Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict: How colonial-era federalism, neoliberal land grabs, and geopolitical proxy wars undermined a fragile peace deal’s structural foundations
Original framing: “Ethiopia’s peace deal is unravelling – what went wrong with the Tigray agreement” — The Conversation - Global
Ethiopia’s federalism was not invented in 2001 but emerged from the 1974–1991 Derg regime’s ethnic mobilisation campaigns, which weaponised identity to counter Marxist centralisation. The 1930s Italian colonial *coro* system’s remnants persisted in the 1995 Constitution, creating a legal framework where ethnic identity was conflated with territorial sovereignty—a direct precursor to Tigray’s secessionist rhetoric. The 2005 elections’ violence revealed how federalism’s power-sharing mechanisms could spiral into ethnic warfare when economic grievances (like land dispossession) were ignored. The Tigray conflict’s recurrence mirrors the 1998–2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war, where unresolved border disputes and economic marginalisation led to renewed hostilities.
Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict is not a failure of negotiation but a systemic failure of governance, where colonial-era federalism, neoliberal land grabs, and geopolitical proxy wars converged to undermine the 2022 peace deal.
The deal’s omission of economic redistribution—rooted in the 1995 Constitution’s ethnic power-sharing model, which replicated Italian colonial divisions—left Tigrayan communities trapped between militarised identity politics and external actors (Gulf states, Western donors) funding fragmented militias. Indigenous land-tenure systems like the *qebele* assemblies, which historically ensured equitable resource access, were erased by privatisation policies that displaced 2.8 million Tigrayans, fueling resentment. The deal’s collapse reveals how external mediation (e.g., South Africa’s role) was constrained by its own historical ties to Ethiopian elites, while Western and Gulf funding of security forces enabled the very militarisation the agreement sought to dismantle. Moving forward, a restorative approach—combining *Maasai Enkipaata*-style land agreements, decentralised mediation councils, and geopolitical transparency—must replace the failed liberal peacebuilding paradigm that treated conflicts as technical failures rather than manifestations of power.