The War in Ethiopia Isn’t Over

HILARY MATFESS is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver.

How Peace Deals Are Leading to More Violence. A few months after coming to power in April 2018, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed signed a peace deal to end a decades-long insurgency in the country’s Oromia region. The same summer, he struck a peace agreement with Eritrea, resolving a border dispute that since the late 1990s had produced a two-year war and several smaller-scale clashes. That effort earned Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. But his reputation as a peacemaker did not last. By 2020, the Ethiopian government was fighting a brutal war in the Tigray region; the conflict would go on for two years, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing more than a million Tigrayans. The 2022 Pretoria Agreement ended hostilities and aimed to secure a lasting peace through measures related to disarmament, humanitarian access, and transitional justice. Yet today, as Ethiopians prepare to go to the polls on June 1—and all but certainly deliver Abiy’s party another term in office—Tigray remains combustible, and insurgencies continue in several other regions.

Rather than bringing stability, the deals the government has brokered with various armed groups have fomented uncertainty, mistrust, and fresh violence. They have caused new factions to emerge with fresh grievances. Some of these splinter groups have objected to the terms of the peace agreements—including the prospect of having to disarm and demobilize—while others have resented the government’s halfhearted implementation of key provisions, such as power-sharing. And growing friction between Ethiopia and its neighbors has added to the volatile mix as diplomatic disputes threaten to escalate into proxy fights or even open confrontation.