Ethiopian Ethnic Federalism: A Model for South Sudan?

Abstract

The civil war that broke out in South Sudan in mid-December 2013 stimulated an already growing interest in federalism and its various models in the country.Among the most interesting of them is the model of Ethiopia, which was designed to overcome ethnic-based conflicts similar to those in South Sudan.However, unlike most countries which have tried to suppress ethnic identities and based their constitutions on a contract with their citizens, in Ethiopia the constitutional contract is between ethnic groups which are granted the right to self-determination.With the overthrow of the Derg by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of ethnic-based parties, it was widely anticipated that Ethiopia would disintegrate, but the EPRDF’s radical decentralization of power to ethnic communities preserved the central stateand appears to have been a factor in the country’s dramatic growth rates in the past decade. It has not, however, ended ethnic conflict.While South Sudan has much to learn from Ethiopia and its survival will depend on developing an appropriate model of decentralized governance that addresses ethnic conflicts, the wholesale adoption of its neighbor’s model of federalism is not feasible due to the differences between the two countries’ societies and political cultures.