OPINION  ·  ETHIOPIA

The Pattern That Repeats: What Ethiopia’s Peace Brokers Keep Getting Wrong  

Western diplomacy knows how to stop a war. It has less experience building what comes after.

May 4, 2026

There is a template. It has been used before. You bring the armed factions to the table, reduce the violence to a workable level, call the result progress, and move on. The American and British embassies in Addis Ababa are running it right now in Ethiopia — applying pressure to include Fano and OLA in negotiations while keeping the TPLF central, as the Pretoria framework demands. The diplomats are professional. The approach is coherent. And if history is any guide, it will produce calm for a while and crisis again later.

I. The Bosnian lesson

In November 1995, Richard Holbrooke brokered the Dayton Accords and ended the Bosnian War. It was a genuine achievement — at minimum, it stopped the killing. But Dayton was, as analysts at the Wilson Center later put it, more a truce than a settlement. The agreement froze the warring parties in place, rewarded ethnic control of territory, and created governing architecture so elaborate that it gave Bosnian leaders no real incentive to negotiate the underlying causes of the conflict themselves. Thirty years on, Bosnia has three de facto mono-ethnic entities, a political system that depends on international supervision to function, and recurring crises that the original agreement was never designed to resolve.

The parallel to Ethiopia is not perfect — no parallel ever is — but it is uncomfortable. The Pretoria Agreement of November 2022 ended the Tigray War. It was necessary, and it was right to pursue it. But it sidelined the Amhara militias who had fought alongside the federal government, left the contested territories of Western and Southern Tigray unresolved, and set up a disarmament process the TPLF resisted almost from the start. Within two years, Fano had launched a full insurgency in Amhara, the OLA remained active across Oromia, and by April 2026, the TPLF had reinstated its own regional government, accusing Addis Ababa of violating the very agreement that was supposed to end the conflict.

“The agreement stopped the shooting. It did not settle the argument.”

This is what happens when a peace process is optimized for cessation rather than resolution. The shooting stops. The argument does not.

II. The ground the diplomats don’t see

The problem is not that Western diplomats are wrong about the need for negotiation. The problem is that the Ethiopia they are negotiating about is considerably more complicated than the framework they are applying to it.

Fano is not a single actor. It is a constellation of autonomous militias — Gondar Fano, Wollo Fano, Shewa Fano, the Amhara People’s Fano Front — with different command structures, different territorial interests, and different relationships with external actors including, according to multiple reports, the TPLF and Eritrea. When the U.S. Embassy holds discussions with “the Fano,” it is mostly talking to whichever faction is willing to show up. In early 2025, the only confirmed meeting was with the Amhara People’s Fano Front, whose own leader acknowledged that disunity was weakening the movement. Meanwhile, at least one other Fano leader publicly rejected any suggestion of negotiation as premature.

The OLA presents a different set of complications. Its fragmentation is also real — a breakaway faction signed a peace deal with the Oromia regional government in December 2024, leading to a meaningful drop in violence in parts of the region. But that decline has proved partial and fragile: sporadic attacks on civilians continued in the weeks that followed, and it remains unclear whether the agreement reflects genuine political transformation or a tactical pause by part of an organization that is itself divided on strategy.

What the numbers show

In Amhara, from December 2024 to January 2025, ACLED recorded 21 civilian targeting events — 48% attributed to Ethiopian federal forces. The conflict is not simply government versus armed groups. Civilians are being harmed by both sides, in a context where Fano controls much of rural Amhara while the federal army holds the cities and transport routes.

These distinctions matter enormously for what negotiation can actually accomplish. A deal signed with one Fano faction means nothing to the others. A ceasefire in Oromia that excludes the OLA factions still aligned with the TPLF creates gaps that violence rushes to fill. Flattening these actors into a single category of “armed groups to be brought to the table” is not diplomacy. It is category error dressed in diplomatic language.

III. What an alternative might look like

Here is where critics of managed peace most often go quiet. It is easier to diagnose the problem than to propose a different approach, partly because any alternative is harder and carries more risk. But the silence itself becomes a form of abdication. So let us try.

First, disaggregate before you negotiate. The U.S. and British embassies should resist the temptation to treat each armed movement as a single interlocutor. That means investing in mapping — not just which factions exist, but what each faction actually wants, who it answers to, and what would need to be true for its grievances to be addressed structurally. Some Fano factions want federal recognition of Amhara territorial claims in Western Tigray. Others are fighting for regional autonomy. Others are proxies for outside interests. These are not the same problem and they cannot be solved with the same solution.

Second, insist on institutional anchors, not just ceasefires. The failure of Pretoria was not only that it ended the war. It is that it created no durable institutions capable of resolving the disputes it left open. The referendum on contested Western Tigray territories — promised under the agreement — had still not taken place as of early 2025. There is no mechanism with genuine authority to enforce disarmament. There is no independent body to investigate the extrajudicial killings that Ethiopian federal forces and armed groups alike have committed. Ceasefires without institutional anchors are just scheduled delays.

Third, include civil society, not as decoration but as a counterweight. One of the core perversions of armed-actor-centered peace processes is that they exclude the people who actually live in the affected regions. In Amhara, in Oromia, in Tigray, there are communities, religious institutions, business networks, and civic organizations whose cooperation is necessary for any settlement to hold — and who currently have no seat at the table because they cannot field a militia. If Western embassies are serious about durable peace rather than managed calm, they need to be pressuring Addis Ababa to open space for these voices, not just for the armed ones.

“The question is not whether to negotiate. It is what negotiation is for.”

None of this is easy. All of it will take longer and require more sustained engagement than a ceasefire agreement. It will require the U.S. and the UK to do something their diplomatic institutions are not naturally structured to do: stay in a process beyond the point where violence has been reduced to a manageable level, and push for structural change that may temporarily increase political friction.

IV. Why this matters now

The TPLF’s decision in April 2026 to reinstate its regional government — effectively repudiating the Pretoria framework — is not a surprise. It is a consequence. When a peace agreement fails to resolve the disputes that caused the conflict, the parties eventually reach the same point again, except with additional grievances accumulated in the interim. The disarmament program was suspended. The territorial referendum did not happen. The federal government narrowed political space rather than opening it. The TPLF, facing internal fractures and external pressure, concluded that the agreement had served its purpose and stopped serving theirs.

Ethiopia is now facing the possibility of simultaneous crises in Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia — which is not a coincidence, but a structural feature of a peace process that resolved none of the underlying conflicts, only reduced their immediate intensity.

Western diplomacy can stop a war. The evidence for that is real. What it has consistently struggled with — in Bosnia, in South Sudan, in Libya, and now in Ethiopia — is building what comes after the ceasefire. That is a harder problem, requires a different kind of patience, and produces less visible short-term results. It also happens to be the only thing that actually works.

The current push from the U.S. and British embassies is rational on its own terms. The problem is that its terms are too narrow. Managed peace is better than unmanaged war. But it is not a substitute for the harder work of building a state in which armed actors have less reason to exist.

That is what Ethiopia needs. It is not what is on offer — at least not yet.

 Research sources: BTI 2026 Ethiopia Country Report • ACLED Situation Update Feb 2025 • CFR Global Conflict Tracker • Freedom House 2025 • Rift Valley Institute Conflict Trends March 2026 • Wilson Center / Dayton Analysis