Author’s Note: This essay argues that Ethiopia’s ongoing crisis is not merely political or ethnic, but structural—a consequence of the gradual erosion of the buffers that allow societies to absorb shock and adapt without fracture. It proposes “restraint” as the core of a renewed national idea, one capable of turning diversity into durability.
From Endurance to Structural Exhaustion
Ethiopia is often described through the language of endurance. Across centuries of upheaval—imperial rise and collapse, revolution, famine, war, and repeated political reinvention—the country has survived where many others have fractured. This resilience has become a source of pride and a default explanation for continuity. Yet survival, powerful as it is, now lacks explanatory and constructive force. Historical resilience alone cannot compensate for deepening division, eroding trust, and the exhaustion of the institutional and social buffers that once absorbed crisis.
Today, Ethiopia faces a more dangerous condition than instability: a system unable to correct itself. Political life is dominated by emergency response rather than future-building; institutions struggle to learn, adapt, or arbitrate conflict; and social diversity, once a source of cultural richness, is experienced as a fault line rather than a shared foundation. Under these conditions, resilience risks becoming a liability—a means of enduring repeated shocks without restoring the capacity to withstand the next.
To break this cycle of crisis and survival, Ethiopia requires more than technical reform or episodic political accommodation. It must forge a new, Living National Idea—a unifying dream born of inclusive dialogue and embodied in revitalized civic institutions. Such an idea cannot function as ideology or nostalgia. It must restore coherence where governing redundancies have been stripped away, drawing from Ethiopia’s communitarian traditions, such as mahaber, while remaining critically engaged with modern ideals of pluralism, justice, and shared citizenship. Only through such a synthesis can Ethiopia transform its legendary capacity for survival into a shared national purpose and its vast diversity into a durable source of strength.
The Erosion of Governing Redundancies
Ethiopia’s present fragility is not the product of a single regime or recent crisis. It is the outcome of a long erosion of the redundancies that allow complex societies to absorb shock, correct error, and govern without collapse. What appears as political succession is, structurally, a single trajectory: the systematic elimination of buffers that once separated disagreement from violence, authority from arbitrariness, and crisis from disintegration.
The Derg initiated this process through surgical de-institutionalization. In the name of ideological purity and revolutionary efficiency, it dismantled the state’s administrative memory, annihilated its intellectual class, replaced law with decree, and eradicated autonomous mediators of social trust. Bureaucracy was stripped of merit, universities of inquiry, courts of impartiality, and society of independent anchors. What remained was a terrifyingly efficient but catastrophically brittle command structure—one that vaporized the moment external patronage was withdrawn.
The EPRDF did not reverse this drawdown; it refined it. Where the Derg relied on terror, the EPRDF relied on mediation and fragmentation. Ethnic federalism provided recognition but hollowed citizenship; party-controlled accumulation replaced state capacity; law became a precise instrument of political warfare. Redundancies were not restored but monopolized. Conflict resolution, economic access, and political belonging were all routed through a single gatekeeper—the party itself. Stability was achieved not through resilience, but through controlled dependence, financed by external aid and masked by growth.
By the mid-2010s, this architecture reached its structural limit. As ecological pressure intensified and geopolitical patronage weakened, the absence of internal buffers became decisive. Protest, drought, and fiscal stress converged on a state with no shock absorbers left. Fragmentation was not an accident; it was the logical expression of a system that had replaced redundancy with control.
The post-2018 reform project inherited this hollowed structure. Its limited traction stems less from flawed intent than from structural mismatch. Technocratic tools, digital systems, and recentralization efforts presuppose the very administrative, cognitive, and social redundancies that decades of governance eroded. Well-meaning attempts at repair have, in practice, deepened bifurcation: a widening chasm between a capable, centralized, and technocratic enclave (often state-affiliated, urban, and digitized) and a demoralized, excluded, and distrustful periphery (where the state is experienced as absent, predatory, or irrelevant).
