RIGHT OF REPLY

The Luxury of Abstract Moralising in a Theatre of Existential Warfare: A Realist Critique of the ‘Collective Intelligence’ Thesis

By Mareshet Yimer Meshesha

Editor’s note: The Ethiopian Tribune publishes this response to Professor Girma Berhanu’s essay “Ethiopia’s Cycle of Self-Destruction: A Crisis of ‘Collective Intelligence’?” under its right of reply. The author writes in a personal capacity as a civic supporter of the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFNM). The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Tribune. References are as supplied by the author. Professor Girma has been offered the opportunity to respond.

The contemporary political crisis in Ethiopia has generated a vast library of diaspora commentary, but few pieces encapsulate the profound limitations of detached academic analysis as clearly as Professor Girma Berhanu’s recent essay, “Ethiopia’s Cycle of Self-Destruction: A Crisis of ‘Collective Intelligence’?” Writing from an analytical distance, Professor Girma constructs an elegant framework attributing generations of engineered warfare, state-sponsored atrocities, and systemic regional destabilisation to a generic deficit of collective intelligence among the nation’s political elites. He defines this intelligence as the capacity of individuals and institutions to learn from historical experience, anticipate long-term consequences, and build sustainable structures for peaceful coexistence.

While this thesis is wrapped in the sophisticated vocabulary of civic moderation and liberal peacebuilding, it ultimately offers a simplistic and structurally blind diagnosis of a brutal, calculated conflict. To reduce a war of existential survival to an intellectual failure or a national learning disability is an act of profound reductionism. It treats the deliberate, weaponised operations of a predatory state apparatus as if they were merely an accidental breakdown of political reasoning.

A rigorous counter-analysis of this thesis reveals three fatal flaws that render abstract peace frameworks entirely useless when confronted with the material realities of asymmetric warfare.

1. The Fallacy of Structural “Both-Sidesism”

In its introductory foreword, The Ethiopian Tribune commends the essay for naming few names, arguing that this omission obliges every reader to apply the author’s diagnosis honestly to their own side before pointing to the failings of the other. While such an approach provides an appealing veneer of editorial neutrality, it functions in practice as a dangerous moral equaliser. By erasing the specific identities of the perpetrators, this framework creates a false equivalence between predatory state elites — who deploy heavy artillery, drone strikes, and state-backed ethnic cleansing against civilian populations — and the indigenous resistance forces, such as Fano, fighting against total erasure on the ground.

One cannot resolve a deep-seated structural quagmire by diagnosing the jailer and the prisoner, the perpetrator of massacres and the victims, the displacer and the displaced, the invader and the invaded, the oppressor and the oppressed with the same generalised intellectual deficit. The defensive mobilisation of the Amhara people was not a choice born of an inability to negotiate; it was an inevitable material reaction to decades of hostile ethno-linguistic cartography, the codification of their marginalisation in the 1995 constitution, and the forced annexation of ancestral lands like Wolkait-Tegede. To demand that a civic or an armed resistance movement share the blame for a war of self-defence under the guise of examining its own failings is a profound distortion of political reality.

2. War as an Operational Mechanism, Not an Institutional Failure

Professor Girma’s thesis assumes that the ruling elites in Addis Ababa continue to choose coercion because they fail to realise that the subjugation of one group breeds long-term insecurity for the entire country. This interpretation completely misreads the rational, predatory incentives of authoritarian state retention. The Prosperity Party regime does not suffer from a failure of political reasoning. It uses managed instability as its primary tool for its own survival and unbridled power.

Controlled chaos has allowed a centralised dictatorship to fracture cross-ethnic civil alliances, justify sweeping emergency decrees, and prevent a unified national civic consciousness from taking root. War, in this context, is not a breakdown of governance. It is the governance. The ruling elites are not acting out of ignorance or a lack of foresight. They are highly rational, short-term maximisers of power who understand that fracturing the populace ensures their own monopoly on violence. Treating a calculated strategy of state survival as a mere intellectual misunderstanding is a luxury only available to those who do not face the immediate threat of physical liquidation.

“War, in this context, is not a breakdown of governance. It is the governance.”

3. The Mirage of Paper Safeguards and the Lesson of August

The essay concludes with standard liberal prescriptions, arguing that durable peace requires institutions that protect political participation, safeguard fundamental rights, and provide credible mechanisms for resolving disputes. This argument enters a logical loop that ignores the fundamental premise of statecraft that institutions do not exist in a vacuum, and that they are maintained by a physical balance of power. One cannot build credible mechanisms when the adversary commands the military, special forces and militia, controls the treasury, the judiciary, and operates the drone fleets.

This analytical blindness was vividly illustrated in Professor Girma’s August 2026 article, “The Hardest Question: Why Are We Destroying Our Own?” In that reflection, the author offered a detailed ethnographic critique of media infighting, YouTube pile-ons, and character assassination among diaspora activists, lamenting it as a form of collective self-destruction that devours potential leaders. While those observations are accurate for toxic digital spaces, the fatal error lies in attempting to copy-paste the logic of internet drama onto a material, territorial armed conflict raging in large parts of Ethiopia.

History has already delivered its verdict on paper safeguards that lack ground-level enforceability. The Pretoria Agreement of 2022 did not collapse because of a psychological failure to cooperate; it collapsed because it was a soft contract that bypassed the structural realities of territorial justice and lacked any physical enforcement mechanism on the ground. Similarly, previous opposition movements like Kinjit in 2005 and Arbegnoch-Ginbot 7 in 2018 were systematically dismantled or disarmed precisely because they engaged in the fatal incrementalism of trading hard tactical leverage for vague, elite-driven promises of institutional reform.

The Realist Determination

Ethiopia’s interlocking crises will never be solved by elite seminars on collective intelligence or diaspora appeals for mutual empathy. True political intelligence is not the abstract desire for cooperation; it is the cultivation of independent material power capable of enforcing justice.

Peace is not the mere absence of tension. It is the presence of structural justice. True stabilisation will only emerge when a disciplined vanguard establishes an unassailable defensive shield across its core operational zones, secures its ancestral borders under permanent administration, and dictates the terms of a genuine national transition from a position of independent strength. Until the material balance of power is fundamentally altered on the ground, paper safeguards remain a mirage, and appeals for abstract peace will continue to ring hollow to those who are fighting simply to exist.

References

1. Atrocities and Summary Executions in Merawi (February 2024): Documented door-to-door summary executions of at least 45 Amhara civilians by Ethiopian state security forces following clashes with Fano. Source: Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Press Statement, February 2024; Amnesty International Report, “Ethiopia: Urgent Investigation Needed into Merawi Mass Executions,” February 2024.
2. Targeted Attacks and Massacres in Arsi Zone, Oromia (2023–2024): Systematically documented door-to-door targeted killings of Orthodox Christian and ethnic Amhara minorities by armed actors operating within regional structures. Source: Human Rights Watch World Report 2024 (Ethiopia Chapter); Amnesty International Briefing on Civilian Protection Failures in Oromia, late 2023.
3. Mass Incarceration and Forced Evictions in Benishangul-Gumuz and Addis Ababa Outskirts: Documented structural targeting and forced displacement of Amhara populations under the guise of law enforcement and corridor development. Source: Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO) 165th Special Report; Amnesty International Call to Halt Forced Evictions, 2024.

Mareshet Yimer Meshesha is an independent political analyst writing on Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa from a structural-realist perspective, with a focus on constitutional engineering and asymmetric conflict. He writes as a civic supporter of the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFNM) and is a member of civic groups concerned with the Amhara popular movement for self-defence and structural justice. He holds no official membership or role within the political or military structures of the AFNM.