Daring the Untried: Struggling for a New Path in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region

How prevailing post-war disillusionment could spark civic renewal

Tigray is a state currently in confusion. It is not just wounded by war—it is directionless in its aftermath. The promises of recovery have collapsed into factional power plays, moral drift, and public despair.

What remains is a society suspended between three painful options: the uncertain dream of independence, the bitter reality of federal reintegration, and a deep cynicism that rejects both. The war may have ended on paper, but the battle over Tigray’s soul has only begun.

Tigray today is not at a crossroads—it is adrift. It is no longer the united region that once mobilized with clarity during the devastating two-year war. Nor is it confidently marching toward recovery. Instead, it finds itself trapped in a bewildering state of political disorientation—torn between independence, federal reintegration, and paralyzing inaction.

What was once a struggle for survival has morphed into a competition of power retention, denial, and silence. It is not merely political—it is moral, generational, and spiritual.

Fractured Fronts

More than 600,000 lives were lost. Thousands remain missing. Whole towns were erased. Yet, despite the scale of the catastrophe, the post-war period has not ushered in a process of healing, reform, or accountability. Instead, it has exposed the deep fractures within Tigrayan society, particularly among its political elites and institutions.

At the heart of this confusion lies the fragmentation of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). One faction, deeply entrenched in the region’s old power structures, is desperately working to retain control—even after the devastation of war, it resists internal reform and dismisses calls for accountability and democratization.

A second faction, led by Getachew Reda, who served as head of the interim administration, has now splintered to form a new political party. While branding itself as a break from the old guard, this camp seems to be aligning with the very federal government responsible for much of the war’s destruction and for obstructing the implementation of the Pretoria Agreement.

The Ethiopian state remains a perpetrator of egregious violations and, at best, an ambivalent actor in the peace process. Both the Ethiopian and Eritrean regimes, in different ways, appear to view Tigray not as a polity with dignity and rights, but as a disposable buffer zone—an expendable geography in their broader ambitions of control and containment.

Meanwhile, a third force is emerging: a newly formed armed movement under a former TDF brigadier general, now organizing in four subdivisions near the Afar border. Their rise reflects growing despair with political stagnation and post-war betrayal. Yet their militarized approach risks recycling the very logic that led Tigray into catastrophe.

Unkept Promises

The Pretoria Agreement, signed with hope in 2022, has failed to deliver a meaningful transition. Implementation is selective. Justice is absent. Institutions remain gutted. What Tigray faces now is not just post-war fatigue—it is political exhaustion, moral erosion, and elite entrenchment.

Religious institutions, diaspora communities, and elite networks—many of whom were complicit, directly or indirectly, in TPLF rule—have largely retreated into silence or factional alignment. Except for a few courageous voices, the majority have offered no serious reckoning with the past or vision for the future. Their neutrality—or worse, quiet endorsement of old paradigms—has become part of the problem.

What is unfolding in Tigray is not simply a political rivalry; it is a symptom of a deeper crisis: the absence of a transformative political vision grounded in justice, accountability, and people-centered leadership.

The struggle is not between left and right, or even between centralization and independence—it is between competing failures, each unwilling to reckon with the moral catastrophe of the war, and each instrumentalizing the people’s pain for legitimacy.

Youth Alienation

The consequences are stark. Transitional justice has been reduced to rhetoric. While survivors demand truth-telling, reparation, and reform, elites negotiate power-sharing and political preservation behind closed doors. The victims of aerial bombardments, sexual violence, displacement, and famine are left without recourse or recognition.

There is no institutional architecture in place to document the harms, let alone address them. The mechanisms required for justice have been deliberately stalled or excluded from public discourse.

This collapse is not accidental. It is sustained by a culture of impunity deeply rooted in Ethiopia’s political history but now reproduced within Tigray’s own ranks. The very actors who led Tigray into war are now positioning themselves as its post-war stewards—without reflection, without apology, without reform. And the consequences are being paid by the people.

Worse still, the youth of Tigray—those who bore the brunt of conscription, displacement, and disillusionment—are increasingly alienated. They see through the contradictions: a leadership that claims victory while negotiating away dignity; a peace that silences dissent; a society that exalts martyrdom but criminalizes memory. The emergence of new resistance movements—however misguided or premature—reflects this deepening generational rupture.

From a peacebuilding perspective, Tigray is missing the necessary conditions for a sustainable transformation. True peace is not merely the absence of conflict—it requires structural redress, inclusive dialogue, and communal healing. These are absent. There is no participatory roadmap, no space for grassroots voices, no vision that moves beyond the binaries of TPLF loyalty or federal submission.

Conflict transformation theory reminds us that when unresolved trauma and unaddressed injustice persist, they inevitably morph into new cycles of violence, whether social, psychological, or physical.

Liberation theology teaches that the cry of the oppressed must be the compass of moral and political action. But in Tigray today, those cries are muffled by elite maneuvering and ideological nostalgia. A political theology that fails to account for the blood on its own hands is not liberation—it is betrayal. The absence of genuine repentance, ethical leadership, and community-grounded renewal has created a spiritual vacuum as much as a political one.

Even international actors, once outspoken about Tigray’s plight, have turned the page too quickly. With shifting geopolitical priorities, donor fatigue, and diplomatic calculations, the pressure on Ethiopian and Eritrean authorities to meet their obligations under the Pretoria Agreement has waned.

This external indifference reinforces internal impunity. Without sustained global attention, the opportunity for transitional justice and regional stabilization is slipping away.

Elusive Choices

Tigray’s present confusion is not only political—it is also existential. It is a region suspended between three unresolved trajectories. The first is the aspiration toward independence, born of deep historical grievances and war trauma, but lacking clarity, unity, or international backing.

The second is federal reintegration, which demands engagement with a central government complicit in unspeakable crimes and continuing to obstruct the full implementation of the Pretoria Agreement.

There is a third force in Tigray’s political psyche—a swelling current of resentment and passive cynicism. This is not a formally organized bloc, nor does it align neatly with armed movements like the one operating near the Afar border. That armed group, while a reaction to political disillusionment, appears more as a militarized offshoot of the pro-reintegration camp, seeking to forcibly displace the current TPLF leadership rather than envision a new social contract.

In contrast, the current of resentment I refer to is widespread but atomized—characterized by deep public distrust in all factions, fatigue with unfulfilled promises, and a collective withdrawal from political participation. It is a form of political paralysis born not from apathy, but from profound moral injury. Left unaddressed, this passive resentment is corrosive—it normalizes elite impunity, allows confusion to metastasize, and erodes the foundations of civic agency.

New Horizons

This is why a fourth option must be pursued—not as a slogan, but as a political project: a nonviolent civic movement grounded in grassroots legitimacy and detached from party control. Ethically anchored and tactically flexible, such a movement must reclaim the political space now monopolized by elite rivalries and war narratives. It must promote truth-telling, communal healing, and justice that goes beyond rhetoric.

Its infrastructure already exists in religious communities, survivor networks, student groups, and neighborhood elders. These are the veins of trust in a context where institutions have failed. Tigray’s youth—traumatized but not yet compromised—should be its heartbeat. The diaspora must evolve from partisan echo chambers into strategic support systems: funding local organizers, defending activists, and amplifying voices without silencing nuance.

This movement must avoid armed struggle and reject exhausted loyalties. It must wield moral clarity to hold all actors—TPLF, the federal government, Eritrea, and the international community—accountable. Only by shifting the center of gravity from elites to ordinary citizens can Tigray escape its cycle of betrayal.

Confusion, while painful, can become the soil of clarity and reinvention—if we stop waiting for failed elites and start building something new. The fourth option is not utopian. It is the only viable path that neither surrenders to federal domination nor replicates the violence of war.

The building blocks exist in trusted spiritual leaders, organizing students, resilient rural communities, and a global diaspora. The challenge is to connect, coordinate, and imagine. Not all will join, but enough can start. Enough to interrupt the cycle. Enough to remind Tigrayans that politics belongs to those who dare to act without permission.

The choice is not whether it is possible. The choice is whether we have the will.

This moment calls for principled defiance—organized, peaceful, and uncompromising. Tigray needs a disciplined, visionary civic movement—one that transcends factions, centers the people, and builds power from below. This is not idealism. It is strategic necessity.

The rise of armed groups led by former TDF officers reflects legitimate frustration. But armed struggle is not the answer. It will not bring justice or renewal. It risks another spiral of destruction. Real peace requires a different kind of courage—one rooted in collective agency, civil disobedience, and truth-telling.

Tigray’s future won’t be salvaged by secret deals or new wars. It must be reclaimed by moral reckoning, by remembering those lost, and by organizing across divides.

Confusion does not have to mean collapse. It can be the beginning of transformation—if we speak, organize, and act together.

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While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.

Main photo: Mekelle residents taking part in protests calling for the return of IDPs, 20 June 2025.

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