Tigray has already proved, at devastating cost, that it can endure. What it has not yet proved is that it can govern itself as free citizens rather than as instruments of whichever project claims to speak in its name. That is the real Tigray dilemma.
Source: Ethiopia Insight
30 September, 2026
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Part II — Liberation secured survival while leaving Tigray’s political order unfinished.
Demographics
Part I showed how Tigray’s liberation movement won the war’s first battles but never built a political order capable of surviving peace.
Federal autonomy came without credible guarantees, military gains went unconverted into a settlement, and Pretoria stopped the fighting without answering what it was fought over. Part II picks up where that leaves off.
Military Limits
The war exposed the same imbalance between mobilization and political conversion. Political scientist Kjetil Tronvoll has described it as four overlapping conflicts: a constitutional struggle between the federal government and Tigray, a territorial war between Amhara and Tigrayan claimants over Western Tigray, a war of long-deferred revenge involving Eritrea, and a separate contest between Oromo political forces and the federal center. Any Tigrayan strategy built only around the first was bound to be incomplete.
Military recovery never became political settlement. When Tigrayan forces later carried the war into Amhara and Afar, battlefield momentum did not overcome diplomatic isolation. Credible, well-documented allegations of serious violations by Tigrayan forces during that phase, including killings, sexual violence and looting, belong permanently in the record and should be subject to prosecution wherever evidence supports it. The narrower lesson is that military effectiveness cannot substitute for political strategy.
Pretoria, signed on November 2, 2022, achieved the cessation of large-scale violence, a genuine and considerable achievement, without resolving the structural grievances that produced the conflict. Territory, displacement, accountability, Eritrean involvement, demobilization and Tigray’s constitutional future remain unresolved. Pretoria ended the war. It did not answer the question over which the war had been fought.
The post-Pretoria period provides the sharpest evidence because it strips away the excuse of active war and exposes the underlying failure of Tigrayan nationalism. Tigray’s political elite fractured instead of renewing itself. Rival camps invoked legality, historical legitimacy and revolutionary credentials against one another while military authority became entangled with political contestation.
By 2026, the TPLF had moved to restore the pre-war regional council even as the institutional order Pretoria was meant to build remained unresolved. Tigray has entered a genuine gray zone: neither an ordinary constituent unit of the federation nor a territory pursuing independence through an agreed process, no longer at full-scale war but not securely at peace.
Africans & Diaspora
That fracturing has cost Tigray more than internal cohesion. It has become, whether by design or default, a shield for the very actors it should be holding to account. A TPLF split into competing camps, each contesting the other’s legitimacy, cannot mount the unified case for accountability that documented wartime crimes require.
The fragmentation has also handed Eritrea, Amhara regional forces and the federal government an opening to deny or minimize their own conduct. No single Tigrayan voice now speaks with enough authority to hold the record straight.
Accusations from Mekelle can be dismissed by interested parties as one faction’s propaganda against another. The result is a vacuum in which multiple armed actors operate with few accountability constraints.
More dangerous still is the assumption, shared by parts of Tigray’s political elite, that this limbo will resolve itself through persistence, and that temporary tactical alliances against a common adversary constitute a political strategy.
A political vacuum does not fill itself with justice. It fills with whichever actor is most organized and least accountable. Waiting inside that vacuum while calling it patience is itself a strategic choice, and it cedes the terms of eventual settlement to whoever moves first.
Tactical Alliances
A significant part of Tigray’s political and intellectual class, led by the TPLF, has come to regard the loose coalition known in Tigrinya as Tsimdo — bringing together elements of the TPLF, the Eritrean government, Amhara Fano militias organized under the Amhara Fano National Movement, and the Oromo Liberation Army — as a strategic asset, perhaps the most serious pressure Abiy Ahmed’s government has faced since Pretoria.
That view is understandable on its own terms. A federal government fighting on several fronts has less room to concentrate force, less capacity to control the narrative and greater incentive to negotiate. For an elite that has watched Tigray’s isolation deepen since 2022, allies capable of complicating Addis Ababa’s position are naturally attractive.
The harder question is what Tigray gains once the immediate crisis passes. Each member of the coalition is pursuing objectives that have little to do with Tigray’s long-term security and, in at least one case, are directly incompatible with it.
Executive Branch
One of Fano’s core demands is legal recognition of the Amhara region’s current extraconstitutional control of Western Tigray. The TPLF, however, has shown no intention of accepting that status quo. Two members of the coalition are therefore working toward outcomes that cannot both prevail.
Eritrean forces committed some of the war’s most severe documented atrocities against Tigrayan civilians, while President Isaias Afwerki marked the TPLF’s fall from federal power in 2018 by declaring publicly that it was game over for the movement.
A partnership with that government, entered without first securing accountability for what its forces did, asks Tigrayans to treat their dead as negotiable when tactical interests realign. It is difficult to see what durable protection Tigray receives in exchange.
The Oromo Liberation Army’s objectives, centered on political representation for Oromos within or against the Ethiopian state, share little structural overlap with Tigray’s security concerns beyond the coincidence of a common adversary.
None of this means the coalition cannot weaken Abiy’s government in the near term. It may succeed at exactly that. But a coalition assembled around a common adversary offers no obvious mechanism for determining what its members owe one another, or Tigray, once that adversary is gone.
The question for the Tigrayan elite investing political capital in this alliance is therefore simple: what happens to Tigray the morning after it succeeds, and has anyone in the coalition answered that question?
Opposition Deficit
The failures of Tigray’s old political class do not excuse the generation challenging it. Younger opposition parties, activists and intellectuals have become skilled at exposing authoritarianism, strategic miscalculation and organizational stagnation, much of which is deserved.
Too much of that criticism, however, has curdled into a diaspora and social-media culture that mistakes rhetorical volume for insight and grievance for strategy.
Many of Tigray’s most visible commentators have built reputations on denunciation while producing little in the way of a draft constitution, fiscal plan or institution capable of outlasting a single leader.
Elleni Centime Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory offers a useful historical lens for understanding this problem. Her study of Ethiopian revolutionary intellectual life examines how successive generations turned social theory into political practice, and how ideas produced in the student movement continued to shape the state after 1974.
The book is not an analysis of contemporary Tigray, but its broader lesson is relevant: Ethiopia has repeatedly produced sophisticated political critique without resolving the institutional problem of turning ideas into durable political arrangements.
The established political class possesses organization without a convincing future. The emerging one possesses critique without organization of its own.
Tigray’s unresolved constitutional divide is further obscured by a familiar Ethiopian argument: that history alone can settle its political future. Mulugeta Aregawi’s new book makes that case from a Tigrayan perspective, and its favorable reception in some Addis Ababa circles is unsurprising, since a Tigrayan critic emphasizing shared history reinforces an older narrative of Ethiopian unity.
But the conclusion does not follow from the history. Samantha Kelly’s scholarship on medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea shows the depth of the political, religious and cultural entanglement across the region long before either the TPLF or the modern Ethiopian state. That history matters, but it does not create a permanent constitutional contract binding present generations.
Africans & Diaspora
A theory of unity that can explain Axum but cannot confront the recent war offers continuity without political repair. Nor does the migration of young Tigrayans to Addis Ababa for work amount to abandonment of Tigrayan political claims. Migration can be an adaptive response to economic and social conditions; interpreting it as political forgetting confuses mobility with amnesia.
The same discipline applies in both directions. The catastrophe of the war does not by itself establish that independence is wise or viable, and rejecting Ethiopian historical determinism while embracing a Tigrayan version of the same argument merely reverses the error.
Political Nationalism
The failures catalogued above — the TPLF’s organizational monopoly, the federal order’s hollow guarantees, the war’s incomplete strategy and an alliance built on convenience rather than shared purpose — trace back to one confusion: mistaking control of the moment for governance of the future. The name for that confusion is status nationalism. The alternative proposed here is political nationalism.
A new flag does not by itself guarantee judicial independence. International scholarship on self-determination makes a related point. Allen Buchanan approaches secession through questions of justice and political legitimacy rather than treating it as an automatic entitlement of any group that defines itself as a nation. Milena Sterio, examining self-determination and recognition, emphasizes the gap between legal principle and the political interests that shape recognition of new states.
International law offers no automatic path to secession. Scholarship on self-determination and secession has found no general international right to secession, while leaving contested questions around remedial secession unresolved. Neither settles Tigray’s case. Together, however, they suggest that a persuasive case for independence must be built rather than simply asserted.
Executive Branch
Tigrayan nationalism must therefore move from status nationalism, which asks where Tigray belongs, toward political nationalism, which asks what kind of political community Tigray should become. Status nationalism remains preoccupied with Ethiopia, independence and recognition.
Political nationalism begins with the citizen and asks how power will be constituted, limited and held accountable through democratic consent, equal citizenship, civilian control of the military and independent institutions.
Wayne Norman’s work on multinational states makes a useful point: a nation does not have to become a separate state to exercise meaningful self-government. Federalism can provide a framework for national self-determination within a shared state, provided institutions are designed to protect autonomy and democratic rights.
Federal arrangements can therefore be a genuine expression of national self-government rather than a consolation prize for a nation denied independence. Ethiopia’s federal experiment failed primarily because the federal government’s commitments were never made sufficiently credible, not because federalism is inherently incapable of accommodating national self-government.
The deeper failure is one of credible commitment and institutional design. Any movement arguing for independence must also explain how an independent Tigrayan state would avoid reproducing the same failure against its own people and future opposition.
This requires two principles Tigrayan politics has so far treated as optional. The first is civic nationalism: membership defined by citizenship rather than blood or dialect, so an Amhara long settled in Mekelle or a child of mixed parentage holds the same claim as anyone tracing an unbroken lineage to Axum. A nationalism anchored in ancestry tends to treat internal difference as betrayal. One anchored in citizenship and institutions can hold difference together within a political community.
Demographics
Alemseged Abbay’s comparative study of the Eritrean and Tigrayan movements helps illuminate the contrast. He argues that colonial partition pushed Eritrean nationalism toward an identity broad enough to encompass Christians and Muslims, highlanders and lowlanders, under one flag, while Tigrayan nationalism developed without a comparable colonial boundary and remained more closely tied to ethnicity and the Axumite past.
Eritrea’s experience should not, however, be confused with democratic success. Independent Eritrea has never implemented its 1997 constitution, permits no legal opposition and maintains indefinite national service. Civic nationalism and democratic nationalism are separate achievements: Eritrea illustrates the possibility of the first without the second.
Democratic nationalism means that authority derives from, and must periodically return to, the consent of the governed through contested elections, not from having once carried a rifle. A liberation record is a historical fact, not a currency that can be spent indefinitely against the demands of voters.
Benedict Anderson’s account of nations as imagined communities makes another point relevant here: national identity is sustained through shared narratives, which means the story Tigrayans tell about themselves can be revised.
Mahmood Mamdani’s work on colonial and postcolonial states, meanwhile, shows the dangers of political orders that divide people into citizens and subjects according to group membership. A future Tigrayan polity should therefore be judged by whether it produces citizens or simply changes who occupies the rank of subject.
Political Commitments
The common thread is that Tigrayan nationalism has always been clearer about what it must survive than about what that survival is for. Any movement seeking authority in Tigray should state publicly and specifically the principles that will bind it once it holds power.
Clubs & Organizations
The proper test of any future Tigrayan order is not whether it conforms to a theory of federalism or sovereignty, but whether it reduces injustice for people living under it. Democratic authorization must replace permanent revolutionary legitimacy. Civilian institutions must control armed power. National resources must be governed transparently rather than channeled through party or military networks.
These principles determine whether a young Tigrayan is treated as a citizen or a soldier, whether a political opponent retains basic rights during an emergency, and whether crimes committed by Tigrayan actors face the same accountability demanded of everyone else. Peace itself must become a nationalist value rather than a tactical concession.
Any resort to another war requires legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, exhaustion of alternatives short of war and a reasonable prospect of success. These are the minimum disciplines a Tigrayan leadership owes a population that has already paid the cost of a war fought without adequate political strategy. Anyone proposing another war carries the burden of demonstrating those conditions, not merely asserting conviction.
Beyond Liberation
Trace the argument back to its start and the pattern holds. Liberation became organizational monopoly instead of pluralism. Federal status arrived without institutions capable of securing it. Military endurance never became political settlement. Pretoria stopped the killing and left the underlying question where the war had found it.
A fractured post-war leadership converted paralysis into patience. A tactical alliance of convenience now stands in for a strategy no one has actually written down. At every stage, control of the moment has been mistaken for authority over the future.
Africans & Diaspora
None of this decides in advance whether Tigray should remain inside a transformed Ethiopian federation, negotiate a new arrangement or pursue independence. It establishes what any of those arrangements would have to accomplish, regardless of which flag eventually flies over Mekelle.
No organization, military force, historical narrative or liberation credential carries a claim superior to the democratic agency of Tigrayans themselves. No generation owns Tigray’s future simply because it paid for Tigray’s past.
Tigray has already proved, at devastating cost, that it can endure.
What it has not yet proved is that it can govern itself as free citizens rather than as instruments of whichever project claims to speak in its name. That is the real Tigray dilemma.
It will not be answered by another slogan, alliance or war, but when Tigrayan nationalism states plainly what it exists to protect, what it will never again permit in Tigray’s name, and what kind of country all this was ever supposed to be for.
