SUPPORT ETHIOPIA INSIGHT .wpedon-container .wpedon-select, .wpedon-container .wpedon-input { width: 200px; min-width: 200px; max-width: 200px; } Part I — Liberation secured survival while leaving Tigray’s political order unfinished.For many centuries, Tigray has answered every threat to its existence and none of the questions about what that existence is for. Nationalism is a claim about legitimate authority. It succeeds only when that claim converts into institutions capable of outliving the leader, the party, or the war that produced them.Judged against that standard, Tigrayan nationalism has failed. Not because it lacks the capacity to mobilize a people in defense of its survival, since on that measure its record has few equals in the region, but because it has never completed the second half of its task: converting mobilization into a political order that citizens, rather than a party or battlefield command, actually govern.That gap between mobilizing a people and governing one is the current Tigray national dilemma.The Tigray dilemma is not an academic expression, and naming it does not minimize the war that made it visible. Families in Mekelle, in the camps around Shire, and in diaspora communities from Washington to Frankfurt carry direct knowledge of mass graves, relatives whose fate remains unknown, siege and starvation used as instruments of policy, and sexual violence whose true scale will take a generation to document.This factual record is the floor beneath everything that follows, and no argument about federal design or independence should proceed without standing on it. But the record of suffering is not itself an argument for any particular political future, and Tigrayan nationalism has too often treated it as though it were.Tigray’s crisis is usually narrated through the vocabulary of war: a humanitarian catastrophe, credible allegations of atrocities that international bodies have assessed as potentially amounting to genocide, mass displacement, and an unresolved dispute over Western Tigray. An unfinished peace agreement sits alongside a weakened federal order, a leadership crisis in Mekelle, and a geopolitical limbo in which Tigray’s security and constitutional status remain unsettled.All of this is accurate, but it describes symptoms rather than the underlying political pathology. That pathology has a name. Tigrayan nationalism keeps mistaking control over the present moment for legitimate authority over the future, repeating that error at each stage: from organizational monopoly during liberation, to constitutional status without institutional security, to military resilience without political settlement, to a post-war order that treated factional survival as governance, to a current armed coalition built on shared enemies rather than a shared program.Liberation and founding are not the same achievement. Liberation is the negative work of removing an oppressive constraint. Founding is the harder task of constituting a lasting public order in which power is exercised in common and bound by law that outlives whoever holds it.Francis Fukuyama’s work on state-building names the specific task that liberation movements from Eritrea to South Sudan have most consistently failed at: not the scope of what a new authority claims to control, but the strength of institutions capable of exercising that control predictably and surviving a change of leadership.Tigray has achieved liberation, repeatedly, at extraordinary cost. It has not achieved a founding, and until it does, the suffering endured in pursuit of liberation will keep purchasing survival without purchasing freedom.Central Yet MarginalTigray occupies a genuinely paradoxical position in Ethiopian history. It helped construct the civilizational and religious traditions from which the Ethiopian state has long drawn its legitimacy, while resisting arrangements that threatened its own regional autonomy. Taddesse Tamrat’s history of church and state in medieval Ethiopia documents how thoroughly religious legitimacy and political authority were fused from the thirteenth century onward, a fusion in which the Church supplied the Solomonic state its central claim to rule and the northern highlands, including Tigray, supplied much of the Church’s institutional weight.Assefa Fiseha has argued that Tigray was central to the historical Ethiopian polity even as the centralizing state of the twentieth century pushed it toward the periphery. Haggai Erlich reaches the same conclusion from a different angle, showing that Ethiopian state formation was never a straightforward national convergence but a sustained contest among regional authority, religious legitimacy, and centralizing power.Donald Levine’s account of Ethiopia as a multiethnic society assembled gradually through conquest, trade, and religious contact points the same way. The state’s coherence was constructed rather than inherited, which is why its terms remain open to renegotiation now.A people can share religion, history, and civilization with a state without permanently consenting to one distribution of power within it. Tigrayan nationalism grew from this unresolved tension long before the TPLF existed. The 1970s produced several competing answers to the same underlying question, from the Tigray Liberation Front’s ethnic self-determination to the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party’s class-based multinationalism.Gebru Tareke has documented that even within the movement that became the TPLF, disagreement persisted between those who read Tigray’s predicament as national oppression and those who situated it within Ethiopia’s broader crisis of authoritarian rule.These were the seeds of genuinely different political futures. They never matured into competing democratic traditions, because armed struggle settled through force what political argument had not resolved through persuasion.Plurality DeniedThe TPLF’s rise should not be read backward as inevitable. John Young’s history of the movement is valuable precisely because it strips away that retrospective inevitability. The organization did not simply out-argue its rivals. It displaced or eliminated competing centers of Tigrayan political organization through a process closer to elite capture than persuasion and became the sole vehicle through which Tigrayan nationalism could speak.Liberation and political monopoly developed together, and armed force resolved disagreements that should have remained the property of ordinary politics. What the TPLF built through armed struggle was effective at removing an adversary. It was never, by itself, capable of founding the kind of authority that requires no gun to sustain it.Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe’s own study of this transition, written by a scholar who moved inside the movement rather than observing it from outside, names the mechanism by which that incapacity became permanent. A guerrilla organization built to fight and win does not automatically know how to govern once the fighting stops, and the internal culture that makes an insurgency effective—strict hierarchy, ideological discipline, and unity enforced from the top—is close to the opposite of what a plural political system requires.The TPLF carried its insurgent culture directly into the state it built, never seriously undertaking the internal transformation its cadres understood to be necessary. Four decades on, that unfinished transition is still the party’s defining problem, inherited now by every faction claiming its legacy.The consequence has outlasted the war that produced it. The TPLF acquired the interpretive authority to define what Tigrayan nationalism meant, an authority no single organization should hold indefinitely over an entire people’s political imagination.That authority remained rooted in the liberation struggle rather than in institutions capable of outlasting any single leader, and Tigrayan politics never completed the transition from a legitimacy of biography to a legitimacy of office. Its political meaning proved adaptable, from the 1976 manifesto’s independent democratic Tigray, through a Marxist-Leninist Ethiopia-wide project, to a federal order in which Tigrayan nationalism grew quiet while the party wielded outsized influence in Addis Ababa.When that influence collapsed in 2018, nationalism again became indispensable to Tigrayan survival, a resource elites deploy according to their position within the broader political settlement rather than a fixed ideology.The sharpest criticism of the TPLF is therefore not that it betrayed Tigrayan nationalism outright. Its deeper failure was structural. It never allowed Tigrayan nationalism to develop institutional independence from the party claiming to speak for it.Self-determination became a constitutional principle whose practical meaning stayed tethered to the organization claiming historical custody over it, and that legacy remains active today. A movement can demand independence while governing through autocratic methods, condemn the TPLF by name while treating dissent as betrayal, and speak fluently in the language of liberation while treating its own citizens as instruments of an unaccountable project.Federal FragilityThe 1995 Constitution recognized Ethiopia as multinational, established territorial self-government, and constitutionalized a right to self-determination extending to secession, responding to real histories of exclusion rather than an abstract theory of ethnic engineering. Its central flaw lay elsewhere, in the gap between constitutional design and institutional practice.Berihun Adugna Gebeye has shown how deep that gap runs. Seen from the regions, Ethiopia’s federal order behaved as something closer to a unitary state, since the federal government retained the largest revenue sources, the legislative chamber, and the authority to set national development policy.Seen from the ethnic groups the Constitution names, the same order behaved as a loose confederation that could dissolve on request. Seen from citizens moving across regional lines, it functioned less as a democracy than as a system in which substantive rights depended on which region’s dominant group one belonged to. Tigray’s security rested on a federal structure that was never fully federal, a weakness obscured for nearly three decades by the TPLF’s outsized leverage within the ruling coalition.Access to the political center was never the equivalent of protection from it. Tigray’s demographic weight meant it could never guarantee long-term security through ordinary parliamentary arithmetic. Its safety depended instead on institutions strong enough to defend the constitutional bargain once the underlying coalition shifted, and those institutions were never made sufficiently independent. Organizational leverage substituted for institutional insurance, and when TPLF dominance ended in 2018, the fragility it had concealed became visible almost immediately.Tom Lavers’s account of Ethiopia’s developmental state helps explain why that leverage felt so durable while it lasted. The EPRDF governed less through law than through the discretionary distribution of loans, land, contracts, and development spending, a model built to reward political loyalty and starve opposition.That model manufactured the illusion of security through patronage rather than the reality of security through institutions, leaving Tigray doubly exposed once the patronage stopped flowing in its direction, first by the collapse of the party’s federal dominance and then by a war that made the accumulated resentment of that patronage politically usable against Tigrayans as a group.Strategic FailureThe years after 2018 confronted the TPLF with a political environment its institutional culture left it unprepared for, and with an adversary whose nature it badly misjudged. In his book, The Abiy Project, Tom Gardner offers perhaps the most penetrating study yet of Abiy Ahmed’s political character, exposing the relationship between performance, deception, and an extraordinary appetite for personal power.He presents Abiy as a political shape-shifter: prophet, entrepreneur, executive, military commander, modernizer, and aspiring emperor—a figure he memorably describes as a kind of “Pentecostal Putin.” These shifting identities allow Abiy to promise different things to different audiences while keeping his intentions strategically obscure.The shape-shifting is not incidental to Abiy’s politics; it is one of the principal means by which power is acquired, defended, and personalized.It is the method. Political scientists studying contemporary hybrid regimes have precise names for that pattern. Erica Frantz’s work on personalist authoritarianism describes systems in which formal institutions, the party, the parliament, and the army exist mainly to serve one leader’s discretion rather than constrain it.Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s related concept of competitive authoritarianism describes governments that retain elections and constitutional forms while using the machinery of the state systematically against opponents.All these descriptions capture something real about the administration Tigray was up against, and something the TPLF’s leadership was slow to grasp.Abiy has treated nearly every instrument available to a modern state—infrastructure projects, telecommunications and banking systems, the security services, religious institutions, and social bonds across ethnic lines—as an asset to be weaponized in the pursuit of continued power rather than a public good to be stewarded. There is little evidence of a boundary he has been unwilling to cross to remain in office.Independent researchers, including estimates compiled at Ghent University, have put the death toll from the war he oversaw at several hundred thousand people, a toll that by most reckonings exceeds any other single episode of political violence in Ethiopia’s modern history.His handling of ethnic division has followed a more calculated pattern than the unifying language of his book Medemer suggested. Abiy tailored different messages to Amharic and Afaan Oromo audiences, promising one constituency restored national unity and the other the historic ascendancy of a long-marginalized nation, two narratives that cannot both be true and that deepened the ethnic polarization Medemer claimed to be healing.A version of that calculation shaped his approach to Tigray. From his first months in office, Abiy did not confine his criticism to the TPLF as a political organization responsible for governance failures between 1991 and 2018. He methodically extended that critique to Tigrayans as a people, casting an entire population as the beneficiaries of a corrupt federal order that everyone else in Ethiopia had supposedly suffered under, converting a political argument about one party’s record into an ethnic indictment of an entire nationality.His government has repressed opponents, curtailed civic space, and used coercive power across Ethiopia; acknowledging that reality does not diminish the suffering of any other community. But Tigrayans were subjected to something more specific: political hostility toward the TPLF was progressively fused with ethnic identity, collective suspicion was translated into state practice, a foreign army was permitted to operate inside Tigray amid extraordinary atrocities, and measures of detention, exclusion, deprivation, and collective vulnerability repeatedly reached civilians because they were Tigrayan, not because they had been individually identified as combatants. Authoritarianism is too general a category to explain a campaign in which ethnicity itself became a recurring basis for suspicion, exclusion, and exposure to state and allied coercion.Using hunger and displacement as instruments against a civilian population is not new in Ethiopian statecraft, which is what makes its repetition so damning. Alula Pankhurst’s research on the Derg’s resettlement campaigns of the 1980s documented how state power converted famine into a tool of population control, moving people by force in the name of relief while a generation died in the process.Peter Gill’s account of the same period also shows how thoroughly that manufactured famine was allowed to pass before the world as a natural disaster rather than a policy choice. Abiy’s siege of Tigray belongs to that same lineage of governance, in which controlling where people live, whether they eat, and whether they can move is treated as an ordinary instrument of state power rather than as the atrocity it is.None of this can be separated from Abiy’s alignment with Eritrea, an alignment his government initially denied and could not credibly keep denying once Eritrean forces were documented operating deep inside Tigrayan territory. Inviting a government that had spent two decades in open hostility toward Ethiopia’s federal order, and whose forces went on to commit some of the war’s most severe documented atrocities, to join a campaign against a single Ethiopian region is not a maneuver that fits any conventional account of national interest. It reads more plausibly as confirmation of how far Abiy was prepared to go, and which partners he was prepared to accept, to secure Tigray’s defeat.TPLF leaders were not blind to the danger this administration posed. Their failure lay in converting that awareness into a strategy capable of reducing Tigray’s growing isolation. Between 2018 and the outbreak of war in November 2020, a movement built to administer a federal coalition could not rebuild trust beyond Tigray, could not shed the legitimacy costs of its federal record, and could not prevent confrontation from hardening into simultaneous threats from Addis Ababa and Asmara.None of this diminishes the individual responsibility of those who committed atrocities once war began. Leadership must nonetheless be judged by whether it protected the population it claimed to represent, and on that measure the years preceding the war deserve harder scrutiny inside Tigray than they have received. .wpedon-container .wpedon-select, .wpedon-container .wpedon-input { width: 200px; min-width: 200px; max-width: 200px; } Query or correction? Email us window.addEventListener("sfsi_functions_loaded", function(){if (typeof sfsi_widget_set == "function") {sfsi_widget_set();}}); While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.Main photo: Martyr’s Memorial, Mekelle. Source: Social media.Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.The post Tigray’s Liberation Must End in Freedom appeared first on Ethiopia Insight.