The Asmara handshake

The no-peace, no-war state

Twenty years of frozen war, the ruling that ended it on paper, and the political lock that kept it frozen

Filed early June 2018 — written on the eve of the announcement

The conflict the new Prime Minister is preparing to end is not, in any of the ways that matter, primarily about a town. The town is Badme. It sits in flat, scrubby country on the western edge of the disputed border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Its pre-war population was around 1,500. It has no resources, no strategic terrain, no military or economic significance proportionate to what has been done in its name. The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in 2018, looking out at the 250 square miles of “disputed rock and scrub,” would describe it as “the most paltry of prizes” for which “two of the continent’s poorest states expended billions of pounds and as many as 100,000 lives.”

The total casualty figure is contested. Wikipedia’s current figure for combined Ethiopian and Eritrean military and civilian deaths during the 1998–2000 war is between 70,000 and 300,000; the most cited single-figure estimate is around 80,000 to 100,000. Six hundred thousand people were displaced. The war was, at its peak, the largest active conflict in the world, with both sides mobilising nearly 250,000 troops along a 1,000-kilometre front. It was characterised by foreign observers — including veterans of more famous wars elsewhere — as the most intense fighting Africa had seen since the Second World War: massed infantry assaults, trench lines, artillery barrages across open ground. Ethiopian conscripts attacked entrenched Eritrean positions across no-man’s-land in repeated waves. Eritrean infantry, also conscripted, did the same in the other direction. The mathematical logic was nineteenth-century. The body count was twentieth. [Wikipedia, “Eritrean–Ethiopian War,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrean%E2%80%93Ethiopian_War]

To understand why the conflict outlasted itself for a further eighteen years, the political background needs to be set down clearly.

Eritrea is a state of around five million people whose modern political history begins in 1890, when Italy formally established it as a colony, and runs through 1941 (British military administration after the Italian defeat in East Africa), 1952 (UN federation with Ethiopia), 1962 (Haile Selassie’s annexation of Eritrea as a province), 1961 (the start of the Eritrean War of Independence under the Eritrean Liberation Front and later the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front), and 1991 (the EPLF’s military victory, coinciding with the EPRDF’s victory in Ethiopia, and the de facto independence of Eritrea pending a UN-supervised referendum). The referendum, held in April 1993, returned 99.8% support for independence with 98.5% turnout. The new state was formally recognised on 24 May 1993. Its founding president, Isaias Afwerki, then 47 years old, had led the EPLF since 1970. He had been a comrade-in-arms of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front during the 1980s — both organisations were fighting the same enemy in Mengistu’s Derg — and had personally been close to TPLF founders including Meles Zenawi. The post-1991 relationship between Asmara and Addis was therefore, at first, the relationship between two revolutionary regimes whose senior leaderships had spent two decades together in the bush.

That relationship lasted approximately five years before it began to fracture. The proximate causes were three: a 1997 Eritrean currency reform that introduced the nakfa, which Ethiopia refused to treat at par with the birr; a deteriorating trade balance in which Eritrea felt extracted from by Ethiopian commercial dominance; and a series of small border incidents in 1997 that exposed the absence of a demarcated border between the two states. The colonial-era treaties of 1900, 1902, and 1908 between Italy and Ethiopia had drawn lines on maps; the lines had never been surveyed on the ground; the maps were imprecise; the populations on either side of the imagined line did not coincide with the imagined line.

What ignited the war was, formally, an Eritrean military operation into the Badme area on 6 May 1998. Eritrea claimed Ethiopian forces had attacked Eritrean officials in the area first. Ethiopia, including its TPLF-dominated military command in Mekelle, characterised the Eritrean operation as a premeditated invasion of Ethiopian territory. On 13 May 1998 the Ethiopian parliament formally declared war. The fighting, after a brief lull during the June rainy season, escalated through 1998 and 1999, with major Ethiopian counter-offensives in February–March 1999 (Operation Sunset) and May 2000 (Operation Mountain Doves) that pushed Eritrean forces back from positions they had taken in 1998 and ultimately resulted in Ethiopian troops occupying a strip of Eritrean territory roughly 25 kilometres deep along the border. By June 2000 Eritrea had agreed to a ceasefire on terms favourable to Ethiopia.

The Algiers Agreement of 12 December 2000 was the instrument designed to end the war and prevent its recurrence. Its drafters were international: the Algerian government as host, the United States and the European Union as witnesses, the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity (later the African Union) as guarantors. Its content was structural. Article 4 established a five-member Boundary Commission, located in The Hague, to delimit and demarcate the border on the basis of “pertinent colonial treaties (1900, 1902 and 1908) and applicable international law.” Both parties — explicitly — agreed in advance to accept the Commission’s ruling as “final and binding.” Article 5 established a Claims Commission to assess damages. The agreement contemplated, in addition, an independent body appointed by the UN Secretary-General to investigate the war’s origins; that body was never formed.

The Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) issued its ruling on 13 April 2002. The Commission divided the border into three sectors. In the eastern and central sectors, it awarded most of the disputed territory to Ethiopia. In the western sector, it awarded most of the disputed territory to Eritrea, including the village of Badme. The Commission’s reasoning relied on the colonial treaties, on contemporaneous Italian and British maps, and on the legal doctrine of effectivités — which party had administered which territory as if it were sovereign. The Commission found that Eritrean sovereignty over the Badme area had crystallised by 1935. [Wikipedia, “Algiers Agreement (2000),” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_Agreement_(2000)]

Both parties accepted the ruling, in the immediate aftermath, in formal statements. Within weeks, Ethiopia’s posture changed. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who had personally been a senior figure in the war’s prosecution, requested “clarifications” from the Commission. The Commission declined to revise. In September 2003 Meles sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General characterising the ruling as “totally illegal, unjust and irresponsible.” In November 2004 Ethiopia announced it accepted the ruling “in principle,” subject to dialogue with Eritrea on implementation. This formula — accepting in principle, refusing in practice — would persist for the next fourteen years.

The reasons for Ethiopian non-compliance under Meles, and after his death in 2012 under Hailemariam Desalegn, had multiple layers.

The shallowest layer was domestic political risk. Badme was administratively part of Tigray Region. It had been the location at which the war’s first major Ethiopian counter-offensive had been launched. It had become, in Tigrayan and broader Ethiopian political memory, a symbol of national territorial integrity disproportionate to its actual significance. A government that returned Badme to Eritrea would face political costs in Tigray and from nationalist currents elsewhere.

The middle layer was the political economy of the TPLF. The TPLF, which dominated the federal coalition through 2018, governed Tigray as a region whose security was structurally linked to the border with Eritrea. A war footing on that border served TPLF political purposes: it justified continued military presence and elevated defence budgets; it allowed the TPLF to position itself as the indispensable shield of national security; it kept the Eritrean regime occupied with its own war-footing problem rather than free to support Eritrean opposition groups, or to support TPLF’s domestic rivals. The “no-peace, no-war” state was, for the TPLF, a managed condition rather than a problem to be solved.

The deepest layer was the relationship between the two states’ senior elites. Isaias Afwerki and the TPLF leadership had broken in 1985, ostensibly over ideological and operational disagreements; the personal animosities had outlasted the strategic ones. Each side’s leadership consistently described the other in language that would be more familiar from civil-war contexts than from interstate ones. After 2000, Isaias built a posture in which Eritrea’s foreign policy, military structure, and demographic policy were oriented around the TPLF threat — and conversely, every TPLF political project incorporated some assumption of Eritrean hostility. The 2002 EEBC ruling was, technically, a solution to a border dispute. It was not, by itself, a solution to the political relationship that had produced the border dispute.

The accumulated cost of the frozen war is worth itemising, because the international press in 2018 will treat the Asmara handshake as a moral achievement rather than as the unwinding of a specific political cost.

For Eritrea, the cost was demographic. The 1998 mobilisation produced an “indefinite national service” programme, formally limited to 18 months but extended in practice for the duration of the war and not curtailed after 2000. Successive cohorts of Eritrean youth — both male and female — were conscripted into national service at age 17 and held in military, administrative, or agricultural assignments for periods of five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. Pay was minimal. Family formation, higher education, and emigration were heavily restricted. The cumulative effect was that a country of around five million produced, between 2001 and 2018, one of the highest per-capita refugee outflows in the world. Eritreans regularly featured in the top five nationalities crossing the Mediterranean to Europe through the 2010s. A significant percentage of those who drowned in the Mediterranean were Eritrean. The political legitimacy of Isaias’s PFDJ regime depended on the persistence of the war footing; the demographic future of Eritrea was sacrificed to maintain that legitimacy.

For Ethiopia, the costs were sharper at the macro level but less burdensome per capita. The country’s military expenditure remained elevated; large ENDF units remained stationed on the northern border; cross-border trade with Eritrea (which had been substantial pre-1998) remained zero; Ethiopia continued to use Djibouti’s port at full capacity, paying port-handling fees and sea-freight costs that access to the Eritrean ports at Assab and Massawa would have substantially reduced. The Tigray regional economy specifically — which under TPLF leadership had pursued a north-facing development orientation — was cut off from its natural commercial corridor.

For the Horn of Africa as a whole, the cost was systemic. Eritrea, isolated by sanctions and by its political differences with the major regional powers, became a destabiliser. Asmara provided sanctuary and material support to Ethiopian opposition groups including the OLF and ONLF; Addis reciprocated by providing sanctuary to Eritrean opposition groups; both arrangements were vulnerable to escalation. UN sanctions imposed on Eritrea in 2009 (over alleged support to al-Shabaab in Somalia, which the UN Monitoring Group itself later struggled to substantiate in the field) further isolated the regime. The Horn became less a coherent regional system than a holding pattern of bilateral hostilities.

By June 2016, the period in which Lemma Megersa was becoming a national figure in Oromia, the holding pattern produced another flare-up: a localised but lethal exchange at Badme that produced several hundred deaths between Eritrean and Ethiopian forces. The flare-up demonstrated that the no-peace, no-war state was not a stable equilibrium. It also demonstrated that no Ethiopian government — under Meles, under Hailemariam, under the EPRDF’s collective leadership — was prepared to do what the Algiers Agreement required them to do. The implementation of the EEBC ruling had become the standing test of whether anyone in Addis was prepared to spend the political capital required to actually settle the question.

That cost-benefit calculation is the one that changes on 5 June 2018.

What changes is not, fundamentally, the legal situation — the EEBC ruling has been in force for sixteen years. What changes is not the strategic situation — Badme is still administered by Tigray; Eritrea is still ruled by Isaias; the demographic, fiscal, and security costs of the frozen war are still mounting. What changes is the political authority in Addis. The TPLF, which had been the structural block on EEBC implementation for sixteen years, no longer dominates the federal coalition. The OPDO chairman who has just been elected Prime Minister has no Tigrayan political base to protect, no TPLF political alliance to preserve, and a powerful immediate political interest in producing a high-profile foreign-policy victory that consolidates his domestic position.

The acceptance of the EEBC ruling, when it comes, will not in any meaningful sense be the resolution of a 20-year dispute. It will be the cancellation of the dispute’s political pretext by an Ethiopian government that no longer has reasons to maintain it. The actual political relationship between Addis and Asmara — between the new Prosperity-oriented federal government and the Isaias regime — will be formed independently of the EEBC ruling, on the basis of their shared interests in the present, not on the basis of any genuine reconciliation about the past.

The TPLF, watching from Mekelle, will read what is about to happen as precisely this: not as a peace, but as a coalition against them. They will be substantially correct.

---

Sources for Article 2A

1. Wikipedia, “Eritrean–Ethiopian War,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrean%E2%80%93Ethiopian_War
2. Wikipedia, “Algiers Agreement (2000),” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algiers_Agreement_(2000)
3. Wikipedia, “Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea%E2%80%93Ethiopia_Boundary_Commission
4. Oxford Public International Law, “Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC),” May 2020 — https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law-mpeipro/e3457.013.3457/law-mpeipro-e3457
5. Daily Sabah, “Ethiopia-Eritrea border rapprochement: Rewards and responsibilities,” 25 June 2018 — https://www.dailysabah.com/op-ed/2018/06/25/ethiopia-eritrea-border-rapprochement-rewards-and-responsibilities
6. The Borgen Project, “A Resolution at Last? The Ethiopian-Eritrean Border Dispute,” 27 June 2018 — https://borgenproject.org/ethiopian-eritrean-border/
7. ISS Africa, “The Eritrea-Ethiopia peace deal is yet to show dividends,” 11 September 2020 — https://issafrica.org/iss-today/the-eritrea-ethiopia-peace-deal-is-yet-to-show-dividends
8. Daily Telegraph (cited via The Communists), “Can Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed really bring peace and democracy to the Horn of Africa?” by Adrian Blomfield, 18 July 2018 — https://thecommunists.org/2018/08/10/news/ethiopia-eritrea-peace-deal/
9. Wikipedia, “Isaias Afwerki,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaias_Afwerki

---

The handshake

Five points, a tarmac embrace, and the structural fault that would produce the next war

Filed late July 2018 — covering 5 June through mid-July 2018

The announcement, when it comes, is made by the institutional body whose authority is about to expire. On 5 June 2018, the Executive Committee of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front — the four-party coalition the new Prime Minister will dissolve eighteen months later — convenes in Addis Ababa and votes to accept the 2000 Algiers Agreement and the 2002 EEBC ruling in full, without preconditions, and to call on Eritrea to reciprocate. The EPRDF Executive Committee is composed of senior representatives from all four constituent parties: OPDO, ANDM, SEPDM, and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The TPLF members are physically present at the meeting. The decision, on the public account, is taken by consensus. [Wikipedia, “2018 Eritrea–Ethiopia summit,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Eritrea%E2%80%93Ethiopia_summit]

The consensus is short-lived. Within days, the TPLF in Mekelle dissociates itself from the announcement. Tigrayan media outlets characterise the EPRDF executive’s decision as having been driven through over Tigrayan objections. On 13 June 2018, the executive committee of the TPLF — meeting in Mekelle, separately from the federal coalition — releases a formal statement denouncing the decision to hand over Badme as “fundamentally flawed” and accusing the EPRDF leadership in Addis of having suffered from a “fundamental error” in conducting Ethiopian foreign policy. Protests follow in Tigray. There are demonstrations in Mekelle. There are demonstrations, more pointedly, in Badme itself, where local residents — most of whom are ethnically Tigrayan and were resettled there during and after the war — march against being assigned to Eritrean sovereignty. The Irob ethnic community in the disputed border zone, who fear being divided across the new line, organise their own protest. Tigrayan veterans of the 1998–2000 war, who lost relatives and limbs in the fighting around Badme, hold ceremonies of public mourning.

The federal government’s response to the Tigrayan protests is to ignore them. On 11 June 2018, six days after the EPRDF announcement, Abiy Ahmed addresses a question session in the federal parliament. Asked to defend his peace initiative, he says, in a sentence that will be quoted in international press for months: “I was standing in [Badme] when we put up our flag, and I cried. Many of my friends who fought in that war, we had to bury.” The reference is to his own service as a young ENDF radio operator during the 1998–2000 conflict. The political function of the statement is to assert that Abiy himself, as a veteran of the war, has the moral standing to make the concession that Meles, Hailemariam, and the TPLF refused to make. The political effect of the statement is to displace the TPLF — the party most directly identified with the war — from the conversation about how to end it.

In Asmara, the Eritrean government takes two weeks to respond to the 5 June announcement. The silence is not accidental. Isaias Afwerki has spent sixteen years building the political and demographic architecture of the Eritrean state around the proposition that the EEBC ruling will not be implemented. The implementation now being offered is therefore not only a diplomatic opportunity but a fundamental challenge to the regime’s organising premise. Indefinite national service, indefinite emergency, indefinite sanctions, indefinite isolation — all of these have rested on the proposition that Ethiopia would not move. Ethiopia is now moving. Isaias must decide whether to move with it or against it.

On 20 June 2018, Isaias delivers the keynote address at Eritrea’s annual Martyrs’ Day commemoration. The speech is the formal Eritrean response. He acknowledges Ethiopia’s announcement, characterises it as a “fundamental shift” in Ethiopian policy, expresses regret for “two lost generations” of Eritrean-Ethiopian relations, and announces that he will be sending a delegation to Addis Ababa “to gauge current developments directly and in depth as well as to chart out a plan for continuous future action.” Embedded in the speech is what Foreign Policy’s Horn of Africa correspondent, writing three weeks later, will identify as the strategic logic of the entire opening: Isaias’s praise for “the Ethiopian protesters” who in his view had rightly pressured the TPLF regime to install Abiy. The Eritrean president was, in a single phrase, characterising the Ethiopian government he had spent twenty years at war with as the TPLF — and the new Ethiopian government as the protest movement that had unseated the TPLF. The vocabulary mattered. It placed Asmara and Addis on the same side of the central political question, with the TPLF on the other side. [Foreign Policy, “Ethiopia and Eritrea Have a Common Enemy,” 12 July 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/12/ethiopia-and-eritrea-have-a-common-enemy-abiy-ahmed-isaias-afwerki-badme-peace-tplf-eprdf/]

The Eritrean delegation arrived in Addis on 26 June. Foreign Minister Osman Saleh and Presidential Adviser Yemane Gebreab held meetings with Abiy and the Ethiopian foreign ministry. The Ethiopian government rolled out unusual hospitality — a state luncheon at the National Palace, Eritrean flags flying alongside Ethiopian ones on Bole Road, public welcoming ceremonies. The Eritrean delegation left with the framework agreement that would be signed in Asmara two weeks later.

The Asmara summit took place on 8 and 9 July 2018. Abiy arrived on Ethiopian Airlines flight ET310 — the first commercial Ethiopian Airlines flight to Asmara in twenty years. He was met at Asmara International Airport by Isaias personally, on the tarmac, in front of cameras. The two men embraced — a hug rather than a handshake, the imagery that would dominate global media coverage that night and the next morning. Abiy’s delegation included Workneh Gebeyehu (Minister of Foreign Affairs), Muferiat Kamil (Speaker of the House of Peoples’ Representatives, soon to become Minister of Peace), Keria Ibrahim (Speaker of the House of Federation), and Seyoum Awol (President of Afar Region). Notably absent from the delegation was Debretsion Gebremichael, the TPLF chairman and President of Tigray Region. The TPLF had not been invited, and would not have come if it had been.

The substantive day was 9 July. After a morning of talks at Isaias’s office and a coffee ceremony at his private residence, the two leaders signed the Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship. The declaration runs to five points:

1. The state of war between Ethiopia and Eritrea has come to an end. A new era of peace and friendship has been opened.
2. The two governments will work to forge intimate political, economic, social, cultural, and security cooperation that serves and advances the vital interests of their peoples.
3. Transport, trade, and communications links between the two countries will resume; diplomatic ties and activities will restart.
4. The two countries will jointly endeavour to ensure regional peace, development, and cooperation.
5. Both governments will work in close cooperation to address terrorism and trafficking of people, drugs, and arms, as well as money laundering.

The Joint Declaration is, in the strict legal sense, a statement of intent rather than a treaty. It does not constitute a peace agreement under international law; the formal end of hostilities under the Algiers Agreement was the 18 June 2000 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement and the 12 December 2000 Algiers Agreement itself. What the Joint Declaration does, instrumentally, is supersede the Eritrean position that no normalisation could occur until Ethiopia withdrew from EEBC-awarded territory, and the Ethiopian position that no normalisation could occur until Eritrea ceased support for Ethiopian opposition groups. Both preconditions, on 9 July 2018, are cancelled.

What the Joint Declaration does not do is also significant. It does not contain a timeline for the demarcation of the border on the ground. It does not contain provisions for the return or compensation of Ethiopians expelled from Eritrea or Eritreans expelled from Ethiopia during the 1998–2000 period. It does not address the legal status of the approximately 175,000 Eritrean refugees living in camps in Tigray Region and elsewhere in Ethiopia. It does not constitute or initiate any formal framework for joint border administration, customs cooperation, or commercial regulation. It does not address the existence of the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission’s findings except by inference. It does not, crucially, contain any reference to the Tigray Region — through whose territory the disputed border runs and whose administration of Badme is the operational question the agreement formally settles.

In the immediate post-summit period the practical normalisation moves quickly. Ethiopian Airlines resumes regular service to Asmara on 18 July. The land border opens on 11 September 2018 — for the first time in twenty years — at four crossing points including Zalambessa, Bure, Rama, and Humera. Phone lines reopen. The Eritrean embassy in Addis reopens; the Ethiopian embassy in Asmara reopens. Eritrean diplomats are recalled to and from Eritrean diplomatic missions abroad to be briefed on the new arrangements. Eritrean nationals living in Ethiopia begin returning home; Ethiopian nationals begin visiting Eritrean relatives many had not seen in two decades. The Massawa and Assab ports, after a hiatus, begin accepting Ethiopian commercial cargo on a trial basis.

In Stockholm, the Norwegian Nobel Committee notes the developments with interest. In Geneva, the UN Security Council moves, through autumn 2018, toward the formal lifting of sanctions on Eritrea, which it accomplishes on 14 November 2018. In Washington, the State Department applauds Isaias’s “courageous leadership” — in the Foreign Policy correspondent’s framing, “a breathtaking about-face, seemingly forgetting that it had long considered Isaias a pariah.”

A set of consequences not visible from any of those capitals on 9 July 2018 will become visible later.

The first consequence is the formal beginning of Ethiopian-Eritrean intelligence cooperation. Ethiopian and Eritrean intelligence services begin sharing files, jointly monitoring border crossings, and — within months — jointly tracking Eritrean refugees living in Ethiopia. Some refugees living in Addis Ababa are detained for three weeks before being acquitted by Ethiopian courts. The political signal to Eritrean refugees more broadly is that Ethiopia is no longer a safe destination. By 2019, refugee flows into the Tigray camps slow markedly. The Eritrean diaspora opposition, which had used Addis as one of its operational centres, finds itself increasingly without political space. Asmara, for the first time since 1998, has a quiet south.

The second consequence is the realignment of Asmara’s regional posture. With Ethiopia no longer the principal threat, Eritrea is free to develop the relationships with Gulf states (UAE, Saudi Arabia) that the Yemen war and the Red Sea geopolitics make available; to reopen the Cairo channel that had been broken since the 1990s; to begin the discreet positioning that will, by 2024–2025, produce an Egypt-Eritrea-Somalia security axis against Ethiopia. The peace with Addis does not produce an Eritrean turn toward Africa. It produces an Eritrean turn toward the Red Sea littoral and the Arab states. The transactional skill with which Isaias manages this realignment will become the central diplomatic story of the Horn through the 2020s.

The third consequence is the structural exclusion of the TPLF from any role in the new order. Badme remains under Tigrayan administration. The border with Eritrea is the border of Tigray Region. The implementation of the EEBC ruling — when and if it occurs — will be a Tigrayan operational responsibility. None of this was discussed in Asmara. The Ethiopian delegation did not include a Tigrayan representative; the agreement does not contain provisions for Tigrayan consultation; the federal government in Addis treats the Tigrayan opposition to the deal as obstruction rather than as a stakeholder position. The Institute for Security Studies, looking back at the deal in 2020, will identify this exclusion as the structural defect from which the November 2020 war directly arises: “the peace process was initiated from Addis Ababa, and there wasn’t adequate consultation and consensus building among stakeholders like the TPLF.” The exclusion does more than alienate the TPLF politically; it generates the precise conditions under which the TPLF will conclude that armed self-defence is the only available posture. [ISS Africa, “The Eritrea-Ethiopia peace deal is yet to show dividends,” 11 September 2020, https://issafrica.org/iss-today/the-eritrea-ethiopia-peace-deal-is-yet-to-show-dividends]

The fourth consequence is the Nobel Peace Prize. On 11 October 2019, the Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce that Abiy has been awarded the 2019 prize, citing “his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.” The award will be greeted in Addis with celebration. It will be received in Asmara with a single official statement of acknowledgment and no public commentary from Isaias. The asymmetry of reception will tell its own story: Isaias is not in this for the prize. He is in this for the consolidation against the TPLF. The prize, in his framing, is something Abiy needed; the dismantling of the TPLF is something he himself needed. The deal had given him the second by giving Abiy the first.

The fifth consequence is the war. In October 2020, with Tigrayan-federal tensions at their post-Pretoria-collapse height, the TPLF will conduct regional elections in defiance of the federal postponement. In early November 2020, the TPLF will attack the ENDF Northern Command base in Mekelle. Within days, Eritrean Defence Force units will cross the border from the north into Tigray, in coordinated operation with the ENDF. They will not be there as peacekeepers. They will be there to settle the account that the Asmara handshake had deferred. By the end of November 2020, EDF forces will be in Axum killing several hundred Tigrayan civilians. By March 2021, even Abiy will publicly acknowledge — months after Amnesty International, the BBC, the Financial Times, and CNN had documented — that the EDF was inside Ethiopia and that what was happening to Tigrayan civilians was happening in part at Eritrean hands. The strategic logic of 9 July 2018 — Ethiopia and Eritrea uniting against a common enemy — would, twenty-eight months later, become its operational form.

This is the deeper meaning of the Asmara handshake, and it was visible at the time to those who chose to look. Foreign Policy, on 12 July 2018, headlined its analysis: “Ethiopia and Eritrea Have a Common Enemy.” The article identified, in print, the framework that would explain the next four years: “Abiy Ahmed and Isaias Afwerki are racing toward peace because they both face the same threat: hardliners in the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front.” The Nobel Committee did not see what Foreign Policy saw — or saw it and assessed it as insufficient ground for withholding the prize. The committee saw a peace deal because one existed. What it did not see was that the peace deal was the coalition-building phase of the next war.

This is also what the celebration in Addis missed. The handshake was not a reconciliation between two states. It was a coordination between two leaders whose interests, on the particular question of how to deal with the TPLF, had aligned. Coordination on that scale produces real diplomatic outcomes — the embassies, the flights, the phones, the Nobel — and those outcomes are not nothing. But coordination is not reconciliation. The Eritrean state under Isaias did not stop being authoritarian; it did not lift national service; it did not open political space; it did not address the refugees. The Ethiopian state under Abiy did not absorb Eritrea into a regional integration framework; it did not demarcate the border; it did not address the Tigrayan question. What the two states did was build a working partnership on the basis of a shared political opponent. When that opponent was eliminated as a political force — in the war of 2020–2022 — the partnership lost its rationale. By 2024 it was strained. By 2026 the two governments are publicly accusing each other of preparing for a new war.

On 9 July 2018 none of this is in evidence. The dominant fact of the day is the embrace on the tarmac. The dominant feeling, in Addis and Asmara and Stockholm, is that twenty years of bad news is over.

It is partly true. It is also insufficient. The peace that ended the war between two states had been built on the coordination of those states against a third party. The third party would be the next war.

---

Sources for Article 2B

1. Wikipedia, “2018 Eritrea–Ethiopia summit,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Eritrea%E2%80%93Ethiopia_summit
2. Cambridge University Press, “Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship between Eritrea and Ethiopia,” International Legal Materials, March 2019 — https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-legal-materials/article/abs/joint-declaration-of-peace-and-friendship-between-eritrea-and-ethiopia/76C651A25602F6DF3E2D62B01BC5984E
3. Foreign Policy, “Ethiopia and Eritrea Have a Common Enemy” by Michael Woldemariam, 12 July 2018 — https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/12/ethiopia-and-eritrea-have-a-common-enemy-abiy-ahmed-isaias-afwerki-badme-peace-tplf-eprdf/
4. ISS Africa, “The Eritrea-Ethiopia peace deal is yet to show dividends,” 11 September 2020 — https://issafrica.org/iss-today/the-eritrea-ethiopia-peace-deal-is-yet-to-show-dividends
5. CSIS, “Eritrea-Ethiopia Peace: Seismic Shifts Throughout a Strategic Zone,” July 2018 — https://www.csis.org/analysis/eritrea-ethiopia-peace-seismic-shifts-throughout-strategic-zone
6. Africa at LSE, “Isaias Afwerki’s gamble in Ethiopia is endangering Eritrean sovereignty,” 24 March 2022 — https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2022/03/24/isaias-afwerkis-gamble-in-ethiopia-tigray-is-endangering-eritrean-sovereignty/
7. Wikipedia, “Isaias Afwerki,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaias_Afwerki
8. Daily Sabah, “Ethiopia-Eritrea border rapprochement: Rewards and responsibilities,” 25 June 2018 — https://www.dailysabah.com/op-ed/2018/06/25/ethiopia-eritrea-border-rapprochement-rewards-and-responsibilities
9. HORN REVIEW, “Isayas Afeworki in Cairo: The Red Sea Intrigue & the Making of Regional Chaos,” 2 November 2025 — https://hornreview.org/2025/11/02/isayas-afeworki-in-cairo-the-red-sea-intrigue-the-making-of-regional-chaos/
10. Ethiopia Insight, “Strategic Reversals: Abiy’s Miscalculation and the Tigray–Eritrea Realignment,” 20 August 2025 — https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2025/08/20/strategic-reversals-abiys-miscalculation-and-the-tigray-eritrea-realignment/

---

End of expanded articles for Dispatch 2. Two articles, approximately 5,300 words.