Transitioning from Ideological Conflicts to Procedural Governance

By Sirak Zena

I would like to begin by thanking Dr. Worku for sharing his article. Dr. Worku Aberra’s two-part analysis “The Council of Oromo Scholars’ Statement: A Step Toward Unity.” of the Council of Oromo Scholars’ statement stands as a rigorous and insightful contribution to Ethiopian political discourse. In Part One, Worku situates the October 2026 statement in relation to the 2025 Seattle Resolution, crediting it with four significant advances: firmer commitments to peaceful coexistence, clearer recognition of interdependence among Ethiopia’s peoples, more concrete cooperation across communities, and explicit concern for state survival, and I concur with Worku’s assessment of these advances. 

He also identifies several unresolved issues: an ambiguous stance on self-determination, an unaddressed tension between collective “peoples’ rights” and equal individual citizenship, an Oromo-centered framing of national grievance, and silence regarding both accountability within the Alliance and the implications of Eritrean involvement in the war. This diagnostic groundwork effectively lays the foundation for the constructive arguments presented in Part Two.

In Part two, Worku moves from critique to institutional design, and his central innovation is the “Democratic Interval.” Rather than a passive waiting period, it is an active phase of democratic self-governance meant to give citizens lived experience of self-rule within a reformed union before any decision on secession is made. He operationalizes this through five indicators, interconnected and mutually reinforcing domains that are crucial for the comprehensive establishment of a democracy;  he adapts from Linz and Stepan (1996): political society, civil society, the rule of law, economic society, and an effective state bureaucracy, translating each into a concrete, observable test (free elections, an unintimidated press, courts obeyed even when they rule against the government, access to land and jobs independent of political loyalty, and an impartial civil service). 

This is a genuine advance on abstract appeals to “democratization,” since it gives citizens and observers a falsifiable basis for judging whether self-government has actually been tried. Worku treats the gains of continued economic integration as a related but separate plank of his case for union, supported by comparative evidence on the costs of separation; it reinforces the argument for the Democratic Interval without being part of its operating mechanism.

Equally important is Worku’s response to the standard objection from secessionist and nationalist quarters: that any conditionality handed to the center amounts to an indefinite veto over self-determination. He meets this directly with an agreed backstop, a specified period after which incomplete democratic consolidation can no longer justify deferring a referendum. This reconciles two legitimate concerns that are usually treated as irreconcilable: the demand for a free and informed choice and the fear that the center will simply stall forever.

Taken together, Worku’s framework speaks, even if not in these exact terms, to the central anxieties of Ethiopia’s competing political currents: it offers unionists institutional safeguards for state integrity, it offers advocates of regional autonomy protection against the recentralization that Ethiopia’s federal record has repeatedly produced, and it offers secessionists a guarantee against perpetual postponement. This is my own synthesis of the argument’s appeal rather than Worku’s explicit framing. Still, it captures why the proposal is better described as a procedural settlement than a substantive verdict on union or separation.

A substantial operational challenge remains, however, one the article raises but does not fully resolve. In Part One, discussing what the Alliance’s proposed transition would require to be credible, Worku poses three unanswered questions: “Who would authorize and supervise the transition? How would armed partners come under common civilian authority? What procedures would govern disputes and secure acceptance of decisions by the parties that lose?” Part Two’s discussion of credible commitments (drawing on Fearon 1995, Powell 2006, and Walter 1997, 2002) notes that monitoring and external guarantees can raise the cost of defection during a negotiated transition, an answer, in part, to the first and third questions. 

However, external guarantees sit uneasily with concerns Worku raises elsewhere in the same article: he treats foreign intervention as a force that pursues its own interests rather than Ethiopians’ and warns that a fragmented, weakly institutionalized state increases outside patrons’ leverage over domestic rivals. An enforcement strategy leaning on external guarantors, therefore, risks trading one problem, factional defection, for another that Worku’s own analysis treats as a danger: dependence on powers whose interests may not align with Ethiopia’s. It may be stated unequivocally that it undermines national sovereignty. 

This is the “Enforcer’s Dilemma”: safeguards and backstops presuppose an authority willing and able to apply them, yet in a multi-actor armed transition, no party stands above the others to compel compliance if one faction refuses to honor its commitments. I must acknowledge that I do not have a solution to this dilemma in its fullest form, nor do I pretend there is an easy answer: if an armed faction withdraws consent outright, no internal arrangement among the same parties can, by itself, supply the missing enforcer.

What follows, then, should be understood as a first-layer internal mechanism, one that lowers the likelihood of defection and narrows its opportunities rather than a guarantee against it. To operationalize Worku’s framework on these terms, and to answer the three transition questions he leaves open in Part One, I would propose a neutral, time-limited Caretaker Government, established immediately upon any regime rupture, whose legitimacy rests not on post-rupture bargaining but on pre-rupture public assurances agreed upon among political and armed alliances in advance. As political philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, pure philosophical neutrality is an illusion; what a caretaker arrangement can realistically offer is procedural fairness and bounded consent rather than neutrality as such. Such assurances would require additional components to address three pertinent aspects, aligned with Worku’s own three inquiries:

• Transitional Governance and Popular Authorization (who authorizes the transition): explicit, public commitments from opposition alliances to a time-bound caretaker framework, with clear procedures for restoring full sovereign authority to the electorate.
• Security and Institutional Continuity (how armed partners come under civilian authority): professional continuity of national defense, police, and civil-service institutions, subject to accountability and pre-negotiated temporary command arrangements, to avert state collapse or warlordism upon regime rupture.
• Mutual Domestic Verification (what procedures govern disputes and secure acceptance of outcomes): cross-faction monitoring panels paired with non-partisan judicial or civil guardians, operating within the caretaker framework through domestic rather than externally guaranteed means, precisely to avoid the sovereignty costs that Worku’s own analysis attaches to dependence on foreign patrons.

These arrangements raise the cost and visibility of defection; they cannot eliminate it. Should a faction reject the framework outright, the Enforcer’s Dilemma re-emerges in undiminished form, a limitation this proposal does not overcome so much as delay and contain. Armed actors asked to pre-commit are, after all, exactly the actors most likely to revisit that commitment once circumstances change, a point consistent with Worku’s own reliance on Fearon and Powell concerning the fragility of commitments among parties with the capacity to break them.

In conclusion, Dr. Worku’s two-part article is a timely and substantial contribution precisely because it refuses the false choice between unconditional unity and unconditional secession. By showing that self-determination and a stable democratic union are not mutually exclusive, that they can be reconciled through verifiable democratic practice, economic integration, and procedures for free and informed consent, Worku shifts the debate from factional rhetoric toward institutional realism. The remaining task, as I have tried to suggest here, is to extend that realism to the moment of greatest fragility: the interval between a regime’s collapse and the first credible exercise of the procedures he proposes. A first-layer internal mechanism, such as the Caretaker Government proposed above, cannot resolve the Enforcer’s Dilemma on its own. Still, it may narrow the space in which that dilemma becomes fatal to the transition.

This is precisely the kind of essential dialogue we need right now to spark the most innovative ideas. I strongly urge others to engage with Worku’s article, contribute their thoughts, and express their viewpoints.

References

Aberra, Worku. 2026a. “The Council of Oromo Scholars’ Statement: A Step Toward Unity. Part One: Reading the Statement.” Borkena, 28 October. https://borkena.com/the-council-of-oromo-scholars-statement-a-step-toward-unity/

Aberra, Worku. 2026b. “The Council of Oromo Scholars’ Statement: A Step Toward Unity. Part Two: The Case for Democratic Union.” Borkena, 29 October. https://borkena.com/the-council-of-oromo-scholars-statement-a-step-toward-unity-2/

Council of Oromo Scholars. 2026. “Statement by Oromo Intellectuals on Ethiopia’s Political Crisis and the Need for an Inclusive Transition.” 17 October. Reproduced by Qeerroo Bilisummaa Oromoo. https://qbo-abo-wbo.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/OromoIntelR-128129-2.pdf

Fearon, James D. 1995. “Rationalist Explanations for War.” International Organization 49 (3): 379–414. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300033324

Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Powell, Robert. 2006. “War as a Commitment Problem.” International Organization 60 (1): 169–203. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818306060061

Sandel, M. J. 1984. “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self.” Political Theory 12 (1): 81–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591784012001005

Walter, Barbara F. 1997. “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement.” International Organization 51 (3): 335–364. https://doi.org/10.1162/002081897550384

Walter, Barbara F. 2002. Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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