The larger inquiry behind an argument previously introduced to Borkena readers
By Fikeru Zewdie
Readers of Borkena may recall my earlier article, “Reconciliation Is Also Prevention,” which was drawn from the then-forthcoming book Ethiopia’s Crisis of Legitimacy.
That article advanced a simple proposition: reconciliation should not be understood only as something societies pursue after violence has ended. In deeply divided societies, reconciliation can also serve a preventive function. By rebuilding trust, creating credible avenues for dialogue, protecting civic belonging, and strengthening institutions capable of managing disagreement peacefully, reconciliation can help reduce the conditions through which political fragmentation becomes more dangerous.
But that argument raised a larger question.
What happens when a state retains authority but begins to lose legitimacy? That question became the organizing inquiry of the book from which the earlier article emerged.
Beyond Authority
Governments can continue to exercise authority even when public confidence weakens.
Institutions may remain operational. Laws may continue to be enforced. Diplomatic relationships may continue. International partners may speak of stability, development, security cooperation, and economic progress.
Yet beneath that continuity, another condition may develop: a widening distance between institutions exercising authority and citizens expected to regard that authority as fair, accountable, and legitimate.
That distinction—between authority and legitimacy—became central to Ethiopia’s Crisis of Legitimacy.
Authority enables institutions to govern.
Legitimacy helps citizens accept the exercise of that authority as rightful. Durable governance requires both.
The inquiry eventually led to another distinction: strategic stability and legitimate stability.
Strategic stability may preserve continuity, security, predictability, diplomatic relationships, and the state itself. These objectives matter.
But legitimate stability requires something deeper: institutional trust, civic inclusion, accountability, peaceful disagreement, reconciliation, and confidence that common institutions belong to citizens across political and social differences.
A country can therefore appear stable while the civic foundations beneath that stability are becoming increasingly fragile.
This leads to one of the book’s central propositions:
Stability imposed without legitimacy eventually becomes fragility.
Where the Inquiry Led
The book does not end with diagnosis.
If declining legitimacy contributes to fragility, another question necessarily follows: How can legitimacy be rebuilt?
That question moves the inquiry toward institutional trust, the civic contract, national dialogue and reconciliation, accountable institutions, security-sector neutrality, inclusive economic opportunity, information integrity, the role of the diaspora, and the responsibilities of international partners.
I will leave those arguments to the book rather than reproduce them here.
What matters for this continuation of the Borkena conversation is how the questions became connected.
“Reconciliation Is Also Prevention” began with the proposition that reconciliation can help prevent deeper national fragmentation.
The larger inquiry asked what makes such prevention institutionally possible. And that ultimately produced a broader question:
How do nations preserve their future through legitimate governance?
Ethiopia is the central case examined in the book, but the question is not uniquely Ethiopian. Wherever authority survives while public confidence deteriorates, wherever stability is measured without examining legitimacy, and wherever political differences threaten the ability of citizens to imagine a shared future, the same institutional question deserves consideration.
I do not present the book as a final answer to that question.
I present it as an invitation to continue examining it.
Books are not monuments to finished thinking. They are invitations to continue thinking. “Reconciliation Is Also Prevention” was one part of that invitation.
Ethiopia’s Crisis of Legitimacy is where the larger inquiry led.
Ethiopia’s Crisis of Legitimacy
How Nations Preserve Their Future Through Legitimate Governance
Fikeru Zewdie
DRJJ Lighthouse Press
Available in paperback on Amazon.
.Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com
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