Why does a nation repeatedly resort to war despite having experienced its devastating consequences for generations? Is Ethiopia’s predicament rooted in its political traditions, historical grievances, cultural attitudes, or, more fundamentally, a failure of collective intelligence? By collective intelligence, I refer not to political intelligence in the narrow sense of strategic or tactical political acumen, but to the collective capacity of political elites to interpret information, integrate diverse perspectives, deliberate, and make decisions that shape political outcomes. This capacity must also be understood in relation to the broader population from which political elites emerge and with which they remain interconnected. The distinction is therefore analytical rather than absolute: political elites occupy specific positions of influence and decision-making, but their collective intelligence is shaped, directly and indirectly, by the knowledge, experiences, values, and aspirations of the wider society.
Ethiopia’s recurring cycles of war, famine, displacement, and human suffering raise a fundamental question: why does a country continue to reproduce the very conditions that have brought it so much misery? For decades, successive generations of Ethiopians have witnessed the destruction of lives, communities, and livelihoods, yet the country seems unable to escape the vicious cycle of violence. One conflict ends, another begins; one humanitarian catastrophe subsides, another emerges. The faces of the victims change, the political actors shift, and the justifications for violence evolve, but the underlying tragedy remains remarkably persistent.
Having witnessed this suffering throughout a significant part of my life, I find it increasingly difficult to understand why Ethiopia continues to pursue such a self-destructive path. I have seen friends, neighbors, and relatives suffer or lose their lives, either directly through armed conflict or indirectly through its devastating consequences. These experiences have convinced me that Ethiopia’s predicament cannot be explained simply by the existence of competing political interests or historical grievances. The more fundamental problem may be our collective inability to learn from experience, anticipate the consequences of our actions, and develop peaceful mechanisms for managing our differences.
My central argument is that Ethiopia’s recurring political violence reflects not merely a crisis of leadership or governance, but a profound deficit of collective intelligence: the failure of political elites and society at large to translate historical experience into a more peaceful and sustainable political order.
Beyond History and Political Tradition
There is no shortage of explanations for Ethiopia’s persistent conflicts. Some point to historical grievances, others to ethnic divisions, political exclusion, authoritarian traditions, or competition over power and resources. Still others attribute the problem to cultural attitudes that glorify military strength and view political compromise as weakness. These explanations have merit, but none is sufficient on its own.
Historical grievances, for instance, are real and cannot simply be dismissed. Communities carry memories of dispossession, marginalization, political repression, and violence across generations. When such grievances remain unaddressed, they become sources of mistrust and resentment. However, history alone cannot explain why grievances repeatedly culminate in armed conflict rather than negotiated settlements. Many societies have experienced deeply traumatic histories without remaining permanently trapped in cycles of civil war.
The critical distinction, therefore, is between having historical grievances and being unable to resolve them peacefully. The former is a feature of Ethiopia’s complex past; the latter is a political failure. Similarly, cultural traditions and political attitudes may help explain why violence becomes normalized, but culture should not be treated as an immutable explanation for national tragedy. Ethiopians are not inherently predisposed to violence, nor is war an inevitable consequence of the country’s diversity. Such arguments risk turning a historically contingent political problem into an allegedly permanent national characteristic. The more useful question is how political institutions, leadership incentives, and prevailing attitudes interact to make violence more likely than compromise.
If the same destructive patterns persist across different governments and political generations, we must look beyond individual leaders and examine the structures and assumptions that reproduce these patterns.
The Failure to Anticipate Consequences
At the heart of Ethiopia’s recurring conflicts lies a striking failure to anticipate the consequences of political decisions.
I understand intelligence not simply as the possession of knowledge, academic ability, or political cunning, but as the capacity to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions and adjust one’s behavior accordingly. By this definition, intelligence requires more than the ability to gain power or defeat an opponent. It requires an appreciation of how decisions made today shape the political, social, and economic realities of tomorrow.
Consider the repeated use of political repression, exclusion, and coercion to maintain control. Governments may initially perceive these measures as effective instruments of political survival. Suppressing dissent, marginalizing particular communities, or forcibly displacing populations may temporarily weaken opposition and consolidate authority. Yet such measures also generate resentment, deepen social divisions, undermine institutional legitimacy, and create new grievances that may eventually fuel resistance. The apparent short-term benefits of repression can therefore produce devastating long-term consequences.
This is not a particularly complicated principle. A political system cannot indefinitely deny people meaningful participation, dignity, and security while expecting lasting stability in return. Nor can a government reasonably assume that communities subjected to injustice will remain permanently passive. Repression may silence grievances temporarily, but it rarely eliminates them.
The fundamental contradiction is that political actors often pursue immediate control through methods that undermine the long-term stability they claim to defend.This pattern raises an uncomfortable question: after decades of political upheaval, why have our leaders repeatedly failed to recognize that the subjugation of one group can become a source of insecurity for the entire country?
A failure to anticipate such consequences is not merely a leadership deficiency. It is a failure of political reasoning itself.
Why Do We Keep Choosing War Over Negotiation?
The persistence of armed conflict also demands an examination of why peaceful alternatives repeatedly fail to take root.
Negotiation, compromise, and tolerance are often portrayed as signs of weakness in political environments shaped by mistrust and zero-sum competition. When political actors believe that losing power means losing their security, freedom, or even their lives, they have powerful incentives to resist compromise. Likewise, when communities believe that political defeat will expose them to domination or persecution, they may regard armed resistance as their only guarantee of survival.
Under such conditions, politics becomes an existential struggle. The objective is no longer simply to govern or influence public policy; it is to prevent the other side from gaining power.
This is one of the most destructive features of Ethiopia’s political predicament. When opponents are treated as enemies to be eliminated rather than citizens with whom a common political future must be negotiated, peaceful coexistence becomes increasingly difficult.
Yet this dynamic is not inevitable. It is reinforced by political institutions, leadership choices, and the absence of credible guarantees that disagreements can be resolved without violence.
A durable peace requires more than calls for unity or appeals to national solidarity. It requires institutions that protect political participation, safeguard fundamental rights, provide credible mechanisms for resolving disputes, and reassure competing groups that they need not resort to arms to secure their future.
Without these safeguards, appeals for peace can sound hollow, particularly to communities that have experienced repression or exclusion.
The argument, therefore, is not that Ethiopians simply need to become more tolerant. It is that tolerance must be translated into political arrangements that make coexistence both possible and worthwhile.
Collective Intelligence: Ethiopia’s Missing Political Resource
If historical grievances, political exclusion, and the struggle for power help explain Ethiopia’s recurring conflicts, the concept of collective intelligence may offer a broader framework for understanding why these problems remain unresolved. Collective intelligence is the capacity of individuals and institutions to combine knowledge, learn from experience, recognize shared interests, and make decisions that are wiser than those produced by isolated actors pursuing narrow objectives.
A society can contain highly educated individuals, sophisticated intellectual traditions, and politically astute leaders while still making collectively disastrous decisions. Individual intelligence does not automatically produce collective wisdom. Indeed, a political system can reward individuals for strategic brilliance while encouraging decisions that are harmful to society as a whole.
I hope readers understand that, when I use the term collective intelligence, I am referring specifically to the collective capacity of political elites to interpret information, deliberate, make decisions, and shape political outcomes. However, I do not intend to suggest that this intelligence exists independently of the broader society. The relationship between political elites and the masses is complex and reciprocal: although elites occupy positions of political influence and decision-making, they emerge from the wider population and are shaped by its knowledge, values, aspirations, and collective experiences. Thus, the distinction I draw is not between two entirely separate groups, but between different positions and roles within a broader social and political system.
A leader may be highly skilled at defeating political opponents but incapable of building a sustainable political settlement. A government may successfully suppress an insurgency in one region while creating conditions for future instability elsewhere. A political movement may achieve its immediate objectives while weakening the institutions necessary for long-term peace. In each case, narrow success becomes a source of broader failure.
Ethiopia’s challenge is therefore not necessarily an absence of intelligent people. It is the inability to organize political life in ways that reward foresight, cooperation, accountability, and learning. A society demonstrates collective intelligence when it can acknowledge the mistakes of the past without becoming paralyzed by them, address historical injustices without reproducing new ones, and pursue competing interests without treating every disagreement as a justification for violence.
By contrast, a society that repeatedly revisits the same conflicts without developing more effective ways to resolve them displays a troubling inability to learn collectively. This distinction matters because it shifts the discussion away from blaming a particular ethnic group, political movement, or generation. It directs attention instead to the incentives, institutions, and political behaviors that allow destructive patterns to persist across different administrations and historical periods.
The central question becomes not whether Ethiopians are intelligent enough to understand their problems, but why their political systems have so often failed to convert that understanding into lasting solutions.
The Human Cost of Political Myopia
The consequences of this failure are measured not only in political instability but also in human suffering. War destroys more than lives and infrastructure. It tears apart families, disrupts education, undermines livelihoods, deepens poverty, and weakens the social relationships upon which communities depend. Displacement deprives people of their homes and livelihoods, while the fear and trauma generated by violence can endure long after the fighting subsides.
The economic costs are equally destructive. Resources that could support education, healthcare, infrastructure, and productive investment are diverted towards military expenditure and the management of humanitarian emergencies. Repeated conflict weakens public institutions, discourages investment, and makes economic recovery increasingly difficult. These consequences, in turn, create conditions that may contribute to further instability.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: conflict weakens institutions and livelihoods; weakened institutions struggle to manage political and economic pressures; unresolved grievances deepen mistrust; and mistrust makes future conflict more likely. What makes this cycle particularly tragic is that its consequences are neither mysterious nor unforeseeable. The relationship between political exclusion, repression, instability, and human suffering is evident enough that any serious assessment of Ethiopia’s past should take it into account.
And yet, political actors continue to behave as though military victory or the consolidation of power can provide permanent solutions to fundamentally political problems. They cannot. Military force may alter the balance of power, suppress an immediate challenge, or produce a temporary victory. It cannot, by itself, resolve competing historical narratives, establish political legitimacy, or create the trust necessary for peaceful coexistence. A victory that leaves the underlying grievances of a conflict unresolved may simply postpone the next confrontation.
A Neglected War and the Regional Consequences of Inaction
As I write this reflection, renewed or continuing conflict in northern Ethiopia raises once again the possibility of prolonged suffering and wider regional instability. The situation demands serious attention, not only because of the immediate humanitarian consequences but also because unresolved conflicts rarely remain confined to the communities in which they begin.
The risk of regional destabilization makes it even more troubling when international attention is limited or inconsistent. The suffering of ordinary Ethiopians should not become less urgent simply because another crisis dominates the international agenda.
External actors also have a responsibility to examine the consequences of their involvement. Foreign governments and other powerful interests may pursue strategic, economic, or security objectives within the Horn of Africa. Their actions can influence the course of internal conflicts, sometimes reinforcing the incentives of domestic actors to continue fighting.
The experience of Sudan provides another stark reminder of how internal political struggles, armed competition, and external interests can interact to prolong devastation. Nevertheless, external interference should not become a convenient explanation for every Ethiopian failure. Domestic political actors retain responsibility for their own decisions. Foreign involvement may aggravate a conflict, but it does not erase the responsibility of those who choose repression, reject meaningful negotiations, or pursue political objectives through violence. Equally, international actors should recognize that prioritizing short-term strategic interests over durable peace can have consequences far beyond the immediate conflict.
A more consistent international commitment to civilian protection, humanitarian access, accountability, and credible peace initiatives is essential. But lasting peace cannot simply be imported from abroad. It must also be built through political choices and institutional reforms within Ethiopia itself.
Breaking the Cycle Requires More Than Changing Leaders
If Ethiopia’s predicament is partly a crisis of collective intelligence, then replacing one leader with another will not, by itself, resolve the problem.
Leadership matters enormously, but the repeated recurrence of similar patterns suggests that the challenge is also institutional and societal. A political system that rewards coercion, concentrates power, discourages dissent, and treats compromise as defeat will continue to generate destructive outcomes, even when individual leaders change.
Breaking this cycle requires a fundamental shift in the conduct of politics.
First, political participation must be protected, and communities must have credible means of pursuing their interests without resorting to armed struggle. Political institutions must be sufficiently inclusive and accountable to ensure that losing a political contest does not mean losing one’s basic rights or security.
Second, historical grievances must be addressed through credible processes of truth-seeking, accountability, reconciliation, and institutional reform. Peace cannot be built by demanding that victims simply forget their suffering. Nor can it be sustained by allowing historical injustices to justify new acts of collective punishment or revenge.
Third, negotiation must become an accepted instrument of political problem-solving rather than an admission of weakness. Compromise does not require abandoning fundamental principles. It requires recognizing that a diverse society cannot be governed sustainably by imposing the will of one group upon all others.
Finally, Ethiopia needs a political culture that rewards long-term thinking. Political leaders should be judged not merely by their ability to acquire or retain power, but by their capacity to prevent conflict, strengthen institutions, protect citizens, and leave future generations with a more stable country. These changes are difficult, but the alternative is far more costly: the continued destruction of human lives and national potential in pursuit of political outcomes that remain inherently fragile.
Conclusion: How Much More Must We Suffer Before We Learn?
After decades of recurring violence, the most disturbing question is no longer simply why Ethiopia experiences war. It is why the lessons of war have failed to produce a more peaceful political order.
How many more lives must be lost before we recognise that no lasting national future can be built through the subjugation of one community by another? How many more generations must endure displacement, poverty, trauma, and the loss of loved ones before we acknowledge that military victory is not a substitute for political settlement? I find this recurring cycle of destruction both heartbreaking and intellectually perplexing. Ethiopia possesses a rich history, a remarkable cultural diversity, and enormous human potential. Yet these strengths cannot protect the country from the consequences of political choices that repeatedly undermine its stability.
The answer cannot be reduced to culture, historical grievances, political tradition, or individual leadership alone. These factors interact, but their destructive effects are amplified by the failure to learn collectively, anticipate consequences, and establish institutions capable of managing disagreement peacefully. Perhaps the deepest tragedy is that the consequences of our collective failures are borne disproportionately by ordinary people, while those who make consequential political decisions may remain insulated from much of the suffering they produce.
A nation that repeatedly sacrifices its people to resolve political disagreements must eventually confront the possibility that the problem lies not only in the disagreements themselves, but also in the way it chooses to resolve them.
For Ethiopia, the way forward requires more than a change of government, a new political slogan, or another promise of national unity. It requires a transformation in political reasoning: from domination to coexistence, from revenge to justice, from short-term calculations to long-term responsibility, and from narrow individual or group interests to a genuine commitment to the common good. Ultimately, the measure of a nation’s intelligence is not how effectively it fights its enemies, but how wisely it prevents disagreements from becoming wars.
If Ethiopia cannot learn from the devastation of its past, what reason do we have to believe that its future will be any different?
Girma Berhanu teaches at the Department of Education and Special Education (Professor), University of Gothenburg. He can be reached at : Girma.Berhanu@ped.gu.se
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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