Navigating Ethiopia's Revolutionary Democracy since 1991: A Tool for Political Control and Regime Stability

Abstract

Ethiopia has had a revolutionary democracy from 1991 to 2018, a two-edged sword that has enabled both regime survival and change under the EPRDF. This article sheds light on how the EPRDF authoritarian regime used co-optation, legitimation, and repression as complementary survival toolkits to maintain power until 2018. The article is a qualitative case study that incorporates both primary and secondary sources through critical analysis, both conceptual and content-wise. The article contends that, under the pretext of revolutionary democratic ideology, the EPRDF has looked to construct a monopoly on power that would serve as the center of authoritative and coercive authority, employing ethnic federalism and development-state rhetoric. Both federalism and the developmental state model are employed as weapons of repression, coercion, and legitimacy to preserve hegemonic power control at the price of long-awaited democratization and self-government. However, these EPRDF strategies stayed a double-edged sword, enabling monopolistic political control while also generating resistance based on long-held dissatisfaction with the ambiguities and contradictions between revolutionary democratic ideas and deeds. Therefore, the repressive techniques used by the EPRDF sparked social mobilization, resulting in collective actions by marginalized groups from various sects, finally leading to the EPRDF regime's collapse in 2018. The downfall of the EPRDF demonstrates that a political ideology not only serves to obtain support and legitimacy by driving party members to fulfill specified political goals, but it can also serve as a primary framework that accelerates political prospects for regime transition.