Introduction

Most accounts of Ethiopia’s present crisis begin from the assumption that the country’s principal problem is identity-based fragmentation. The analysis argues that such accounts invert causality. Collective national claims emerged from older structures of domination: conquest-based incorporation into an empire that treated many peoples as subjects to be administered rather than as citizens and co-authors of the political order. Reading the crisis through Oromo-centered and multinational scholarship does not deny intercommunal violence or coercive mobilization. It changes the starting point by asking what forms of conquest, land confiscation, cultural erasure, and hollow constitutional recognition made collective claims politically indispensable.

The argument advances a different interpretation. The deepest continuity in Ethiopian politics is not identity pluralism as such, but the failure of successive regimes to transform subordinated peoples into equal citizens while also protecting them as constituent peoples. Imperial incorporation created durable disputes over land, authority, language, identity, and belonging. Later regimes altered but did not resolve these disputes: the revolutionary state proclaimed equality while relying on centralized coercion, and the post-1991 federation recognized Nations, Nationalities and Peoples while ruling-party centralization and security-led governance often hollowed out self-rule.

The argument proceeds from an Oromo-centered standpoint because Oromia is a foundational site where these questions converge. Oromo historiography has long analyzed the making of modern Ethiopia through conquest, land alienation, cultural suppression, and contested citizenship (Baxter 1978; Hassen 1990; Jalata 2005). Oromia is also central to contemporary disputes over the capital, urban expansion, political representation, and security force violence (Benti 2007; Human Rights Watch 2016). The point is not that Oromo experience explains all Ethiopian conflicts, nor that Oromo politics is internally uniform. It is that treating Oromo experience as analytically central reveals structures that state-centered narratives often obscure: the political economy of incorporation, the hierarchy of languages and histories, and the persistent gap between constitutional recognition and enforceable rights.

The contribution is therefore primarily interpretive and historiographical. It bridges three bodies of literature that are often discussed separately: the historiography of imperial expansion and incorporation; political science scholarship on nation-based federalism, party-state rule, and center-periphery governance; and normative debates about multinational citizenship. Bringing these literatures together clarifies why the choice is not between nation-based federalism and liberal citizenship in the abstract. The more important choice is between an order held together through coercive cohesion and an order rebuilt through a rights-based bargain that protects both collective self-rule and individual equality.

The intervention is therefore both corrective and constructive: it challenges interpretations that locate Ethiopia’s crisis primarily in identity fragmentation, while extending Oromo-centered and multinational scholarship by treating collective mobilization as a response to an unresolved foundational bargain rather than as the original source of instability.

The conceptual architecture is deliberately hierarchical. Two concepts do the primary analytical work. Foundational bargain names the underlying settlement through which membership, territory, land, authority, and protection are defined. It serves as the diagnostic frame for explaining why Ethiopia’s crisis cannot be reduced to identity fragmentation. Political authorship names the central normative criterion by which that bargain should be judged: whether peoples and citizens participate as co-authors of the political order or are governed as populations to be administered. The other concepts are subsidiary.

Subjecthood describes the historical condition produced when incorporation occurs without political authorship. Promissory recognition describes the post-1991 pattern in which collective rights are constitutionally named but weakened by party-state control, securitized governance, and weak enforcement. Dual rights architecture names the institutional remedy: collective guarantees for constituent peoples joined to enforceable individual rights for every person within the polity.

A foundational-bargain frame also avoids two extremes. It does not reduce conflict to ancient identity antagonism, nor does it treat the state as a neutral container into which identity politics intruded after 1991. It places the state itself inside the analysis: as an institution that organized identities, privileged some histories, subordinated others, allocated land, and defined which claims counted as national.

Method, Standpoint, and Scope

The study uses interpretive historical analysis. It does not seek to test a single-variable model of conflict onset, nor does it claim that all episodes of violence can be reduced to one historical cause. Instead, it reconstructs a genealogy of political legitimacy: how conquest-based incorporation, land governance, cultural hierarchy, subjecthood, and state centralization shaped the categories through which communities make claims on the Ethiopian state.

The study does not collect new interview, survey, or ethnographic field data. Its evidence consists of documentary and textual sources: scholarly works, constitutional and legal materials, human-rights reports, institutional reports, and selected political texts interpreted in relation to the conceptual claims advanced here.

The evidence base is deliberately layered. The historical sections rely primarily on peer-reviewed scholarship and major books on Oromo history, Ethiopian state formation, and center-periphery relations. The institutional sections draw on scholarship on nation-based federalism, the 1995 Constitution, and post-1991 party-state governance. Contemporary illustrations rely on human-rights documentation and selected institutional reports to show how disputes over land, security, and representation have been lived in Oromia, Somali Region, Gambella, Sidama, Wolaita, and other areas. Opinion essays, memoirs, and partisan statements are treated here as political texts that illuminate discourse, self-understanding, and contestation, while the analysis grounds its historical and institutional claims primarily in scholarship, constitutional texts, and human-rights documentation.

The standpoint is Oromo-centered but not Oromo-exclusive. This distinction matters. An Oromo-centered analysis begins from the premise that Oromo experiences of conquest, land confiscation and alienation, language exclusion, cultural stigmatization, and security governance are not peripheral grievances but central evidence for understanding the Ethiopian state. At the same time, the Oromo case does not exhaust the experiences of Somali, Sidama, Wolaita, Gambella/Anuak, Afar, Benishangul-Gumuz, Tigrayan, Amhara, or other communities. Nor is there a single Oromo political position. Oromo actors disagree about federalism, confederalism, sovereignty, party strategy, armed struggle, relations with other peoples, and the future of the Ethiopian state. Oromo historiography is therefore used as a corrective lens rather than as a totalizing explanation.

A structural account of domination should not romanticize any community, political movement, or state institution, nor should it deny harms committed in the name of national unity, regional authority, collective rights, security, or liberation. At the same time, the analysis should not create false equivalence between communities or movements emerging from conditions of domination, incarceration, dispossession, and blocked peaceful politics, and state or state-affiliated actors that exercise organized coercive power under institutional protection or impunity. The point is not to condemn armed resistance as such, but to insist that all political projects claiming legitimacy must protect civilians and reject domination, arbitrary detention, forced displacement, collective punishment, attacks on minorities, and restrictions on civic and political freedoms.

Because the analysis is interpretive, its claims are best understood as reframing claims rather than exhaustive causal claims. It argues that historical incorporation, subjecthood, and asymmetric political authorship are necessary to understand the crisis, not that they are sufficient to explain every act of violence or every policy choice. The narrower claim is that these factors operate within a political field already structured by unresolved questions of constituent peoplehood, territorial authority, and trust in the state.

Structure should therefore not be read as determinism. Historical incorporation, land dispossession, cultural hierarchy, and hollow constitutional recognition create the field of vulnerability, mistrust, and political possibility within which actors operate. They do not mechanically produce conflict. Contemporary elites, ruling parties, opposition movements, security institutions, regional authorities, local brokers, media networks, and diaspora actors interpret these structures, convert them into mobilizing frames, and make choices that can escalate, redirect, or de-escalate conflict. The argument is therefore interactive: historical structures shape the incentives and repertoires available to political actors, while political actors reproduce, instrumentalize, or transform those structures through strategy and decision. The same caution applies to the term center, which refers here to historically dominant institutions, narratives, and governing coalitions, not to northern Ethiopians as persons or to all citizens who value Ethiopian unity.

Why Marginalized Peoples Embraced Nation-Based Federalism

A large part of Ethiopia’s contemporary policy debate treats identity-based or nation-based federalism as the origin of instability. Critics argue that organizing political units around named peoples hardens boundaries, empowers political entrepreneurs of belonging, marginalizes minorities, and turns territorial disputes into existential struggles. These criticisms identify real dangers, especially where minorities, migrants, mixed communities, or dissenters lack enforceable protection or where political elites instrumentalize belonging. But the critique becomes analytically misleading when it treats nation-based federalism as the first cause of the crisis rather than as a historically specific response to older structures of domination.

The more important question is not simply why Ethiopia adopted identity-based federalism after 1991, but why marginalized nations and nationalities demanded it. For many Oromo, Somali, Sidama, Wolaita, Anuak, and other historically subordinated peoples, centralized statehood had not meant neutral citizenship. It had meant conquest, confiscation of land, suppression of language, erasure of identity, displacement of indigenous institutions, and rule through administrative hierarchy. In such a context, collective claims were not invented by federalism; they were produced by the earlier denial of collective political existence. Nation-based federalism became attractive because it promised what centralized imperial and revolutionary systems had denied: recognition as constituent peoples, authority over territory, protection of language and culture, and institutional safeguards against renewed assimilation.

This does not mean that nation-based federalism is beyond criticism. It can reproduce domination at regional or local levels when minorities, migrants, mixed communities, and dissenters lack enforceable protections. But that is an argument for deepening the rights architecture, not for abolishing collective recognition. In Ethiopia’s historical context, the state has often functioned as a vehicle for the dominant national narrative, dominant language hierarchy, and centralized control of land and security. The real normative question is therefore comparative: which political arrangement can overcome inherited domination while also preventing new forms of exclusion?

This counterargument has serious scholarly and policy foundations. Turton (2006) framed Ethiopia’s ethnic federalism as a comparative experiment whose capacity to manage diversity depended on democratic practice, not constitutional design alone. Abbink (2011) argued that ethnic-based federalism risked hardening ethnic categories, strengthening authoritarian central control, and weakening shared issue-based politics. International Crisis Group (2009) and Zeleke (2023) similarly warn that territorialized nationality, indigeneity, and self-determination can expose minorities, migrants, and mixed communities to exclusion. These are not trivial concerns. Ethiopia’s post-1991 experience contains examples in which the language of belonging has been used coercively, and any defensible multinational order must confront that record.

However, the counterargument is weaker when it treats centralized alternatives as historically innocent. A centralized state is not automatically liberal, especially where prior centralization was experienced as linguistic assimilation, land confiscation, cultural erasure, and security domination. The question is therefore not whether identity should matter in the abstract. It is whether a political order can protect peoples whose collective existence was historically denied while also protecting individuals and minorities within every territory.

Political science scholarship on the federation has also shown that post-1991 institutions did not simply liberate local communities. Nation-based federalism operated through a dominant-party system in which regional autonomy was formally recognized but politically constrained. Aalen (2011) emphasizes that political identity, power, and mobilization were shaped by party structures and state institutions, not only by cultural identity. International Crisis Group (2009) argued that the federal design was implemented in ways that generated discontents, especially where local aspirations collided with ruling-party centralization and securitized governance.

This also means that identity-based conflict should not be explained by institutions or history alone. Political elites make strategic choices about when to emphasize nationality, indigeneity, unity, security, victimhood, or territorial entitlement. Collective identities and nationality categories become politically consequential not simply because they exist, but because institutions and actors make some identities more useful than others in struggles over office, land, security, and resources. Comparative work on identity politics shows that institutions shape which identities become salient, while political entrepreneurs activate those identities for strategic purposes (Brubaker and Laitin 1998; Posner 2005). In Ethiopia, therefore, the problem is not identity as such, but the interaction between inherited structures of domination, party-managed federalism, and elite strategies that convert unresolved grievances into instruments of competition, repression, or mobilization.

A better formulation is that nation-based federalism recognized a real problem but did not settle it. The 1995 Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE) acknowledged Nations, Nationalities and Peoples as constituent political subjects and granted them rights to self-government and self-determination (FDRE 1995). Yet recognition was filtered through a party-state that limited pluralist competition, constrained regional autonomy, and often responded to constitutional demands through security measures. In this sense, the problem was not recognition alone. It was recognition without a sufficiently democratic, accountable, and negotiated institutional bargain.

Coercive Incorporation, Subjecthood, and Asymmetric Political Authorship

The modern Ethiopian state was consolidated through late nineteenth-century expansion into the south and east. For state-centered nationalist histories, this process is often narrated as unification or state-building. For many Oromo and other historically marginalized communities, it is remembered as conquest and incorporation into an imperial order that reorganized landholding, labor, tribute, and political authority. The crucial point is not merely that citizenship was historically unequal. It is that many conquered peoples were not treated as citizens of a shared polity at all. They were governed as subjects of empire: populations from whom land, labor, loyalty, and taxes could be extracted without equal recognition as authors of the state (Baxter 1978; Hassen 1990; Markakis 2011).

This distinction between citizenship and subjecthood also has comparative theoretical resonance. Mamdani (1996) distinguishes between citizens governed through civil rights and subjects governed through administrative authority, a framework that helps clarify why formal inclusion in a state does not necessarily produce political equality. In Ethiopia, the problem was not only that incorporated peoples lacked equal access to institutions; it was that incorporation frequently took an administrative form that denied them the status of constituent authors. Matshanda (2022) similarly treats Ethiopia’s contemporary conflicts as struggles over contested national belonging produced by postcolonial modernity and internal hierarchies of incorporation.

The historical point is more specific: the modern imperial state consolidated authority through an uneven process in which some groups gained privileged access to state power while others entered the polity under conditions of military defeat, administrative subordination, and land insecurity. The political memory of that incorporation continues to shape how later reforms are interpreted.

Recent work on Ethiopia’s contested nation-building sharpens this point by treating conquest-centered narratives and nationalist unification narratives as competing accounts of the same state-making process. Holcomb and Ibssa (1990) and Kelecha (2025) situate Oromo claims within a longer debate over whether the modern Ethiopian state should be understood primarily as national consolidation or as an imperial formation that produced colonized peoples. The debate determines whether contemporary claims to land, language, and self-rule are read as destabilizing identity claims or as attempts to renegotiate an unequal political compact.

For Oromo historiography, the issue is not only that land changed hands. It is that indigenous institutions of authority and accountability were displaced or delegitimized as imperial administration expanded. Gadaa and other Oromo institutions should not be romanticized as timeless or uniform, but their marginalization illustrates how state formation was also a struggle over legitimate political knowledge. When local systems of law, mediation, and social order were pushed outside official recognition, the state narrowed the range of institutions through which Oromo communities could govern themselves and defend their interests.

Lemmu (1971) argued that Oromo democratic governance had direct relevance to nation-building. Legesse (1973; 2000) subsequently documented Gadaa as a sophisticated indigenous constitutional order, organized through rotational leadership, deliberative assemblies, institutional checks, and accountability between leaders and the governed. Jalata likewise emphasizes that Gadaa institutionalized rotation of power, checks and balances, leader accountability, reconciliation, and rule of law, making it relevant to the concern with political authorship rather than merely cultural survival (Jalata 2004).

Megerssa and Kassam (2020) deepen this reading of Oromo political and relational order. Safuu should not be reduced to moral order or ethical accountability; it is better understood as the supreme constitutional principle of Oromo relational order, the divine and foundational law (Seera Waaqaa) governing relations among Waaqa, humans, nature, and the wider cosmos. Gadaa, as human law (Seera Namaa), derives legitimacy only insofar as it conforms to Safuu.

Cubbuu names rupture under Safuu. Dispossession, unaccountable authority, domination, systematic exclusion, ecological destruction, and forms of accumulation that corrode reciprocity and public legitimacy can therefore be read as Cubbuu rather than merely policy failures (Kelbessa 2011; Megerssa 2005).

From this standpoint, imperial displacement of Gadaa matters because it displaced an internally generated constitutional order, disciplined by Safuu and oriented toward Nagaa, with externally imposed administrative hierarchy. These concepts are therefore used to clarify the broader claim: conquest, dispossession, and externally imposed rule were experienced not only as historical injuries, but as ruptures of legitimate authority requiring repair, accountability, and restored political authorship.

Markakis (2011) frames Ethiopia through its frontiers: zones where the state extended authority, extracted resources, and negotiated or imposed relations with peoples at the margins of the highland center. Frontiers reordered access to land, labor, taxation, and administrative power. In many incorporated regions, land held within local and collective systems was confiscated or subordinated to imperial tenure arrangements, redistributed through military and administrative hierarchies, and converted into systems of tenancy, tribute, and coerced agrarian dependency. Pankhurst documents the scale of enslavement and slave exports in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including from southern regions (Pankhurst 1964; 1968). The historical memory of conquest became inseparable from material insecurity.

For Oromia, land is central to this history. Oromo scholarship has treated the late nineteenth-century incorporation of Oromo territories as a political-economic rupture that reconfigured indigenous authority and made land a site of contestation (Jalata 2005; Bulcha 2011). These disputes concern the continuing relationship between land, livelihood, and political authority: who has the power to allocate land, whose historical claims are recognized, and who bears the costs of state-led modernization. The problem was not simply unequal allocation of land and authority. It was the transformation of conquered peoples from holders of land and political institutions into tenants, serfs, tributaries, or administered populations within an imperial hierarchy. Contemporary controversies over urban expansion around Finfinnee/Addis Ababa make more sense against this longer background.

Cultural hierarchy was equally important. Imperial centralization relied on a hierarchy of languages, histories, and public identities. Baxter (1978) emphasized that Oromo language had been denied official status and restricted in print, preaching, teaching, and broadcasting until the final period of the empire. Tuso (1982) linked minority education to broader patterns of exclusion, while Hassen (2010) traced the development of written Oromo literature as part of a longer relationship between orature, resistance, and nationalism. Official language determines access to schooling, employment, administration, courts, and public memory. When a people’s language is excluded from state institutions and their identity is stigmatized, citizenship becomes formally universal but practically hierarchical; cultural exclusion can function as a project of erasure.

The result was asymmetric political authorship. Some groups became authors and beneficiaries of the state: they shaped its official language, institutions, historical narrative, territorial imagination, and claims to legitimacy. Others were made subjects of administration: their lands were confiscated or subordinated, their institutions displaced, their identities stigmatized, and their cultures pushed outside official public life. This asymmetry did not affect all communities in the same way, and it changed across regimes. Nevertheless, the pattern matters because it created durable associations between the state, land insecurity, cultural denigration, and coercive authority. In later periods, even reforms that promised equality were interpreted through this inherited mistrust.

This historical genealogy changes the interpretation of current conflict. Land disputes, language claims, representation struggles, federal-boundary controversies, and demands for self-rule are not new problems created by identity-based mobilization. They are continuations of incorporation-era structures that were never fully dismantled. The point is that the categories through which people experience the present were produced through historical institutions. Any diagnosis that begins only with recent inter-nation competition misses this longer structure.

Revolution, Federal Recognition, and the Party-State Gap

The 1974 revolution transformed Ethiopia’s political economy but did not resolve the foundational bargain. The Derg abolished the imperial monarchy, nationalized land, and proclaimed equality among Ethiopia’s peoples. These reforms disrupted some of the property relations associated with the imperial order and opened political space for the language of nationalities. Yet the revolutionary state remained deeply centralized and militarized. Clapham (1988) describes the period as one of transformation and continuity: radical changes in ideology and ownership coexisted with enduring patterns of state centralization and coercion. The nationalities question was acknowledged but not democratically negotiated.

The Derg’s wars and counterinsurgency practices deepened distrust in many regions. State violence, forced recruitment, displacement, famine governance, and militarized administration left a legacy that shaped the post-1991 transition. National liberation movements and student debates had placed the rights of nations and nationalities at the center of Ethiopian politics. But recognition without democratic decentralization remained insufficient. Equality declared from the center could not substitute for a negotiated order in which peoples had meaningful authority over land, language, and local governance.

The post-1991 constitutional order represented the most explicit attempt to address this problem. The 1995 Constitution defines Ethiopia as a federation of Nations, Nationalities and Peoples and recognizes rights to self-government, cultural and linguistic protection, and self-determination (FDRE 1995). These provisions should not be dismissed as mere identity engineering. For communities whose languages, institutions, and territories had been subordinated, constitutional recognition mattered. It enabled local-language education and administration, rehabilitated identities previously stigmatized, and made collective rights part of the official architecture of citizenship.

The post-1991 period nevertheless produced real gains that complicate any purely dismissive account of nation-based federalism. Local-language administration and education altered everyday citizenship for many communities. Regional states created arenas in which formerly marginalized identities could be publicly named and institutionally represented.

Yet these gains were made vulnerable by the absence of autonomous institutions capable of defending them against ruling-party priorities. Courts, electoral bodies, local administrations, and security institutions often lacked the independence required to mediate disputes credibly. The federation thus produced a paradox: it recognized peoples as constitutional subjects, while the dominant-party system limited their capacity to act as political subjects. This is what promissory recognition means: rights were named, but the institutions needed to make them dependable remained weak.

Promissory recognition also had a fiscal and land-governance dimension. Regional states were constitutionally recognized as units of self-government, but their capacity to exercise political authorship remained constrained when land administration, infrastructure priorities, revenue flows, credit, public investment, and development corridors were shaped by central ministries, ruling-party networks, and national development strategies. The result was economic dependence as well as political centralization: regions could be named as constituent units while lacking the fiscal leverage needed to protect land, negotiate development priorities, or convert constitutional status into material authority (Aalen 2011; International Crisis Group 2009).

The promise of multinational federalism was constrained by party-state practice. Under the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), regional autonomy operated within a dominant-party hierarchy that limited meaningful competition. Constitutional self-rule was filtered through administrative and security networks loyal to the ruling party. Aalen (2011) shows how political identity, power, and mobilization were shaped by this party-managed federation. International Crisis Group (2009) described a federal system that recognized diversity but generated discontent because political pluralism and genuine regional autonomy were constrained.

This gap between constitutional form and political practice is central to the present crisis. If collective rights are recognized on paper but peaceful contestation is restricted, communities may conclude that constitutional pathways are unreliable. If regional self-rule exists formally but key decisions about security, land, finance, and party competition are controlled from the center, federalism becomes a promise rather than a bargain. If minority rights within regions are weakly protected, then group recognition can reproduce domination at a lower level. The result is a double failure: the center fails to secure trust among historically marginalized peoples, while regional institutions may fail to protect vulnerable residents within their own territories.

The post-2018 period requires separate treatment because Abiy Ahmed’s rise followed sustained Oromo protests and was widely interpreted as a major political opening. Because Abiy Ahmed is Oromo, his ascent might seem to disconfirm claims about Oromia’s structural subordination. But that interpretation confuses elite representation at the federal apex with political authorship for Oromia as a constituent polity.

The Abiy era therefore illustrates the difference between representation and political authorship. Article 49(5) recognizes Oromia’s “special interest” in Addis Ababa regarding social services, natural resources, and joint administrative matters arising from the city’s location within Oromia (FDRE 1995, ⁠⁠art. 49(5)). Yet the ambiguity surrounding this provision, continuing conflict in Oromia, centralized security decision-making, and unresolved land and metropolitan-governance disputes suggest that Oromo representation at the federal apex has not translated into political authorship for Oromia as a constituent people and territory (Human Rights Watch 2022; 2023b; 2023a; Zeleke 2023).

The same distinction between representation and political authorship has a constitutional-legal expression. Ararssa (2014; 2016) argues that the non-implementation of Article 49(5)'s special-interest clause shows a pattern of recognition without exercise: the Constitution acknowledges Oromia’s interest in Finfinnee/Addis Ababa while the implementing framework that would make the right operative remains deferred. A right that is named but not institutionalized can signal inclusion while preserving the power relations that made the right necessary in the first place.

This is also why the transition from the EPRDF to the Prosperity Party matters. The EPRDF order was deeply authoritarian and party-managed, but it formally preserved a coalition structure organized through regional ruling parties. The Prosperity Party reconfigured that arrangement by absorbing most EPRDF member parties and allied regional parties into a single national ruling party (Lashitew 2019). From an Oromo-centered and multinational perspective, this shift did not simply represent administrative modernization or national integration. It narrowed the already limited arenas in which regional parties could bargain upward as representatives of constituent units.

This consolidation did not create a unified Oromo political field. Post-2018 Oromo politics has instead been divided among actors inside the ruling party, opposition organizations such as the Oromo Federalist Congress and Oromo Liberation Front, armed actors including the Oromo Liberation Army, local communities affected by security operations, and diaspora networks. These divisions do not negate the claim about Oromia’s political authorship; they show that political authorship is itself contested and requires protected institutional channels rather than rule through party absorption or armed confrontation (Human Rights Watch 2022; 2023b; 2023a; U.S. Department of State 2024).

Militarized governance and command-post arrangements in parts of Oromia further ground subjecthood in the present. When political disputes are administered primarily through emergency security structures, residents encounter the state less as a constitutional forum for political authorship than as an apparatus of containment. Such practices may be justified as counterinsurgency, but they reproduce the central pattern: claims over land, representation, and authority are converted into security problems, and affected populations are governed as objects of control rather than participants in the bargain (Human Rights Watch 2022; 2023b; 2024; U.S. Department of State 2024).

The post-2018 crisis therefore reflects not only inherited institutional constraints, but also strategic choices by ruling elites, opposition actors, security institutions, and local organizers over how to interpret and act upon those constraints. The Abiy era demonstrates this interaction between structure and agency: federalism can be undermined by the state apparatus itself, not only by historically dominant state elites or northern-centered governing coalitions. A state can be led by an Oromo prime minister while still governing Oromia through centralized security institutions, party discipline, fiscal dependence, and unresolved metropolitan authority. Post-2018 conflict in Oromia, including abuses by state and non-state actors, underscores that representation at the center has not translated into secure self-rule on the ground (Human Rights Watch 2022; 2023b; 2024; U.S. Department of State 2024).

Oromia as an Analytic Vantage Point

Oromia reveals the foundational bargain problem with exceptional clarity. It is Ethiopia’s largest regional state; the federal capital, Finfinnee/Addis Ababa, is situated within its territory; it contains major agricultural and urbanizing zones; and it has been central to both state formation and contemporary protest. Oromia is not a peripheral site where identity grievance erupts into national politics. It is a central site where the legitimacy of the Ethiopian state is continually produced, contested, and tested.

The Oromo case shows how colonial and postcolonial categories do not map neatly onto Ethiopia’s self-understanding. Many peoples within Ethiopia describe their incorporation through the language of conquest, colonialism, or imperial domination. This vocabulary identifies a real analytical problem: anti-colonial sovereignty at the international level can coexist with hierarchical incorporation inside the state. Oromo-centered scholarship forces this tension into view.

The political vocabulary of Oromo claims matters because it shows that demands for self-rule are not merely reactive identity claims. Oromo scholarship has articulated Oromummaa as rooted in shared historical experience, Afaan Oromo, and struggles against domination (Bulcha 2011; Jalata 2005). To treat Oromo nationalism merely as identity-based mobilization is therefore to miss its normative claim that authority should be accountable to peoples whose institutions and histories were subordinated.

The Finfinnee/Addis Ababa question is a condensed expression of this wider problem. From one standpoint, Addis Ababa is a national capital, diplomatic hub, and diverse metropolis. From an Oromo standpoint, it is also a city embedded in Oromia’s land and historical memory. Benti (2007) characterizes the Oromo struggle for Addis Ababa as a problem of a nation without a city, a formulation that captures the relationship between urban citizenship, national identity, and territorial dispossession. The constitutional and political challenge is therefore not simply a dispute between a diverse federal capital and surrounding Oromo communities. It concerns the city’s location within Oromia, Oromia’s territorial and constitutional claim concerning Finfinnee/Addis Ababa, and the expansion of the capital into surrounding Oromo lands through processes that often displace local communities while denying them secure legal claims to the value created on their land.

Recent scholarship on urban frontier-making strengthens this interpretation. Debelo and Soboka (2023) situate the Finfinnee/Addis Ababa controversy within a longue durée process in which the city’s foundation and horizontal expansion displaced Oromo farmers as part of state-building, making contemporary expansion disputes continuations of a foundational territorial logic rather than isolated planning conflicts. Regassa and Emmenegger (2023) extend the argument to symbolic politics, showing that monuments, street names, and built environments in the capital materialize competing claims over who authored the Ethiopian state.

The 2014–2016 Oromo protests illustrate how land, representation, and security converged. Mobilization around the Addis Ababa/Oromia expansion controversy cannot be understood solely as opposition to a planning document. It expressed deeper fears that development centered on the capital would continue older patterns of land alienation and political exclusion. Human Rights Watch (2016) documented killings, mass arrests, and other serious abuses in the state’s response to Oromo protests. The significance of this episode lies not only in the number of violations documented, but in the sequence: a dispute over land and voice was securitized, and the securitized response reinforced the belief that constitutional claims would be met with coercion rather than negotiation.

The Qeerroo movement is not adequately captured by the label of identity-based youth mobilization. Structural grievance did not automatically produce the 2014–2016 protests. Students, youth networks, cultural producers, opposition figures, local organizers, diaspora activists, and state officials all made strategic choices that shaped the timing, scale, language, and direction of mobilization. Qeerroo activism transformed localized grievances over land, representation, and state violence into a broader challenge to the political order (Forsén and Tronvoll 2021). Its force came from structural conditions that successive Ethiopian regimes did not merely fail to address, but often lacked the political will to dismantle. Educated Oromo youth faced blocked rural futures through land scarcity, dispossession, and urban expansion, as well as blocked modern futures through unemployment, uneven development, and exclusion from the benefits of state-led growth (Abebe 2020; Wayessa 2019). State actors also made contingent choices: by securitizing protest, restricting peaceful channels, and responding to constitutional claims with coercion, they helped transform grievances into a wider crisis of legitimacy (Human Rights Watch 2016).

The analytic value of the Oromo case is therefore broader than Oromia itself. It shows that the center-periphery question is not only geographical. It is also epistemic: whose history counts as national history, whose political vocabulary is treated as legitimate, and whose insecurity is interpreted as a national problem rather than as a local disturbance. An Oromo-centered reading forces Ethiopian studies to confront the possibility that what appears as fragmentation from the center may appear as unfinished emancipation from the periphery.

Contemporary Afterlives: Self-Rule, Security, and Displacement

The foundational bargain problem is visible beyond Oromia. In the Somali Region, Human Rights Watch (2008) documented war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Ogaden context during counterinsurgency operations, including collective punishment and abuses against civilians. Human Rights Watch (2018) later documented torture and other abuses in Jail Ogaden. These reports show how security governance can transform peripheral regions into zones where citizenship is conditional and civilians are treated through the lens of insurgency. The issue is not simply identity; it is the relationship between territorial control, counterinsurgency, and the state’s willingness to protect or punish communities collectively.

In Gambella, Human Rights Watch (2005) documented serious abuses against Anuak communities, including violations it assessed as crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch (2012) later documented forced displacement associated with villagization. These episodes connect the citizenship question to land and development. Development schemes and security operations can become mechanisms through which vulnerable communities experience the state as dispossessive rather than protective. When land governance lacks consent, transparency, and remedies, development becomes part of the conflict structure.

Western Oromia and Benishangul-Gumuz reveal a related pattern. Etefa’s study of Gumuz-Oromo violence shows that disputes often described as local ethnic conflict were shaped by unclear administrative borders, overlapping jurisdiction, weak accountability, elite manipulation, arms flows, and militia organization. The significance of these cases is not that group identity is irrelevant, but that identity became dangerous where institutions failed to adjudicate land, representation, security, and local authority credibly (Etefa 2019).

In the south, the Sidama demand for regional statehood exposed both the promise and the limits of constitutional practice. The November 2019 referendum demonstrated that constitutional self-determination mechanisms can be implemented within the federation (Tronvoll et al. 2020). This case shows that constitutional demands for statehood or autonomy become destabilizing when institutions delay, criminalize, or securitize them.

Contemporary displacement further underscores the human-security dimension of the bargain. The International Organization for Migration’s 2025 Ethiopia Crisis Response Plan documents large-scale internal displacement, with conflict as a major driver (International Organization for Migration 2025). Displacement transforms constitutional debates into immediate questions of survival: return, relocation, compensation, minority protection, land restitution, and accountability. When communities fear demographic engineering or permanent loss of land, political compromise becomes harder. A state that cannot credibly protect displaced persons or adjudicate land claims will struggle to sustain legitimacy, regardless of its constitutional form.

The most important normative implication of this analysis is that Ethiopia does not face a choice between group rights and individual rights. It needs both. Collective rights are necessary because historically marginalized peoples were not merely collections of individuals denied private liberties. They were nations and communities whose lands, languages, institutions, cultures, and political authority were subordinated. Individual rights are necessary because every region contains minorities, migrants, mixed communities, dissenters, and citizens whose safety cannot depend on belonging to the local majority. A legitimate foundational bargain must therefore treat group-differentiated protections and universal individual rights as co-equal pillars.

This dual architecture would require four principles. Collective self-rule must be meaningful rather than merely administrative. Minority protections must be justiciable. Land governance must be insulated from partisan capture through transparent procedures, fair compensation, and independent review. Security institutions must be accountable to civilian law rather than ruling-party imperatives or communal pressure. These principles are modest compared with maximalist visions of centralized unity or separation, but they are demanding because Ethiopian regimes have often avoided building such institutions.

Justiciability means more than a general promise of tolerance. It requires accessible courts or constitutional-review bodies able to hear claims by minority residents, migrants, mixed communities, dissenters, and local political opponents; remedies against discriminatory land allocation, exclusion from services, language-based administrative barriers, arbitrary detention, and forced displacement; and appeal pathways beyond local officials when regional institutions are themselves implicated. Such mechanisms would not abolish collective self-rule. They would define its legitimate boundaries by ensuring that a self-governing Oromia, Somali Region, Sidama, or any other regional state cannot reproduce within its territory the same domination that multinational federalism was designed to prevent.

The capital question illustrates how the dual architecture would work in practice. Addis Ababa’s residents require equal citizenship, municipal representation, services, and protection from identity exclusion. Oromo communities require recognition that the city sits within a history of Oromo land and that expansion has distributive consequences. The federal state requires a capital able to perform national and diplomatic functions. A legitimate arrangement would not erase any of these claims. It would specify jurisdiction, revenue sharing, land protection, compensation, cultural recognition, and representation in ways that reduce ambiguity and prevent development from becoming dispossession.

This dual architecture begins with constitutional recognition, but it need not end with one predetermined constitutional form. The rights of Nations, Nationalities and Peoples to language, culture, self-government, territorial autonomy, and self-determination are safeguards against renewed assimilation and domination. At the same time, Zeleke’s analysis of citizenship and indigeneity identifies a real danger: indigeneity can be politicized in ways that undermine mobility and equal citizenship (Zeleke 2023).

Land governance should be at the center of this settlement. In Oromia and many other regions, land is where historical memory, livelihood, political authority, and development converge. Transparent land registries, fair compensation, independent review of expropriation, and participation by affected communities are not technical reforms; they are legitimacy reforms. The Addis Ababa/Oromia interface requires particular care because it concentrates the tensions of capital-city governance, Oromo territorial claims, urban citizenship, and national economic development. A durable arrangement would protect the city’s diverse residents while also preventing dispossession of surrounding Oromo communities and recognizing Oromia’s constitutional interests.

Security-sector accountability is equally central. The repeated use of military or command-post governance to manage political disputes has weakened trust across regions. Human-rights documentation from Oromia, Somali Region, Gambella, and other areas shows that impunity and collective punishment deepen rather than resolve conflict (Human Rights Watch 2005; 2008; 2016; 2018; Amnesty International 2020). Security reform must therefore include civilian oversight, transparent rules for deployments, investigation of abuses, protection for witnesses and journalists, and credible prosecution pathways. Without accountability, dialogue becomes performative because citizens cannot trust that the state will protect them if they dissent.

Fiscal federalism and development policy also belong in the bargain. A multinational federation, confederation, or looser alliance cannot be legitimate if resources, infrastructure, credit, public contracts, and administrative opportunity remain concentrated in ways that reproduce center-periphery inequality. Equitable development means that public investment and economic reform are governed transparently, that constituent peoples have meaningful authority over development priorities, and that growth does not depend on politically mediated access to land or party networks. The political economy of development must be evaluated by whether it reduces historical hierarchy or repackages it as modernization.

Finally, political competition must be reopened. Constitutional rights have little meaning if parties, media, civic associations, and local leaders cannot organize without being treated as security threats. The closure of peaceful politics encourages radicalization and makes armed contention more likely. This is especially important in contexts where communities already believe that constitutional channels have been hollowed out. A foundational bargain cannot be negotiated by armed actors or ruling elites alone. It requires protected civic space, credible elections, inclusive dialogue, and the release or fair trial of political detainees.

Future Without Coercive Unity: A Realistic Range of Outcomes

The normative implication is not that Ethiopia must preserve one predetermined constitutional form. The analytical point is narrower: constitutional form cannot claim durable legitimacy unless political association is rebuilt through consent rather than force. For peoples whose historical experience of Ethiopia has included conquest, land confiscation, cultural erasure, and coercive administration, the central question is not whether unity is preferable in the abstract. It is whether unity, federation, confederation, alliance, or any other arrangement can protect both collective authorship and individual rights. What should be non-negotiable is not the inherited state form, but the rights of peoples and individuals.

The realistic range of outcomes must therefore remain open. If meaningful dialogue succeeds, a re-legitimated multinational federation may remain possible. If mistrust of centralized authority remains too deep, a confederal or loose-alliance arrangement may better reduce coercive center-periphery control while preserving interdependence. If even that proves impossible, negotiated separation into independent states should not be treated as inherently illegitimate. A negotiated coming-apart may be less destructive than an indefinite project of holding an empire-state together through war. The central normative question is not whether unity, federation, confederation, alliance, or independence is preferable in the abstract, but whether any arrangement can be constituted through consent while protecting both collective authorship and individual rights.

Conclusion

The central problem of the Ethiopian crisis is not that marginalized peoples assert collective rights; it is that Ethiopian state-building repeatedly converted conquered peoples into subjects of administration rather than equal citizens and co-authors of the polity. Imperial incorporation produced land confiscation, cultural hierarchy, subjecthood, and asymmetric political authorship. Later regimes altered this inheritance but did not fully resolve it: the revolutionary state relied on centralization and militarization, while the post-1991 federation recognized multinational rights but often implemented them through party-state control and securitized governance.

Oromo-centered analysis therefore functions as a corrective lens, not an exclusive explanation. Oromia reveals the political economy of incorporation, the capital question, the link between land and political authorship, and the consequences of securitizing constitutional demands. A durable future will depend on replacing coercive cohesion with consent through truth-telling about state formation, land governance that protects livelihoods and historical claims, security institutions accountable to law, courts, and rights bodies capable of protecting individuals, and political channels through which self-rule claims can be negotiated peacefully. The argument is therefore not structurally deterministic: it shows how inherited arrangements of domination become politically explosive when contemporary actors instrumentalize them, securitize them, or refuse to democratize the institutions through which they might be peacefully renegotiated.