Ethiopia is currently engulfed in a widespread war of all against all. It now faces an existential threat to its survival as a “nation of nations.” Most regions in Ethiopia are facing widespread war where at times it is not even known on who is fighting against whom, creating a complete anarchy.
‘In a Widespread War of All Against All: Can Ethiopia survive the storm?’ is published as part of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep) program. The report details Ethiopia’s dramatic transformation over the past half century. Two of the biggest changes were the victory in 1991 of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which remained the dominant party for approximately three decades and more recently, the accession to power of Abiy Ahmed Ali as prime minister and the subsequent elimination of the EPRDF and the advent of the Prosperity Party as a ruling party.
The paper describes the nature and organization of the state and non-state violent actors who through their violent actions have made the country ungovernable. It describes that this kind of war is a manifestation of the decay in the country and argues that this tide of decay has created an existential threat to the country as a nation of nations.
The devastation Ethiopia is a widespread war of all against all, the kind of ‘Hobbesian’ conflict that we saw in Darfur after the intense war period of 2003-05, when anarchy ruled. Abiy Ahmed was comfortable with, though he was storing problems for himself because this chaos will give birth to the forces that overthrow him as much as Umar Al Bashir of Sudan enjoyed the chaos in Sudan up until it gave birth to the forces that ate his regime.
The response of the Federal Government to a call for national dialogue came too late and was too incomplete to meet the kind of challenges the country is facing. It was actually designed as a process to validate the Prosperity Party (PP) in government and exclude armed opposition groups. Ethiopia has now reached a stage where everything is combustible leading it into a scenario where the regime could unravel. The paper further concludes, that there is only limited time to save the collapse of the Ethiopian state by agreeing to some form of transition that gives Ethiopian elites the space to create a consensus in defining the problems of the country and the way forward.
It finally suggests that Tigray, as the only region that has an interim administration free of the direct rule of the Prosperity Party, could lead by example by creating an internal process that enables the Tigrayans come into a shared definition of their problems and the way forward as a prerequisite to a country wide dialogue for a similar objective.
