The Anatomy of Ethiopia’s Civil War

The civil war that erupted in November 2020 in Ethiopia was a culmination of several overlapping, long-running conflicts. The main conflict involves the nature of the Ethiopian state: whether it should be a unified structure reflecting a singular national identity, or a multiethnic federal system preserving autonomy for regional states. The discrete conflicts involve tensions between the central state and the regional states of Tigray and Oromo; territorial disputes between different ethnic groups; and an old rivalry between the regime of neighboring Eritrea and the ruling party in Tigray. The complex layers of the war make peace all the more elusive.