Contesting the EPRDF Government: Mass Resistance, Political Mobilisation, and Legal Activism in the 1990s

In some historical accounts of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF, 1991–2019), the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the leading coalition member, ruled the country in an authoritarian manner. While there has been critical research that highlighted contestation and the agency of citizens and civil society (see, for example, Bahru and Siegfried 2002), in the dominant narrative of governance, citizen agency and civil society are peripheral. Instead, the Ethiopian people have largely been de-scribed either as dictated to by an elite who had centralised power and whom they followed dutifully, or as a citizenry that had been pacified by centuries of such rule. This portrayal is not consistent in all publications; however, the exceptions prove the rule. As with any enduring narrative, there is truth to be found in these historical ac-counts of the EPRDF. It is not coincidental that such narratives were promoted by the EPRDF and TPLF (as well as others), describing their role as the vanguard, protector, and people’s guardian, acting both in the interest of the people and on their behalf. However, this narrative implies that change only occurred in a top-down fashion, through centralised decision-making by the ruling elite. It fails to acknowledge that these ways of telling history have excluded counter narratives and silenced non-dominant voices. Throughout the EPRDF period, people were not silent and did not merely accept the dictates from the central government; nor were they passive in the making and re-making of Ethiopia, as demonstrated in this volume.