The Continuing Crisis: Amhara, Oromia, Sidama, and the Fragility of the Federation

Thesis

As of mid-2026, the Ethiopian federation contains three regional states (Amhara, Tigray, Oromia) where federal authority is contested by force of arms, two other regions (Sidama and the broader southern complex) where federal authority is contested politically and where the constitutional restructuring of the SNNPR into four successor regions has not produced settlement, and an external environment (Ethiopia-Eritrea relations, Sudan-Ethiopia tensions over the GERD and RSF support, Egypt-Ethiopia tensions over Nile waters and Red Sea access) that has substantially deteriorated since 2022.¹ The Critical Threats Project’s June 2026 assessment characterised Ethiopia as facing “simultaneous crises across multiple regions” with federal capacity stretched across the Amhara, Tigray, and Oromia conflicts simultaneously.²

The article’s argument is that the simultaneous crises are not separate problems with separate causes; they are the same constitutional problem manifesting in different regional settings. Each crisis can be analysed regionally — the Fano insurgency in Amhara has Amhara-specific triggers (the dissolution of the Amhara Special Forces in April 2023, the unresolved Welkait question, broader Amhara nationalist grievances); the OLA insurgency in Oromia has Oromia-specific triggers (the post-2018 disappointment of Oromo political expectations under Abiy’s pan-Ethiopianism, the contested transition of OPDO to Prosperity Party); the Sidama and southern questions have their own dynamics. But all three crises share a constitutional feature: each is a regional political mobilisation against a federal government whose constitutional standing the mobilisations contest, in a constitutional framework that does not provide effective adjudication of the contest. The constitutional architecture that produced the Tigray crisis is producing the others. The continuing crisis is the architecture’s continuing operation.

The Amhara conflict

The Amhara conflict is, as of mid-2026, the most acute of the active armed conflicts within Ethiopia. The conflict began in April 2023, when the federal government announced the dissolution of the Amhara Special Forces and other regional special forces as part of a broader security-sector centralisation programme.³ The Amhara Special Forces had been substantial — estimates ranged from 50,000 to 100,000 personnel — and had been instrumental during the Tigray war on the federal side. The dissolution order produced immediate protests; significant elements of the Special Forces defected to Fano militias rather than integrate into the federal security services; and active armed conflict began in April–May 2023.

The conflict’s intensity has fluctuated but has remained sustained for over three years. The federal government declared a state of emergency in Amhara in August 2023, which has been repeatedly extended. By mid-2026, Fano operations were active in over 64 woredas across 12 zonal administrations of the Amhara region. The Critical Threats Project documented that Fano increased its average monthly rate of attacks by over 50 percent in the March–May 2026 period compared to December 2025–February 2026, with Fano forces targeting election infrastructure ahead of the June 2026 federal elections and the National Electoral Board ultimately announcing that elections would not be held in at least 8 of Amhara’s 138 constituencies due to insecurity.⁴

The Fano movement is organisationally decentralised. The strongest single faction is the Amhara Fano National Movement; others include various local militias loosely federated under the Fano banner. The decentralisation has been operationally significant: it has made the federal government’s negotiation efforts difficult (there is no single counterparty), but it has also limited the movement’s capacity to translate military success into political consolidation. By 2026, Fano was assessed as having established limited local governance structures in rural Amhara to supplant federal and regional authorities, but it had not produced the kind of unified political authority that would represent the Amhara constituency as a whole.⁵

The conflict’s constitutional content is significant. The Amhara grievances articulated by Fano and by allied political movements (NaMA, EZEMA, others) include:

(a) The territorial questions in western Tigray (Welkait, Tselemt, Humera), which the federal government’s 2022 Pretoria framework left ambiguous and which the federal government’s February 2026 House of Federation decision to remove the five constituencies addressed in a way Amhara interests opposed;

(b) The dissolution of the regional security forces, which Fano frames as an unconstitutional unilateral federal decision against the regional state’s constitutional autonomy;

(c) The broader question of Amhara representation in the federation, with Fano arguing that the post-2018 framework has produced Oromo-dominated federal governance at Amhara expense;

(d) The Orthodox-Church-related issues that emerged from the 2023 Synod schism, in which the federal government’s response to Oromo Orthodox claims for autocephaly was understood by Amhara constituencies as taking the Oromo side.⁶

The constitutional question is not just regional. As with the Tigray case, the conflict tests what the constitution means when a federal government and a regional constituency disagree about constitutional authority. The federal government’s framing is that Fano is an extra-constitutional armed movement that must be defeated or absorbed into legal political process. The Fano framing is that the Amhara Special Forces dissolution was the unconstitutional act, and that the armed resistance is constitutional defence. Neither framing has been adjudicated by any independent institution. The conflict continues in the constitutional vacuum.

The December 2025 agreement between the federal government and what was described as FANO-AFPO — Fano’s Amhara Federalist Political Organisation — was presented by federal sources as a major peacebuilding success, witnessed by the AU Deputy Chairperson and the IGAD Deputy Executive Secretary.⁷ As of mid-2026, the agreement’s operational implementation has been limited; the main Fano factions, particularly the Amhara Fano National Movement, did not sign it; armed operations have continued.

The OLA insurgency

The Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), the armed wing of what was the Oromo Liberation Front before the OLF’s 2018 return to legal political activity, has been active in significant parts of Oromia since 2018. The post-2018 OLA emerged when OLF leadership and rank-and-file split over whether to accept the legal political space the Abiy government offered or to continue armed struggle. The OLA chose armed struggle, asserting that the Abiy government’s pan-Ethiopian framework had betrayed Oromo political aspirations.⁸

The OLA insurgency has been geographically extensive (active in West Wollega, East Wollega, Horo Guduru, Kellem Wollega, parts of Shewa) and operationally sustained. The federal government’s response has included substantial military deployments, the Oromia Special Forces (which were not dissolved on the timeline of the Amhara Special Forces), and a network of allied irregular forces. The conflict has produced significant civilian casualties, including the documented Gimbi massacre of June 2022 in which at least 230 ethnic Amhara residents were killed (responsibility contested between OLA and federal forces).⁹

The OLA’s constitutional content is a contested question. The OLA’s official position is that it represents the legitimate self-determination claim of the Oromo people that the 1995 Constitution recognises in Articles 8 and 39, and that the Abiy government’s pan-Ethiopianism is an unconstitutional move away from the ethnic-federal framework. The federal government’s position is that the OLA is an armed terrorist organisation operating against the constitutional government and that its claims are extra-constitutional. As with Fano, neither position has been adjudicated.

The political effects of the OLA insurgency on the Oromia political landscape have been significant. The Oromia regional government, run by the Oromo branch of the Prosperity Party, has lost effective administrative control of substantial parts of the region. The OFC, the principal legal Oromo opposition party, has operated under continuing restrictions, with leaders detained periodically. The Oromo political constituency that brought Abiy to power has substantially fragmented: pro-Abiy Oromo voters who view his pan-Ethiopian framework as appropriate, OLA-sympathetic voters who view the framework as betrayal, and a large undecided middle that has substantially demobilised from political participation.¹⁰

The Ambo crisis of June 2026 — in which the city was reportedly “under siege” by criminal gangs amid disturbing abuses documented on social media — is symptomatic of the broader collapse of administrative control in parts of Oromia.¹¹ The federal government’s capacity to maintain governance in significant parts of the region is, as of mid-2026, contested.

The Sidama and southern questions

The Sidama Region was created in 2020 following the November 2019 referendum, which produced 98.5 percent affirmative vote on a turnout of 98.9 percent.¹² The creation of Sidama was the only successful Article 39 invocation in the constitution’s history — successful in the sense that the process was completed and the new region was constituted. The political consequences have been mixed.

The Sidama regional government has, as of 2026, operated as a Prosperity Party regional affiliate. Hawassa, the regional capital, has continued to function as a substantial urban centre. The political question that the referendum had been about — Sidama autonomy under the federation — has been answered in a way that established the autonomy without resolving the underlying tensions. The Sidama–Wolaita boundary dispute in the Lake Abaya area has continued; the management of multi-ethnic Hawassa has remained contentious; the relations between Sidama and the surrounding regions have produced periodic friction.¹³

The 2021 establishment of the Southwest Ethiopia Peoples Region — through a referendum on 30 September 2021 in five zones (West Omo, Bench Sheko, Kefa, Dawro, Sheka) and one special woreda (Konta) — was the second SNNPR breakup.¹⁴ The 2023 establishment of the South Ethiopia Region (referendum 6 February 2023, final approval July 2023) and the parallel re-designation of the SNNPR remainder as the Central Ethiopia Region completed the dissolution of the SNNPR into four successor regions.¹⁵

The Gurage question remains unresolved. The Gurage zone, alone among the SNNPR remnant, voted against integration into Central Ethiopia and submitted a request for its own separate statehood in 2022. As of 2026, the request has not produced a referendum; Gurage protests in Wolkite (capital of Central Ethiopia, in Gurage zone) have continued; the regional and federal governments have managed the situation through periodic detentions and de facto emergency measures.¹⁶

The Wolayita question is similarly unresolved. Wolayita politicians have continued to argue for separate statehood; the federal government has not granted a referendum; political tension in Wolayita zone has continued.¹⁷

The broader political question of what the SNNPR breakup has accomplished is contested. Defenders argue that it has reduced the long-standing pressure for nationality self-determination within the previously unwieldy multi-ethnic region; critics argue that it has multiplied the federation’s administrative complexity without addressing the underlying nationality questions that produced the pressure. The empirical assessment is that some pressures have been reduced (the original Sidama statehood demand has been met) while others have been multiplied (Gurage, Wolayita, smaller nationality demands continue) and the federation’s administrative coordination has become more complex.¹⁸

The Eritrean question and the regional environment

The Ethiopia-Eritrea relationship, briefly rapprochement-oriented from 2018 to 2020, has deteriorated dramatically since the Tigray war’s late phase. The principal flashpoints in 2026:

The Eritrean occupation of Tigrayan territory. Eritrean forces entered Tigray in November 2020 and have, in significant parts, remained in occupation despite the Pretoria Agreement’s terms. The contested areas include parts of central and eastern Tigray that, by the constitutional framework, are Ethiopian sovereign territory.¹⁹

The Assab question. Abiy Ahmed identified Eritrea’s port of Assab in 2023 as a potential location for Ethiopian sea access, framing the issue as Ethiopia’s strategic necessity. Eritrea has treated the framing as a threat to its sovereignty. Egypt’s investment in Assab port in 2025, allegedly granting Egyptian naval access, has added a regional dimension to the question.²⁰

The Fano support question. The federal government has alleged that Eritrea is providing arms and training to Fano forces. Critical Threats Project assessments and Ethiopia’s June and October 2025 letters to the UN have documented Ethiopian intelligence claims of Eritrean support for Fano operations against federal forces.²¹

The TPLF-Eritrea-Fano alignment. The April 2026 hardliner consolidation in the TPLF, combined with Eritrea’s interest in weakening the federal government and Fano’s separate war against the federal government, has produced what Critical Threats Project describes as a loose strategic alignment of three actors who would, in normal circumstances, be hostile to each other. The alignment is operationally significant: a war in Tigray would now likely involve Eritrean participation on the TPLF side, with Fano operations in Amhara constraining federal capacity to deploy to Tigray.²²

The Sudan-Ethiopia tensions. Since December 2025, Sudanese officials have accused Ethiopia of training Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighters and allied militias in western Ethiopia. Satellite imagery analysed by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab documented activity at an Ethiopian National Defense Force base near Asosa consistent with military support operations. The Sudan-Ethiopia border has emerged as an additional theatre of regional tension.²³

The regional environment, in mid-2026, is at the worst it has been since the post-Cold War period. The federation that the 1995 Constitution was designed to govern is, in significant parts, at war or near-war internally and is facing degraded external relations with all its principal neighbours except Djibouti.

The constitutional architecture’s role

The continuing crisis is not solely caused by the constitutional architecture. The Amhara Special Forces dissolution was a federal policy decision that could have been managed differently. The post-2018 disappointment of Oromo political expectations involved choices the Abiy government made about what to prioritise. The Sidama and Gurage questions reflect the underlying nationality politics that the constitution acknowledged rather than created. The Eritrean rapprochement collapse involved choices by both Abiy and Isaias Afwerki. Each of these is a contributing cause.

The constitutional architecture’s role is in the absence of institutional capacity to manage the crises through constitutional means. There is no constitutional court to adjudicate the Welkait territorial question. There is no independent electoral commission to manage contested elections in disputed territories. There is no functioning parliament to constrain executive choices about regional security policy. There is no independent judiciary to assess the constitutionality of emergency measures. There is no House of Federation capable of issuing decisions against federal executive preferences. The institutional architecture that, in a working constitutional democracy, would mediate the political conflicts the country faces does not exist.

This is what the hollow-pillar diagnosis of Article 12 looks like in operation. When the country faces simultaneous constitutional crises, the constitutional institutions do not produce constitutional resolution. The crises are managed by the executive through political and military means, and the political and military means produce the outcomes the executive prefers — until the affected constituencies mobilise, at which point the executive’s preferred outcomes become contested by force. The continuing crisis is the predictable trajectory of a constitutional architecture that does not provide institutional means for crisis adjudication.

Steelman of the federal position

The federal government’s position is that the crises are inherited problems being managed under extraordinarily difficult conditions, that the post-2018 reforms (security-sector centralisation, regional special forces dissolution, the SNNPR breakup, the rapprochement with Eritrea) were necessary steps toward a more functional federation, and that the current armed oppositions (Fano, OLA, TPLF) are responsible for the violence rather than the federal government’s framework choices.²⁴ This has elements of weight. The Ethiopian federation does face genuine inherited problems; the post-2018 reforms did address some of them; the armed movements have made choices that escalated conflict beyond what political negotiation might have produced.

The reply is that the federal government has had eight years to address the inherited problems through constitutional means and has, in operational terms, used the time to consolidate executive authority rather than to build constitutional capacity. The hollow-pillar pattern has not been addressed. The institutional architecture has not been retrofitted. The constitutional reform discussion in the National Dialogue Commission has not produced concrete amendments. The federal government has had the opportunity to use the 2026 supermajority to undertake constitutional reform; whether it will is the question of the next eighteen months.

Multi-causal accounting

The continuing crisis reflects (a) the constitutional architecture’s structural limitations; (b) the specific policy choices of the Abiy government, particularly the security-sector centralisation programme; (c) the unfinished business of the Tigray war’s aftermath; (d) the regional security environment; (e) the demographic and economic pressures of post-pandemic Ethiopia, including inflation, urban unemployment, and rural displacement; (f) the inherited political dynamics of each affected region; and (g) the international donor environment, which has continued to fund the federal government’s developmental programme while expressing concern about the political-conflict dimensions. The architecture is one factor among many. Its specific weight is in the absence of institutional mediation that the other factors would otherwise produce more manageable outcomes from.

What the article establishes

As of mid-2026, the Ethiopian federation faces simultaneous crises in three regional states with active armed conflict and additional crises in the SNNPR successor regions and in external relations. The crises are not separate problems with separate causes; they are the same constitutional problem — the absence of institutional capacity to adjudicate federal-state and ethnic-political disputes — manifesting in different regional settings. The continuing crisis is the constitutional architecture’s continuing operation. The next articles take up the comparators (other federations that have managed similar problems) and the political-economy explanation for why each Ethiopian regime has repeated the pattern.

---

References

Footnotes

1. For overview, see Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026: Ethiopia, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2026/country-chapters/ethiopia. ↩

2. Critical Threats Project Africa File assessments, 2026. ↩

3. On the Amhara Special Forces dissolution and the start of the Fano insurgency, see “Fano insurgency,” Wikipedia; “UNDERSTANDING THE FANO INSURGENCY IN ETHIOPIA’S AMHARA REGION,” Rift Valley Institute, https://riftvalley.net/publication/understanding-the-fano-insurgency-in-ethiopias-amhara-region/. ↩

4. “Fano Disrupts Ethiopian Elections,” Africa File, May 28, 2026, https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/ethiopia-fano-tplf-abiy-somalia-isis-puntland-drc-m23-rwanda-rubaya-africa-file-may-28-2026. ↩

5. Africa File, May 28, 2026. ↩

6. On Amhara grievances, see “The Human Rights Crisis in Ethiopia, May 15, 2026,” Genocide Watch, https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/the-human-rights-crisis-in-ethiopia-may-15-2026. ↩

7. On the December 2025 agreement, see “Ethiopia Beyond Fragility,” IFA, March 2026, https://www.ifa.gov.et/2026/03/19/ethiopia-beyond-fragility-resilience-reform-and-realities-in-light-of-nrc-humanitarian-insights-2026/. ↩

8. On the OLA, see Goitom Gebreluel, “Ethiopia’s Oromo Crisis”; various 2018–2026 reports. ↩

9. On the Gimbi massacre, see Reuters and Human Rights Watch reports, June 2022. ↩

10. On Oromia political dynamics, see “Abiy Ahmed’s Hegemonistic Prosperity Party,” Borkena, June 2026. ↩

11. “Communities mourn merchant shot dead,” Addis Standard, June 2026. ↩

12. On the Sidama referendum, see “2019 Sidama Region referendum,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Sidama_Region_referendum. ↩

13. On the post-Sidama tensions, see Rift Valley Institute briefing on the South Ethiopia referendum. ↩

14. On the Southwest Ethiopia Region, see various sources; September 2021 referendum. ↩

15. On the South Ethiopia Region, see “2023 South Ethiopia Region referendum,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_South_Ethiopia_Region_referendum. ↩

16. On the Gurage question, see Rift Valley Institute briefing; ACLED Ethiopia Peace Observatory, https://epo.acleddata.com/southern-nations-nationalities-and-peoples-region-snnpr/. ↩

17. On Wolayita, see Rift Valley Institute briefing; NEBE statements regarding the 2023 referendum rerun. ↩

18. For the assessment, see Rift Valley Institute analyses 2023–2026. ↩

19. On Eritrean occupation of Tigrayan territory, see various 2023–2026 reports. ↩

20. On the Assab question, see “The growing threat of conflict in the Horn of Africa,” The New Humanitarian, March 2026. ↩

21. On Eritrean support to Fano, see “Fano insurgency,” Wikipedia; “Military Buildup In Northern Ethiopia,” Africa File, February 12, 2026. ↩

22. On the TPLF-Eritrea-Fano alignment, see “Tplf Undoes Tigray Peace Agreement,” Africa File, April 23, 2026. ↩

23. On Sudan-Ethiopia tensions, see “After the Supermajority,” CSIS, June 2026. ↩

24. For the federal position, see Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statements; Government Communication Service publications. ↩