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"Tronvoll, Kjetil"
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Voting for war, to secure peace: weaponising the Tigray 2020 election in Ethiopia
Elections in divided societies and in countries undergoing political transitions are precarious events. Hastened democratisation may ignite inter-communal antagonism and mobilise voters for conflict. Sub-national elections are even more prone to challenge national policies to defend regional autonomy and self-determination. The relationship between the Tigray Peoples' Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Ethiopian Federal government had been deteriorating since the coming to power of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in 2018. It was formally breached in September 2020 when the TPLF insisted on organising a separate regional election in Tigray in defiance of the federal government's decision to postpone national elections due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to one of Africa's most devastating civil wars in modern times. In the pursuit of democratic legitimacy, and conversely consciously framing the federal government as non-democratic, the TPLF ‘weaponised’ the election. This article analyses the process leading up to the decision to conduct separate elections in Tigray, its conduct and result. The analysis demonstrates how elections and the contestation to claim a democratic legitimacy in transition countries may contribute to a politics of violence, ultimately leading to war.
Journal Article
Contested power in Ethiopia : traditional authorities and multi-party elections
Drawing on nine case studies, this book offers a comparative ethnography of the contested powers that shape democratization in Ethiopia. Focusing on the competitive 2005 elections, the authors analyze how customary leaders, political parties and state officials confronted each other during election time.
eBook
War and the Politics of Identity in Ethiopia
Images of war, narratives of suffering and notions of ethnicity are intrinsically linked to Western perceptions of Africa. Filtered through a mostly international media the information of African wars is confined to narrow categories of explanation emergi
eBook
Constitutional Discord and Division in Tanzania: The Breakdown of the Government of National Unity in Zanzibar
This article explores the effects of the Tanzanian constitutional review process undertaken from 2011 to 2015 by Zanzibar's government of national unity (GNU), which was operative between 2010 and 2015. Central to this analysis is the historicity of constitutionalism in Tanzania and political antagonism and violence in Zanzibar. The reconciliation agreement of 2009 brought relative stability to the isles; however, the start of the constitutional review process led the GNU partners to take opposite stands on key issues of the union framework and Zanzibar autonomy, rekindling identity distinctions and deep-rooted enmity. This discourse, together with other proximate factors, explains the withering of the reconciliatory spirit within Zanzibar's unity government during the constitutional review process, leading ultimately to the collapse of the process and the discontinuation of the GNU. As it was expected that the aborted constitutional review process would be resumed after the 2020 elections, the lessons learned from the first phase of the process will be vital to understanding its possible completion.
Journal Article
The Ethiopian 2010 federal and regional elections: Re-establishing the one-party state
Tronvoll offers three broad categories, each with three sets of interconnected and reinforcing factors, explaining the shift of political climate in Ethiopia since the 2005 elections, making sense of the \"better-than-Soviet-style\" 2010 election result. He presents a brief background to Ethiopia's electoral transition and analyzes the political context prior to the run-up to the 2010 election. He discusses the campaign, pooling, results, and complaint processes, before concluding with the three sets of factors explaining the election outcome.
Journal Article
The End of Democracy? Curtailing Political and Civil Rights in Ethiopia
This article assesses political developments in Ethiopia after its 2005 federal and regional watershed elections. Although an unprecedented liberalisation took place ahead of the contested and controversial 2005 polls, a crack-down occurred in the wake of the elections, when the opposition was neutralised. Subsequently, the government rolled out a deliberate plan to prevent any future large-scale protest against their grip on power by establishing an elaborate administrative structure of control, developing new legislative instruments of suppression and, finally, curbing any electoral opposition as seen in the conduct of the 2008 local elections. As a result, Ethiopia has by 2008 returned firmly into the camp of authoritarian regimes.
Journal Article
Ambiguous elections: the influence of non-electoral politics in Ethiopian democratisation
The ‘non-electoral context’ of elections is often overlooked in democratisation studies, in order not to obscure an otherwise clear model or theory of transition. A key challenge for research on democratisation processes is to balance electoral ‘formalities’ with contextual factors, qualitative perceptions and non-electoral issues, in order to reach a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of democratic transitions. This article advocates a multilayered approach to – or a ‘thick description’ of – elections, as this will capture the diversity of real life experiences and expose alternative power discourses competing with the electoralist one in influencing the path of democratisation. In so doing, it casts light on the crucial impact of the Eritrean–Ethiopian war on Ethiopia's 2005 election, in addition to other qualitative and contextual factors, which lead to the conclusion that the advancement of democracy through multiparty elections in Ethiopia under the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has failed.
Journal Article
The politics of continuity and collusion in Zanzibar: political reconciliation and the establishment of the Government of National Unity
The popularity of unity governments to settle both internal political divisions and outright conflict has grown in the last 20 years. However, more often than not unity governments fail to mitigate the political dynamics baked into the political economies and suffer from being insufficiently anchored in local society. The Government of National Unity (GNU) in Zanzibar, formed in 2010 as the culmination of the ‘maridhiano’ political reconciliation process and following numerous attempts at reconciliation led to initial successes, is a case in point. Zanzibar's GNU turned out to be ‘position’ rather than ‘power’ sharing, constitutionalised through a hybrid format of the politics of continuity and collusion. As such the position sharing system broke down when voters in the 2015 election sought neither continuity nor collusion, but transformational change of governance. This was in turn blocked by veto actors in favour of continuity, resulting in the collapse and discontinuation of the GNU in Zanzibar.
Journal Article