Pretoria’s Unfinished Peace Is Fueling Tigray’s New Crisis

Avoiding another war requires resolving the conditions Pretoria left unimplemented.

The fear of renewed war in northern Ethiopia is legitimate. In diplomatic circles, concern is growing that tensions in Tigray could once again escalate into open conflict only a few years after the devastating 2020–2022 war formally ended.

Calls for restraint and dialogue are therefore understandable. Another war would be catastrophic for millions of civilians still recovering from the last conflict, for Ethiopia’s fragile political order, and for a Horn of Africa region already under mounting strain.

Yet the current escalation cannot be understood simply as a new political crisis emerging inside Tigray. The tensions now surfacing are rooted in the unresolved aftermath of the Pretoria Agreement that ended the war.

Much of the international response has focused on containing immediate instability, but far less attention has been paid to the deeper reality that the peace process itself remains fundamentally incomplete.

That distinction matters because the present moment did not emerge from a settled post-war order suddenly falling apart. It emerged from a peace arrangement whose central political questions were deferred. Over time, those unresolved issues accumulated into a new phase of instability.

Tigray’s efforts to reconstitute its pre-war administration should therefore be understood less as the origin of the crisis than as a symptom of Pretoria’s non-implementation, a failure that has now deepened over three years without resolution.

Broken Promises

The 2022 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement was intended to create a pathway toward several interconnected outcomes: the withdrawal of non-federal forces from Tigray, restoration of basic services and humanitarian access, resolution of contested territories, a verified process for the return of internally displaced Tigrayans, and Tigray’s reintegration into Ethiopia’s federal order.

More than three years later, the core substance of the agreement remains unimplemented. The International Crisis Group, while warning of escalation, has acknowledged that the parties failed over several years both to implement the agreement and to establish a framework for Tigray’s reintegration into Ethiopia’s federation.

The evidence of non-implementation is not ambiguous. Western Tigray, which is constitutionally recognized as an integral part of the region, remains under extraconstitutional control by Amhara regional authorities.

More than a million Tigrayans displaced from the area during the war have remained in makeshift camps for over three years, living in dire conditions and unable to return to their homes.

The constitutional relationship between Tigray and the federal state—including the question of Tigray’s governing authority and administrative standing within the federation—has been left unresolved in ways that have benefited the federal center’s management of the crisis.

Managed Ambiguity

Nor has there merely been passive non-implementation. The period since Pretoria has included continuing restrictions on budget subsidies and fuel supplies to Tigray, reports of federal support for armed splinter actors operating within Tigray, drone strikes, and significant troop deployments around the region’s borders.

This pattern of federal engagement is marked by sustained ambiguity, in which economic constraints on Tigray persist and key constitutional questions remain unresolved.

The dominant international response to the current moment has been to call for restraint and renewed talks. That instinct is understandable, particularly with national elections approaching and external actors seeking to minimize visible instability. But this same formula already produced the current crisis.

The Pretoria process was itself the de-escalation mechanism. What it ultimately delivered was a three-year freeze that preserved occupation, displacement, and constitutional ambiguity while making reversal progressively more difficult with each passing month.

Calling for de-escalation once again, without insisting on implementation, risks reproducing the same outcome. Pressure for dialogue is not the same as pressure for resolution.

Essential Conditions

For the current moment to lead somewhere different, several elements must be placed on the table before—or at minimum alongside—any call for restraint.

A verifiable process for Western Tigray and the return of displaced populations must form part of any framework, not be deferred to a later negotiating stage.

Tigray must be represented by a legitimate governing interlocutor capable of negotiating on constitutional grounds.

Security arrangements must be enforceable and independently monitored, not merely declared.

Without these conditions, another round of talks risks becoming yet another managed process that lowers visible tensions while leaving the underlying crisis intact.

There is, in practical terms, a clear test for whether any emerging dialogue is genuine: whether the federal government is willing to place a concrete, time-bound commitment on Western Tigray and IDP return on the table before formal talks begin.

Lasting Peace

Western Tigray is the issue where time is not neutral. Every additional month of displacement and contested administration consolidates physical and demographic realities that become progressively harder to reverse. An actor genuinely seeking settlement will accept a timeline before negotiations begin. An actor seeking merely to manage the situation, however, will agree only to discuss the issue once talks are underway, where it can once again be postponed indefinitely.

The question facing international actors is not whether war should be prevented. It must be. The question is what prevention actually means.

A de-escalation process that freezes Western Tigray in its current condition, leaves displaced populations in indefinite uncertainty, and preserves constitutional ambiguity is not stability. It is simply the next crisis waiting to happen.

The conditions that made renewed conflict thinkable were not created by Tigray’s institutional reconstitution. They were created through three years of accumulated non-implementation. Addressing those conditions is the only path to a peace that lasts.

The AU presented the Pretoria Agreement as evidence that African diplomacy could end one of the continent’s deadliest wars. More than three years later, the people of Tigray are still waiting for that promise to be fulfilled.

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

Main photo: Members of the federally backed Tigray Peace Force, composed of former TPLF fighters, at a base in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Source: social media.

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