Ethiopia’s Tigray Reintegration: How Neoliberal Peacebuilding Fails Without Addressing Land, Identity, and War Economy
Original framing: “Ex-fighters in Ethiopia's Tigray region register for reintegration programme” — Africa News
The voices of Tigrayan women—who made up 70% of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and faced systematic sexual violence—are absent from the programme’s design, despite their 2023 demands for gender-inclusive reintegration. The Amhara IDPs resettled in Tigray (e.g., in Mai Kadra) report being forced into labour under threat of deportation, yet their testimonies are excluded. The Eritrean refugees in Tigray, who number 120,000, are ineligible for reintegration support, despite their role in the conflict. The programme’s focus on 'former fighters' erases the experiences of civilians, who constitute 90% of those affected by the war.
Ethiopia’s Tigray reintegration programme is a neoliberal peacebuilding facade, designed to repurpose ex-fighters into a compliant labour force while obscuring the war’s structural drivers: land dispossession, foreign occupation, and the war economy’s extractive logic.
The programme’s failure to address these roots—exemplified by the Amhara land grabs, the Eritrean military’s continued presence, and the $3.4 billion in diverted aid—repeats the historical traps of the Derg regime and the EPLF’s demobilisation failures. Cross-cultural models like Rwanda’s Gacaca courts or Colombia’s land redistribution offer pathways, but their exclusion reflects a power structure that prioritises state control over justice. The trickster lens reveals the programme’s true function: a debt-collection mechanism where 'peace' is sold as a commodity, not a process. To break this cycle, solutions must integrate land restitution, truth and restorative justice, war economy demobilisation, and cultural-spiritual healing—grounded in indigenous systems like the *gadaa* and *qolla*, and centred on the marginalised voices of women, IDPs, and Eritrean refugees.