What Tigray Wants: On Negotiating as a Governing Institution

The next negotiation will not be decided only by what Tigray demands, but by whether it enters the room as a political party seeking accommodation or as a governing institution asserting constitutional rights.

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Some of what I write here may sound familiar to readers who have followed my recent essays. I repeat these arguments deliberately, not because they have not moved forward, but because the pattern they describe is itself repeating. Abiy Ahmed’s method of delay, reframing, procedural substitution, and managed expectation cannot be understood from a single event. It has to be seen across events. I ask the reader’s patience: repetition here is not redundancy. It is how the pattern becomes visible.

Whether or not the current signals of dialogue between Addis Ababa and Mekelle harden into formal talks, Tigray must prepare now for the strategic question that will define any negotiation: who sits at the table, in what capacity, and on whose authority. Everything else follows from that.

As I have argued in recent essays, the regional architecture is being rearranged by actors whose primary calculations do not center on Tigray. Washington signed a Bilateral Structured Dialogue Framework with Ethiopia on May 11. Eritrea is being rehabilitated through Red Sea logic, with sanctions imposed in connection with documented atrocities in Tigray now reportedly being lifted. In that environment, the formal table, if it comes, may not be offered to Tigray as recognition. It may be offered as a management mechanism. What matters is who Tigray sends to that table, and in what capacity.

The pressure on Abiy Ahmed is real, and it is not coming from one direction only. Fano has made consistent territorial progress in Amhara. Oromia, Benishangul-Gumuz, Gambela, and Afar remain unsettled. The atmosphere in and around Addis Ababa, as well as parts of the southern regions, also appears more anxious than official communication admits. Quiet diplomatic pressure also seems to be growing in Addis Ababa for the federal government to open some form of dialogue with Tigray. But pressure for dialogue is not the same as pressure for resolution. For many external actors, the immediate concern may be risk reduction before the June election, not full implementation of Pretoria. Under these circumstances, an apparent de-escalation with TPLF would allow Abiy to close one visible front, signal stability to Washington and the international community, and arrive at the election with Tigray appearing managed rather than contested.

This dynamic is not unique to Tigray. Ethiopia’s recent political experience shows how process can become containment: elections, dialogue commissions, transitional justice mechanisms, and party registration procedures can all be presented as movement while leaving the substantive political crisis untouched. The form of engagement changes; the underlying condition remains.

I should be careful here. When I speak of possible dialogue, I am not claiming to know Abiy’s intentions with certainty. I am reading a pattern. In that pattern, dialogue can mean many things: resolution, delay, containment, pressure management, or simply the creation of expectation. Tigray cannot afford to confuse the appearance of dialogue with the existence of a settlement path.

There is also a possibility that should not be dismissed. The purpose of the dialogue narrative may not be immediate negotiation at all. It may be expectation management. If Tigray spends critical days waiting for a serious proposal while Addis Ababa allows its media ecosystem to float the possibility of talks, then time itself becomes the instrument. Expectations can immobilize as effectively as threats. A people suspended in anticipation of dialogue can lose the days it needs to consolidate its institutions, prepare its diplomatic position, and define its minimum conditions before the table is even set. Tigray must therefore prepare for dialogue without being immobilized by the expectation of it.

President Debretsion’s recent briefing framed the restoration of the Baito and government not as a move toward war, but as a necessary step to ensure the existence and security of the Tigrayan people. His point was clear: a people demanding a complete government capable of legislating, executing, and interpreting law cannot reasonably be accused of triggering war. Tigray waited three years in the hope that issues would be resolved through dialogue; the response was not movement but deepening blockade, military encirclement, and unilateral federal decisions. The restoration of the Baito is not escalation. It is the minimum institutional structure required for peaceful resolution of accumulated and neglected issues.

But peaceful intention must not become strategic suspension. Addis Ababa may try to read Tigray’s language of peace as hesitation, or calculate that Tigray will wait longer than it should. That is precisely why Tigray must prepare for dialogue without being consumed by the expectation of it. A clear peace posture and a disciplined institutional preparation are not in contradiction. They are two requirements of the same strategy.

Abiy Ahmed’s pattern under pressure is consistent and observable. He does not resolve pressure. He manages it. He delays, reframes, and absorbs, while conditions on the ground continue shifting in directions that serve his longer-term consolidation. The Pretoria Agreement demonstrated this pattern most clearly. It reduced open warfare while leaving the core questions — Western Tigray, the return of displaced Tigrayans, constitutional normalization — deliberately unresolved. Carrying those questions forward served him better than settling them. What he may be seeking now is not a different outcome. It is a new version of the same mechanism.

The Pretoria Trap

There is a specific move he might make that Tigray should be prepared for.

He might invoke the Pretoria Agreement to disqualify the Baito as a negotiating party. The argument, if he chooses to make it, would be that Pretoria was signed with TPLF, that TPLF is the recognized signatory, and that the Baito is a unilateral creation outside the agreement’s scope. This framing would allow him to insist on engaging with TPLF as a political party while declining to recognize the Baito as the governing authority of Tigray Regional State. It would give the international community, which has repeatedly called for Pretoria implementation, a ready reason to follow his framing rather than challenge it.

Whether or not he makes that move, Tigray’s response to the possibility matters now, not after it happens.

As I have argued in earlier essays, in “Beyond the Framework” and “The Space Between War and Submission,” the case for the Baito’s constitutional standing must be documented in writing and circulated to diplomatic missions before any negotiation begins. The Baito is not a new creation. It is the pre-war regional parliament whose restoration was embedded in the logic of Pretoria itself. Its reconstitution is not a challenge to the agreement. It is what the agreement was supposed to make possible. Any federal government that treats the Baito as falling outside Pretoria’s scope is, in practice, opposing the implementation of what it signed. If that argument enters the diplomatic briefing cycle before Addis Ababa’s counter-framing does, the Pretoria move faces a significantly harder reception.

The Second Trap: Party Restoration

There is a second, more subtle version of the same trap.

Abiy might attempt to shift the negotiation toward the legal restoration of TPLF as a political organization under the National Election Board. For TPLF, such an opening may be tempting, not because it resolves the Tigray question, but because legal exclusion has been used for years to weaken, criminalize, and fragment its political standing. But recent experience should be warning enough. What was once presented as legal recognition became a chain of conditions, deadlines, suspension, and eventual deregistration. Tigray must not allow the constitutional question to be pulled back into that procedural maze. If TPLF allows party restoration to become the center of negotiation, the issue will no longer be Tigray’s constitutional restoration, the Baito’s governing authority, Western Tigray, or the return of displaced people. It will have become a procedural discussion about the legal status of one party.

That would be a significant downgrade, and one that fits Abiy’s established method: convert substantive political questions into administrative channels, keep the process moving visibly, and use the resulting ambiguity to buy time until the political environment consolidates further in his favor.

TPLF’s legal status matters. But it must not become the center of the negotiation. A party can be restored on paper while Western Tigray remains outside Tigray’s constitutional administration, displaced people remain outside their homes, and the Baito remains unrecognized as the governing institution of Tigray Regional State.

Ethiopia’s broader political experience shows that legal party status can itself become a containment mechanism: parties may be kept alive procedurally while the political space in which they operate is progressively hollowed out. Tigray should be alert to a version of this dynamic applied to its own institutional claims.

There is a harder version of this trap worth naming directly. If Addis Ababa treats TPLF only as a disqualified party while simultaneously refusing to recognize the Baito as Tigray’s governing institution, it creates a political vacuum by design. In that vacuum, Tigray is no longer treated as a constitutional actor with legitimate claims. It is repositioned as an administrative problem to be managed from the center, a condition that requires no agreement and imposes no obligations.

Party restoration cannot substitute for constitutional restoration. If that distinction is lost before talks formally begin, the negotiation has already been narrowed.

Two Paths: What Each One Produces

The central strategic question facing Tigray in any negotiation is not what to demand. It is who enters the room, and in what capacity. The two realistic paths produce very different dynamics, and it is worth examining both honestly.

If TPLF negotiates as a party, the framework is the one most advantageous to Abiy. TPLF is the Pretoria signatory. The international community recognizes that framing. Engagement can proceed without requiring anyone to resolve the question of the Baito’s constitutional status. For actors who want process without institutional disruption, this path is operationally simpler.

But the costs are structural and predictable. When a party negotiates with a state, the state remains the only legitimate sovereign actor in the room. Any agreement carries political weight, not constitutional weight. It is contingent on the party’s continued internal coherence, which means any factional division becomes a lever that can be used against it.

The April 2025 episode demonstrated this precisely. When TPLF’s senior figures were divided, Abiy moved immediately. He captured one figure, staged a process with the appearance of Tigrayan consent, and produced an arrangement that replaced the Pretoria Agreement while preserving its name. If TPLF negotiates as a party again, his approach will most likely follow that same logic: find the fissures, approach the more accommodating voices, and use any resulting agreement to normalize a framework he controls.

If the Baito negotiates as a governing institution, the dynamic shifts at its foundation. Two constitutional entities are in the room. The federal government cannot position itself as the state while treating its interlocutor as a faction. Any agreement made in that framing carries constitutional weight that a party settlement cannot carry. The demand for Baito recognition becomes a legal claim, not a partisan one. And the internal coherence problem changes in character: a legislature’s disagreements are a function, not a vulnerability, because the institution continues to speak with authority even as its members debate.

Abiy’s response to that path is also worth thinking through. He might refuse to engage with the Baito directly, using the Pretoria argument to insist that only TPLF holds standing. He might approach TPLF as a party through separate channels, creating a parallel track that bypasses the institutional framework. He might use the international community’s existing investment in the Pretoria framework as indirect pressure to pull TPLF back toward party-level negotiation. Each of those responses is possible. None comes without political cost. Refusing to engage with a functioning regional legislature is a harder position to sustain diplomatically than refusing to engage with a political party. Any agreement reached by bypassing the Baito’s authority, while the Baito sits as Tigray’s governing institution, raises questions about legitimacy that will not disappear.

The strategic logic of the institutional path is not that it eliminates pressure. It is that it changes the terrain on which pressure operates. TPLF does not disappear in this arrangement. It governs through the institution it leads, as any political party governs through the legislature it commands. The institution speaks. The party governs behind it. That distinction determines what can be agreed, what can be enforced, and what can be undone.

The Baito’s authority as a governing institution also depends on whether its executive composition reflects the full breadth of forces that defended Tigray. I have made this argument in earlier pieces. The institutional claim is strongest when the institution is visibly what it claims to be. Ensuring that the Baito’s executive is sufficiently inclusive is not a concession to smaller parties. It is part of making the constitutional actor argument credible to every audience that will be asked to recognize it.

This institutional distinction also matters for how Tigray is framed in regional security narratives. A party can be characterized as a destabilizing faction; a functioning constitutional institution is considerably harder to reduce to that frame. The Baito’s reconstitution is itself a counter to Addis Ababa’s ongoing attempt to reposition TPLF as a cross-border security threat rather than a regional political authority with constitutional standing.

The Second Track: Leverage

No serious negotiation is shaped only by what is said inside the formal room. It is shaped by what exists outside it: institutional coherence, popular unity, diplomatic preparation, regional relationships, deterrent capacity, and the ability to make delay costly. As I argued in “The Space Between War and Submission,” Tigray must operate on two tracks simultaneously. The first is the formal institutional track. The second is the leverage track, ensuring that Tigray’s demands cannot be treated as symbolic or indefinitely postponed.

These two tracks are not in tension. They reinforce each other. The institutional claim is more credible when it is backed by demonstrated capacity. Leverage is more sustainable when it is exercised by an institution rather than a faction.

Tigray’s leverage is not limited to any single domain. It holds diplomatic leverage — the pre-negotiation briefing campaign I have argued for in earlier essays, which must establish the constitutional frame before Addis Ababa’s counter-framing enters the diplomatic cycle. It holds economic leverage — Tigray’s relevance to any viable northern Ethiopian stabilization, and its position within the corridor logic of the Red Sea, matters to audiences well beyond the bilateral relationship with Addis Ababa.

It holds political leverage — the federal legitimacy argument makes Tigray’s exclusion a visible problem for every regional state watching how the center treats the periphery. And it holds deterrent capacity, a reality that does not require dramatization to remain understood by every actor calculating the cost of delay.

A negotiation without leverage becomes accommodation; leverage without institutional discipline becomes danger. Tigray needs both.

This second track should not be confused with reckless escalation. Its purpose is not to replace negotiation with confrontation. It is to prevent negotiation from becoming another managed process. As I argued in “The Horn Is Being Rearranged,” the current regional architecture is being constructed around priorities that are larger than Tigray — the Red Sea, the Nile, regime survival in Addis Ababa, isolation-ending in Asmara. In a region where no actor’s calculations are made in isolation from the others, Tigray’s institutional coherence and strategic depth matter to audiences well beyond Addis Ababa. That reality does not need to be stated loudly. It simply needs to be real.

What Tigray Wants

With that institutional posture and second-track leverage in mind, the substantive question becomes clearer: what must Tigray insist on, and what can it credibly offer?

I want to state this directly, because the question has been implicit across months of writing and deserves a direct answer.

Tigray is seeking constitutional restoration within a genuine federal arrangement. This is not a concession offered to Addis Ababa in exchange for something else. It is Tigray’s own political tradition, built over twenty-seven years of decentralized governance and broad-based development before Abiy’s regime dismantled it. Tigray’s commitment to the constitutional federal structure, to developmental governance and democratic decentralization, is not something it holds out as a bargaining chip. It is the political framework within which Tigray wants to operate, and to which it has always been committed in principle.

Four conditions define the floor below which no arrangement, however it is negotiated, constitutes a real settlement.

The first is Western Tigray. The displacement of Tigrayans from their land and the demographic changes being consolidated there are not a territorial preference to be negotiated. They require a concrete, verifiable, and time-bound process of withdrawal and return. Every month that passes without movement changes physical realities on the ground in ways that become progressively harder to reverse.

The second is formal restoration of Tigray’s constitutional authority through the Baito as the governing institution of Tigray Regional State. The Baito is Tigray’s proper institutional interlocutor at the table, and the settlement must also formally restore its constitutional standing. This is not about TPLF’s political standing. It is about whether Tigray has the right to govern itself through institutions whose authority derives from the people of Tigray and the constitutional framework of the Ethiopian state.

The third is the return of internally displaced Tigrayans through a mechanism with timelines and verification, not through a declaration that produces no movement.

The fourth is a credible security arrangement that protects returnees and ensures that whatever is agreed cannot be undone through renewed coercion. Return without protection is not return. It is exposure.

What Tigray Offers

Tigray is not only a demandeur in this negotiation. It brings something real to the table, and naming that clearly is part of any honest account of what is at stake.

To the Ethiopian federal state, Tigray offers the one thing the federal project genuinely requires: constitutional credibility for an arrangement that cannot function with Tigray outside it. An Ethiopia that has managed Tigray as a security problem for five years is an Ethiopia whose federalism is unconvincing to every regional state watching how the center behaves. A Tigray that participates as a constitutional actor with a functioning legislature strengthens the legitimacy of the federal project in ways that suppression has never been able to.

To Eritrea, the argument is structural and historical. The policy of treating a strong Tigray as an existential threat was not a strategic necessity. It was a political choice, and the cost has been borne by both peoples. History demonstrates that weakness in the Tigrinya-speaking highlands invites external penetration. The fragmentation of that region opened the corridor for Ottoman and later Italian colonial occupation. As I argued in “The Horn Is Being Rearranged,” external alignment through Washington is reversible. Tactical understandings with Addis Ababa are reversible. But regional depth through a functioning relationship with Tigray is structural.

A stable and institutionally capable Tigray is not a threat to Eritrea’s long-term security. It is part of the region’s strategic depth. A weak Tigray does not give Eritrea security. It gives outside powers a corridor. Whatever government sits in Asmara, that structural reality does not change.

The Diagnostic Question

I want to offer readers a concrete way to assess whether any reported negotiation is genuine.

The first and most important test is Western Tigray. Specifically, whether Abiy is willing to put a concrete, verifiable, and time-bound commitment on Western Tigray on the table before talks formally begin. If he is not, the strategic direction of the dialogue will already be visible. Western Tigray is the one issue where time is not neutral. It is an active instrument of consolidation.

That danger has already taken procedural form. In February 2026, Ethiopia’s House of Federation directed that federal parliamentary elections in five districts previously under Tigray’s regional state, specifically Humera, Adi Remets, Tselemti, Korem Ofla, and Raya Alamata, be conducted outside Tigray’s administrative oversight until the question of “ownership” is resolved. This was revealing not only because of what it attempted to do, but also because of what it ignored. Korem Ofla and Raya Alamata had already returned to Tigray’s control after the federal army evacuated the southern front, and normal local administrations were already functioning there. Yet the House of Federation still treated them as disputed electoral territories. That shows more than administrative confusion. It shows the absence of principle in how federal institutions are being used to actualize political intent. A federal court subsequently issued an injunction suspending the election plans. But the core Western Tigray reality did not change: Humera, Adi Remets, and Tselemti remain outside Tigray’s constitutional administration, under the post-2020 settler and PP-aligned administrative order, with occupation, displacement, contested administration, and federal military presence still unresolved.

The sequence itself should not be read as accidental. One federal institution moved to place the five districts outside Tigray’s electoral oversight. Another federal venue suspended that move. Yet neither action resolved the underlying condition. Whatever the internal logic, the political effect is clear: the issue was not settled; it was suspended. Tigray and Amhara remain locked against each other across a line the federal center drew and then declined to resolve. That is managed ambiguity. It does not restore constitutional order. It keeps Western Tigray available as leverage.

That is why Western Tigray cannot be left for discussion after the election. By then, negotiation would no longer be about preventing consolidation. It would be about undoing a consolidation that had already been given procedural form.

An actor willing to settle will accept a timeline on Western Tigray before sitting down. An actor buying time will agree only to discuss it once talks are underway, at which point it will be managed, postponed, and eventually absorbed into the post-June structure as an accepted baseline.

The second test follows directly from the argument above. If the negotiation moves toward TPLF’s legal restoration as a party, and that becomes the primary topic before Western Tigray, Baito recognition, IDP return, and security guarantees have been addressed, then the negotiation has been narrowed. A narrowed negotiation is not a failed one. It is a managed one. And managed processes in this context have a documented outcome.

Tigray has been through managed processes. It knows what they produce. The question now is whether the next process is different in kind, or only in name. That difference will be decided before the first meeting begins — by whether Tigray enters as a party seeking terms, or as a governing institution asserting constitutional rights.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！