Abstract
National dialogue is frequently presented as an inherently constructive response to political conflict. However, the normative appeal of dialogue can obscure a more difficult question: under what conditions does a political conversation acquire sufficient legitimacy to speak in the name of a nation? This question is particularly consequential in deeply divided societies where the incumbent government is simultaneously a party to conflict, an object of political grievance, an institutional sponsor of dialogue, and the principal authority responsible for implementing any resulting recommendations.
This article distinguishes consultation, dialogue, negotiation, and political settlement, arguing that they perform different political functions and should not be treated as interchangeable. Drawing on deliberative democratic theory, theories of political representation, constitutional legitimacy, and credible commitment, it argues that broad participation—even if it yields valuable recommendations—may possess considerable social and diagnostic value without constituting a legitimate national political settlement. Political legitimacy must therefore be assessed not only by outputs but by the conditions of representation, independence, reciprocity, and enforceability that structure the process that produces them.
Illustrated by the concluding phase of Ethiopia’s current National Dialogue, this framework offers a principled alternative to the polarized choice between legitimizing a state-convened process as a surrogate for national consent and dismissing its substantive contributions in advance. Valid proposals should be evaluated on their merits, while claims of final national political authority should be withheld unless the process meets the higher thresholds required for binding political settlement.
Author’s Note
This article was conceived and written as a conceptual intervention at a critical, rapidly evolving moment in Ethiopia’s political history. As the Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission approaches the end of its sessions and prepares to submit recommendations to the regime, the country remains fractured by ongoing military conflicts in the Amhara and Oromia regions, with Tigray and several consequential opposition groups and armed organizations excluded from the process.
Because independently verifiable reporting on key procedural dimensions of the ongoing dialogue remains limited, the analysis that follows is intentionally theoretical: it clarifies concepts and proposes criteria for assessing when a state-convened forum can plausibly claim national political authority.
This text does not dispute the Commission’s formal legal establishment by state proclamation. It argues, however, that legal authorization must not be confused with political legitimacy. In deeply divided societies, a state-convened forum cannot plausibly claim comprehensive national authority when the principal political and armed adversaries whose conflicts define the crisis are absent from the table.
As the process concludes, there is a serious risk of a category mistake: that the regime will treat the generated recommendations—even if the process yields substantive contributions—as a surrogate for national consent or as a completed political settlement. Dialogue can generate societal insight with immense moral and diagnostic value; only reciprocal negotiation among actual political adversaries can reliably produce enforceable commitments and a durable political settlement. Attempting to resolve foundational, highly contentious issues—such as constitutional restructuring or the political status of Addis Ababa—within a politically incomplete and state-dominated forum may not produce sustainable peace. Instead, it risks generating new legitimacy grievances and further deepening the national divide.
The proposition of this article is therefore one of principled non-legitimation combined with substantive openness. That is, it withholds settlement-level authority from the process while treating its outputs as non-binding inputs to be evaluated on their merits. Useful ideas generated by participants should be preserved, publicly documented, and carried forward as inputs. However, claims of final political legitimacy should be withheld, treating these recommendations not as sovereign commands but as a rich evidentiary resource for a future, genuinely inclusive negotiation capable of making political defeat survivable and peace enforceable for all Ethiopians.
I. Introduction: Beyond Legal Mandate
Few political concepts possess the moral appeal of dialogue. It evokes listening rather than coercion, mutual recognition rather than exclusion, and compromise rather than violence. In societies fractured by political conflict, historical grievances, armed confrontation, constitutional disagreement, and declining institutional trust, the call for national dialogue carries significant normative weight. However, its moral appeal should not prevent scrutiny of the conditions under which it occurs. Not every political conversation constitutes a national dialogue; not every national dialogue amounts to negotiation; not every negotiated understanding becomes a political settlement; and not every recommendation produced by a large gathering holds the authority of national consent.
These distinctions are especially important in Ethiopia, where public debate addresses fundamental questions of statehood, federalism, self-determination, citizenship, territorial administration, political representation, human rights, accountability, peace, and constitutional order. When disagreements concern the rules of governance, legitimacy becomes inseparable from substance. The central question is therefore not simply whether people have spoken, whether thousands have participated, or whether useful recommendations have emerged. It is whether the conditions of the process allow its outcomes to plausibly claim national political authority.
The Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission has a formal legal basis. Legal authorization, however, does not settle the separate question of political legitimacy. A process may be lawful while its inclusiveness, representativeness, independence, and capacity to produce binding commitments remain contested. This article does not deny the Commission’s legal status, nor does it assume that a state-convened process is necessarily politically illegitimate. In a large, conflict-affected country, state authorization, resources, territorial access, and security arrangements may be necessary to conduct a nationwide process. The legitimacy problem arises when this necessary convening role becomes unilateral control over commissioner selection, agenda boundaries, participant access, facilitation, security conditions, interpretation of consensus, and implementation.
This article distinguishes four processes often compressed into the phrase “national dialogue”: consultation, dialogue, negotiation, and political settlement. Consultation gathers grievances, preferences, and proposals. Dialogue enables reciprocal reasoning, challenges, clarifications, and possible understanding. Negotiation allows actors capable of affecting a conflict to make reciprocal commitments. A political settlement institutionalizes those commitments through accepted and enforceable rules governing political competition, rights, security, and authority. Each process has value, but each generates a different kind of political authority. Confusing them risks transforming participation into presumed consent, recommendations into presumed commitments, and politically incomplete deliberation into a presumed national settlement.
The central argument is not that Ethiopia’s current process is empty or that it has already attained the authority of a national political covenant. A state-convened forum may produce valuable consultation and deliberative exchange among participating constituencies. However, scale, legal establishment, and the substantive quality of recommendations cannot alone establish comprehensive national legitimacy. That requires meaningful inclusion of affected constituencies and consequential political actors; procedures not unilaterally determined by one party to the conflict; the practical freedom to challenge power; and credible pathways from recommendations to reciprocal and enforceable commitments. The appropriate response is therefore neither wholesale rejection nor premature legitimation: preserve useful ideas and assess them on their merits while reserving national political authority for a process capable of representation, reciprocity, independence, and enforceability.
Legitimacy criteria. For this analysis, the political legitimacy of a national dialogue process is assessed through four conditions. Representation concerns whether affected constituencies and consequential political actors are present through defensible forms of inclusion and authorization. Independence concerns whether agenda-setting, facilitation, participant access, security conditions, and the interpretation of outcomes are insulated from unilateral control by any single party to the conflict. Reciprocity concerns whether adversaries can contest claims, shape the agenda, and make conditional commitments on terms they can regard as procedurally fair. Enforceability concerns whether there are credible mechanisms—legal, institutional, or political—that can convert proposals into commitments and reduce incentives for selective implementation or reversal.
Road maps. Section II distinguishes consultation, dialogue, negotiation, and settlement as analytically distinct political processes. Sections III and IV separate substantive validity from procedural legitimacy and clarify the difference between descriptive inclusion and political authorization. Section V examines the legitimacy problem created when a conflict party also owns the institutional conditions of dialogue. Sections VI–IX develop the higher legitimacy threshold for constituent questions, the risks of inclusion without democratic authorization, and the credible-commitment problem that separates recommendations from enforceable obligations. Sections X and XI conclude by arguing for preserving useful outputs as evidence and input while withholding settlement-level legitimation unless the process meets the conditions required for a binding political covenant.
II. Consultation, Dialogue, Negotiation, and Settlement
Political discourse often treats consultation, dialogue, negotiation, and settlement as though they were different stages of the same activity—or as though they were interchangeable. Political analysis should resist that tendency because the differences among them concern authority, representation, commitment, and political consequence.
Consultation is primarily an information-gathering and participatory process. Citizens, community representatives, professionals, religious leaders, victims, civil society organizations, regional constituencies, women, youth, displaced people, and other groups may articulate grievances, identify priorities, recommend reforms, and express visions for the country’s future.
Consultation can reveal experiences that political elites ignore, broaden the agenda, uncover grievances that otherwise remain hidden, generate proposals, and establish a valuable public record. However, consultation does not generally authorize participants to bind those who did not empower them to negotiate on their behalf. A farmer may speak persuasively about land rights, a displaced person may describe insecurity with moral authority derived from experience, an academic may propose an excellent constitutional framework, and a religious leader may articulate principles of reconciliation. Their voices matter greatly, but none of those contributions necessarily commits an opposition organization, an armed movement, a regional government, or the incumbent state to a political agreement. Consultation, therefore, primarily answers the question: What do people believe, experience, fear, and desire? It does not necessarily answer the question: What have the principal political adversaries agreed to do? Consultation is normally non-binding.
Dialogue transcends consultation by being deliberative rather than merely expressive. In a consultative framework, individuals or groups may communicate preferences and grievances to an authority without needing to engage with one another, justify claims against competing arguments, or ensure that their views influence an outcome. In contrast, dialogue requires reciprocal engagement among participants. They confront opposing perspectives, challenge rationales, clarify misunderstandings, revise positions when appropriate, articulate disagreements with greater precision, and may identify limited areas of common ground. The value of dialogue is not measured by the number of speakers but rather by the extent to which participants can genuinely shape the terms and direction of collective reflection.
Jürgen Habermas’s (1996) theory of deliberative legitimacy is pertinent here. Legitimate political communication relies not only on the opportunity to speak but also on conditions that allow claims to be scrutinized, reasons to be exchanged, and those affected to participate as equals. This notion of equality does not require eliminating disparities in wealth, education, or institutional position. Instead, it requires that such inequalities do not determine who can speak safely, what can be criticized, whose arguments are acknowledged, which issues are prioritized, and whether deliberation can influence political authority. A microphone alone does not constitute political freedom; permission to speak is not equivalent to the practical capacity to challenge power.
A national process should therefore be evaluated not only by participation numbers or agenda breadth but also by the inclusion of significant conflict actors and affected communities; the independence of agenda-setting and facilitation; the safeguarding of dissent; the opportunity to contest official positions; and a credible link between deliberation and subsequent political action. Dialogue may foster understanding and provisional consensus, but it does not by itself produce binding political commitments. Its central inquiry is: What can participants understand, reconsider, and potentially agree upon through reciprocal reasoning?
Negotiation belongs to a different political category. Its principal participants must possess some capacity to make commitments on behalf of constituencies, organizations, institutions, or forces whose behavior affects the conflict. Negotiation does not require all participants to be morally admirable, democratically elected, or socially representative in every respect. Peace negotiations often include actors precisely because their cooperation is necessary to stop violence. This creates an uncomfortable but important distinction: political relevance and democratic legitimacy are not identical. An armed organization may need to participate because it has the capacity to sustain war, but that fact does not automatically confer democratic authority to design the country’s constitutional future.
Conversely, thousands of ordinary citizens may possess stronger democratic moral standing than organized armed actors yet lack the organizational authority to order combatants to disarm or governments to relinquish power. National reconstruction, therefore, requires both citizens and consequential political actors. Negotiations among political and armed actors must not displace citizens; at the same time, political negotiation cannot be replaced by citizen consultation. Negotiation asks: What obligations will actors capable of affecting the conflict accept in exchange for reciprocal commitments from others? It is the category most directly oriented toward commitments. Negotiation can become binding.
A political settlement goes further still. It establishes sufficiently accepted rules governing access to power, political competition, security, rights, institutional authority, and the treatment of winners and losers. Its durability does not depend upon unanimous affection for those rules. Successful constitutional orders are often sustained not because political actors love one another but because they regard institutional competition as safer and more advantageous than destroying the system.
A settlement, therefore, asks: What political order will adversaries accept even when they lose? That question is fundamental because a peaceful political system cannot depend on any single group continuously controlling the state. It must make losing survivable. Political defeat must not mean imprisonment, dispossession, exile, loss of citizenship, communal insecurity, or death. If losing political office becomes existentially dangerous, actors acquire strong incentives to permanently seize control of the state, manipulate elections, mobilize communal constituencies, preserve armed organizations, or overthrow the constitutional order rather than accept defeat. A political settlement is, therefore, not simply an agreement about desirable principles; it concerns the institutionalization of survivable political competition—settlement: explicitly binding or intended to be binding.
These distinctions can be summarized in a simple conceptual sequence: consultation gathers voices, dialogue develops understanding, negotiation produces commitments, and settlement institutionalizes those commitments. A country may possess the first without achieving the second, conduct meaningful dialogue without reaching negotiation, or negotiate agreements that never mature into a durable political settlement. Treating all four as synonymous with “national dialogue” obscures the very differences in authority, representation, commitment, and enforceability that determine whether political discussion can become a legitimate national covenant.
Dialogue may take place among those present; however, a process cannot credibly assert comprehensive national deliberative authority when politically significant constituencies are absent, excluded, or unable to participate under conditions they regard as sufficiently fair.
III. The Difference Between Truth and Legitimacy
Once these categories are distinguished, a further philosophical problem emerges. Suppose a politically defective process produces recommendations supporting judicial independence, constitutional reform, protection of minorities, equal citizenship, accountability for abuses, freedom of expression, or peaceful transfer of power. Should such propositions be rejected because the process producing them lacked sufficient legitimacy? The answer should be no. Their substantive merits must be assessed independently. However, the opposite conclusion is equally mistaken: the fact that participants advance morally compelling or politically desirable proposals does not retroactively legitimize the institutional process through which those proposals emerged.
The distinction can be stated in two propositions: procedural illegitimacy does not automatically invalidate every substantive idea produced by a process, and substantive validity does not automatically confer legitimacy upon the process that produced it. This distinction matters because political polarization often encourages the opposite reasoning. Critics may assume that accepting a recommendation produced by an objectionable process amounts to endorsing the process itself, while supporters may argue that, because worthwhile proposals have emerged, critics should recognize the institution as legitimate. Neither conclusion follows.
Truth and legitimacy answer different questions. Truth asks whether a proposition is defensible; legitimacy asks whether an institution or process possesses justified authority to make decisions binding upon others. A defective institution can occasionally produce a correct judgment, just as a legitimate institution can occasionally produce a poor policy. The legitimacy of an institution and the merits of a particular proposition, therefore, require separate evaluation.
Applied to national dialogue, this distinction permits intellectual honesty without political surrender. One may affirm that a recommendation is correct while simultaneously maintaining that the process does not yet possess sufficient authority to transform that recommendation into a national covenant. Such a position is not indecision or political ambiguity; it is conceptual precision. It also offers a principled middle ground between indiscriminate rejection and premature legitimation.
IV. Representation Without Authorization
A second source of confusion concerns representation. Large numbers are politically impressive, but they are not automatically politically representative. Hanna Pitkin’s classic analysis distinguishes different senses in which one person or institution may be said to represent another (Pitkin, 1967). The distinction matters because descriptive presence—having participants from different communities, professions, regions, genders, or social categories—does not necessarily constitute political authorization. A participant may descriptively resemble a constituency without possessing the authority to negotiate on its behalf. Likewise, a participant may express views widely shared by millions without having been empowered by those people to enter binding commitments.
This is not an argument against participation or against the moral value of citizen voice; it is an argument about what kinds of authority different forms of participation can legitimately claim.
This does not diminish the importance of broad participation; it clarifies what participation can legitimately authorize. National dialogue, therefore, requires at least two forms of representation. The first is social representation, meaning the inclusion of citizens’ experiences and perspectives across society. The second is political representation, meaning the participation of actors possessing sufficient authority to negotiate consequential political commitments. Neither should replace the other. A process confined to elites may ignore society. In contrast, a process composed overwhelmingly of consultative participants may fail to bind the organized actors whose cooperation is indispensable to ending conflict.
The relevant question is therefore not simply how many people were in the room, but in what capacity they were present. Were they witnesses, consultants, deliberators, representatives, negotiators, or decision-makers? The answer determines the political meaning of their agreement. In Ethiopia, four thousand people agreeing to a proposition may be politically and morally significant, but it is not necessarily equivalent to four thousand authorized representatives ratifying a constitutional settlement. This distinction protects citizens as much as it protects organized political actors. Ordinary Ethiopians should not be reduced to spectators while consequential political and armed actors negotiate the country’s future; at the same time, ordinary citizens should not be symbolically converted into representatives of political organizations they did not authorize and cannot bind.
V. When a Conflict Party Owns the Table
National dialogue becomes especially problematic when one principal political actor simultaneously occupies several structurally incompatible roles. An incumbent government may be a participant in an existing political conflict, an object of grievances raised by other actors, the institutional sponsor of dialogue, the provider of administrative and financial support, a decisive influence over the surrounding political environment, the authority controlling coercive institutions, and ultimately the institution expected to implement the recommendations. The problem is not that the government should be absent; it is indispensable because no serious political settlement can ignore the actor controlling the existing state. The issue lies in the distinction between participating at the table and owning the table.
State convening is not, in itself, disqualifying. In a large and conflict-affected country, state authorization, resources, territorial access, and legal protection may be necessary conditions for a national process. The legitimacy problem arises when the state’s necessary convening role becomes unilateral control over the institutional conditions of dialogue—commissioner selection, agenda boundaries, participant access, facilitation, security conditions, public communication, interpretation of consensus, and implementation.
A government should be entitled to defend its position, contest accusations, advance constitutional proposals, negotiate security arrangements, and seek guarantees for its own supporters. However, when the government itself is a party to the political dispute, the legitimacy of the process becomes questionable if it also retains disproportionate authority over the institutional rules by which competing claims are selected, processed, translated, or implemented. John Rawls’s conception of politics as fair terms of cooperation among free and equal persons offers a useful normative lens here (Rawls, 1993). Political procedures should not simply reproduce the advantages belonging to whichever actor happens to occupy the strongest initial position.
A simple test follows: Would the principal political competitors accept the same procedural rules if they did not know which one of them would control the state? If the answer is no, the institutional design contains a legitimacy problem. Importantly, this conclusion does not require proving that officials dictate every speech, manipulate every participant, or write every recommendation. Structural power operates more subtly.
A government may refrain from controlling every sentence while nevertheless controlling the political environment in which sentences acquire consequence. It may permit criticism while retaining discretion over implementation, tolerate recommendations while maintaining authority over whether they become law, or allow discussion of institutional reform while preserving the institutional power required to prevent reform. Thus, the most important question is not whether participants spoke genuinely; they may well have done so. The more demanding question is whether the process can generate political outcomes that credibly constrain the actor with ultimate institutional control. That is the real test of self-binding.
Political legitimacy, moreover, should not be assessed solely upon the creation of a national dialogue institution. Inclusiveness, independence, impartiality, and procedural fairness are not permanent attributes conferred by proclamation or institutional design; they must be demonstrated continuously through practice. A dialogue may begin with principles that command broad approval yet lose credibility if its subsequent conduct departs substantially from them.
Conversely, an initially contested process may gain credibility if it progressively broadens inclusion, protects dissent, demonstrates institutional independence, and restrains the political advantages of those who control the state. Legitimacy is therefore cumulative, conditional, and revisable: political actors are entitled to reassess a process as evidence about its operation develops. The creation of a dialogue institution establishes an opportunity for legitimacy; it does not establish legitimacy once and for all. The relevant question is consequently not merely whether the principles announced at the formation of a national dialogue were defensible, but whether the conduct of the dialogue has remained faithful to those principles.
This distinction is particularly important where the incumbent government is itself a party to political conflict. Such a government cannot realistically be expected to become substantively neutral toward disputes in which its own authority, policies, or conduct are contested. What can legitimately be required is different: the dialogue institution must remain sufficiently independent and impartial while the government exercises procedural restraint and participates as a single political actor rather than asserting ownership of the process. Neutrality must therefore reside primarily in the architecture and administration of the dialogue, not in an unrealistic assumption that the regime’s political interests have disappeared.
These institutional concerns are particularly relevant in Ethiopia’s current process. The issue is not that all opposition, armed, or regional actors must agree in advance with the Commission’s mandate or with each other. Nor does the absence of any specific actor automatically invalidate the process or negate meaningful deliberation among participants. The main concern is political incompleteness: if consequential opposition forces, armed organizations, and Tigray’s political constituency are not fully and directly represented, the process cannot plausibly claim to reflect negotiated consent among all principal parties to Ethiopia’s conflict. While it may still facilitate valuable consultation and deliberative exchange among those involved, it requires credible avenues to broaden inclusion and link deliberation to direct political negotiation before it can serve as a foundation for a comprehensive national settlement.
This structural incompleteness is not merely a theoretical deficit; it is a material reality. Claiming comprehensive “national” authority while the state remains engaged in active military conflicts in the Amhara and Oromia regions, and while Tigray’s political constituency remains functionally marginalized from the process, creates a significant tension. A dialogue conducted under the shadow of ongoing regional warfare cannot reliably establish the safe and egalitarian conditions required for national deliberation. Proceeding under these conditions risks turning dialogue into a mechanism of unilateral conflict management, in which participation is taken to substitute for reciprocal political consent in the absence of key adversaries.
VI. Constituent Power and the Higher Threshold of Legitimacy
The legitimacy requirements governing a national dialogue become more demanding as the questions under consideration move from ordinary policy matters to foundational questions concerning the political order itself. This distinction is especially important in Ethiopia because the National Dialogue addresses questions extending beyond administrative reform to national identity, sovereignty, federalism, self-determination, citizenship, territorial authority, constitutional design, and the structure of government. These are not simply policy questions to which citizens may offer preferences; they concern the basic rules under which Ethiopians constitute themselves as a political community.
The classical concept of constituent power captures this distinction. Constituted institutions operate within an existing political order, whereas constituent power concerns the authority through which the political order itself is founded or fundamentally reconstructed. When a national dialogue moves from discussing policy grievances to reconsidering the constitutional foundations of the state, its legitimacy threshold must therefore rise accordingly. This creates a paradox: if political actors disagree not merely about policies but about the legitimacy of the existing constitutional and institutional order, the regime cannot resolve the disagreement simply by inviting opponents to participate within procedures whose legitimacy those opponents contest. The procedure itself becomes part of the dispute.
For a national dialogue confronting foundational questions, legitimacy cannot rest primarily on participation numbers or agenda breadth. It must increasingly depend on whether the process reduces unilateral control, broadens meaningful political inclusion, protects independent deliberation, and creates procedures that principal competing actors can regard as sufficiently fair to accept, even when particular outcomes do not favor them. The more foundational the decision, the less defensible it becomes for one actor to retain predominant control over the institutional machinery through which that decision is made.
A vivid illustration of this boundary is the potential introduction of highly polarizing territorial and sovereignty disputes—such as the political and administrative status of Addis Ababa—into the dialogue agenda. In a genuinely inclusive and procedurally credible negotiation, the foundational status of the capital city would be approached through reciprocal compromises capable of binding major actors. However, attempting to “settle” such existential issues within a politically incomplete and state-dominated forum, where key regional constituencies and armed actors are absent, creates a high risk of destabilizing legitimacy contestation. Under these asymmetrical conditions, any recommended change to Addis Ababa’s status will predictably be perceived by excluded parties as a unilateral imposition. Rather than fostering a national covenant, addressing such foundational questions in a compromised forum is likely to generate acute new grievances and deepen the national divide.
VII. Inclusion Without Armed Veto
The demand for inclusion requires careful qualification. Excluding consequential political and armed actors can render a peace process ineffective, as actors capable of sustaining violence can continue to disrupt any agreement reached in their absence. However, acknowledging this fact should not transform armed capacity into democratic sovereignty. A movement does not become representative of an entire people merely because it possesses weapons, nor should the possession of coercive capacity confer on any organization unilateral veto power over citizens who prefer peaceful politics.
This yields an important dual principle: a peace process that excludes actors capable of sustaining war may be ineffective. In contrast, a constitutional process dominated by those same armed actors may be illegitimate. A credible national process, therefore, requires two forms of inclusion to work together. The first is horizontal political inclusion among consequential political adversaries whose cooperation is necessary for ending conflict. The second is vertical societal inclusion, connecting political negotiation to citizens, victims, communities, civil society, professional organizations, women, youth, minorities, displaced populations, and others whose lives will be governed by the settlement.
This is also where the legitimacy criteria emphasized above converge: inclusion is not merely numerical; it concerns whether representation and reciprocity are sufficient to convert participation into commitments, and whether those commitments can be made enforceable.
Neither dimension is sufficient alone. A handful of armed actors cannot legitimately decide the country’s constitutional future. At the same time, thousands of consultative participants cannot, by themselves, negotiate ceasefires, security guarantees, disarmament arrangements, or reciprocal commitments among organized adversaries. The architecture must connect the two. This is where national dialogue becomes more than an event; it becomes a political process composed of different institutions performing different functions.
VIII. The Credible Commitment Problem
Even a perfectly written set of recommendations does not implement itself. Political science has long recognized that institutional agreements face a credible commitment problem: actors may promise restraint when an agreement is negotiated but acquire incentives to violate that promise once circumstances change. North and Weingast (1989) demonstrated the importance of institutions capable of making political commitments credible, while Walter (1997), in the study of civil conflict, showed why adversaries often hesitate to implement agreements when compliance leaves them vulnerable, and no credible enforcement mechanism protects them.
This problem becomes particularly severe when political reforms require an incumbent authority to weaken its own position. Imagine recommendations calling for independent courts, autonomous electoral institutions, restrictions on executive authority, security sector reform, independent investigations of abuses, the release of political detainees, greater media freedom, or constitutional restructuring. The critical question is not whether these recommendations are desirable; it is what transforms them from recommendations into obligations. If implementation depends entirely upon the discretionary consent of the political actor whose power the reforms are intended to constrain, then the process faces an obvious self-binding problem. Why would a dominant political actor voluntarily surrender institutional advantages once public attention declines, opponents demobilize, or the political cost of noncompliance decreases?
This is why road maps, recommendations, and implementation plans are insufficient unless accompanied by clear institutional responsibility, defined legal procedures, transparent timelines, independent monitoring, political guarantees, and consequences for noncompliance. In general terms, credible commitment mechanisms often include jointly agreed sequencing, independent verification and monitoring, third-party guarantees, or institutional changes that reduce the capacity for unilateral reversal.
A political agreement acquires durability when compliance becomes more rational than defection. This may also require reciprocal guarantees. The government must trust that political reform will not simply become an instrument for its physical destruction; opposition actors must trust that entering peaceful politics will not expose them to imprisonment or elimination; and communities must trust that losing political control will not expose their populations to collective punishment.
This leads to one of the deepest principles of democratic reconstruction: political competition becomes sustainable only when defeat becomes survivable. Adam Przeworski (1991) conceptualizes democracy as a system in which political actors accept uncertainty about who will win because the continuation of the institutional order remains preferable to its destruction. Where political loss threatens survival, democratic uncertainty becomes intolerable. Political actors then have powerful incentives to monopolize power rather than risk alternation. This is not merely an Ethiopian problem; it is a structural foundation of authoritarian persistence.
IX. Democratic Ends and Democratic Means
A further philosophical issue concerns the relationship between political means and democratic ends. Can a process establish democratic legitimacy through procedures that systematically contradict the democratic values the proposed settlement is supposed to embody? No transition satisfies ideal democratic standards. Negotiations occur under unequal conditions; incumbents retain state power; armed groups possess coercive leverage; foreign actors sometimes influence outcomes; and institutions remain imperfect. Demanding procedural purity can therefore become politically unrealistic.
However, the opposite conclusion—that means are irrelevant so long as democratic language appears in the final document—is equally untenable. A process intended to produce political equality must contain recognizable elements of equality; one intended to establish constitutional restraint must demonstrate some capacity for self-restraint; one intended to institutionalize pluralism must accommodate meaningful disagreement; and one intended to establish reciprocal recognition must permit adversaries to participate without first requiring them to accept the legitimacy of the political arrangement they contest.
The principle may be stated simply: a national dialogue need not perfectly embody the future democracy, but it must prefigure it sufficiently to make its promises credible. This is not idealism but institutional logic. Citizens judge whether future promises are credible partly by observing how political power behaves during the transition. If dissent is tolerated only when politically harmless, promises of future pluralism lack credibility. If recommendations are respected only when consistent with incumbent interests, promises of future constitutional restraint remain doubtful.
Transition processes, therefore, possess a prefigurative function: they demonstrate, in miniature, whether political actors can practice the restraints they promise to institutionalize later.
X. Preserve the Ideas, Withhold Final Legitimation
What, then, should become of useful work generated by a politically incomplete national dialogue? It should not be discarded. It should be published, archived, studied, criticized, compared, expanded, and eventually presented as part of the evidentiary record available to a broader and more legitimate political process. This approach avoids two equal and opposite mistakes. The first is legitimation by association: the assumption that, because useful recommendations have emerged, the process that produced them must possess national political authority. The second is rejection by association: the assumption that, because the process suffers from structural legitimacy deficits, every idea generated within it is politically contaminated.
Neither conclusion follows. The better principle is to preserve the ideas while withholding the claim to final legitimacy. Material generated through consultation and deliberation may provide valuable insight into how citizens understand federalism, citizenship, national identity, justice, economic grievances, institutional reform, displacement, security, and political representation. It should inform subsequent political negotiations, but it should enter those negotiations as evidence and input rather than as sovereign command.
Evidence is not sovereignty; consultation is not authorization; dialogue is not negotiation; recommendation is not commitment; agreement among participants is not national consent; and national consent itself is not yet an enforceable political settlement.
This position rejects the false binary that often structures public debate. One need not either endorse the existing process as fully legitimate or dismiss everything associated with it. Citizens who participate in an imperfect institution retain intellectual and moral agency, and defensible proposals should be judged by their merits rather than rejected because of their origin. At the same time, substantive merit cannot confer, retrospectively, the political authority that a process may lack. Broad consultation cannot substitute for negotiations among actors whose cooperation is necessary to end conflict, just as the inclusion of armed actors, where necessary for peace, cannot convert coercive capacity into democratic authority over the country’s constitutional future.
A reconstructed process would preserve what has already been learned while changing the political status of that material. It would widen direct and credible representation of consequential political actors and affected constituencies, strengthen the independence of agenda-setting, facilitation, and implementation, protect dissent and societal participation, and establish procedures capable of converting proposals into reciprocal commitments. Such a process would not erase the work already done. It would treat it appropriately: as a substantial public resource for a more inclusive political negotiation rather than as a completed expression of national consent.
The relevant standard is not procedural perfection. No transition begins under conditions of complete equality, full trust, or universal agreement. The question is whether the process progressively reduces unilateral control, broadens meaningful inclusion, and creates sufficient guarantees for competing political actors to accept outcomes that do not fully favor them. Pragmatism should not require conceptual surrender. Consultation should be respected as consultation, dialogue valued as dialogue, negotiation evaluated according to representation and reciprocity, and a national political settlement recognized only when it establishes rules that are sufficiently legitimate, reciprocal, and enforceable under which political communities and organizations can coexist.
XI. Conclusion: From Dialogue to Political Covenant
Ethiopia needs dialogue. Its political future cannot indefinitely be governed by coercion, armed conflict, imprisonment, communal fear, and political exclusion. However, precisely because dialogue is necessary, the concept should not be diluted by treating every organized political conversation as equivalent to a national political settlement. Legal establishment, broad participation, and valuable recommendations may each matter, but none alone confers the authority to speak conclusively on behalf of the nation.
The Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission may have legal status, and its process may generate useful consultations and deliberative exchanges among participating constituencies. Those achievements should not be overlooked. Since the Commission’s recommendations are ultimately submitted to the regime for a final decision, the decisive political question is not only what is proposed but what—if anything—obligates the state to adopt, implement, or refrain from selectively applying those proposals. Whatever the regime decides will shape national peace, peaceful coexistence, and Ethiopian politics, for better or worse.
Legality, however, is not the same as settlement legitimacy, and dialogue among those present cannot substitute for the representation, consent, and reciprocal commitments of significant political forces and affected constituencies that remain outside the process. A process becomes politically credible not by eliminating all inequality or disagreement but by progressively limiting unilateral control, broadening meaningful inclusion, protecting dissent, allowing competing claims to shape outcomes, and establishing a credible path from deliberation to negotiation and implementation.
The appropriate response is therefore neither wholesale rejection nor premature legitimation. Useful recommendations should be preserved, published, criticized, and evaluated on their merits. They should enter subsequent political engagement as evidence and input, not as sovereign commands or substitutes for a negotiated settlement. A nation may learn from a state-convened dialogue and draw on its outputs as non-binding inputs while still withholding settlement-level legitimacy unless the process credibly satisfies the requirements of representation, reciprocity, independence, and enforceability. Similarly, the participation of armed actors may be necessary where their cooperation is essential to peace. However, armed capacity must not be confused with democratic sovereignty, nor wielded as a veto over citizens’ constitutional future.
The decisive test is whether Ethiopia can construct a process that integrates social inclusion with political inclusion: one that protects citizens’ voices while enabling significant adversaries to make reciprocal and enforceable commitments. Such a process must ensure that the regime participates without dominating the table, that political opponents can engage without first surrendering the claims they bring to the process, and that political defeat becomes sufficiently survivable for actors to accept institutional competition rather than seek permanent domination.
Ultimately, this analysis underscores a sobering reality: the nation stands on the precipice, still distant from lasting peace or a credible path to democratic rule. Whether the regime will embrace genuine, inclusive negotiations with all armed groups and opposition parties—or whether entrenched distrust and intransigence will widen and deepen the spiral of violence—remains an urgent and deeply consequential question. The prevailing posture of military brinkmanship on every side casts a dark shadow over the future, hinting that decisive outcomes may be wrenched by force rather than forged through statesmanship. The close of the National Dialogue Commission’s proceedings does not dispel this crisis; it exposes, with acute clarity, the momentous and perilous crossroads now confronting the nation.
A nation can learn from a dialogue before it is ready to recognize that dialogue as a settlement. The true measure of national dialogue is not whether people have been assembled beneath one institutional roof, but whether the process can include the forces necessary for peace, protect the voices necessary for justice, bind institutions to implementation, and establish common rules that adversaries can accept even when particular outcomes do not favor them. Only then can consultation become more than participation, dialogue more than speech, negotiation more than bargaining, and political agreement begin to take on the character of a national covenant.
Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
__
Join our Telegram Channel: t.me/borkena
Like borkena on Facebook
To submit a press release, send the submission to info@borkena.com
Add your business to Ethiopian Business Listing / Ethiopian Business Directory
Join the conversation. Follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @zborkena to get the latest Ethiopian news updates regularly.
References
Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (W. Rehg, Trans.). MIT Press.
North, D. C., & Weingast, B. R. (1989). Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England. The Journal of Economic History, 49(4), 803–832.
Pitkin, H. F. (1967). The Concept of Representation. University of California Press.
Przeworski, A. (1991). Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Cambridge University Press.
Rawls, J. (1993). Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press.
Walter, B. F. (1997). The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement. International Organization, 51(3), 335–364.