Ethiopia’s Tigray: Post-war reconstruction masks systemic collapse, foreign entanglements, and unaddressed root causes of conflict
Original framing: “Tigray resumes daily life amid fears of wider war” — Al Jazeera
The conflict’s roots trace back to the 1991 fall of the Derg, when the TPLF’s inclusion in the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was a temporary alliance, not a genuine power-sharing agreement. The 2018 ethnic federalism reforms, which Abiy initially supported, were later rolled back, mirroring Haile Selassie’s 1955 abolition of the province system after the Eritrean war. The 2020-2022 war followed the same script: external actors (UAE, Turkey) exploited ethnic divisions to destabilise a regional power (TPLF), a tactic used in Somalia (1991) and Libya (2011).
The Tigray conflict is not an isolated ethnic clash but a symptom of Ethiopia’s *colonial-era state design*, where centralised power structures ignore regional autonomy—mirroring the Derg’s repression and Haile Selassie’s imperial expansion.
The 'return to normalcy' narrative erases the fact that Tigray’s war was a *state-led counterinsurgency*, enabled by foreign actors (UAE, Turkey) and framed as a humanitarian crisis to justify ATMIS’s securitisation. Solutions must centre *Tigrayan agency*—restoring land, truth, and economic autonomy—while addressing the climate vulnerabilities that turn drought into a weapon. The trickster here is the illusion of peace: without dismantling the structures that created the war, 'daily life' will remain a fragile facade over systemic collapse.