Introduction: Situating Ethiopia in Genocide Debates

Abstract

Genocide scholars have largely neglected Ethiopian histories of atrocious violence, with rare exceptions. This looks set to change given the violent conflict and spiralling human rights violations over the past year, under the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. In July 2020, the Ethiopian government cracked down on protests in Oromia region with extrajudicial killings and mass arrests. Soon afterwards, amid rising political instability, regional militias targeted local minorities in what was described as “ethnic-cleansing.” Then, in early November 2020, Tigray erupted into armed conflict, following a dispute between the regional government, led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the federal government, and leading to intense warfare and violence against civilians in the region and beyond. Over the months since, various armed forces – principally the Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) and the Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) – have perpetrated massacres, sexual violence and forced starvation likely to amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, or possibly crimes constitutive of genocide. There is bound to be a surge in scholarly responses to these atrocities in Ethiopia, of the kind we witnessed (and contributed to) after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the atrocities in Darfur in 2003-05. Such an explosion of interest is not without its problems. Western scholars were overly-represented in early debates on Rwanda and Darfur – not least because small communities of domestic scholars were devastated, lacking resources, or still at risk. New country experts and comparativists were nominally “outsiders,” but they could not automatically side-step the malign politics. In Rwanda, some scholars fuelled the “politicization of even the most basic concepts and research questions.” In Darfur, the international advocacy movement promoted the framing of the atrocities as “genocide” with the explicit intention of provoking an international military intervention,