouring Eritrea, and the removal of some armed groups from the country’s terrorist list, such as the Oromo Liberation Front, Ginbot 7 – and the Ogaden National Liberation Front, which had been engaged in armed resistance in Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State (SRS) for over two decades.
PeaceRep research has examined post-settlement peacemaking in SRS and beyond. The central peace and transition challenge is to establish a renewed political accommodation over the organisation of the Ethiopian state: the distribution of authority between centre and regions, meaningful political competition, territorial and identity claims, and the institutional rules through which Ethiopia’s constituent political communities coexist.
Browse key findings and publications in the tabs below.
Crisis of political settlement
Ethiopia’s crisis is a crisis of its fundamental political settlement
Ethiopia’s current conflicts are manifestations of a deeper crisis in the country’s political settlement. The EPRDF system established after 1991 combined an ethnofederal constitutional order with highly centralised party control. It was authoritarian and increasingly oligopolistic, but it maintained a carefully managed balance between the federal centre and ethnoregional political elites. Abiy Ahmed’s accession to power in 2018 initiated a fundamental reconfiguration of this arrangement (de Waal 2018). The dissolution of the EPRDF and its replacement by the Prosperity Party accompanied an explicitly centripetal political project that sought to move away from the previous model of ethnic federalism and strengthen an overarching Ethiopian political centre (Abate Demissie, Girma & Pospisil 2022).
The resulting transition, however, has not produced a widely accepted alternative settlement. The weakening of the previous federal bargain has coincided with a transformation in how political authority is exercised. Mulugeta Gebrehiwot traces a longer evolution of the EPRDF from a centralised public-service and political monopoly towards oligopolistic rule. Yet, he also identifies a sharper change under Abiy towards personalised ‘big man’ politics, in which patronage, coercion and the management of disorder increasingly substitute for institutionalised political authority (Gebrehiwot 2025c). Ethiopia sits uneasily between two political orders: the still present ethnofederal system, and nationalist centralising political mechanisms substantially dismantling it without being able to offer a new stable centre-region bargain.
This unsettled political order has resulted in a proliferation of armed conflict. Tigrayan, Oromo and Amhara conflicts have distinct histories and should not be collapsed into a single national insurgency. Against the background of the new Ethiopian unsettlement, however, they unfold within a common context in which the basic rules governing political representation and authority as well as relations between regional and federal powers are contested. Gebrehiwot characterises the resulting fragmentation as a developing ‘war of all against all’. Such was is driven by political decay and proliferating state and non-state armed actors rather than by one clearly structured national confrontation (Gebrehiwot 2025a; 2025b).
Attempts to address this crisis through national dialogue have so far not resolved the underlying problem. The existing National Dialogue process came late and excluded important armed opposition actors, limiting its capacity to generate a broadly shared definition of Ethiopia’s political problems and pathways for resolving them (Gebrehiwot 2025a; 2025b). The central peace and transition challenge is therefore to establish a renewed political accommodation over the organisation of the Ethiopian state: the distribution of authority between centre and regions, meaningful political competition, territorial and identity claims, and the institutional rules through which Ethiopia’s constituent political communities coexist.
Subnational conflictscapes
Ethiopia’s subnational conflictscapes follow their own trajectories
Ethiopia’s national political crisis is refracted through subnational conflictscapes with their own actors and trajectories. Developments in the Somali Regional State and Tigray demonstrate why these cannot be understood simply as local manifestations of a single national conflict. In both cases, shifts at the federal level created opportunities for negotiated transitions, but subsequent outcomes have depended on locally specific questions of political participation, territorial control, justice, security and social recovery.
Indeed, subnational settlements can result in meaningful reductions in violence and new political spaces even while the wider national settlement remains unresolved. Yet, their durability depends on how local political arrangements interact with federal authority and neighbouring conflict systems.
The Somali Regional State provides Ethiopia’s clearest example of a relatively successful transition away from prolonged insurgency. The 2018 Asmara Accord ended more than two decades of armed confrontation between the federal government and the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). It enabled the ONLF’s transformation into a political party, and contributed to a significant opening of political and civic space.
However, the transition remains incomplete. Key questions about the structural roots of the conflict were left unresolved, including regional autonomy, political representation, natural-resource governance, revenue distribution, justice and accountability. The failure to establish the federal-level joint mechanism anticipated by the ONLF has consequently remained an important source of mistrust. Moreover, the opening of civic space has not been matched by equivalent opportunities for competitive electoral politics, which created a substantial dilemma for an armed movement demobilising on the expectation of meaningful peaceful participation.
Regional civil society organisations, survivor networks and women-led initiatives in the Somali Region demonstrate that post-conflict political change is not confined to relations between former belligerents. The Somali Regional State’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has provided a locally grounded mechanism for confronting legacies of state violence at a time when equivalent national initiatives have struggled to gain traction. Women-led organisations have similarly developed dialogue between political actors while supporting survivors and former combatants. These initiatives show how regional processes can generate forms of reconciliation and political agency independently of progress at the national level.
The Somali Regional State is also a transboundary political space. Kenyan Somali political figures contributed to mediation between the ONLF and the Ethiopian government, while kinship, religious and commercial networks continue to connect Jigjiga with Nairobi, Jubbaland and other Somali territories (Ali 2023). Recent clashes around Dacawaley illustrate, however, how local land and identity disputes can also become entangled with security forces, political entrepreneurs and actors across the Somaliland–Ethiopia border. This entanglement creates conflict dynamic that cannot be understood through federal Ethiopian politics alone (Ali 2025).
Tigray demonstrates a different trajectory between conflict/post-conflict. The end of the wave of large-scale hostilities in 2022 created the possibility of recovery, but the region continues to confront the political and social consequences of an exceptionally destructive war.
Humanitarian recovery had taken place amid deep distrust between federal and Tigrayan authorities, weakened regional institutions, mass displacement and unresolved demands for restitution, accountability and reconstruction (Gebrehiwot & de Waal 2023). The return and reintegration of former combatants illustrates the difficulty of treating post-conflict recovery as a conventional technical exercise: Gebrehiwot argues that Tigray’s immediate DDR needs are fundamentally humanitarian and welfare challenges. Meaningful security-sector transformation ultimately depends on resolving wider political grievances (Gebrehiwot 2023). The new outbreak of fighting in September 2026 demonstrates this shortcoming (Interview with TRT World, Pospisil, October 2026).
Territorial disputes demonstrate the persistence of subnational conflict dynamics. Western Tigray remains contested through competing administrative, historical and identity claims, continued displacement and unresolved questions over political authority. Technical boundary settlement or referendums alone cannot resolve these issues. Such tensions are a manifestation both of locally specific conflict dynamics and of Ethiopia’s wider crisis over its political settlement (Gebrehiwot 2025d).
Subnational and regional conflict layers
Subnational and regional conflict layers are distinct but increasingly interconnected
Ethiopia’s conflicts are not merely different fronts of a single civil war. Tigray, Amhara, Oromia and the Somali Regional State have distinct political histories and grievances. Their trajectories cannot be explained solely through developments at the federal centre. Yet the weakening of Ethiopia’s political settlement has made these arenas increasingly permeable to one another. Armed actors form shifting alliances, regional authorities pursue their own security interests.
These interconnections extend across Ethiopia’s international borders. PeaceRep Somalia research has shown that Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State, Somalia and its federal member states form a deeply entangled political-security arena in which local actors, federal governments, security forces and commercial networks operate across formal boundaries. Increasingly, transactional political-marketplace logics and local dealmaking cut across – and sometimes also contradict – central government strategies (Majid et al. 2026b).
This interaction is reinforced by changes in Ethiopia’s regional policy since 2018. The earlier EPRDF model combined domestic party-state discipline with comparatively institutionalised regional diplomacy. This system’s erosion has been accompanied by a more personalised and de-institutionalised conduct of foreign relations (Abate Demissie, Girma & Pospisil 2022; Sarkar 2023). Domestic power struggles and regional alignments consequently feed into one another: subnational actors acquire external relationships, while neighbouring states and regional political entrepreneurs become increasingly relevant to Ethiopia’s internal conflicts. The result is not a single integrated conflict system, but a set of distinct conflict layers whose growing connections make escalation harder to contain within any one locality or political arena.
Peacemaking in a fragmented ecosystem
Peacemaking operates in a fragmented ecosystem
Peacemaking in Ethiopia, consequently, is dispersed across several arenas. The 2018 Asmara Accord in the Somali Regional State, the 2022 Pretoria Agreement ending the Tigray war, federal-regional bargaining, local reconciliation processes and international mediation all address different parts of the conflict landscape. This fragmentation reflects the conflicts themselves: agreements can reduce violence and open political space in particular settings without resolving the broader contest over Ethiopia’s political order.
The Pretoria Agreement illustrates both the achievements and limitations of elite-level peacemaking. It temporarily succeeded in stopping catastrophic large-scale warfare in Tigray. Yet, it provided only a limited outline for resolving the political disputes underlying the war. Key provisions concerning territory, IDP return, DDR, transitional justice, humanitarian recovery and reconstruction remained incomplete (Gebrehiwot 2024). Pretoria therefore demonstrates that cessation of hostilities and political settlement are distinct categories: an agreement can fundamentally change a conflict trajectory without establishing a durable or comprehensive peace.
The wider peacemaking environment is institutionally fragmented as well. Ethiopia’s transition has unfolded amid competing regional and international interests rather than a stable regional peace architecture (Abate Demissie, Girma & Pospisil 2022). Ethiopian diplomacy, in turn, has shifted away from more institutionalised regional engagement towards increasingly personalised and transactional mediation, illustrated by Abiy Ahmed’s 2019 Sudan initiative (Taye 2024). The different agreements and mediation arenas need to be understood as parts of a fragmented peacemaking ecosystem whose interactions can reinforce, undermine or simply bypass one another.
Horn geopolitics
Horn geopolitics increasingly frame Ethiopia’s peace and conflict setting
Ethiopia’s domestic political transformation since 2018 has been inseparable from changes in its regional relationships. Foreign policy became more personalised and less institutionalised under Abiy Ahmed, while domestic political consolidation increasingly shaped relations with neighbouring states (Sarkar 2023). The rapprochement with Eritrea initially appeared to represent a major regional breakthrough. However, it also became entangled with Ethiopia’s internal political struggle and subsequently with the Tigray war, and, meanwhile, has entirely collapsed again. More broadly, the weakening of established regional institutions has coincided with intensified competition involving Gulf states, Türkiye and other external actors, producing a more crowded and fluid diplomatic environment in the Horn (Sofos 2023).
The relationship between Ethiopia and Somalia illustrates particularly clearly how domestic and regional political arenas increasingly overlap. Ethiopia’s long-standing security engagement in Somalia developed alongside its management of the Somali Regional State. Brokers, commercial interests, local authorities and security actors operate across the Ethiopia-Somalia borderlands, sometimes pursuing deals that diverge from central government strategies (Majid et al. 2026a). The Somali borderlands consequently function less as a fixed interstate boundary than as a transboundary political and economic formation in which control of trade routes, checkpoints and security relationships shapes political power (Majid et al. 2026b).
These dynamics place Ethiopia within a broader Horn and Red Sea conflict environment in which domestic instability, interstate competition and economic precarity reinforce one another. Peace processes themselves operate within political economies shaped by dispossession and unequal access to resources, meaning that agreements which address political elites without engaging these underlying conditions can reproduce new forms of insecurity (Sarkar 2024). Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Red Sea politics and the growing diversity of external actors increasingly form part of the political and security environment through which Ethiopia’s internal conflicts are negotiated, financed and sustained.
References
PeaceRep’s key findings series presents a top-line overview of findings from the breadth and depth of the consortium’s data-driven and in-country research between 2021 – 2027. To view all PeaceRep publications, visit the publications database.
Researchers and contributors
Abel Abate Demissie, Aden Abdi, Juweria Ali, Alex de Waal, Mulugeta Gebrehiwot, Leulseged Girma, Nisar Majid, Jan Pospisil, Alexander Ramsbotham, Aditya Sarkar, Spyros A. Sofos, Eliab Taye
Citation
Pospisil, J. & Ramsbotham, A. (2026). PeaceRep Key Findings: Ethiopia. PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
References
Abate Demissie, A., Girma, L., & Pospisil, J. (2022). Fragmented Transitions in the Context of Competitive Regionalism: The Case of Ethiopia (PeaceRep Report: Global Transitions Series). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Ali, J. (2023). Sustaining peace and reconciliation in the Somali region of Ethiopia: cross-border Somali peace networks as an untapped resource. PeaceRep blog. 13 Dec 2023. https://peacerep.org/2023/12/13/sustaining-peace-and-reconciliation-in-the-somali-region-of-ethiopia/.
Ali, J. (2025). Buying and Selling Loyalty: Market Logics and Political Finance in the Somali Territories. PeaceRep blog. 11 July 2025. https://peacerep.org/2025/07/11/buying-and-selling-loyalty/.
De Waal, A. (2018). The Future of Ethiopia: Developmental State or Political Marketplace? World Peace Foundation Briefing, 20 August 2018. Conflict Research Programme.
Gebrehiwot, M. (2023). Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Tigray: An element in a national DDR/SSR program or a compassionate humanitarian need for returning combatants in Tigray region? Somerville, MA: World Peace Foundation.
Gebrehiwot, M. & de Waal, A. (2023). Humanitarian Priorities for Tigray, Ethiopia, after the Cessation of Hostilities. Somerville, MA: World Peace Foundation.
Gebrehiwot, M. (2024). Towards a Meaningful Peace for Tigray: How to Move from the ‘Permanent Cessation of Hostilities Agreement’ to a Durable Peace. Somerville, MA: World Peace Foundation.
Gebrehiwot, M. (2025a). In a Widespread War of All against All, Can Ethiopia Survive the Storm? (PeaceRep Policy Brief). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Gebrehiwot, M. (2025b). Can Ethiopia Prevent the Collapse of the State? PeaceRep blog. 17 Feb 2025. https://peacerep.org/2025/02/17/can-ethiopia-prevent-the-collapse-of-the-state/.
Gebrehiwot, M. (2025c). The Story of Ethiopian Governance: From a Centralized Public Service Monopoly to ‘Big Man’ Politics (PeaceRep Report). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Gebrehiwot, M. (2025d). Western Tigray: The Unresolved Challenge and a Test for Ethiopia (PeaceRep Report). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Majid, N., Abdirahman, K., Adan, G. & Ali, J. (2026a). Market Logics, Checkpoints and Transboundary Formations: The Somali Borderlands. PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Majid, N., Abdirahman, K., Ali, J., & Adan, G. (2026b). Ethiopia and Somalia’s Political-Security Entanglement: The Evolution of the Political Marketplace in the Horn of Africa (PeaceRep Report). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Sarkar, A. (2023). Two-Level Game or the Primacy of Domestic Politics? Ethiopia’s Regional Foreign Policy after 2018 (Working Paper). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Sarkar, A. (2024). Peacemaking, Precarity, and Accumulation by Dispossession in the Horn of Africa (PeaceRep Report). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Sofos, S. (2023). Navigating the Horn: Turkey’s Forays in East Africa (Global Transitions Report). PeaceRep: The Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform, University of Edinburgh.
Taye, E. (2024). Ethiopia’s Pivot from Institutionalised Regional Diplomacy to Populist Peacemaking: Abiy Ahmed’s 2019 Khartoum Peace Initiative and Its Impact on Ethiopia-Sudan Relations (PeaceRep Report). World Peace Foundation.