The study, conducted by Tamu Alemu Gedamu of Debre Tabor University, draws on interviews with thirteen key informants, including eight former ASF members—five of whom were active insurgents at the time of data collection—alongside regional security officials and academic experts. Using thematic analysis triangulated against official documents, constitutional texts, media briefings, and reports from organizations such as Amnesty International and ACLED, the research reconstructs how a reform intended to bring peace instead deepened the rift between the federal government and the Amhara political community. The findings arrive at a moment when Ethiopia’s conflict landscape remains volatile, with fighting in the Amhara region, renewed tensions along the Tigray-Amhara border, and accusations of foreign interference threatening to regionalize the war.

To understand why the dissolution failed, the study situates it within Ethiopia’s ethnofederal architecture. The 1995 constitution empowered regional states to establish and administer their own police forces, and in 2007 the federal government began supporting regional “Special Forces”—known in Amharic as Liyu Hail—initially in the Somali region to counter the ONLF insurgency. These paramilitary units, financed and logistically equipped by the federal government, expanded across the federation as gendarme-style forces designed to combat insurgents and organized crime. But after the split in the ruling EPRDF coalition in the 2010s, mistrust grew within the federation, and the special forces became increasingly autonomous, in some cases rivaling the national army in capability. Incidents such as the 2019 coup attempt in the Amhara region and the Tigray special forces’ attack on the federal Northern Command in November 2020, which ignited a devastating civil war, convinced the federal government that these forces posed an existential threat to state control.

The irony is that the ASF had been among the federal government’s most valuable allies. During the Tigray war of 2020 to 2022, ASF fighters, allied with the Ethiopian National Defense Force, helped repel the Tigrayan Defense Forces from Amhara towns including Weldia, Dessie, and the industrial hub of Kombolcha. In the eyes of the Amhara public, they were protectors of the region. When the federal government announced on April 6, 2023 that the special forces would cease to exist as an organizational structure, the announcement landed on a population already gripped by a profound security dilemma. Mass killings of Amhara civilians in places such as Agamsa, Guliso, Horo-Gudru, Metekel, Gura-Ferda, and Mai-Kadra remained unaddressed, and the Pretoria Agreement that ended the Tigray war had left the fate of disputed territories like Welkait and Raya dangerously ambiguous.

Gedamu identifies three distinct legal flaws at the heart of the dissolution. The first is what he terms constitutional infringement: the federal government declared the regional special forces unconstitutional, yet the ASF had been established under Article 52(2) of the FDRE Constitution, which grants regions the power to create and administer their own police forces, and under Article 39, which guarantees nations and nationalities the right to self-determination, including the creation of governing institutions. The second flaw is jurisdictional overreach. Under Article 51(21) of the constitution and the Firearm Administration and Control Proclamation No. 1177/2020, the authority to disarm weapons threatening public security belongs to the federal or regional police commissions—not the defense force. Yet it was the Ethiopian National Defense Force that executed the dissolution, a responsibility it had never been delegated. The third flaw concerns the Pretoria Agreement itself, which the study characterizes as an inter se accord, legally binding only on its two signatories, the federal government and the TPLF. Extending its disarmament provisions to non-signatory forces, the research argues, had no legal basis.

The procedural failures were equally consequential. Former ASF members reported that they were neither consulted nor informed before the dissolution was announced; some learned of it from a federal declaration that their organization no longer existed, while the regional government simultaneously told them to remain in their camps. Regional officials were kept in the dark as well—seven members of the regional coordination committee were reportedly never consulted. A disarmament letter drafted by a regional task force member was poorly communicated and appeared to conflict with the official framing of “reorganization,” generating confusion and anger among fighters and civilians alike who feared being left defenseless. Girma Yeshitila, the Prosperity Party leader in the Amhara region, acknowledged that the crisis stemmed not from whether to reorganize, but from how the decision was implemented. The result was a persistent ambiguity over whether the process was a constitutional reorganization or a targeted dissolution—a question that fueled conspiracy narratives on all sides.

The theoretical framework of the study draws on three second-generation security sector reform lenses: democratic security sector governance, conflict-sensitive reform, and critical peacebuilding theory. Together they explain why the dissolution triggered insurgency rather than peace. Democratic governance theory holds that security reforms gain legitimacy only through transparency, accountability, and civilian control. Conflict-sensitive theory warns that in divided societies, reforms that ignore local identities and historical grievances can have unintended and destabilizing effects. Critical peacebuilding scholarship, including Richmond’s concept of locally owned peace and Mac Ginty’s notion of “everyday peace,” emphasizes that top-down, non-participatory reform can transform latent grievances into active violence. The ASF dissolution violated the core precepts of all three: it was centrally imposed, excluded affected communities, and prioritized state consolidation over political negotiation.

The consequences escalated rapidly. Protests swept the major towns of the Amhara region, with demonstrators blocking military convoys. Disbanded ASF fighters, retaining heavy weapons including DShK machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades acquired during the Tigray war, joined the Fano insurgency. After the assassination of Girma Yeshitila in late April 2023, armed remobilization accelerated. By August 2023, coordinated Fano offensives had brought temporary control of cities including Lalibela and the regional capital Bahir Dar, prompting the federal government to declare a state of emergency that lasted nearly a year. The military’s so-called “final operation” launched in September 2024, involving mechanized forces and dozens of drone strikes across twenty-two districts, failed to defeat the decentralized insurgency, which waged guerrilla warfare from the rural highlands and fought in 1,395 recorded battles between March 2024 and February 2025. According to government figures cited in the study, half the schools in the region closed, leaving millions of children out of education and creating further recruitment opportunities for the insurgents.

The implications extend well beyond Amhara. Clashes have reignited along the contested Tigray-Amhara border over territories such as Welkait, Tsegedie, and Raya, threatening the fragile Pretoria peace. Ethiopia has accused Eritrea of arming Fano factions, and a formal letter to the United Nations in October 2025 alleged that Eritrea was funding and directing armed groups to widen the conflict—a dispute entangled with Ethiopia’s stated ambition to regain access to the Red Sea. Yet the study also identifies a potential opening: in January 2026, divided Fano factions formed the Amhara Fano National Movement, a unified framework that could enable genuine negotiation, and some insurgent groups from Wello, Gojam, and Gondar have already signed peace agreements with the regional government, with the African Union and IGAD involved, albeit belatedly.

The policy lessons are stark. Drawing on Stedman’s spoiler theory and Walter’s work on civil war settlements, Gedamu argues that dissolution must follow, not precede, the resolution of political grievances. Before any disarmament resumes, he contends, Ethiopia must address the political status of disputed territories, prosecute perpetrators of massacres against Amhara civilians, establish transitional justice mechanisms, and clarify the constitutional ambiguity over the division of security powers—ideally through interpretation by the House of Federation. Inclusive dialogue involving the Amhara political community, former fighters, civic and religious leaders, and affected communities is essential, supported by international technical and humanitarian assistance. The study’s central conclusion is a warning with resonance far beyond Ethiopia: in ethnically polarized, fragile states, legal and procedural legitimacy are not technical details of demobilization but its preconditions. Coercive disarmament imposed on communities who feel existentially threatened does not produce a state monopoly on violence—it produces the next war.

Subject of Research: Legal and procedural failures in the security sector reform process of dissolving the Amhara Special Forces and their role in the Amhara insurgency in Ethiopia

Article Title: Legal and procedural flaws in the dissolution of the Amhara Special Forces fueled insurgency and undermined peacebuilding in Ethiopia

Article References: Gedamu, T. A. (2026). Legal and procedural flaws in the dissolution of the Amhara Special Forces fueled insurgency and undermined peacebuilding in Ethiopia. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00586-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00586-1

Keywords: Ethiopia, Amhara Special Forces, security sector reform, insurgency, Fano, peacebuilding, demobilization, ethnofederalism, Pretoria Agreement, constitutional law, disarmament, conflict

The intellectual backdrop to this argument is a profound shift in how the international community treats democracy. In the immediate post-Cold War period, peace-building missions, international interventions, and security sector reform were explicitly conceived as vehicles for democratic governance, and Western security aid was frequently conditioned on liberalization, elections, and human rights commitments. That orientation collapsed rapidly after the early 2000s, the study argues, as terrorism, irregular migration, cyber-attacks, and renewed geopolitical rivalry pushed governments and international institutions toward “security first” models. Democracy conditionality was relaxed or abandoned in favor of reliable security partnerships, and authoritarian-leaning regimes received tolerance as long as they delivered cooperation. Democracy was reframed as an aspirational goal rather than an immediate imperative, creating a widening gap between rhetorical commitments and practical governance that forms the empirical basis of the research.

Protection diplomacy, as defined in the study, is a strategic exchange in which states secure regime survival and territorial protection through international guarantees, thereby reducing their dependence on domestic democratic legitimacy. Unlike conventional alliances built on reciprocity or shared values, these arrangements are characterized by asymmetry, dependence, and explicit political tradeoffs: states relinquish some measure of democratic input in exchange for military assistance, intelligence sharing, diplomatic cover, or financial aid. Crucially, the framework is not limited to autocracies. Authoritarian, hybrid, and democratic systems all engage in protection diplomacy when survival is at stake, which is precisely why the study treats it as a structural feature of modern international politics rather than a pathology of any single regime type.

The theoretical machinery behind the argument combines securitization theory from the Copenhagen School, critical political economy, and relational sovereignty. Securitization theory describes how political elites define an issue as an existential threat requiring extraordinary measures, suspending the deliberation, transparency, and accountability that normally constrain executive power. The study’s innovation is to show how foreign security commitments stabilize and prolong these threat narratives. When external patrons legitimize a regime’s definition of a security need, they lower the political cost of repression and rights restrictions. Emergency governance, once framed as temporary, becomes the normal way of doing business, and the distinction between emergency politics and ordinary politics dissolves. External actors, preferring predictable security partners over unpredictable reformers, remove the international pressure that might otherwise push regimes to de-securitize.

Relational sovereignty supplies the second analytical pillar. Against the idea that sovereignty confers untrammeled discretion, the study argues that sovereignty is socially constructed within an international hierarchy in which weaker states trade autonomy for protection, economic benefits, or recognition. Formal independence is retained while substantive autonomy narrows. External guarantors become de facto underwriters of regime stability, gaining influence over domestic political trajectories without public acknowledgment, while the norms of non-interference are formally observed. Drawing on hierarchy theory, the study notes that compliance in protection diplomacy extends beyond foreign policy alignment into domestic governance itself: border security becomes conditional on regime stability rather than democratic character, and democratic accountability comes to be seen as a liability rather than an asset within these hierarchical relationships.

From this framework the study derives four causal propositions. First, international security guarantees substitute for popular consent, reducing the cost of suppressing dissent. Second, international acceptance of a regime’s threat framing institutionalizes securitization and normalizes emergency government. Third, accountability shifts from citizens toward the foreign patron, weakening electoral and civic oversight even when elections continue. Fourth, and perhaps most counterintuitively, the short-term stabilization achieved through protection diplomacy generates long-term fragility, as institutional erosion, diminished legitimacy, and dependency cycles accumulate. The causal sequence runs from security assistance through internationally legitimized securitized governance, to executive centralization, to democratic erosion, and finally to a feedback loop in which growing instability deepens reliance on external security assistance, perpetuating the cycle.

The empirical cases illustrate how the same causal chain produces regionally distinct forms of erosion. In the Sahel, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso cooperated for years with France, the United States, and the European Union on counterterrorism while domestic institutions collapsed. In Mali, a national state of emergency transferred sweeping authority to the armed forces, civil liberties restrictions expanded, oversight mechanisms were bypassed, and security assistance flowed directly to executive and military institutions without accountability. The study documents how external recognition of military leadership empowered officers, hollowed out civilian institutions, and contributed to a wave of military coups, after which international partners adapted by continuing to cooperate with military elites rather than terminating partnerships. Western criticism of human rights abuses remained largely symbolic and irregular, while counterterrorism operations displaced civilians and deepened grievances.

Eastern Europe demonstrates that protection diplomacy can operate inside formal democratic alliances. Hungary and Poland, both NATO and European Union members, received extensive security assurances that multiplied after geopolitical tensions with Russia reignited in 2014, weakening the leverage available to enforce democratic conditionality. Hungary’s government consolidated control over courts, media, and civil society under justifications of national cohesion and security, while the V-Dem Institute recorded a fall in the country’s liberal democracy score from nearly 0.80 in 2010 to approximately 0.30 in 2023, and Freedom House downgraded Hungary from Free to Partially Free in 2019. Elections continued, and opposition victories such as the Budapest mayoral races showed that competition persisted, but the study argues that protection diplomacy devalues elections rather than eliminating them. The European Union’s sanction mechanisms proved slow and consensus-bound, allowing illiberal normalization to proceed within the liberal international order itself.

The Middle East case shows the regime-focused variant in its starkest form. Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf monarchies rely on large-scale military support and diplomatic backing legitimized by regional instability. After the Arab Spring, external actors pivoted toward protecting incumbent regimes, treating democratic reform attempts as threats to stability. Egypt illustrates the pattern: despite a brief pause in some deliveries, the United States continued providing over 1.3 billion dollars per year in military assistance after the 2013 military takeover, while emergency law has been continuously extended since 2017, enabling broad detention powers and restrictions on assembly, and opposition figures have been prosecuted under counterterrorism charges. The study highlights the irony that security arrangements designed to produce stability instead bred insecurity, as coercion replaced legitimate political channels and external actors were repeatedly drawn back into crises of their own making.

The study’s conclusions carry significant implications for international relations theory and policy. Liberal theories have long assumed that security provision creates conditions for democratic consolidation; protection diplomacy shows the opposite can occur, meaning security agreements must be understood as governance mechanisms rather than merely strategic arrangements. Because democratic backsliding is co-authored by international and domestic processes, responsibility for it crosses borders, yet existing global governance frameworks contain no mechanism for assigning that responsibility. The study recommends differentiated democratic conditionality tailored to each donor, structural rather than merely declaratory de-securitization, security assistance that builds civilian institutions alongside military capacity, multilateral accountability mechanisms with democratic indicators and transparent agreements, and ultimately a reframing of security as a democratic public good in which citizens participate rather than an executive privilege. Without such reforms, the research warns, the short-term gains of protection diplomacy will continue to undermine the long-term institutional resilience on which both security and democracy ultimately depend.

Subject of Research: The relationship between external security guarantees and democratic erosion in the contemporary multipolar international order

Article Title: The tradeoff between democratic governance and external security guarantees in a multipolar order

Article References: Edmond, C. (2026). The tradeoff between democratic governance and external security guarantees in a multipolar order. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 224. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00557-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00557-6

Keywords: protection diplomacy, democratic backsliding, securitization, sovereignty, security alliances, Sahel, Eastern Europe, Middle East, authoritarianism, international relations, global governance, counterterrorism

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