Between Resistance and Survival: On the dilemma dividing Tigrayan thinking, and what it is hiding

Tigray cannot afford to let its internal debate do what its enemies could not.

There is a conversation happening inside Tigrayan households, in diaspora living rooms, on social media timelines, and in quiet exchanges between people who love Tigray deeply and disagree about what that love requires right now. It is not a comfortable conversation. It is often not a calm one. And it is one that many people, on all sides of it, are having with genuine fear at its center.

That fear deserves to be named honestly before anything else is said.

Those who argue that another confrontation must be avoided at almost any cost are not speaking from weakness. They are speaking from memory. They have watched what war does to a people, to cities, to our mothers, to our sisters, to our children, to the living, and to the future of the living. They have counted losses that cannot be recounted without breaking. They are saying: we cannot go through that again. That is not a position that can be dismissed. It is a position born from the full weight of what Tigray has already endured.

Those who argue that Tigray cannot concede its sovereignty, that submission is not a form of survival but a form of erasure, are also not speaking from recklessness. They are speaking from history. They are saying: Tigray has faced this question before. At every moment when the external calculation suggested that resistance was too costly, Tigray chose to bear the cost. And it was precisely that refusal to submit that preserved what we are now trying to protect. That too is a position that cannot be dismissed. It is a position born from the same record that made Tigray what it is.

Both of these positions are looking at the same reality. They are reading the same danger from different angles of experience and different calculations of risk. To understand this is not to split the difference between them. It is to take both seriously enough to ask what they are each missing.

What each instinct is missing is not the other instinct. It is the space between them.

The first instinct, the one oriented toward preservation, sometimes slides into a position it does not intend. In its urgency to prevent another war, it can begin to accept conditions that make the alternative to war more tolerable from the outside. When the cost of resistance is consistently described as too high, and the cost of non-resistance is consistently left unnamed, the argument does not stay neutral. It begins to drift. At the same time, in focusing on the immediate cost of war, it can also understate the scale and direction of what is already unfolding on the ground. The consolidation of Western Tigray is not static. It is moving. And if left unchallenged, it signals not only what is being secured today, but what could be attempted elsewhere tomorrow. And the direction it drifts toward is not peace. It is the gradual acceptance of arrangements that foreclose the future without a single shot being fired.

The second instinct, the one oriented toward resistance, is not blind to the difficulty of the moment. It is shaped by the understanding that Tigray may be pushed into a position where defending its sovereignty is not a choice, but a necessity. It carries the conviction that, if forced, Tigray can resist and endure, as it has done before, even under conditions that appear deeply unfavorable. But this is where another question becomes critical. Having a cause is not sufficient. Having the will to bear a cost is not sufficient. The real question is whether the conditions exist to make that cost lead somewhere, rather than end in destruction. Tigray’s own seventeen-year armed struggle against the Derg was defined by exactly this tension. There were moments of devastating loss, moments when the cost seemed to exceed what could be borne. What carried the struggle through those moments was not bravery alone. It was bravery combined with organization, patience, and strategy, rebuilt and refined through each setback. One without the other would not have been enough then. It is not enough now.

So the dilemma is real. But it is not the most dangerous part of this moment.

What is most dangerous right now is something the dilemma is hiding.

While Tigrayans debate each other, Abiy Ahmed is not debating anyone. He is moving. He is consolidating Western Tigray steadily. He is building the legal architecture that replaces the Pretoria Agreement with a framework he controls unilaterally. He is converting the silence of international actors into a form of endorsement. And he is watching the internal fractures inside Tigrayan politics and calculating, correctly, that a divided Tigray applies less pressure than a unified one, regardless of which side of the internal debate is louder.

Internal fragmentation does not benefit the preservation instinct. It does not benefit the resistance instinct. It benefits him. That is the reality this debate is hiding, and it is the reality that must be named directly.

There is a pattern in Tigrayan political history that is worth remembering here. Tigray has never been brought to its weakest point by external pressure alone, but by internal division that opens the door for that pressure to take effect. The 2020 war was possible not only because of military calculation. It was also possible because political relationships had been allowed to deteriorate without repair. Internal coherence is not a luxury. It is a precondition. And right now, that precondition is under strain.

There is also a layer to this discussion that is shaping how these instincts are expressed, and it cannot be ignored.

In recent months, a visible segment of the political conversation, particularly in urban spaces and on social media, has been increasingly defined by voices that position themselves in opposition to TPLF. Much of this energy comes from a younger generation that is questioning past decisions, demanding accountability, and seeking a different political direction for Tigray. This is not, in itself, a problem. It reflects engagement, not disengagement. It reflects a generation that is unwilling to accept inherited narratives without scrutiny. That instinct, in any political society, is necessary and worth taking seriously.

But there is a distinction that matters in this moment.

Narrative visibility is not the same as political weight. The ability to dominate a conversation online does not automatically translate into the ability to shape outcomes on the ground. When these two are conflated, the result is not a more balanced political field. It is a distorted one. The loudest voice in a space is often mistaken for the most representative one, and the depth of an organization’s actual capacity becomes obscured.

The effect of that distortion is not neutral.

It creates the appearance of a Tigray that is internally divided at a moment when external actors are actively reading and reacting to that perception. It weakens the coherence required to apply meaningful pressure. And it risks turning legitimate internal critique into a form of fragmentation that benefits those who are not part of that critique, and who are counting on it to do exactly that.

There is also a specific argument that has gained weight within this space, and it deserves to be addressed directly.

For many, the experience of the 2020–2022 Mekhete is not only remembered as resistance, but also as a failure in how that resistance was conducted. The fact that Tigray was able to deter a much larger force does not erase the scale of the destruction that was endured. For those who carry that memory, the concern is not abstract. It is concrete: that a new confrontation, led in the same way and by the same structures, would produce the same outcome, or worse.

This concern is legitimate. It reflects a serious reading of what Tigray has already gone through. It is not an argument for submission. It is an argument against repetition without change.

But this is where the conclusion becomes critical.

If the lesson drawn from that experience is that resistance itself must be avoided, then the argument unintentionally leads toward a position where the alternative becomes structurally closer to acceptance of what cannot be accepted. If, however, the lesson is that resistance must not be entered without a different level of preparation, coherence, and structure, then the argument leads somewhere else entirely.

The question, then, is not whether the previous Mekhete should be repeated. It should not be. The question is whether Tigray is capable of building the conditions under which any future confrontation, if it cannot be avoided, is fundamentally different in how it is organized, sustained, and directed. What that experience exposed was not only the cost of resistance, but also the limits of how it was structured and coordinated under extreme pressure.

At the same time, something else is happening in parallel, and it deserves more attention than it is currently receiving inside the critical conversation.

The political configuration inside Tigray is not static. The calls for broader inclusion, for institutional restructuring, and for a more open political space are being responded to. The reconstitution of governing structures and the move toward a more inclusive framework are not symbolic gestures. They are attempts to absorb internal energy rather than allow it to remain outside and disconnected, to create a political space large enough to hold critique without being broken by it.

This creates a choice, though not the one it is often framed as.

The choice is not between supporting or opposing any particular political organization. It is between remaining outside a changing political structure and reacting to it from a distance, or entering that structure and shaping it from within while the space for doing so still exists.

This distinction matters because of timing.

The current moment is not open-ended. It is bounded by external developments that are moving independently of internal debates. The period before June is not simply a political timeline. It is a narrowing window in which internal coherence can still influence external outcomes.

What is at stake, therefore, is not the resolution of internal political disagreements. Those will continue. What is at stake is whether those disagreements are expressed in a way that strengthens Tigray’s position in that window, or in a way that weakens it at the moment when weakness is most costly.

There is a phrase that captures what this moment requires, and what Tigray’s history has always known.

War costs. Sometimes the question is not whether to bear a cost, but which cost is more bearable. But there is always a choice about the conditions under which that cost is borne.

The work being done now – building institutional coherence, constructing a unified position, and applying structured pressure before June, including the economic, administrative, and societal resilience required to withstand prolonged pressure, is the work of ensuring that if cost must be borne, it is borne from a position of strength rather than from a position of fracture.

That is not a compromise between the two instincts. It is the frame that holds both of them without destroying either.

The preservation instinct is right that another war must not be entered carelessly. The resistance instinct is right that submission is not survival. Both are right. And both require the same thing: a Tigray that is coherent enough, unified enough, and strategically positioned enough that neither confrontation nor submission is forced upon it by default.

That coherence does not exist automatically. It has to be built. It has to be chosen. And it has to be chosen now.

The question being asked across Tigrayan households is whether we are moving toward confrontation or toward a political path.

That is not the wrong question.

But it is an incomplete one.

The complete question is whether Tigray enters whatever comes next as a unified force, with a clear position and a structured strategy, or as a fractured one whose internal debate has already done part of the opponent’s work for him.

History does not wait.

And the space that still exists before June, the window in which a political path remains open and a forced confrontation can still be avoided, is narrowing.

What Tigray does with that space, together, is the only question that matters right now.

ትግራይ ትስዕር！ሰላም ንህዝብና！