Understanding Ethiopia Through the Lens of Ethnic Recognition
As we have been giving (virtual) book talks this fall, we have, unsurprisingly, been asked a good deal about current events in Ethiopia. In the book, our Ethiopia case study was especially interesting to us since it was the TPLF minority regime that adopted recognition, in contrast to the much more common global practice of pluralities adopting, and minorities avoiding, recognition. While we were putting the finishing touches on the book, Abiy, a leader from Ethiopia’s plurality Oromo group, became President and we began to think about what this might mean for Ethiopia and our theory of recognition. Since publication in April, clashes in Ethiopia have erupted into violent conflict and the news emerging from Ethiopia is worsening by the day. So, we asked Hilary Matfess, a terrific PhD candidate at Yale and a USIP Peace Fellow, who keeps us up to date on Ethiopia via twitter (and whom we follow also for her great work on gender and conflict) to help us think about Ethiopia today and the question of recognition. Here’s what she had to say. Thank you, and welcome to our blog, Hilary!
Understanding Ethiopia Through the Lens of Ethnic Recognition
Guest post by Hilary Matfess
On November 4th, Prime Minister Abiy announced a six-month State of Emergency in response to an attack by Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) on a federal military base in Tigray State. In the days since, the relative peace and stability that Ethiopia has experienced since 1991 has seemed to unravel, with outright war between the TPLF and the Ethiopian government, clashes between ethnic militias, and even reports of ethnically-motivated mass-killings. Though communal violence and ethnic militias have long been a feature of the security landscape in modern Ethiopia, the outbreak of violence in November 2020 represents a shift in the dynamic of violence and threatens to plunge the country into a destructive and protracted conflict.
In King and Samii’s Diversity, Violence, and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace, Ethiopia was put forth as a puzzling case study (an instance of “institutional mismatch”): why would the minority TPLF, who represented roughly 6% of the country’s population, choose to not only recognize ethnic identity, but to institutionalize it through a system of ethno-federalism and a constitution that gave ethno-regional administrative units the right to secede? King and Samii note that ethnic recognition in this case was partially a result of path dependency: the war to overthrow the Derg (the military government that led Ethiopia from 1974-1991) was fought by ethno-regional armed groups and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) was itself a coalition of ethnic armed groups that became a coalition of ethnically based parties.
The turning point (or one of the turning points) pushing Ethiopia towards war centers on the change (or perceived change) in the recognition of ethnic groups. The formation of the Prosperity Party (PP) in 2019 represented a shift in how ethnicity would be recognized. The PP was designed by Abiy as the successor to the EPRDF. While many noted that the ideological platform of the PP (medeemer, meaning synergistic unity) deviated from the “revolutionary democracy” of the TPLF, another important aspect of the PP was that it encouraged a unified Ethiopian identity. Its formation required the dissolution of ethnically based regional parties that constituted the EPRDF. As King and Samii noted, the TPLF was the only constituent party in the EPRDF to resist joining the PP.
Though the country’s electoral board approved the PP, the creation of the new party pushed the country towards a constitutional crisis and undermined the legitimacy of the government. Members of the TPLF challenged the legality of its formation since the Prosperity Party was not on the ballot in the previous elections. The TPLF asserted that “those who opted for merging the party should resign... from government.” Members of the TPLF also considered the formation of the PP to be a repudiation of ethno-federalism; defenders of the PP maintained that rule by a pan-Ethiopian party was compatible with regional self-rule as laid out in the 1995 constitution. Regardless of whether the arrangement could work in theory, the TPLF’s refusal to join the party foreshadowed conflict.
Delaying the 2020 elections, scheduled for May but moved because of the coronavirus pandemic, further pushed the country towards conflict. After September 30th, critics and analysts noted, the Abiy government’s mandate would expire, putting the country into a constitutional crisis. In defiance of the central government, the TPLF held regional elections in September, in which they were unsurprisingly and overwhelmingly successful. The federal government considered the regional elections unconstitutional, while regional government officials stated that any action by the federal government regarding the elections would be taken as a “declaration of war.”
Through the framework laid out by King and Samii in Diversity, Violence, and Recognition, the establishment of the PP represented an instance in which a member of the dominant ethnic group (Abiy himself is Oromo and came up through the EPRDF ranks as a part of the Oromo People's Democratic Organization) shifting the country’s political system away from ethnic recognition. Ethiopia is in transition from one form of “institutional mismatch” to another. The TPLF’s resistance to this reform can be understood both as a rejection of their waning political fortunes under Abiy’s administration and as a form of mobilization by a threatened ethnic minority. Interestingly, the Ethiopia case illustrates the capacity for ethnic mobilization by a minority in response to the removal of ethnic recognition. Just as the EPRDF’s ethno-federalism has been criticized as a smoke screen for the consolidation of the TPLF’s power, the PP’s pan-Ethiopianism can be interpreted as a threat to the ethnic identities and rights of minorities that are explicitly recognized in the 1995 constitution. Furthermore, though the government has couched its military offensive as an effort to remove the TPLF as a political party, the actions of the government (including a statement from a military spokesman that “We want to send a message to the public in Mekelle to save yourselves from any artillery attacks and free yourselves from the junta ... After that, there will be no mercy”) do not seem designed to differentiate Tigrayans from the party.
The Ethiopian case suggests that the mobilization effects of ethnic recognition create a high and costly barrier to the removal of this recognition. This trend suggests an extension and potentially rich research agenda extending King and Samii’s findings: how do political institutions and actors manage change between recognition/non-recognition? Developments in Ethiopia thus far suggest that once ethnicity is recognized, shifting towards non-recognition can promote violent resistance.
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Please feel free to reach out with your thoughts and/or if you’d like to author a reaction piece. If you’d like to guest write on a different topic related to ethnic recognition, we’d also be pleased to hear from you.