A 2026 analysis of Ethiopia conflict history — Tigray, the Fano uprising, and the Oromo insurgency.
Ethiopia’s conflict history stretches back to imperial times, including long wars over Eritrea, a brutal civil war under the Derg (1974–1991), and, more recently, violent clashes such as the Eritrean–Ethiopian border war and the Tigray conflict.
Throughout 2024, the current Ethiopian civil war, shaped by clashes between the Government of Ethiopia and the Fano militia in Amhara, alongside intensified fighting with the OLA over control and authority, recorded a sharp rise in organized armed violence to nearly 4,100 deaths. One-sided violence also exceeded 1,000 deaths, while intercommunal fighting remained limited.
In 2025, Ethiopia’s conflict centred on fighting between the federal government and Fano militias in Amhara, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), and a renewed confrontation with the TPLF, alongside communal violence and one-sided attacks on civilians. UCDP recorded 5,458 battle-related deaths, including 949 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Ethiopia’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
A note on borders. Two territorial disputes sit inside Ethiopia’s current map, and both are live rather than historical. Along Ethiopia’s northern edge, the fertile district of Welkait (part of what is now called Western Tigray) is claimed by both the Amhara and Tigray regions; Amhara forces and the allied Fano) militia have controlled and administered it since 2020, and its return to Tigrayan administration is a central, unresolved term of the 2022 peace deal that ended the Tigray War. On Ethiopia’s western edge, the al-Fashaga triangle is claimed by both Ethiopia and Sudan, rooted in a disputed 1902 colonial-era boundary; Sudanese forces have controlled most of the area since 2020, and sporadic clashes continue. Neither dispute affects Ethiopia’s broad shape on a map, but both remain active flashpoints, not settled history.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Ethiopia is a large, landlocked country in the Horn of Africa, built on a high volcanic plateau — sometimes called the “Roof of Africa” — that the Great Rift Valley splits diagonally in two. More than eighty ethnic groups live within its borders, speaking languages from several distinct families and practising Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions in roughly comparable numbers. Mainstream historians treat Ethiopia’s central fact as continuity: unlike almost every other African territory, it was never absorbed into a European colonial empire (a five-year Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941 aside), and it traces an unbroken line of highland Christian kingship back to the ancient trading civilisation of Aksum. That kingship, embodied later in the Solomonic monarchy, expanded dramatically in the late nineteenth century under Emperor Menelik II, roughly doubling the territory it governed and fixing the country’s modern borders. The result, in the standard account, is a state far older than its current constitution, repeatedly reorganised — imperial, socialist, federal — around the same underlying task: holding a vast, plural highland-and-lowland territory together under one government, a task made harder by the fact that no single ethnic group forms a majority of the population.
Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1974 (1991); Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Updated ed., 2002).
Five thresholds structure the mainstream account. Aksum’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, under King Ezana, bound crown and church together for the next sixteen centuries. The “Solomonic restoration” of 1270 installed a dynasty that claimed descent from the biblical King Solomon, giving Ethiopian kingship a religious charter it kept until 1974. The Battle of Adwa in 1896, where Ethiopian forces defeated an invading Italian army, preserved the country’s independence during Europe’s colonial partition of Africa and became a founding symbol of the modern state, even as the same years of Menelik’s rule roughly doubled the territory the crown controlled through conquest of the south. The 1974 revolution ended the monarchy outright, installing a Marxist military junta known as the Derg, which pursued land reform and forced resettlement under the banner of scientific socialism. And the Derg’s own collapse in 1991, after a long guerrilla war led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, brought a new government that redrew the country’s internal map around ethnic-language regions, a system called ethnic federalism. Each threshold changed who legitimately held power and on what grounds — divine right, revolutionary ideology, or ethnic representation — while leaving unresolved the deeper question of how to bind so plural a country together.
Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1974 (1991); Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Updated ed., 2002).
The mainstream account holds that in Ethiopia the state came first, by a wide margin, and built the nation more than the nation built the state. A highland Christian kingdom, centred on the Solomonic monarchy, existed for centuries before anything resembling a shared “Ethiopian” identity extended to the diverse peoples eventually incorporated into it. That extension came largely through Menelik II’s conquests of the 1880s–1900s, which brought Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and many other peoples under one crown, followed by decades in which the imperial centre promoted the Amharic language and Orthodox Christianity as unifying, semi-official markers of Ethiopian nationhood. This top-down nation-building was only partly successful and was formally abandoned in 1995, when a new constitution replaced it with ethnic federalism, organising the country into regional states built around language and ethnicity and granting them, on paper, a right to self-determination up to and including secession. Historians read this as a state still searching, well over a century after its territorial consolidation, for a settled answer to what binds its nation together — a search visible in the country’s repeated constitutional experiments and in the periodic conflicts, including the present ones, over how much autonomy its constituent regions should actually hold.
Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1974 (1991); Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Updated ed., 2002).
The long-term force the mainstream identifies is the repeated, never-finished project of binding a vast and plural territory to a single centre of authority. Successive Ethiopian states have tried different instruments for the job — dynastic religion under the emperors, revolutionary socialism under the Derg, ethnic federalism under the government that followed it — and each has bought a period of cohesion at the price of a later crisis, as the groups left unsatisfied by one settlement pushed for the next. Aksum’s ancient trading wealth built the first version of this centre; Menelik’s conquests built its modern territorial extent; the Derg’s centralising socialism tried, and largely failed, to override ethnic difference with class solidarity; and each subsequent government has had to answer, again, how a highland Christian-founded state governs a country where perhaps half the population is Muslim and dozens of languages are spoken. What best explains Ethiopia’s long trajectory, on this account, is this unfinished integration — a state periodically remade by conquest, revolution, or constitutional redesign, but never permanently settled, so that the same underlying question resurfaces, in new form, in each generation’s crisis.
Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Updated ed., 2002); Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity (1991).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading resists the idea of Ethiopia as one continuous, self-evidently unified civilisation, and argues instead that the country as it exists today is the fusion of two separate histories under unequal terms. One is the highland Christian, Amharic- and Tigrinya-speaking imperial core; the other is the collection of independent kingdoms, chiefdoms, and stateless societies — Oromo, Somali, Sidama, Wolayta, and many more — that lay south and east of it and were conquered and absorbed into the same state in the 1880s–1900s, in the same decades as Europe’s colonial partition of Africa. On this reading, Ethiopia’s proud claim to have alone escaped colonisation obscures a second, less-told story: an African empire built by broadly the same methods — military conquest, land expropriation, forced assimilation — that Europeans used elsewhere on the continent. This does not deny that Ethiopia repelled Italy at Adwa; it argues that the same conquering army, and the same historical decades, produced an internal empire that mainstream history has folded into a single, flattering word: unification. Some proponents of this school, echoing the Oromo, Somali, and Sidama political movements that draw on it today, go further and describe the resulting state as a form of settler colonialism practised by Africans on other Africans, a framing mainstream historians reject as overstated but do not dismiss outright.
Bonnie K. Holcomb & Sisai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia: The Making of a Dependent Colonial State in Northeast Africa (1990); Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History, 1570–1860 (1990).
The revisionist backbone keeps the same run of turning points the mainstream cites — Aksum, the Solomonic restoration, Adwa, the 1974 revolution, the 1991 transition — but reweighs the middle of that sequence, Menelik II’s southward conquests, as the decisive one. Rather than treating the conquered south as empty or backward territory awaiting incorporation, this school points to evidence, including Mohammed Hassen’s detailed study of the Oromo kingdoms of the Gibe region, that organised states and economies already existed there before conquest. The conquest itself installed a system historians call neftegna-gebbar: settler-soldiers (neftegna) granted conquered land, worked by the subjugated local peasantry (gebbar) as tribute-payers — an arrangement revisionists read as land expropriation and forced labour rather than peaceful integration. The 1974 revolution and the 1991 transition to ethnic federalism are then read not as separate events but as two attempts, one socialist and one federalist, to dismantle that nineteenth-century settlement — attempts this school judges incomplete. Because it reinterprets accepted events rather than inventing new ones, this is legitimate scholarship, though how much of the neftegna-gebbar system varied by region, and how coercive it was everywhere, remains genuinely disputed among historians.
Teshale Tibebu, The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896–1974 (1995); Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History, 1570–1860 (1990).
In this reading, the Ethiopian “nation” was not a pre-existing unity that the state merely governed, but something the conquering centre actively manufactured after the fact, by promoting the Amharic language, Orthodox Christianity, and an “Ethiopianist” historical memory as the markers of true national belonging — markers that fit the highland core and excluded, or subordinated, most of the annexed south. Populations who had their own languages, their own faiths, including Islam and indigenous religions such as the Oromo’s Waaqeffannaa, and, among the Oromo specifically, their own sophisticated political institution, the Gada system of rotating, elected age-grade leadership, found that system and identity displaced rather than incorporated. On this view the state built the nation by assimilation, not consent, for roughly a century — a process sometimes called, in this literature, “Amharisation” — until the 1995 constitution’s ethnic federalism represented the first formal, though still contested, attempt to recognise this underlying plurality rather than erase it. This corrects a romantic story of an ancient people simply reclaiming or extending its ancestral state, though it can understate the genuine antiquity of highland Christian identity that the cultural perspective stresses.
Bonnie K. Holcomb & Sisai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (1990); Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History, 1570–1860 (1990).
The force this school foregrounds is internal colonisation and the long, unfinished struggle to undo it. On this account, the deepest driver of modern Ethiopian history is not the resilience of an ancient state but a repeating cycle: a highland centre conquers and assimilates a periphery, the periphery organises and resists, and the centre grants a partial, incomplete devolution that defers rather than resolves the underlying grievance. Menelik’s conquests began the cycle; Haile Selassie’s centralising monarchy and the Derg’s forced villagisation programmes continued it; the ethnic federalism introduced in 1995 was the most serious attempt yet to break it, by giving regions built on ethnicity real, though bounded, self-rule. That the cycle is still turning is, in this reading, visible in the twenty-first century’s renewed conflicts — in Tigray, in Amhara, in Oromia — running along almost exactly the old fault lines between centre and periphery, and drawing, on every side, on grievances first formed under nineteenth-century conquest. This is a materialist, post-colonial interpretation that departs deliberately from the mainstream’s language of “integration,” and its contested point is how much weight conquest and coercion bear against Ethiopia’s own internal diversity and negotiation as causes of today’s unrest.
Teshale Tibebu, The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896–1974 (1995); Bonnie K. Holcomb & Sisai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (1990).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through faith and political legitimacy, Ethiopia is above all a layered religious civilisation built around a royal myth. The highland core has practised Christianity since the fourth century, in the form of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the oldest branches of the faith anywhere. From the thirteenth century, Ethiopian kingship rested on a founding text, the Kebra Nagast (“Glory of the Kings”), which traced the ruling Solomonic dynasty to the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and cast Ethiopia as a new, chosen Israel, guardian of the Ark of the Covenant. Yet this is only half the picture: close to half of Ethiopians are Muslim, following a presence of Islam in the region that is itself older than in much of the Middle East, and millions more practise traditional or minority faiths, including a small, ancient Jewish community, the Beta Israel. Cultural and political historians read Ethiopian identity as the product of this layered, sometimes uneasy coexistence — a Christian-founded state ruling over, and gradually accommodating, genuine religious plurality, with the two great faiths often sharing the same mountains, market towns, and even, in places, the same shrines.
Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (1972); J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (1952).
The turning points, read this way, are moments in the relationship between faith and rule. Aksum’s fourth-century conversion bound crown and church for the long term. The 1270 “Solomonic restoration” gave that bond its lasting ideological form, embedding the Kebra Nagast‘s “chosen nation” myth as state doctrine for seven centuries. Centuries of contact and conflict with neighbouring Muslim states, most sharply the sixteenth-century wars against the forces of Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known in Ethiopian tradition as “Gragn” (the left-handed), threaded an Islamic history through the highlands as deeply as the Christian one. The Italian occupation of 1936–41 was a rupture in the sacred-monarchy narrative, ended by Emperor Haile Selassie‘s restoration and his subsequent international standing as a symbol of African sovereignty. And the abolition of the monarchy in 1974 removed, for the first time in centuries, the religious keystone of Ethiopian political legitimacy, forcing every government since to find some other source of authority — revolutionary ideology, then ethnic representation, with the Orthodox Church itself later disestablished as the state faith and increasingly sharing public life with a resurgent, politically assertive Islam. Each turn reshaped the relationship between belief and power without ever fully separating the two.
Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (1972); Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (2nd ed., 2000).
On this reading, a shared cultural and religious self-understanding long preceded, and largely built, the pre-modern Ethiopian “nation,” even where political control over outlying regions was thin. The sociologist Donald Levine’s influential study, titled simply Greater Ethiopia, argues that despite deep ethnic and linguistic diversity, highland Ethiopia forms a genuine single cultural region, bound by shared practices — plough-based farming, a distinct Ethiopian calendar running roughly seven to eight years behind the Gregorian one, and patterns of hierarchy and religious tolerance — that predate and outlast any particular government. The Solomonic monarchy supplied this cultural region with a political centre and a legitimating story; modern nationalism, when it later emerged among educated elites in the twentieth century, drew directly on that inheritance, casting Ethiopia as a uniquely unconquered, divinely favoured nation with a civilisational history stretching back three thousand years, an idea reinforced abroad by the country’s status as the seat of the Organisation of African Unity and a touchstone of Pan-African pride. This account holds that state and nation, in Ethiopia’s case, grew together from a shared cultural root, rather than one being imposed on the other — a picture the revisionist perspective contests as flattening real conquest and coercion into a story of natural cultural unity.
Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (2nd ed., 2000).
The lasting force, in this cultural and political reading, is the search for a legitimating idea capable of holding together a genuinely plural society. For most of Ethiopian history that idea was sacred kingship: a monarch who ruled because the church and the Kebra Nagast said he should. When the monarchy fell in 1974, that source of legitimacy vanished, and the Derg reached for Marxist-Leninist ideology instead, attempting to bind the country through revolutionary class solidarity rather than religion. When the Derg itself fell in 1991, the new government reached for a third idea, ethnic federalism, built on formally recognising Ethiopia’s “nations, nationalities, and peoples” as the basis of the state. Each idea has commanded real loyalty in some quarters and provoked real resistance in others — clergy and monarchists mourned 1974, students and soldiers who had backed the Derg felt betrayed in 1991, and today ethnic federalism itself is contested by both centralising and secessionist critics. What best explains Ethiopia’s long-term development, on this account, is this repeated search — sacred, revolutionary, and now ethnic — for a political theology capable of legitimising rule over so plural a country, no version of which has yet proven durable enough to end the search itself.
Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (2nd ed., 2000); Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (1972).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
The shape of Ethiopia’s land explains a great deal of its history. The country sits on a vast volcanic highland plateau, sometimes called the Roof of Africa, split by the Great Rift Valley and ringed by lower, more arid terrain — the Ogaden in the east, the Afar depression in the northeast, and other lowland fringes. The highlands, well-watered and fertile, could support dense farming populations, plough agriculture, and the tax base of a strong state; the surrounding lowlands, drier and largely home to pastoralist peoples, could not be as easily governed or taxed. This contrast, more than any single ruler’s ambition, organised Ethiopian history: wealth, population, and political power concentrated in the highland core, while the lowland rim remained a harder-to-integrate periphery. In antiquity, the highland kingdom of Aksum used its access to the nearby Red Sea coast, through the port of Adulis, to become a hub of trade in gold, ivory, and incense connecting Africa, Arabia, and India — a maritime advantage the country’s interior-based successor states would later lose, and one whose loss still shapes Ethiopia’s foreign policy today, since it has been a landlocked country, dependent on its neighbours’ ports, since Eritrea’s independence in 1993.
Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity (1991); Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800–1935 (1968).
The economic and geographic turning points follow the movement of trade, land, and food. Aksum’s control of Red Sea shipping lanes built its wealth from roughly the first to the seventh century; when that trade declined, the political centre retreated into the interior highlands, losing direct sea access for the best part of a millennium. Nineteenth-century conquest under Menelik II extended the highland plough-farming economy south by force, installing a land-tribute system, described in detail by the economic historian Richard Pankhurst, that tied conquered peasants to soldier-settlers as tribute-payers. Recurrent highland droughts then exposed the fragility of that agrarian base: the famine of 1888–92 killed a substantial share of the population, and the famine of 1973–74, documented internationally, helped trigger the revolution that ended the monarchy the following year. A further famine in 1983–85 killed several hundred thousand people and drew global attention, prompting the largest famine-relief effort the world had yet mounted. Finally, Eritrea’s 1993 independence, following a thirty-year war of secession, stripped Ethiopia of its remaining Red Sea coastline, making landlocked status — and the search for secure trade and water access — a defining economic fact of the present, one that now shapes Ethiopia’s relations with almost every neighbour it has.
Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800–1935 (1968); Donald Crummey & James McCann, Farming and Famine: Landscape Vulnerability in Northeast Ethiopia, 1889–1991 (2018).
On this reading, geography drew Ethiopia’s internal map before any government did. The productive highland plateau generated dense settlement, taxable surplus, and centralised states capable of raising armies; the surrounding lowlands, harder to farm intensively and easier to move across, sustained pastoralist societies that were harder to tax, harder to conscript, and were consequently among the last territories drawn into the Ethiopian state and remain, in places, the least fully integrated into it today. Colonial-era mapping played little role here compared with most of Africa; instead, the boundary between governed highland and loosely governed lowland is, on this account, older than any specific conquest and rooted in what the land itself could support. The modern state, built outward from an agrarian highland core, inherited this terrain-shaped divide rather than creating it, and the difficulty of binding highland and lowland together by ordinary administration — as opposed to periodic military campaigns — is written into Ethiopia’s geography as much as into its politics. Even today, the country’s poorest and least governed regions map closely onto its driest and lowest ones, a correlation this perspective treats as more than coincidence.
James McCann, People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800–1990 (1995); Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity (1991).
The force that best explains Ethiopia’s long-run development, in this reading, is the enduring tension between a productive but landlocked highland economy and the country’s perennial search for secure outlets — to the sea, and to the water resources the highlands themselves generate. The Blue Nile, which supplies the large majority of the water reaching Egypt, rises in Ethiopia’s Lake Tana, giving the highlands enormous downstream leverage that Ethiopian governments have long wanted, but historically lacked the capital and technology, to use. Rain-fed highland agriculture has repeatedly proven vulnerable to drought, producing famines that have toppled governments. And the loss of Red Sea coastline in 1993 turned a long-standing geographic disadvantage into an acute one. Today’s construction and 2025 activation of a massive hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, and Ethiopia’s renewed pursuit of a Red Sea port, are on this account not new departures but the latest expressions of a single, centuries-old geographic fact: a rich highland core, permanently short of secure access to the sea and to guaranteed control over its own water, and therefore permanently drawn into negotiation, and occasional confrontation, with every neighbour that sits between it and either.
James McCann, People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800–1990 (1995); Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800–1935 (1968).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The sharpest dispute concerns Menelik II’s late nineteenth-century conquests. The consensus and cultural readings treat them as unification — the same sovereignty defended against Italy at Adwa, extended to secure and consolidate the country against the era’s European scramble for Africa. The revisionist reading treats the same conquests as internal colonisation: an African empire built by broadly the methods Europeans used elsewhere, imposed on Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other peoples who had their own states and institutions already. Same conquests, opposite verdicts: national self-defence, or empire-building.
The Battle of Adwa itself shows the same split in miniature. The cultural and consensus readings treat it as Ethiopia’s founding symbol of dignity and unconquered sovereignty, a source of pride felt across Africa and the African diaspora to this day. The revisionist reading does not deny the victory but stresses what followed it: the same army, fresh from repelling Italy, turned south within years and pressed the conquests that built the internal empire. One battle, two very different places in the larger story.
On one point, all four perspectives agree: Ethiopia’s core and enduring political problem has been binding a highland centre to a very large, diverse periphery, and that bond has never fully settled. They part on why — an unfinished nation-building project, an unresolved conquest awaiting real decolonisation, an unresolved question of what legitimises rule, or a landscape that made integration structurally difficult from the start.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1974 (1991); Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Updated ed., 2002); Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity (1991); Bonnie K. Holcomb & Sisai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia: The Making of a Dependent Colonial State in Northeast Africa (1990); Teshale Tibebu, The Making of Modern Ethiopia, 1896–1974 (1995); Mohammed Hassen, The Oromo of Ethiopia: A History, 1570–1860 (1990); Donald N. Levine, Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (2nd ed., 2000); Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270–1527 (1972); J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in Ethiopia (1952); Richard Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 1800–1935 (1968); James McCann, People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800–1990 (1995); Donald Crummey & James McCann, Farming and Famine: Landscape Vulnerability in Northeast Ethiopia, 1889–1991 (2018). No thesis presented here rests on a single contested framework in the way Scott’s “Zomia” or Furnivall’s “plural society” do elsewhere in this series; the internal-colonialism reading in the Revisionist section is, however, itself an actively contested interpretation, not a consensus finding, and is presented as such throughout.
Ethiopia’s history remains open and, in several places, violently so. The Tigray War (2020–2022) between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) killed an estimated several hundred thousand people and ended with the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement. More than three and a half years on, that agreement’s core provisions remain largely unimplemented: disarmament of Tigrayan forces has not been completed, and Western Tigray — the contested Welkait district — remains under Amhara administration, blocking the return of displaced Tigrayans; a December 2025 report described starvation deaths among Tigrayan displaced people still sheltering at the Hitsats camp. In April 2026 the federal government extended the tenure of the Tigray interim administration’s president over TPLF objections, and the TPLF’s move to reinstate its own pre-war regional council has deepened a rift each side accuses the other of using to violate the peace deal.
Ethiopia’s other active conflict is in Amhara region, where the Fano militia — an Amhara nationalist force that turned against the federal government in 2023 after a state of emergency and the disarmament of regional special forces — has intensified its insurgency, with attack rates in early 2026 up more than fifty percent on the previous quarter, disrupting the federal government’s June 2026 elections in parts of the region.
In September 2025 Ethiopia inaugurated the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, Africa’s largest hydroelectric project. Ethiopia maintains it has a sovereign right to develop the river and has offered downstream states assurances on equitable use; Egypt, which depends on the Nile for the great majority of its water, formally protested the inauguration to the United Nations Security Council as a unilateral act, and no binding water-sharing agreement among Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt exists.
Relations with Eritrea, cooperative after a 2018 peace deal, have deteriorated sharply since early 2025 over Ethiopia’s landlocked status and its demand for access to a Red Sea port, chiefly Eritrea’s Assab; both governments have moved troops toward their shared border, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, while calling maritime access “a matter of survival,” has said Ethiopia will not go to war to obtain it. Abiy’s Prosperity Party won a landslide in the June 2026 parliamentary election, but he now governs a state fighting active insurgencies in two of its largest regions, Amhara and Oromia, while managing unresolved disputes with both of its northern neighbours.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (Al Jazeera, Reuters/France 24/CNN/NPR on the GERD inauguration, Addis Standard, Ethiopia Insight, Rift Valley Institute, ACLED, Human Rights Watch, Critical Threats/Africa File), current as of 29 July 2026.
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Ethiopia is a highly diverse country with more than 80 ethnic groups. After monarchies and then Emperor Haile Selassie, a military junta called the Derg took power in 1974 and ruled through upheaval and displacement until it was overthrown in 1991. The EPRDF then governed through an ethno-federal system (regions linked to ethnic identities). When the EPRDF dissolved in 2019 and the TPLF refused to join the new ruling party, relations deteriorated into war in 2020–2022.
According to UCDP, the main escalation in 2024 came from state-based conflicts. In the Amhara region, fighting continued between the Ethiopian government and the Fano militia, once an ally, with deaths rising to over 2,100 and civilians affected by increasingly indiscriminate airstrikes. A second conflict also intensified between the government and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). One-sided violence (attacks on civilians) increased too, with government forces the main perpetrator.
Overall organized violence rose sharply in 2024, with fatalities increasing from nearly 2,350 to almost 4,100, though still below the peak of the 2021–2022 TPLF-government war. Civilians have been heavily impacted, especially in areas where the main conflicts overlap with one-sided violence and airstrikes. Non-state fighting was comparatively limited, including an Anuak–Nuer conflict in Gambella that caused a little over 100 deaths.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Since 2018, under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party, Ethiopia shifted from an ‘inside-out’ security-focused approach to an ‘outside-in’ model emphasizing regional connectivity, economic integration, and a ‘neighbor-first’ policy. This included rapprochement with Eritrea, power interconnections with Sudan, Kenya, and Djibouti, and positioning Ethiopia as an economic hub exporting renewable energy. The policy, rooted in ‘Medemer’ synergy, prioritizes sovereignty, development, and multipolar engagement amid global shifts, transforming past rivalries into cooperation while advancing the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam diplomatically. Challenges persist from internal conflicts and regional instability.
Sources: EBC, SAIiiA, PeaceRep
Landlocked since Eritrea’s independence in the 1990s, Ethiopia views sea access as a core national security imperative amid rising realpolitik. A 2024 memorandum with Somaliland aimed to secure commercial rights, but Israel’s recognition of Somaliland has complicated alignments. Tensions with Eritrea, Sudan over borders, and Somalia amid Al-Shabaab threats underscore vulnerabilities. Ethiopia frames this as essential for 130 million citizens’ survival, leveraging multipolar opportunities to reduce dependency on Djibouti and enhance Red Sea strategic positioning through diversified partnerships.
Sources: CFR, Horn Review, Yenisafak
Ethiopia asserts regional hegemony via military strength, AU hosting, and anti-terrorism efforts, but faces rivalries with Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia over borders and influence. Ongoing conflicts in Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray power struggles with the TPLF weaken capacity. A ‘Horn-first’ diplomacy seeks stability through infrastructure and mediation, yet harsh rhetoric and confrontations raise escalation risks. Balancing internal stability with external partnerships, including Türkiye, remains key to countering fragility and Al-Shabaab threats.
Sources: CFR, Chatham House, The Reporter Ethiopia
Modern-day Ethiopia is rich in cultural and religious diversity, with more than 80 ethnic groups. The oldest hominid yet found comes from Ethiopia, and Ethiopia was the second country to officially adopt Christianity in the 4th century A.D.
A series of monarchies ruled the area that is now Ethiopia from 980 B.C. to 1855, when the Amhara kingdoms of northern Ethiopia united in an empire under Tewodros II. Many Ethiopians still speak reverently about the Battle of Adwa in 1896, when they defeated Italian forces and won their freedom from colonial rule.
Emperor Haile SELASSIE became an internationally renowned figure in 1935, when he unsuccessfully appealed to the League of Nations to prevent Italy from occupying Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941. SELASSIE survived an attempted coup in 1960, annexed modern-day Eritrea in 1962, and played a leading role in establishing the Organization of African Unity in 1963.
In 1974, a military junta called the Derg deposed him and established a socialist state. The period was marked by bloody coups, uprisings, drought, and massive displacement.
The Derg regime was toppled in 1991 by a coalition of opposing forces, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The EPRDF became an ethno-federalist political coalition that ruled Ethiopia from 1991 until its dissolution in 2019.
Ethiopia adopted its constitution in 1994 and held its first multiparty elections in 1995.
A two-and-a-half-year border war with Eritrea in the late 1990s ended with a peace treaty in 2000. Ethiopia subsequently rejected the 2007 Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission demarcation, leading to more than a decade of tense “no peace, no war” stalemate between the two countries.
In 2012, longtime Prime Minister MELES Zenawi died in office and was replaced by Deputy Prime Minister HAILEMARIAM Desalegn, marking the first peaceful transition of power in decades. After popular dissent and anti-government protests beginning in 2015, HAILEMARIAM resigned in 2018 and ABIY Ahmed Ali took office as Ethiopia’s first ethnic Oromo prime minister. ABIY promoted a rapprochement with Eritrea in 2018 that included a peace agreement and the reopening of their shared border. In 2019, the EPRDF merged into the Prosperity Party, but the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) declined to join. In 2020, a military conflict erupted between forces aligned with the TPLF and the Ethiopian military; the conflict—marked by atrocities committed by all parties—ended in 2022 with a cessation of hostilities agreement between the TPLF and the Ethiopian Government. Ethiopia continues to experience ethnic-based violence as other groups, including the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and Amhara militia Fano, seek concessions from the Ethiopian Government.
UCDP data for Ethiopia shows several simultaneous conflict tracks: intrastate fighting between the Government of Ethiopia and armed challengers (Fano, OLA, and GLF), alongside separate non-state clashes between communal militias (including Afar–Issa, Afar–Oromo, and other local dyads). These patterns point to a mix of national-level struggles over state authority and security, plus localized disputes that escalate into organized violence when armed groups and community forces mobilize.
Civilians face risks both from being caught in fighting and from being deliberately targeted. UCDP records 331 civilian deaths as collateral harm in state-based conflict in this dataset segment. It also records 1,030 deliberate civilian killings (one-sided violence), including 704 attributed to the Government of Ethiopia and 326 attributed to non-state groups. Non-state conflict between communal militias records additional civilian deaths, even where totals are smaller than in the state-based and one-sided violence categories.
The dataset captures a highly fragmented security landscape where different forms of violence occur at the same time: government-versus-insurgent dyads, militia-versus-militia communal fighting, and one-sided violence by several actors (including TPLF in this segment). This matters for civilians because threats vary by location and by perpetrator, and insecurity can persist even when a person is far from a front line. It also complicates protection, since perpetrators are not limited to one main conflict pair.
Sources: UCDP data.
Federal forces fight multiple armed challengers and also operate in areas with local communal violence. UCDP records both collateral civilian deaths during fighting and large numbers of deliberate killings attributed to state forces in this dataset segment.
Fano is an armed militia actor engaged in fighting with state forces and also clashes with the OLA. UCDP records deliberate killings of civilians attributed to Fano in this dataset segment, indicating serious direct risk to non-combatants in affected areas.
The OLA is an insurgent actor fighting the Ethiopian government and also clashing with Fano. UCDP records one-sided violence by the OLA against civilians in this dataset segment, adding to displacement and fear in contested areas.
The GLF is recorded by UCDP as fighting state forces in an intrastate dyad. In this dataset segment, civilian harm is primarily captured through the broader conflict environment rather than specific one-sided violence attribution to GLF.
TPLF is listed in UCDP one-sided violence data as a perpetrator of deliberate civilian killings in this dataset segment. Even where front-line battles are not captured here as a dyad, recorded abuses still affect civilian security and shape fear and retaliation dynamics.
Afar communal armed actors are involved in non-state clashes recorded by UCDP, reflecting local disputes that can escalate into lethal violence. Even when civilian deaths are limited in the dataset segment, civilians face risks from raids, displacement, and insecurity around contested areas.
Issa (Dir) armed actors appear in UCDP’s non-state conflict data through clashes with Afar. Such fighting is typically localized but can disrupt travel, trade, and access to services, with civilians exposed to violence near contested routes and settlements.
Oromo communal armed actors are recorded in UCDP non-state conflict data through clashes with Afar. These confrontations often revolve around local security and control, and they can quickly threaten civilians through attacks on homes, road insecurity, and displacement.
Amaro communal armed actors are listed in a UCDP non-state dyad with Guji, indicating localized inter-group violence. Even when civilian fatalities are not widely recorded, these clashes can still lead to intimidation, property destruction, and short-notice displacement.
Guji communal armed actors appear in UCDP as fighting Amaro in a non-state conflict dyad. Such violence can place civilians at risk in rural areas where protection is limited and where retaliation cycles can spread across neighboring communities.
Anuak communal armed actors are recorded by UCDP as fighting Nuer in a non-state dyad. Civilians can be caught in attacks on villages, forced movement, and breakdowns in local governance and dispute resolution.
Nuer communal armed actors are listed as opponents of Anuak in UCDP’s non-state conflict data. Such clashes can produce insecurity beyond battle deaths, including fear-driven displacement and interruptions to farming, markets, and schooling.
Ari communal armed actors are recorded as fighting Mursi in a UCDP non-state dyad. These local conflicts can be highly disruptive to civilians through insecurity on roads and the risk of sudden violence around settlements.
Mursi communal armed actors are listed by UCDP as fighting Ari. Even where recorded civilian fatalities are limited, local armed clashes can still expose civilians to raids, displacement, and reduced access to health care and markets.
Guraghe communal armed actors are recorded in UCDP’s non-state conflict data in clashes with Mareqo. These disputes can threaten civilians through sporadic attacks, insecurity at checkpoints, and displacement from contested neighborhoods or rural areas.
Mareqo communal armed actors are listed in UCDP as fighting Guraghe. Local armed confrontations can still create serious civilian stress through fear, displacement, and reduced access to public services even when battle lines are limited.
Ethiopia’s violence combines intrastate fighting between the federal government and multiple armed challengers with separate inter-communal conflicts. Competing claims over political authority, security control, and territory within a diverse federal system help sustain both insurgency and localized militia clashes.
The United Nations federates Eritrea with Ethiopia under Emperor Haile Selassie, granting Eritrea autonomy but placing defense and foreign affairs in Ethiopian hands. The later dissolution of this federation helps trigger the Eritrean struggle, militarizing Ethiopian politics and shaping future center–periphery conflicts.
Eritrean guerrilla movements fight successive Ethiopian regimes for independence. Prolonged war centralizes power in Addis Ababa, expands the army, and normalizes insurgency politics, providing experience, tactics, and grievances that influence later rebellions in Tigray, Oromia, and Amhara regions.
The Derg junta deposes Emperor Haile Selassie, proclaiming a Marxist-Leninist state. Land nationalization and harsh repression provoke multiple ethnic and regional insurgencies. The militarized, authoritarian model of rule deepens mistrust between central authorities and regions, echoing in present-day conflicts with regional militias.
Somalia invades Ethiopia’s Ogaden region to unite ethnic Somalis. Backed by Soviet and Cuban support, Ethiopia repels the attack. The war entrenches security-first thinking in Addis Ababa and entrenches contested boundaries and identities, feeding longstanding tensions in Ethiopia’s Somali and Oromo areas.
The TPLF, allied with other fronts, expands its armed struggle against the Derg in northern Ethiopia. Prolonged war devastates Tigray and neighboring regions, hardening ethnic-based mobilization and paving the way for an ethnic federal order that later shapes Amhara and Oromo armed politics.
TPLF-led EPRDF forces capture Addis Ababa, ending Derg rule. Rebel alliances redraw political power, marginalizing some Amhara and Oromo actors while empowering new elites. The settlement institutionalizes ethnic parties, setting patterns for later disputes over representation, territory, and state authority.
Ethiopia adopts a constitution establishing ethnic-based federal regions with self-rule and theoretical secession rights. While expanding regional autonomy, the ruling EPRDF tightly controls politics, creating a gap between formal rights and practice that later fuels discontent and armed mobilization in Amhara and Oromia.
Disputes over the town of Badme escalate into full-scale war, killing tens of thousands. The conflict entrenches national security structures, justifying internal crackdowns and party dominance. It strengthens TPLF influence, aggravating later resentment among Amhara and Oromo actors over perceived Tigrayan hegemony.
Elections bring unprecedented opposition gains and mass protests over alleged fraud. Security forces kill and detain demonstrators, signaling limits to pluralism. The episode undermines electoral trust, encourages opposition to organize outside formal politics, and reinforces a pattern of securitized responses to dissent.
Large-scale protests erupt over land plans, marginalization, and federal dominance, especially in Oromia and Amhara. Security crackdowns kill hundreds. The unrest weakens the EPRDF, empowers Oromo elites, radicalizes some activists, and normalizes protest and militia organization later seen in OLA and Fano dynamics.
Abiy Ahmed assumes office, releases political prisoners, legalizes banned groups, and signs peace with Eritrea. Central authority loosens as armed actors reorganize. Hopes of reform mix with rising competition among ethnic elites, setting the stage for later clashes in Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia.
Tensions between Addis Ababa and TPLF leadership escalate into full war in Tigray, drawing in Eritrean and regional forces. Mass atrocities and displacement occur. The conflict militarizes Ethiopian politics nationwide and diverts resources, indirectly empowering other armed groups like Fano militias and the OLA.
The federal government and TPLF sign a ceasefire in Pretoria, halting major fighting in Tigray. While reducing one front, unresolved grievances and redeployed forces shift focus toward Amhara and Oromia, where disputes over territory, autonomy, and federal authority escalate into intensified armed confrontations.
The government launches operations to disarm Amhara Fano militias after tensions over security control and disputed territories. Fighting spreads across Amhara, while clashes with the Oromo Liberation Army intensify in Oromia, contributing to thousands of battle-related and civilian deaths recorded through 2026.
