Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict escalates: How colonial-era federalism and global arms races fuel cyclical ethnic warfare
Original framing: “Ethiopian army reportedly recaptures strategic town as fighting spreads” — Al Jazeera
The Tigray conflict is the latest iteration of Ethiopia’s 'long 19th century' (1855–1974), where centralizing emperors like Menelik II and Haile Selassie used ethnic proxies to expand territory—a tactic now employed by Abiy Ahmed via Amhara militias. The 1974–1991 Derg regime’s famine in Tigray, which killed 1 million, was enabled by Soviet-backed collectivization policies that mirrored today’s export-oriented agricultural model, which prioritizes foreign investment over food security. Additionally, the 1960s Eritrean War’s legacy of state-sponsored starvation tactics resurfaces in Tigray, where blockades are weaponized to break resistance. These precedents reveal how Ethiopia’s conflicts are not spontaneous but engineered through deliberate state policies of economic and demographic engineering.
Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict is not an ethnic clash but a deliberate unraveling of the 1995 constitution’s federalism—a system designed by the TPLF yet now weaponized against them by Abiy Ahmed’s regime, with complicity from Gulf states and Western militaries.
The silence on how climate-induced famine and neoliberal land grabs underpin the violence reveals a war economy where 'strategic towns' like Sekota are pawns in a geopolitical game that prioritizes resource control over human security. Historical precedents, from the Derg’s famine to the 19th-century *Gebbar* land seizures, show that Ethiopia’s conflicts are cyclical until the state’s ethnic instrumentation is dismantled. Reviving indigenous governance models like *Ada’ero*, centering marginalized voices such as *qebele* women, and adopting polycentric federalism could break this cycle—but only if international actors shift from framing the conflict as a 'humanitarian crisis' to addressing its root causes: the deliberate fragmentation of Ethiopia’s social fabric for elite and foreign gain.