Ethiopia's Peace Is Crumbling — and the Alliances Prove It

The Peace Agreement That Was Never Really Peace

Ethiopia’s Pretoria Agreement, signed in November 2022, ended two years of full-scale war between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. But from the start, it was a ceasefire built on unresolved disputes — not a settlement. The fighting that erupted this week in Tigray is not a breakdown of peace. It is the logical continuation of a process that never actually resolved the war’s root causes.

What makes the current escalation dangerous is not just the intensity of the fighting. It is the alliance forming around it.

Former Enemies, Common Opposition

The most significant development is not the fighting itself but the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, announced this month by seven armed movements. Among its members are the TPLF and the Amhara Fano National Movement — groups that fought on opposite sides during the 2020–2022 war. Fano fighters stood alongside federal troops against the TPLF. Now they stand together against Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government.

This reversal matters. During the last war, the federal alliance included Eritrean forces and Amhara fighters. Both have since fallen out with Abiy. Eritrea’s President Isaias Afwerki has accused Addis Ababa of pursuing access to Red Sea ports at Eritrea’s expense. Abiy has accused Eritrea of backing armed groups inside Ethiopia. Eritrea denies it. Either way, the former wartime partners are now likely adversaries.

The alliance also includes the Oromo Liberation Army, which has fought federal forces in central Ethiopia since 2018, and a faction of the Ogaden National Liberation Front in the Somali region. Common opposition to Abiy does not mean these groups agree on Ethiopia’s future. The TPLF and Fano still have competing claims to western Tigray. Their coalition is built on what they are against, not what they are for.

The structural irony is stark: Abiy Ahmed’s centralization agenda, which many analysts initially argued provoked the very resistance it sought to suppress, is now producing its own negation. By dismantling federal power-sharing mechanisms and concentrating authority within his Prosperity Party, Abiy transformed local grievances into coordinated opposition. The alliance’s announcement was not preceded by public negotiations between the member groups. Instead, it emerged through what sources describe as encrypted messaging channels and back-channel introductions facilitated by intermediaries with no formal political standing. That detail alone signals how far outside official processes these realignments have moved.

The Unresolved Core: Western Tigray

Western Tigray is the dispute that the Pretoria Agreement papered over without resolving. During the war, Amhara forces took control of the territory. Hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans were displaced. Tigrayan leaders say the land must be returned and the displaced must be allowed home. Amhara leaders say the territory was wrongfully incorporated into Tigray when regional boundaries were redrawn in 1992.

This is not a peripheral grievance. It is the dispute that fueled the last war and it remains unsolved. The federal government says Tigrayan forces have retained weapons they were meant to surrender under Pretoria. Tigrayan leaders say the government has failed to secure the withdrawal of outside forces or enable displaced people to return. Both sides are pointing at the other for starting this week’s clashes. Independent verification is scarce.

What has compounded the problem is the slow and uneven implementation of disarmament provisions. Under Pretoria, Tigray’s defenses were to be consolidated under a single regional police force, with heavy weapons surrendered to federal custodianship. Reports from the region indicate that small arms distribution has continued in parts of Tigray, while Amhara regional forces have maintained a visible presence in areas they captured during the war. The absence of monitoring mechanisms — the Pretoria deal never established an independent verification body — means there is no authoritative account of compliance.

Second-Order Effects Already Visible

The economic fallout is beginning to register. Ethiopia’s inflation rate, already elevated, has accelerated in regions bordering Tigray. Trade corridors through the Afar region have been disrupted, affecting imports that flow through the port of Djibouti. For a country where over 60 percent of trade depends on that single corridor, any disruption sends immediate price signals through the supply chain. Agricultural markets in central Ethiopia have seen disruptions as Oromo-region transport routes face intermittent closure.

On the humanitarian side, the displacement figures from the last war — over two million people — should serve as a baseline for concern. The current escalation has already triggered new internal displacement within Tigray, with the UN reporting approximately 780,000 people internally displaced before this latest round of fighting. Humanitarian access negotiations, which had shown tentative progress under Pretoria, are now stalled. Aid agencies operating in the region report that the security conditions required for safe passage are deteriorating faster than diplomatic channels can respond.

Regionally, the realignment is shifting Ethiopia’s posture toward its neighbors. Eritrea, no longer a partner of convenience, is now viewed by Abiy’s government as a hostile actor. This reverses a strategic arrangement that dated back to 1991, when Eritrean forces helped topple the Derg regime. The reversal raises questions about Eritrea’s capacity and willingness to project influence across the border — a capability it demonstrated decisively during the 2020–2022 war. Kenya and Uganda, key military partners of Ethiopia, have publicly urged de-escalation but have stopped short of offering mediation frameworks. Their caution reflects a broader discomfort among East African states with becoming entangled in a conflict that could redraw the region’s military balance.

What Happens Next

The African Union has called for an immediate halt and asked former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, who helped mediate the 2022 deal, to engage the parties urgently. IGAD, the East African bloc, has urged neighboring countries to avoid actions that could worsen the crisis. Neither body has enforcement power.

The risk of a wider war is real but not yet certain. Fighting has crossed Tigray’s borders into Afar and Amhara. The federal government already faces armed conflicts in other regions. The seizure of airports in Mekelle, Axum, and Shire by Tigrayan forces has disrupted civilian flights and drawn criticism from the AU for being inconsistent with Pretoria.

About three-quarters of a million people remained displaced within Tigray before this escalation. Whatever happens next, they are the ones who will pay the price.

The most plausible near-term scenario is not a return to the 2020–2022 pattern of total war but a protracted low-intensity conflict punctuated by periodic escalations. Each flare-up will further erode the institutional structures that Pretoria attempted to create. Local governance in Tigray, already weakened by the leadership dispute between the TPLF and the interim administration, is likely to fragment further. In Amhara, Fano’s dual identity — as both a regional militia and a member of a coalition opposition — creates ambiguous chains of command that make de-escalation negotiations structurally difficult. And in Oromia, where the OLA operates across a vast geographic area with porous governance, federal military responses tend to broaden rather than contain the conflict.

Why This Matters Beyond Ethiopia

International coverage of Ethiopia’s conflicts tends to focus on the human cost — which is real and urgent. But the broader implication is structural. Ethiopia is the second-most-populous country in Africa and a key security partner for Western nations. Its stability affects the Red Sea, the Nile Basin, and the Horn of Africa. A collapse into full-scale civil war would not stay contained.

The rise of a multi-group alliance challenges the assumption that Abiy Ahmed can isolate his opponents. It also shows how the Pretoria Agreement, by leaving contentious issues unresolved, created a framework where armed groups could regroup and realign rather than integrate. The TPLF faction led by Debretsion Gebremichael retook control of Tigray’s administration earlier this year, displacing the interim government established under the peace deal. That move alone undermined the agreement’s political architecture.

There is also a question of precedent. The Horn of Africa has witnessed multiple peace agreements that collapsed under the weight of unaddressed grievances — in South Sudan, Somalia, and Sudan. Each produced cascading effects on displacement, armed group proliferation, and regional destabilization. The difference with Ethiopia is its scale: a population of more than 120 million, a military of considerable size, and strategic positioning that makes external actors — from the United States to China to Gulf states — invested in outcomes they cannot fully control.

The question now is not whether Ethiopia is on the verge of another civil war — the signs are already visible. The question is whether the international community will treat this as a local conflict to be managed or a structural failure to be addressed before the next war begins in earnest. The alliance of seven groups signals that the old framework no longer contains Ethiopian politics. A new framework is either being built now, or it will be built by force.