The study, conducted by Getent Addisu Gelaneh of Debre Markos University, examines the competing effects of the institutional and governance reforms implemented since 2018, focusing on the Amhara National Regional State. Using a qualitative research design built on secondary data, the research deploys an integrated institutionalist framework that deliberately combines three theoretical traditions: historical institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism, and sociological institutionalism. The technical point matters, because each lens captures a different mechanism of institutional change. Historical institutionalism emphasizes how inherited structures and path dependencies constrain what reformers can do. Rational choice institutionalism focuses on the strategic calculations of elites as they weigh costs and benefits within new institutional rules. Sociological institutionalism highlights how norms, identities, and shared understandings shape whether institutions are accepted as legitimate at all.

The central finding is stark: the reforms of the post-2018 period, spanning the security sector, the party system, and regional administration, produced centralizing effects that undermined democratic governance rather than deepening it. What was presented as liberalization operated, in practice, as recentralization. The ruling coalition that had governed Ethiopia since 1991 through the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front was dissolved and replaced by a single Prosperity Party, a move that weakened the ethnic-based constituent parties of the federation. Meanwhile, security reforms stripped regional governments of their own armed formations, most visibly through the dissolution of the regional Special Forces, which were nominally to be integrated into federal structures or regional police.

In Amhara, the study finds, the failure to implement key institutional reforms directly sparked a legitimacy crisis. The region had been a crucial base of support for the reform agenda, having hosted mass protests in 2016 and 2017 that helped bring the previous regime down. Residents and regional elites expected that the grievances accumulated under the old order, including contested territorial questions in districts such as Raya and Wolkait and the perceived marginalization of Amhara identity within the ethnic federal framework, would be addressed by the new government. When those expectations went unmet, and when security measures instead eroded regional autonomy, the gap between promise and delivery became politically explosive.

The consequences were dramatic. By 2023, the dissolution of the Amhara Special Forces triggered open resistance, and the Fano militia movement, rooted in a long regional military tradition, emerged as a major armed actor. An International Crisis Group report from that year documented the escalating crisis in the region, and subsequent scholarship has traced how Fano and other armed groups diverged in their trajectories of resistance within Ethiopia’s ethnic federal system. The study argues that this armed mobilization was not an irrational outburst but the product of interacting forces: historical legacies of contested federal arrangements, elite strategic calculations about the costs of compliance, and identity-based narratives that framed the region’s position as existential.

This is where the integrated institutionalist framework earns its keep. A purely rational choice account might explain the rebellion as elites maximizing their bargaining position, but it would miss why ordinary communities rallied behind armed groups. A purely sociological account might explain the identity mobilization but not the timing, which tracked specific institutional decisions such as the Special Forces dissolution. A purely historical account would trace the deep roots of territorial grievance but not why crisis erupted in this decade rather than earlier. Only by combining the three lenses, the study contends, can analysts see how institutional legacies, strategic choices, and normative structures interact to generate outcomes that no single theory predicts.

The Ethiopian case also carries broader lessons for the study of multiethnic federations. Ethnic federalism, adopted in 1995, was designed to manage diversity by granting nations and nationalities constitutional recognition and, at least on paper, the right to secession. Comparative scholarship has long debated whether such arrangements dampen or inflame ethnic conflict, with evidence running in both directions depending on institutional design, resource distribution, and the credibility of central commitments. Ethiopia’s experience since 2018 suggests that federal bargains are fragile precisely when one level of government unilaterally rewrites the terms of the compact. Reforms that weaken regional autonomy in a federation legitimated by ethnic self-rule attack the system’s core legitimacy claim, and the resulting backlash can be armed rather than merely political.

The study’s findings on the security sector reform deserve particular attention. Security sector reform in fragmented states is a standard prescription of international peacebuilding practice, intended to unify armed forces under civilian control and reduce the risk of warlordism. But the Ethiopian case shows that sequencing and consent matter enormously. Dismantling regional security forces before establishing trusted, inclusive federal alternatives left communities feeling exposed, particularly in regions with histories of ethnic violence. The reform was technically a centralization of coercive capacity, but politically it read as disarmament of one community in a fractured federation, and communities that feel defenseless in the face of real or perceived threats are fertile ground for militia recruitment.

Equally significant is the study’s treatment of the party system reform. The merger of the EPRDF’s constituent parties into the Prosperity Party was framed as a step beyond ethnic politics toward a unified national political community. Yet critics, and now this research, argue that the merger in practice concentrated power at the center and dismantled the federal architecture of representation without replacing it with a genuinely competitive national party system. Opposition parties remained constrained, elections were postponed amid conflict, and the democratic opening of 2018 narrowed into what some scholars have described as a paradox of reform: liberalization in rhetoric, recentralization in structure. The Amhara region, having lost both its security forces and its distinct party vehicle, experienced this double centralization acutely.

The study’s ultimate conclusion is a sobering one for democratization theory and practice. Institutional reforms that fail to address underlying legitimacy crises can have destabilizing consequences, even, and perhaps especially, when they are launched in the name of democracy. Reform is not merely a technical exercise of redesigning rules; it is a renegotiation of the bargains that hold plural societies together. In multiethnic federations, where legitimacy is distributed across competing centers, reforms imposed without negotiation with the constituent units can convert reformers into centralizers in the eyes of the regions, and centralizers into targets of resistance. Ethiopia’s trajectory since 2018, from Nobel laureate’s honeymoon to civil war in Tigray and insurgency in Amhara, illustrates how quickly the machinery of hope can grind into the machinery of conflict when institutional change outruns institutional trust. For scholars and policymakers alike, the message is that the architecture of reform must be built with the same care as the aspirations that inspire it.

Subject of Research: The effects of post-2018 institutional and governance reforms on legitimacy and armed resistance in Ethiopia's Amhara region

Article Title: Institutional reform and its discontents in Ethiopia’s Amhara region since 2018

Article References: Institutional reform and its discontents in Ethiopia’s Amhara region since 2018. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01765-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01765-2

Keywords: Ethiopia, Amhara, institutional reform, ethnic federalism, democratization, security sector reform, Fano, legitimacy crisis, political centralization, new institutionalism, armed conflict, Prosperity Party