Another Tigray War? Key Background Readings

Elections, power struggles, regional dynamics, and unresolved trauma.

On June 1, Ethiopia held parliamentary elections. Results should come out this week, and Reuters along with many other outlets is predicting a “landslide win” for incumbent Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (took office 2018) and his Prosperity Party. The elections were marked by numerous security concerns and irregularities. One of the biggest post-election concerns, meanwhile, is whether war will resume between the central government and the regional authorities in the Tigray region. As Reuters explains:

More than 50 million people were registered to vote, but there ‌was no election in the northern Tigray region, where organisers had cited “unfavourable conditions” in the aftermath of a two-year civil war and amid continuing political turmoil.

[…]

Though a 2022 peace deal ended the civil war in Tigray, which researchers say caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, a move last month by the main political party there to reassert control over the region’s political administration has led Ethiopian officials and analysts to warn of the risk of fresh unrest.

For background, here are four themes that have helped me understand some of the dynamics involved.

Elections, Control, and Violence

DW’s Eshete Bekele reported (May 29) on the immediate pre-election atmosphere in Tigray. Bekele highlights how Tigray’s lack of elected representation in Addis Ababa, pre- and post-election, is one of many gaps in implementation of the 2022 Pretoria Agreement meant to end the war. Bekele retraces the intertwined history of elections and violence from 2020 to the present:

In 2020, Ethiopia’s government under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had to postpone the country’s planned elections due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The TPLF [Tigray People’s Liberation Front] — the largest and most dominant party in the country’s northern Tigray region — accused Abiy of unconstitutionally extending his government’s term this way, and went on to arrange its own local elections, which it won.

Afterwards, the TPLF denied the federal government’s legal authority over the Tigray region; the standoff quickly escalated into military hostilities between the TPLF and the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF).

Between 2020 and 2022, an estimated 600,000 people died in the ensuing fighting, with both sides accusing each other of initiating the conflict.

In November 2022, following the Pretoria peace agreement between the Ethiopian government and the TPLF, the results of the 2020 local elections in Tigray were eventually annulled and an interim regional administration was established in Tigray, sidelining TPLF’s wartime leaders.

Bekele goes on to discuss how both the Prime Minister and the TPLF leadership have taken unilateral decisions about the administration of Tigray, which takes us to the next piece.

Contending to Control Tigray’s Administration

In a Q&A (May 15), International Crisis Group’s Magnus Taylor laid out the power struggle over who will administer Tigray. In April, Taylor says, “the federal government unilaterally extended the mandate of Tigray’s interim administration, created under the peace deal, and reappointed Tadesse [Werede, Abiy’s choice for interim regional administrator] to another year in office.” In response, the TPLF “replaced his administration with a new regional council. This body is led by TPLF chair Debretsion Gebremichael, who was the region’s leader during a bloody 2020-2022 war between Tigray and the federal government.” Taylor delves into not just relations between Addis Ababa and Mekelle (Tigray’s capital), but also dynamics within the TPLF, whose “old guard,” including Debretsion, bucked against what they saw as the deeply unfavorable terms of the Pretoria Agreement. Taylor noted that complex regional dynamics involving Ethiopia, as well as the desire to mark a political triumph in the June elections, could all convince Addis Ababa not to undertake a super-escalatory military response. Taylor sketched a few possibilities:

There are no guarantees that Addis Ababa will forebear, even temporarily. Abiy may view the TPLF’s actions as a grave provocation that undercuts Ethiopia’s sovereignty and demands a response. Even if Abiy does not immediately respond militarily, the federal government may conclude that the only long-term solution is through a military operation to remove the TPLF administration from power and replace it with one that is more aligned with Addis Ababa. Another option Abiy may take is to embark on a campaign focused on enforcing a tighter economic blockade, and possibly aerial strikes, rather than a new ground invasion. The possibility that such operations could escalate cannot be discounted.

The regional picture receives sustained discussion in the Taylor Q&A, and also in the next piece.

Regional Dynamics

At Democracy in Africa (March 9), Yohannes Gedamu offers a succinct discussion of the Ethiopia-Tigray-Eritrea triangle. Gedamu goes through the long history of tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea from Eritrea’s 1993 secession through the 1998-2000 war through the 2018 peace deal between the two countries. Gedamu then details more recent dynamics, including alleged Eritrean support for insurgencies in different regions of Ethiopia, and above all Eritrea’s shifting postures vis-a-vis the TPLF:

After Abiy came to power in April 2018, the Tigrayan grip on Ethiopia ended. In November 2020, the Tigray war started. Eritrea blamed the Tigray People’s Liberation Front for its own economic and political fragility and isolation, and supported Abiy against the Tigrayans.

[…]

Eritrea fought on Ethiopia’s side during the war. When the war ended, Eritrea complained that it was not consulted or invited by Ethiopia to be a party to the peace accord.

Ethiopia now claims that Eritrea has switched alliances. After the Tigray war concluded and a provisional administration was installed in Mekelle, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the government of Ethiopia failed to address their differences. And Eritrea extended its hand to its historic foe, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

Gedamu and many others have called for diplomacy aimed at reducing tensions, but the regional picture is only becoming more complex, including as Ethiopia becomes more deeply involved in Sudan’s war. Ethiopia’s alleged support to the Rapid Support Forces could even boomerang back onto Ethiopia itself. As Mat Nashed bluntly warned at the New Humanitarian (March 23), “The prospect of renewed war in northern Ethiopia between government forces, Tigray factions, and Eritrea risks pulling in neighbouring Sudan and merging two of the deadliest conflicts in recent history.” For further reading on the regional picture, see Hilary Matfess’ May piece in Foreign Affairs. Meanwhile, the 2020-2022 war’s fallout remains largely unaddressed in terms of displacement and trauma.

Aftershocks and Silence

Tigrayans have, in different ways, lamented the devastation left by the last war and have pointed to numerous unresolved issues. An anonymous former combatant, writing at the New Humanitarian in August 2025, sounds bleak:

They waged war not only on the TPLF, but against the entire people of Tigray.

Innocent civilians were massacred and thousands of women were raped. Western Tigray was ethnically cleansed by the Amhara militias, who burned villages to the ground and forced tens of thousands of Tigrayans to leave their homeland and cross the Tekeze River into Sudan.

Five years later, those displaced people are still languishing in camps, hungry and diseased.

Like thousands of others, I joined the resistance because I felt I had no choice. I was not fighting for the TPLF: I was fighting to defend my family, my land and my people. I watched many of my comrades die during the struggle. I was willing to die myself, because I believed that we had a just cause.

That has all disappeared now, as if our sacrifices meant nothing.

The scholar Teklehaymanot Weldemichel, meanwhile, has argued that the Ethiopian government created a “zone of invisibility” around the Tigray War and its effects. He writes:

Why, despite its unparalleled scale, has this crisis remained invisible to the world? While obvious factors such as race and the peripherality of the region play a role, making Tigray a blind spot in global geopolitics, these explanations are neither sufficient nor the sole reasons. In this article, I focus on the deliberate steps taken by the Ethiopian government and its allies to conceal atrocities and human rights violations from global scrutiny.

Relatedly, I should note that there is serious debate about whether “genocide” is the right term to apply to the violence against Tigrayans. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International concluded in 2022 that ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity had occurred, but also that they had “not found the crime of genocide in Western Tigray based on the evidence we collected, but our organizations do not exclude the possibility. We also note that there is no formal hierarchy of crimes under international law: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are all considered the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.”

At the World Peace Foundation, Mulugeta Gebrehiwot and Alex de Waal stated directly in a 2025 essay that genocide had occurred - while simultaneously laying significant responsibility for the war’s arc, and its aftermath, at the feet of the TPLF leadership. Some excerpts:

Abiy Ahmed, Isaias Afewerki and their allies, subordinates and minions committed the crime of genocide against the people of Tigray.

[…]

Three years after active fighting and massacres finished, the TPLF is completing the job of dividing, demoralizing and dehumanizing the people of Tigray. It is collaborating in the ongoing genocide of their own people.

The TPLF senior officials and those who have splintered from them should be utterly ashamed. They have betrayed the people’s trust. It is time for them to go.

A destroyed playground in Mekelle, 2022 via Wikimedia Commons

Connecting all of these themes, then, the current situation is shaped by a peace deal on its last legs, a tumultuous regional environment, political exclusions and power struggles at the level of Ethiopia and of Tigray, and the unresolved grievances and tragedies of the last war. Meanwhile, this could be a tense week as election results come out - and as even relatively minor incidents, such as a reported drone strike in northwestern Tigray on June 5, could presage a return to wider war.