Ethiopia’s Contemporary Crisis: Historical Roots and Drivers of National Unraveling

Ibrahim A. Ibrahim

Abstract

This article examines the historical foundations of Ethiopia’s contemporary political crisis by tracing the evolution of the Ethiopian state from nineteenth-century imperial consolidation to the present. It argues that the roots of today’s instability and reckless rhetoric to destabilize the Horn of Africa lie in the structures created during Menelik’s expansion, which incorporated diverse nations through conquest and established an extractive political economy anchored in unequal land ownership and centralized coercive authority. The analysis highlights how these structures persisted under Haile Selassie, mutated under the Derg, and remained unresolved in the post-1991 period, producing cycles of resistance, repression, and fragmentation and external projection. A second focus is Ethiopia’s prolonged occupation of Eritrea and the systematic repression, which precipitated decades of war and contributed to the collapse of the imperial and Derg regimes alike. We argue that recent conflicts in Oromia, Amhara, Tigray, and elsewhere, along with the resurgence of expansionist rhetoric toward the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, reflect the enduring legacy of these structural contradictions. By situating Ethiopia within broader histories of empire, state formation, and contested nationhood, we provide a framework for understanding the country’s current volatility and identifies the political, institutional, and historical reforms required for lasting stability.

Introduction

The contemporary crisis in Ethiopia, characterized by civil wars, mass displacement, authoritarian consolidation, and economic deterioration, cannot be understood without a close examination of the historical foundations of the Ethiopian state. The roots of today’s instability lie in the late nineteenth-century imperial expansion under Emperor Menelik II, when diverse nations and communities were incorporated through conquest into an unequal political order built on extractive land relations and coercive governance. These structures were reinforced under Haile Selassie, transformed but not dismantled under the Derg, and adapted rather than resolved in the post-1991 era. Across these political eras, the state retained a reliance on centralized power, unequal distribution of land and resources, and a contested national identity that excluded many of the peoples it claimed to represent.

A second and equally consequential dimension of Ethiopia’s instability was its prolonged occupation of Eritrea and its effort to dismantle the federal arrangement established by the United Nations in 1950. Eritrea’s political pluralism, industrial base, and autonomous institutions threatened the homogenizing project of the imperial state, prompting decades of repression, resistance, and war. This unresolved conflict not only contributed to the downfall of the imperial regime in 1974 but later shaped the policies of the Derg and the post-1991 governments, all of which struggled to reconcile Ethiopia’s imperial legacy with the demands of its diverse populations.

The cumulative effect of these historical processes is a state marked by deep structural fractures. Episodes of reform have periodically raised hopes, yet each reformist moment has failed to address the underlying contradictions of land inequality, national identity, and political centralization. As a result, the country has experienced cycles of resistance, repression, and fragmentation that continue to shape Ethiopia’s political landscape today. The following sections trace these dynamics from the formation of the modern state to the present, demonstrating how the unresolved legacies of empire continue to fuel Ethiopia’s contemporary crisis.

1. The Foundations of the Modern Ethiopian State

To understand the present crisis, it is necessary to examine how the modern Ethiopian state was originally constructed. The dynamics that define Ethiopia’s instability today did not begin in the twentieth century; they emerged from the political institutions, modes of expansion, and economic structures forged during the Menelik era. The following section traces these foundations and demonstrates how the logic of conquest shaped the evolution of imperial and post-imperial governance.

The modern Ethiopian state was initially built through a series of military campaigns under Emperor Menelik II. These campaigns incorporated diverse nations and communities into an expanding imperial domain. The political and economic system that developed was highly extractive and relied on land ownership as the primary source of power. By the mid-twentieth century, nearly half of all arable land was controlled by the emperor and the hereditary aristocracy, while the Orthodox Tewahdo Church possessed roughly a quarter. The state held an additional portion, leaving the peasantry, who generated most of the country’s wealth, with access to only a small share of the land they farmed.¹

Bonie Holcomb and Sisai Ibssa, in their 1990 book The Invention of Ethiopia: The Making of a Dependent Colonial State in Northeast Africa, argue that the modern Ethiopian state is not an ancient, organically continuous nation but a political formation created in the late nineteenth century. They contend that it took shape through the conquest of non-Abyssinian peoples and through the assistance of European powers. According to their analysis, Ethiopia’s emergence “was the result of an alliance between the major European powers and Abyssinian princes.” They describe the state as “an artificial unit,” created during Menelik’s expansion through what they call “dependent colonial policy,” in which European governments supplied weapons, technical expertise, and political support to Abyssinian rulers who sought territorial enlargement.² Their work challenges the narrative that Ethiopia stands as an indigenous exception to colonial rule in Africa and presents it instead as a local empire constructed with external imperial resources.

A central element of their argument is the concept of Ethiopia as a dependent colonial state. In their view, its consolidation relied on three interconnected elements: European weaponry that enabled territorial conquest, European technical and administrative support that helped build institutions of control, and continued reliance on European diplomatic and material assistance.² Within this structure, the institutions, taxation systems, military organization, and political ideology of the state served to administer conquered populations such as the Oromo, Somali, Afar, Sidama, and the Southern nations. These groups were not incorporated as equal citizens but governed through mechanisms designed to secure extraction and political dominance. By placing Ethiopia within the broader global history of empire, Holcomb and Ibssa explain the persistence of conflict, resistance movements, and political fragmentation from the era of Menelik II to the present. Their study remains a significant and often controversial critique of Ethiopian state formation, and it provides a framework for understanding the structural roots of modern Ethiopian crises.

Haile Selassie inherited this structure and promised modernization and land reform. These promises, however, remained largely unfulfilled. Rural poverty worsened and political exclusion tightened. The 1974 Revolution arose not from a sudden political shift but from decades of inequality, economic deterioration, and public frustration with a system that proved unwilling or unable to reform.

The contradictions embedded in Menelik’s state eventually generated profound internal tensions. These tensions were most visible in Ethiopia’s relationship with Eritrea, whose autonomous institutions and political pluralism challenged imperial centralization. As the empire expanded outward, its attempt to suppress Eritrean autonomy drew it into a prolonged conflict that exposed structural weaknesses within the state itself. The next section examines this relationship and explains how the occupation of Eritrea contributed directly to the unraveling of the imperial order.

2. Eritrea and the Unraveling of the Imperial State

A central but often underacknowledged driver of Ethiopia’s instability was its prolonged occupation of Eritrea and the dismantling of the federal arrangement established by the United Nations in 1950. The resolution had granted Eritrea autonomy within a federation, complete with its own parliament, judiciary, and political institutions.³ Haile Selassie perceived Eritrea’s pluralistic politics and comparatively advanced industrial economy as “a threat of good example”. Within a decade, the federal arrangement was effectively destroyed through the suppression of Eritrean languages, political rights, and civic freedoms. This repression triggered organized resistance: the Eritrean Liberation Movement (ELM)-1958, the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF)-1960, the full-scale armed struggle beginning in 1961 and, after the unilateral annexation of Eritrea in 1962, the resistance escalated and out of the effort to reform the ELF, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Forces, later Front (EPLF) was born in 1970.

By the early 1970s, the war in Eritrea had become a central source of crisis for the Ethiopian state. In a confidential memo to Haile Selassie, Lt. General Kebede Gebre, the last imperial Minister of Defense, reported that morale among Ethiopian troops in Eritrea had collapsed after a decade of fighting; units had mutinied, arrested their commander, and appealed directly to the emperor.⁴ This breakdown in discipline reflected not only exhaustion but also major battlefield defeats. The “two-weeks battle” of December 1973–January 1974, fought around Alakieb and Algena, in the Northeastern Sahel, inflicted a decisive defeat on the imperial army at the hands of the still-nascent Eritrean People’s Liberation Forces (EPLF). The rout exposed profound weaknesses at the core of the imperial military and accelerated the regime’s collapse.

The crisis in Eritrea was only one manifestation of broader pressures facing the imperial regime. By the early 1970s, Ethiopia was engulfed by widespread military mutinies, urban protests, economic hardship, and famine. These converging crises created conditions in which the state could no longer sustain its traditional forms of authority. The fall of Haile Selassie and the rise of the Derg must therefore be understood as outcomes of both the imperial structure and the wars it provoked. The following section analyzes this pivotal transformation and the new forms of violence and centralization it unleashed.

3. The 1974 Revolution and the Rise of the Derg

By January 1974, Ethiopia was engulfed by simultaneous military and civilian unrest. Mutinies erupted in Eritrea, Negelle Borena, and other garrisons, driven by battlefield losses, low pay, deteriorating living conditions, and anger at imperial command. At the same time, public fury over famine, corruption, and authoritarian rule spread across the country spearheaded by University and High School Students all over the country. Haile Selassie attempted to quell dissent by dissolving his cabinet, but the move only underscored his loss of control.

Out of this chaos emerged the Derg, a committee of junior and mid-level officers led by Mengistu Haile Mariam and Atnafu Abate, which seized power and abolished the monarchy.⁵ The Derg entrenched its rule through extensive repression, the “Red Terror,” and large-scale militarization. Nowhere was its violence more severe than in Eritrea, where scorched-earth campaigns and collective punishment caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and ultimately failed to stop the liberation struggle.

Cold War geopolitics further fueled the conflict. Eritrean fighters received minimal foreign support, while Ethiopia enjoyed extensive military backing: the United States and Israel armed Haile Selassie,⁶ and after 1974, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba, Libya, and Yemen became Ethiopia’s principal benefactors.⁷ Despite this support, Ethiopia failed to defeat the Eritrean movement, which grew into one of Africa’s most disciplined liberation forces.

4. Post-1991 Transitions and the 1998–2000 War

The Derg’s collapse in 1991 removed one authoritarian system but did not resolve the structural legacies of empire. Ethiopia and Eritrea entered a period of cautious cooperation, yet the unresolved question of the border and the competing visions of post-Derg statehood soon reignited conflict. The 1998–2000 war revealed the limits of the transitional order and revived many of the historical grievances that had shaped earlier periods of conflict. The next section examines this turbulent transition and its long-term consequences.

After Eritrea’s liberation in 1991, its leadership sought a cautious path to independence rather than unilateral declaration. Eritrea allowed Ethiopia time to reorganize after the Derg’s collapse and held a referendum supervised by the United Nations, the OAU, and international observers. In 1993, Eritreans voted 99.8 percent in favor of independence.⁸ A period of cooperation followed, with Ethiopia using Eritrean ports under fair negotiated agreements.

This stability ended when Ethiopia initiated the 1998–2000 border war, a conflict that cost roughly 135,000 Ethiopian soldiers and nearly 19,000 Eritreans.⁹ The Algiers Agreement established the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC), which issued a unanimous, final, and binding ruling in 2002. Ethiopia initially celebrated the decision, then refused to implement it.¹⁰ The TPLF-led government instead pursued a strategy of isolating Eritrea diplomatically and economically, including the promotion of contested narratives used in lobbying for sanctions.¹¹

5. The Post-2018 Era: Reform, Collapse, and Expansionist Rhetoric

The post-1991 settlement created temporary stability but failed to address underlying contradictions within Ethiopia’s federal system. These tensions resurfaced dramatically after 2018, when early reforms under Abiy Ahmed gave way to renewed conflict and authoritarian retrenchment. The outbreak of war in Tigray, escalating violence in Oromia and Amhara, and the revival of territorial claims toward the Red Sea reflect the persistence of unresolved historical dynamics. The following section explores this most recent phase and situates it within Ethiopia’s broader trajectory.

Abiy Ahmed’s ascent to power in 2018 produced initial optimism, domestically and internationally. His release of political prisoners, legalization of opposition groups, and public and unconditional acceptance of the EEBC ruling culminated in the Jeddah Peace Agreement and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet the reformist period quickly unraveled. Conflict intensified in Oromia between federal forces and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), rooted in long-standing Oromo marginalization and the fragmentation of the Oromo Liberation Front.¹² The insurgency evolved into a sustained conflict with severe humanitarian consequences.

The 2020 outbreak of the Tigray War marked an even more devastating chapter. Independent estimates, including those by Ghent University, indicate that between 300,000 and 800,000 civilians may have died from violence, starvation, and the collapse of essential services, making it the deadliest conflict of the twenty-first century.¹³

Amid widening internal crisis, Abiy shifted toward territorial revisionism. In 2023, he declared that Ethiopia’s “natural border” lies at the Red Sea and suggested that maritime access could be obtained “even by force,” reviving expansionist claims not heard since the Derg era.¹⁴ This rhetoric has intensified regional tensions and brought Ethiopia and Eritrea to the brink of conflict, not because of Eritrean actions, but as a consequence of Ethiopia’s domestic fragmentation and its leadership’s search for external scapegoats.

6. Ethiopia’s Contemporary Crisis

The accumulation of conflicts after 2018 signals a deeper structural crisis rather than isolated unrest. Internal displacement, humanitarian emergencies, and political fragmentation reveal the costs of a state unable to reconcile its imperial foundations with the aspirations of its many nations and communities. The final analytical section details the scale and character of this contemporary crisis and highlights the dangers posed by continued governance through coercion and expansionist rhetoric.

The human cost of Ethiopia’s instability is unparalleled. Between 2018 and 2022, conflict and violence produced 12.96 million internal displacements, the highest figure globally during that period.¹⁵ Ethiopia recorded 5.1 million new displacements in 2021 alone, more than any other country.¹⁶ As of mid-2025, an estimated 4.5 million Ethiopians remain displaced.

Violence continues across multiple regions: the Tigray War and its aftermath, the OLA-federal conflict in Oromia, armed resistance in Amhara, recurrent Gedeo–Guji clashes, and instability in the Somali and Benishangul-Gumuz regions. These conflicts have devastated infrastructure, destroyed livelihoods, and generated famine-like conditions in several areas.

The federal government has responded by tightening authoritarian controls and pursuing foreign-policy gambits, including unilateral attempts to secure maritime access through Somaliland.

The historical arc traced across these sections makes clear that Ethiopia’s instability is not the result of episodic mismanagement, but the product of structural contradictions embedded in the very formation of the state. The conclusion draws these threads together and outlines the political and institutional changes necessary for a durable peace.

7. Ethiopia: Selling the Nation to Foreign Bidders While Its Peasants Starve

Ethiopia has entered a new age of dispossession, one in which the state leases its most fertile lands to foreign billionaires while the very people who have lived on those soils for generations are pushed aside, starved, and silenced. In Gambella and other fertile regions, the rural poor are being driven back into the same landlessness and humiliation that helped ignite the 1974 revolution, forced to watch Saudi, Indian, Chinese, and Western agribusinesses fence off hundreds of thousands of hectares for export crops. Companies like Saudi Star, Karuturi, and Ruchi irrigate vast plantations for rice to the Gulf, soybeans to Asia, and biofuels to foreign markets, while the Anuak, Nuer, and other indigenous communities are uprooted, stripped of forests and water, and told they are being “villagized” for their own good.¹⁷ Their own description is far more honest: “We are living like refugees in our own country.”

The contradictions are staggering. Ethiopia exports rice and boasts of “wheat self-sufficiency,” yet remains one of the world’s largest recipients of Canadian, American, and European wheat as food aid to feed its own people. Soldiers guard foreign-owned plantations while the displaced peasants watch their ancestral land transformed into profit zones for outsiders. Forests vanish, rivers are diverted, wildlife disappears, and entire communities are erased under the fiction of “foreign currency generation.” Investors enjoy unlimited access to water and natural resources, the profits flow abroad or into the pockets of corrupt elites, while peasants face hunger, displacement, and destitution.

In today’s Ethiopia, the tragedy is unmistakable: the land still belongs to the state, but the state belongs to the buyers. The rural majority has been thrust back into a pre-1974 reality—landless in their own homeland, watching their future auctioned to the highest bidder.

8. From Selling Land to Selling a Sea: Ethiopia’s Red Sea Rhetoric as Agent for Foreign Masters

Ethiopia’s new land colonialism is not an isolated tragedy; it is directly connected to the reckless rhetoric now being deployed about a supposed “sovereign right” to Somali, Djiboutian, and especially Eritrean coastlines. A government that sells its own interior to foreign investors for pennies is hardly fighting for national survival at sea. The Red Sea narrative is not driven by Ethiopian interests but by the demands of its external sponsors, chief among them the UAE, Israel, and other actors seeking security corridors, naval footholds, and agricultural monopolies. The same political class that hands over Gambella to Saudi Star and Karuturi is now conjuring a maritime fantasy to disguise its total failure to protect the livelihoods of its own people.

The facts are too stark to ignore. Ethiopia cannot feed its population yet boasts of exporting wheat grown on stolen land. It cannot safeguard the basic rights of peasants yet claims it deserves a coastline “by history” or “by right.” It cannot manage the land under its feet yet declares itself a guardian of seas it never owned. This is not national strategy; it is geopolitical errand work. Addis Ababa is once again positioning itself as a client state, an instrument for outside powers that covet access to the Horn’s waterways but prefer to operate through a dependent proxy. The UAE wants a compliant ally along the Red Sea corridor; Israel wants influence on maritime security; others seek commercial and military leverage. Ethiopia obliges because dependency has long been its political habit.

The Red Sea campaign is therefore a smokescreen, an attempt to divert public attention from Ethiopia’s internal collapse, the mass displacement of its peasants, and the auctioning of its farmland to foreign capital. A state that has returned its rural majority to pre-1974 dispossession has no credibility claiming to champion “sovereign access” to the sea. Its leaders are not fighting for the Ethiopian people; they are advancing the interests of foreign sponsors while the country sinks deeper into hunger, fragmentation, and economic despair. As in previous eras, from Menelik’s reliance on European arms to the Derg’s dependence on Soviet patronage, Ethiopia’s ruling elites are once again trading national dignity for external protection. The tragedy is that they now do so while stripping their own citizens of the soil beneath their feet—and dreaming of oceans they have no moral or legal claim to.

Conclusion

Ethiopia’s present turmoil is rooted in a century of political structures that were imposed rather than negotiated and sustained through coercion rather than consent. The modern state, forged through nineteenth-century conquest and later maintained through imperial centralization, military authoritarianism, and externally supported counterinsurgency, has not resolved the fundamental questions of land, identity, and political inclusion. The prolonged occupation of Eritrea, the dismantling of its federal status, and repeated attempts to assert dominance over diverse nations within Ethiopia set the stage for recurring cycles of conflict that have carried into the twenty-first century.

The persistence of civil wars in Oromia, Amhara, and elsewhere; the devastation wrought by the Tigray War; the staggering levels of internal displacement; and the revival of expansionist rhetoric directed toward the Red Sea all signal a state still struggling with unresolved historical contradictions. These crises reflect not spontaneous eruptions of violence but the predictable consequences of a political order that has long relied on centralization, militarization, and exclusion.

A sustainable path forward requires more than administrative adjustments or security-driven policy. Ethiopia must confront the structural legacies of its imperial formation, recognize the political aspirations of its many nations and communities, and cultivate a system that accommodates genuine pluralism. Without such an undertaking, the country risks deeper fragmentation, continued humanitarian catastrophe, and renewed regional conflict. The weight of history will continue to shape Ethiopia’s future unless a political settlement is forged that addresses the profound grievances that have accumulated over generations.

Footnotes

1. Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 140–145.
2. Bonnie K. Holcomb & Sisay Ibssa, Invention of Ethiopia: The Making of Dependent Colonial State in Northeast Africa, Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1990.
3. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 390 A (V), “Eritrea: Report of the Commissioner,” 1950.
4. Lt. General Kebede Gebre, confidential memo to Haile Selassie.
5. Bahru Zewde, A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855–1991 (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), 222–240.
6. Gebru Tareke, The Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn of Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 43–48.
7. Christopher Clapham, “The Soviet Union and the Derg,” Journal of Communist Studies 5, no. 1 (1989): 67–88.
8. UN Observer Mission to Verify the Referendum in Eritrea (UNOVER), Final Report, 1993.
9. International Crisis Group, “Ethiopia and Eritrea: War or Peace?” Africa Report No. 68, 2002.
10. Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission, “Decision Regarding Delimitation of the Border,” The Hague, 2002.
11. Human Rights Watch, Service for Life: State Repression and Indefinite Conscription in Eritrea (2009), introductory discussion on sanctions narratives.
12. Asafa Jalata, Oromo Nationalism and the Ethiopian Discourse (Lawrenceville: Red Sea Press, 1998).
13. Jan Nyssen et al., Ghent University, “Tigray War Mortality Estimates,” 2022.
14. Ethiopian Parliament, Official Transcript of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Speech, 13 October 2023.
15. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID), 2023.
16. IDMC, “Ethiopia Country Profile,” updated 2024.
17. Gilles van Kote, Scramble for Ethiopia’s Land, Le Monde, 01/05/2012. (Translated from French). The original article in French is available here https://farmlandgrab.org/uploads/attachment/12010618.pdf.
    

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