From imperial power to regional policeman: Ethiopian peacekeeping and the developmental state

Abstract

After decolonization, judicial sovereignty and the principle of non-interference in each other's internal affairs formed the framework for interactions between African states. Military interventions, including peacekeeping operations, by African sovereigns were rare. However, in the last 30 years the institutional, normative and geopolitical outlook has altered dramatically. Africa has become the continent that hosts the greatest number of peacekeeping interventions, with African states intervening regularly on the territory of their neighbours and being among the most prolific contributors to missions led by the United Nations, the African Union (AU) and subregional organizations.¹

The contemporary tendency for direct interventions on the part of African states and international organizations in the affairs of their neighbours and member states invites a rethink as to how changing norms and practices around peacekeeping reflect evolving conceptions of security and sovereignty. The modalities of intervention have shifted amid a sense of protracted fragility regarding statehood in Africa. Two strands of inquiry have hence dominated scholarship on peacekeeping. First, the literature has been preoccupied with the legal, normative and geopolitical conditions that determine the shape of missions and regimes of cooperation and imposition in weak states.² Second, attention focuses on assessing the success—or, more often, failure—of peacekeeping in controlling violence and building peace.³ When interveners' motives have been studied, the desire to obtain external backing has usually been highlighted: as with Uganda's role in the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM),⁴ for instance, which fortified relations with donors and shielded Yoweri Museveni's human rights track-record from criticism,⁵ or the instrumentalization by Chad's President Idriss Déby of interventions in the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali and the Sahel to augment French and American support for his regime.⁶

This article widens ongoing conversations by investigating how peacekeeping might reflect the shifting logics of state-building projects—not in the host country that is the subject of the intervention, but in the peacekeeping contributor. Because intervention raises questions concerning its effects on the balance of power, legitimacy and the functioning of institutions back home,⁷ the assemblage approach foregrounded in this special section of International Affairs offers opportunities to rethink the complex ways in which the material drivers and social character of intervention have been rekindled: it anchors African attempts to maintain and enforce peace in a global context of great power rivalries and of African actors drawing on global registries to shape and/or reinterpret peacekeeping for their own purposes.⁸ This article's interest is less in the specifics of operational deployments and more in leveraging the prism of assemblages to understand interactions that shift power relations and security orders.⁹ Because assemblages emphasize historical contingency, continuous ‘becoming’, and competition and cooperation between a panoply of actors, this underscores the importance of the ideational and material interactions that lead African polities to see themselves—and be recognized by other African states and external actors—as legitimate interveners.

Our purpose is to draw attention to how peacekeeping rearticulates internal and external dimensions of political order in intervening states. After the crises of the post-decolonization period and civil wars that saw national armies fragment and/or prey on their populations, African militaries became principally associated with state unbuilding.¹⁰ Yet that connotation obscures ‘the close integration of armed forces in political decision-making and tasks of domestic governance’ in attempts to bolster sovereignty and reorganize political economies that have endured, or resurfaced, in recent decades.¹¹ We argue that military intervention redefined as peacekeeping can become a state-building technology that strengthens party-state institutions and modes of accumulation, and helps counter historical threats to territorial integrity while building new alliances. Therefore, we explore how the reorganization of domestic and regional political order influences, and is influenced by, peacekeeping.

We dissect a single case-study, because through in-depth analysis we seek to uncover covariational evidence that helps identify the evolution of African intervention logics. Moreover, our case is empirically crucial in its own right: we study Ethiopia, which in the 2010s became the world's most prolific peacekeeper—a highly consequential development that needs explaining, as it was a striking reversal from earlier periods that tells us not only something about a changing Ethiopia but also changing approaches to intervention across (the Horn of) Africa. By combining temporal and within-unit variation in tracing Ethiopia's relationship with peacekeeping, we formulate descriptive inferences that can contribute to the broader literature.¹²

Ethiopia has long regarded itself as the Horn of Africa's natural hegemon. Territorial conquests turned it into one of Africa's dominant polities but imperial legacies also undergird the regional rivalries that challenge Ethiopia's projection of power. If, initially, participation in peacekeeping missions seemed to generate international goodwill for Ethiopian interests in the Horn, after the 1960–1964 United Nations Operation in the Congo (ONUC), Ethiopia stopped partaking altogether and became sceptical of the utility of peacekeeping to Ethiopian sovereignty. More recently, however, Ethiopia embraced the practice like no other African state: after a hiatus from the 1960s lasting until 2003, during which no Ethiopian soldiers served as peacekeepers, by 2016–2017 Ethiopian troops had become the single largest source of blue helmets. Ethiopia's contribution to addressing regional conflicts and combating terrorism underpinned its growing stature as a unique African partner in global politics. While several factors could explain this volte-face, we argue that the most consequential one has been the evolving exigencies of the state-building project of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), between 1991 and 2018.

We thereby also advance the empirical literature. Although the EPRDF ‘developmental state’ has been extensively studied, researchers have foregrounded its domestic rationales, such as the ideology of revolutionary democracy¹³ and its embeddedness in longue durée state formation and decay.¹⁴ When examining its external dimensions, researchers have discussed east Asian inspiration for the developmental state¹⁵ and the resulting economic diplomacy efforts¹⁶ but have rarely explored linkages with broader foreign policy. Scholarship on the latter has centred on the Ethiopian role in the global ‘war on terror’¹⁷ rather than on Ethiopian peacekeepers. Whereas some emphasize Ethiopia's contested character as a security provider,¹⁸ we argue that, certainly by historical and comparative standards, what stood out in the EPRDF period was not the rejection of Ethiopian interventionism by regional states, but rather the degree to which it was accepted.

We begin by deconstructing conceptions of sovereignty and peacekeeping in Africa, highlighting variation across time and space. We situate the views of Ethiopia's rulers in the instability of domestic state–society relations and regional hostility vis-à-vis Ethiopian sovereignty and influence. We propose that after the EPRDF's capture of state power, transforming regional relations came to be seen as indispensable to a domestic revolution and, conversely, a reformed domestic political economy was believed to facilitate a rupture in enmities with Ethiopia's neighbours. Intervention as peacekeeping served key material interests and strengthened the consolidation of the party-state, while helping to articulate a new international identity for Ethiopia.

We document how an increasingly prominent role in UN and AU missions was both a result of and a catalyst for the EPRDF's vision of Ethiopia's (re-)emergence as a regional hegemon; peacekeeping solidified ties with the global superpower, the United States, and helped bind neighbouring states to Ethiopia in new, non-coercive ways that were internationally sanctioned and therefore hard(er) to refuse. The EPRDF sought to render the Horn more amenable to Ethiopian power by multilateralizing its interventions and consolidating ties with elites in Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. We underline that instrumentalizing peacekeeping to expand Ethiopia's regional influence dovetailed with the balance of power within the Ethiopian party-state: professionalizing and internationalizing the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) through peacekeeping strengthened the military as a pillar of illiberal state-building. We conclude by underlining how the post-2018 dissolution of the EPRDF destabilized Ethiopia's regional leadership role and by reflecting on wider policy implications.

Changing understandings of intervention in Africa

Our argument about the entanglements between Ethiopian peacekeeping and state-building needs to be situated in long-standing struggles over the organization of Africa's international relations. Theoretically, we understand peacekeeping to be a function of the broader question of intervention as an evolving but persistent practice across time and space.¹⁹ Within controversies over the use of force on the African continent, Ethiopia occupies a unique place. The League of Nations' failure to thwart Fascist Italy's annexation of Abyssinia in 1935 underscored the brittleness of the League and its promises to defend every member state against aggression; memories of betrayal have loomed large in the perceived need among Ethiopians and many other Africans to legally constrain intervention. But simultaneously, the Abyssinian empire was an earlier beneficiary of the late nineteenth century's Scramble for Africa, as it exploited European rivalries to extend its own borders and, uniquely among African polities, saw its sovereignty recognized by the great powers. Colonial legacies have for decades underpinned Ethiopia's self-ascribed role as a regional hegemon whose interventions are coterminous with maintaining international peace.

In Ethiopian national security circles, ‘danger’ and ‘weakness’ as causes of intervention are longstanding preoccupations of continued relevance.²⁰ The difficulty of projecting authority throughout the territory, the contentious nature of state–society relations and the marginal position of Africa in international relations have all contributed to a sense of enduring fragility that extraregional players—or envious neighbouring states—might exploit. Yet structural vulnerabilities do not render intervention, by Ethiopia or any other state, self-explanatory: whereas accounts of African sovereignty have usually emphasized how polities have diverged from the Westphalian ideal, their material weakness has ingeniously been used to extract resources from the international system while keeping more intrusive meddling at bay.²¹ A more promising approach lies in dissecting how different ‘regimes of sovereignty’²² have enabled certain outcomes (such as interventions to remedy ‘failure’ and ‘keep the peace’) while disabling others (such as alternative reconstitutions of sovereignty and international order).²³ The conditions under which African states have come to be seen as requiring peacekeeping do not merely reflect ‘hard facts’ of economic marginalization and differences in military capabilities. Post-colonial African history evinces that intervention by the powerful in the affairs of the weaker results from evolving shared understandings surrounding the legitimacy of intervention's character and modalities, which renders some behaviours—including peacekeeping—acceptable or even desirable at certain points in time while circumscribing others.²⁴

To wit, in the second half of the twentieth century African states had their sovereignty recognized as a consequence of having been colonized, rather than by virtue of historically more common performative standards that would have forced them to fend for themselves or lose recognition. As codified by the AU's predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), in 1963, state sovereignty trumped rival articulations of political authority and was buttressed by the acceptance of international borders, as they had emerged from imperialism, and the outlawing of secessions and interference by neighbours in each other's affairs.²⁵ Under such conditions, peacekeeping between belligerent states was uncommon, and the deployment of UN blue helmet peacekeepers to separate domestic warring parties was conditional upon host-government consent.

The theory and practice of intervention underwent a sea change after 1990. Social reasons—the goals and means that African actors consider to be important and legitimate—are crucial to understanding why this happened. The new interventionism reflected changes in the international system: the importance of African resources for transnational supply-chains, the global ‘war on terror’, and the securitization of development and migration have raised Africa's security profile—and made peacekeeping a global concern. But equally significant is the fact that African approaches to sovereignty have altered. Many recent interventions have been requested and jointly implemented by African sovereigns and regional organizations.²⁶ This includes extra-regional interventionism by the US, EU and Middle Eastern and Asian actors, with stated objectives ranging from combating piracy and jihadism to supporting peace agreements. But it also applies to operations by African regional organizations or states against security threats on the territory of another sovereign African nation. Changing understandings of what constitutes the ‘peace to keep’ and the legitimate use of force to uphold specific ideas of political order undergird this shift.²⁷

The historically contingent and contested normative character of intervention is also marked by geographical variation. Unlike in most other corners of the continent, the OAU consensus around colonial borders was widely rejected across the Horn of Africa, both in theory and in practice. This manifested in Eritrea's war of liberation, in the irredentism of successive Mogadishu governments vis-à-vis Somali-speaking territories outside their jurisdiction, and in myriad liberation fronts that sought self-determination for their people and a redrawing of the regional map. At the centre of contestation lay Ethiopia, which prided itself in never having succumbed to European colonialism, and the diverse population of which was roughly equal in size to that of all its neighbours combined. By virtue of history, demographic weight and location, it saw itself as the region's hegemon, and, in view of multiple claims on its territory, its imperial government emphasized the OAU framework. By contrast, its enemies regarded the OAU charter as legitimating the subjugation and fragmentation of their homelands and peoples by European and Abyssinian imperialisms during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²⁸ This fuelled decades of conflict both within Ethiopia's borders and regionally.

From the standpoint of imperial Ethiopia, and the military junta of the Derg which supplanted it in 1974, the Horn was therefore a perilous region that held back its natural hegemon and destabilized domestic centralization and assimilation. For both Emperor Haile Selassie and the socialist Derg, the strengthening of state authority externally was indispensable to the coexistence of Ethiopia's dozens of ethnolinguistically diverse populations.²⁹ Despite their ideological differences and the disparate coalitions of social forces on which both regimes relied, the central purposes and blind spots of their foreign policies were remarkably similar.³⁰ As Ethiopia fought proxy conflicts with Egypt, Somalia and Sudan, it courted global powers to obtain arms and international legitimacy. Haile Selassie sent troops under UN mandates to the Korean peninsula and the India–Pakistan border, so as to obtain international support to confront regional and domestic threats.³¹ However, as instability engulfed Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s, it stopped participating in missions. Peacekeeping in the Horn to address shared regional security concerns was unthinkable in the normative and geopolitical context of that era; intervention could only be imagined as undermining sovereignty. Domestic problems were routinely blamed by Ethiopia on external interference—and the region was seen as an unceasing source of destabilization.

The rise of the EPRDF and the domestic imperative

1991 heralded extraordinary changes in the Horn of Africa. The Soviet Union's disintegration removed the region's chief supplier of weapons and military advisers. The Somali state collapsed as militias engaged in clan cleansing. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) controlled Eritrea after decades of insurgency. Most consequentially of all, the EPRDF ousted Ethiopia's president, Mengistu Haile Mariam, in May 1991. The EPRDF, a coalition of four ethnically-based parties dominated by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), believed that Ethiopia's internal and external crises were inextricably linked.

The TPLF argued that Ethiopia had to become a different state to survive.³² For Sebhat Nega, who served as the movement's chairman from 1979 to 1989:

You could say that the Ethiopian state was too strong because it decided everything for people, the language they should speak, the identity they had … But in another way it was too weak: it did not provide services or dignity or security to the population, especially outside the cities.³³

The TPLF–EPRDF reversed decades of assimilation policies; regional states were created with considerable autonomy, at least on paper; and ‘the nations and nationalities’ of Ethiopia were constitutionally guaranteed self-determination.³⁴ Recognizing diversity while stimulating development could enable the state to offer genuine inclusion to the peripheries, where insurgencies had long been supported by Ethiopia's neighbours.

EPRDF state-building concentrated on domestic issues after decades of civil war; foreign policy was initially not the priority. But the EPRDF leadership believed that the external environment had exacerbated internal crises: its views on the OAU's track record were scathing—‘the organization was obsessed with state sovereignty and never lifted a finger when Haile Selassie and the Derg were repressing our people’³⁵—and Ethiopia's mismanagement of core–periphery relations had driven aggrieved minorities to solicit foreign assistance, fuelling regional proxy wars. The TPLF itself received military support from Sudan in the 1980s, and its leaders travelled on Somali passports. Since its mission of domestic state-building was so daunting and EPRDF's flagship ‘agricultural development-led industrialization’ strategy required most of the available resources, Ethiopia's external environment needed to facilitate these priorities, not complicate them.

Regional de-escalation could allow a ‘guns-to-butter’ shifting of resources, but this required the exercise of composure. First and foremost, recognizing Eritrea's independence lost Ethiopia its access to the sea and was unpopular among the bureaucracy and intelligentsia which the EPRDF needed to govern. However, the EPLF had done much of the heavy lifting during Eritrea's war of liberation; the TPLF had benefited from this, and was told in no uncertain terms by its Eritrean comrades that economic partnership was premised on accepting Eritrean sovereignty.³⁶ Anything short of self-determination risked pitting the EPRDF against a militarily stronger force that controlled the seaports on which Ethiopia depended. Its ambitions were also imperilled from the east: state collapse and inter-clan violence threatened to spill across Somalia's borders, but the EPRDF believed that intervention would only inflame passions and hoped that the US and UN would contain the violence. Finally, the Islamists who dominated government in Sudan proclaimed a desire to export their revolution. Ethiopia told the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) fighters to leave so it could pursue peaceful co-existence with the government in Khartoum, despite the opposing ideological orientation of both regimes.³⁷ In view of this fraught regional context and the internal challenges that were consuming the EPRDF—including the demobilization of the old national army and former rebels—it rejected participation in any OAU or UN missions.

Ethiopian peacekeeping in the global context

This presents a puzzle: in view of historically acrimonious relations between Ethiopia and its neighbours, decades of disinterest in peacekeeping and the EPRDF's determination to concentrate on domestic priorities, how can we account for Ethiopia transforming into the single biggest contributor to UN operations, especially in Horn of Africa countries? The EPRDF's decision to embrace peacekeeping did not happen overnight; rather, it was a function of the evolving global and regional needs of its state-building project. Participation in peacekeeping catalysed a shift in Ethiopian interpretations of the practice, and changing ideas about Ethiopia's relationship to the region enhanced the attractiveness of peacekeeping.

The EPRDF sent 800 troops to post-genocide Rwanda,³⁸ which would contribute to a rethink of regional politics. This was followed in 2003 by Ethiopia's dispatch of infantry battalions to the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) and its provision of 800 troops for the AU's first peacekeeping operation, the African Mission in Burundi (AMIB).³⁹ These troops were subsequently rehatted as UN blue helmets with a reinforced mandate and funding structure. Subsequently, Ethiopia participated in UN operations in Côte d'Ivoire, CAR and Chad. From mid-2008 onwards, Addis began its involvement in huge interventions in South Sudan (United Nations Mission in South Sudan—UNMISS) and the African Union–United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID). These deployments were complemented by a third ‘Sudanese’ mission to the disputed region of Abyei (United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei, UNISFA), starting in 2011, which was entirely reliant on 4,000 Ethiopian peacekeepers.⁴⁰ These commitments ensured that by the mid-2010s Ethiopia was the world's largest provider of blue helmets. Such numbers did not even include the more than 4,000 Ethiopian troops who were integrated into AMISOM after 2014.⁴¹ Ethiopia became near-indispensable to peacekeeping in Africa, the principal theatre of UN activity.

Ethiopia's volte-face was shaped by the evolving global context. Given their limited material power, African states ignore the international system at their peril. By echoing great power agendas or tropes, many attempt to extract military, financial and/or diplomatic resources for domestic consolidation of authority. In Ethiopia's case, there can be little question that a desire to deepen relations with the most powerful country on earth, the United States,⁴² in particular, underpinned troop deployments by the EPRDF's long-serving supremo, Meles Zenawi. Ethiopia's first participation in a UN operation in the twenty-first century, in UNMIL, occurred after the George W. Bush administration helped to edge Charles Taylor out of power in Liberia and implored Africans to step up. Yet if Ethiopia's answering of the call surprised in 2003, its growing reputation as a reliable, battle-hardened partner was reinforced by its willingness to deploy when Washington really needed it to. When, in 2007–2008, after years of acrimonious US pressure over Sudan, the UN Security Council authorized the rehatting of UNAMID from the AU to the UN, the Bush administration was delighted that Ethiopia sent peacekeepers to Darfur:

Ethiopia's decision was crucial, to give the mission a chance of being credible—and our credibility depended on it. We could not have the mission just staffed by Bangladeshis and Nepalis and South Africans—we needed tougher soldiers who the Sudanese army and rebels would respect, like the Ethiopians. And they committed just when we needed them most.⁴³

The US–Ethiopia relationship was especially consequential in 2011 when fighting in Abyei threatened to reignite war between Sudan and the SPLA/M-governed South Sudan. Uniquely, Meles enjoyed the trust not only of President Barack Obama's administration, but also of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and South Sudanese leader Salva Kiir, and committed to have Ethiopian forces keep the peace almost singlehandedly. According to a former director at the US National Security Council:

When at the eleventh hour we came up with a UN force for Abyei, [Meles] stepped in and said he would do it. We had a bad hangover from Darfur and AMISOM where it took us so much time to get countries to contribute troops—and often low-quality. For Meles to just write us a check then and there was a huge relief. It demonstrated his commitment to peace, he had real skin in the game.⁴⁴

Notwithstanding how crucial Ethiopian peacekeeping became to US objectives on the African continent, such partnerships did not imply normative convergence. Ethiopian interventionism was not aimed at building ‘liberal peace’, nor did the EPRDF hide its belief in revolutionary—rather than liberal—democracy.⁴⁵ Ratcheting up its participation in peacekeeping from 2003 onwards did not contribute to greater pluralism within Ethiopian society. The opposite holds more true: the EPRDF's interventions protected it from harsher external scrutiny of its illiberalism. One example was the Bush administration's resistance against the US Congress's efforts to tie security and development assistance to human rights improvements under the Ethiopia Democracy and Accountability Act of 2007, citing contributions to regional stability as reasons to ‘engage’ Ethiopia instead.⁴⁶

Regional peacekeeping to strengthen Ethiopia at home

Ethiopia's peacekeeping activities reflected the EPRDF's response to global conditions as it consolidated internal dominance. But it was also the outcome of a process in which participation in peacekeeping underlined, to the EPRDF leadership, that approaching regional security differently could advance its state-building objectives.

The EPRDF's first peacekeeping deployment, to the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1994/95, reflected solidarity with a like-minded movement and a shifting interpretation of interests which the party elite began to see as requiring proactive regional positioning and collective defence. Meles' decision to bolster UNAMIR reflected multiple considerations: his blossoming relationship with the US; his yearning for a new African approach to intervention, instead of the OAU doctrine, which he saw as having failed both Ethiopia and Rwanda; and deepening partnerships with other (neo)liberation-movements-turned-governments, especially Uganda's National Resistance Movement (NRM) and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). These shared the belief of the TPLF–EPRDF and Eritrean leaderships about the need to supplant the OAU with new forms of regional cooperation. In 1992 Haile Menkerios, the right-hand man of Eritrean president Isaias Afewerki and a confidante of Meles, had traveled to Uganda and Rwanda, meeting Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and RPF commander Paul Kagame. These visits were instrumental in identifying the convergence between a new generation of pan-Africanists. Moreover, mounting fears over military-Islamist Sudan, especially following an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 1995 in Addis Ababa, gave ideological alignment with the RPF and NRM a pressing strategic rationale too.⁴⁷

A pre-deployment visit to Rwanda by ENDF chief of staff Tsadkan Gebretensae underlined how tenuous the RPF's victory remained after July 1994 and was crucial in forging trust between the Ethiopian and Rwandan military elites which peacekeeping further enhanced.⁴⁸ ENDF troops were deployed in what was held to be the most dangerous part of Rwanda—in Cyangugu, on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire)—from where thousands of génocidaires wanted to ‘complete the task’. According to Rwandan and external sources, Ethiopian peacekeepers were the only UNAMIR troops with the resolve to confront them.⁴⁹ It was one of several reasons why in 2015, almost 20 years after the end of UNAMIR's mandate, Rwandan president Kagame celebrated the 40th anniversary of the TPLF's establishment, proclaiming that ‘the TPLF and the EPRDF are our sister parties … The late Ato Meles Zenawi … is a hero, to all of us.’⁵⁰

The deployment prefigured more ambitious operations. Eritrean, Ethiopian, Rwandan and Ugandan guerrilla-fighters-turned-sovereigns dreamed of building a ‘Greater Horn of Africa’ together. This implied turning the moribund Intergovernmental Authority on Development into a vehicle for regional integration that would break with the OAU regime: ‘The Greater Horn was … leftist governments trying to change Africa for good’, according to Yemane Kidane, an ENDF officer who served as diplomatic and intelligence coordinator in the Greater Horn.⁵¹ The ambitions were breathtaking: ‘We wanted to support revolutionaries across Africa—Rwanda, Uganda, Congo. We believed in new African states. We were so excited and wanted to change everything.’⁵² This meant discarding old conventions about sovereignty and borders. While the NRM and RPF took the lead (with support from Eritrea and Ethiopia) in toppling the Zairean dictator Mobutu Seso Seko in 1997, Museveni joined Isaias and Meles in sending troops to bolster the SPLA/M's campaign for regime change in Sudan.⁵³ Although the EPRDF was militarily the least adventurous of the pan-Africanist comrades, its commitment was real. Regional threats and the sense of opportunity engendered by ideological solidarity and the EPLF–EPRDF–NRM–RPF alliance's martial prowess led it to downscale the caution of its early years in government.

The dream of the Greater Horn evaporated when, in 1998, the ‘War of Brothers’ erupted between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the Second Congo War divided the comrades who together had overthrown Mobutu. For several years, the ENDF was too preoccupied with the conflict against Eritrea and the subsequent ‘no war, no peace’ standoff over the contested border to contemplate participating in peacekeeping missions. However, Meles would embrace a reworked understanding of intervention as he reformed the EPRDF state-building project.

The war with Eritrea brought to boiling point a number of long-simmering tensions. It split the TPLF–EPRDF and resulted in the removal of defence minister Siye Abraha as well as chief of staff Tsadkan, as Meles concentrated power in the office of the prime minister.⁵⁴ Rattled by criticism from within his party's Tigrayan core, and by nationalists who chided him for being soft on Eritrea, Meles decided on a two-pronged approach. First, economic transformation to increase the government's output legitimacy: a developmental state, inspired by east Asian examples, would accelerate growth through railways, dams and social services. This provided unprecedented opportunities to citizens, which the party-state hoped would over time dissolve identity conflicts and thereby vindicate EPRDF ideology. Second, for Meles, the developmental state and the confrontation with Eritrea required more Ethiopian involvement in the Horn, not less. The country's first-ever Foreign Affairs and National Security Policy and Strategy formalized a novel approach.⁵⁵ Countering Isaias' gambit to destabilize Ethiopia necessitated new partnerships, especially in Somalia and Sudan where historically Ethiopian interests were seen as inimical with local ones. Meles believed that perceptions needed to be altered—concomitant with his critique that bad regional relations under Haile Selassie and Mengistu could not be separated from failing internal policies. Ethiopia could only win its war on poverty if it could export more and attract foreign investment, but its problematic neighbourhood inhibited those objectives. Changing Ethiopia therefore required changing the region.

Peacekeeping helped catalyse the articulation of this vision. Take Sudan, which became the prime focus of Ethiopian peacekeeping. For decades, Sudanese governments supported Ethiopian rebels and, in turn, Ethiopia backed insurgents in eastern and southern Sudan; this ensured that Sudan aligned with Egypt in Nile politics, opposing Ethiopia's challenges to the hydropolitical status quo. However, the EPRDF spotted an opportunity in the mid-2000s when military-Islamist Sudan sought to escape isolation. Meles relentlessly engaged Bashir, opening Ethiopia to Sudanese investors and serving as a conduit to improve Sudan's testy relationship with the US. If, historically, deploying Ethiopian forces in Sudan would have been a red flag, Meles managed to make Ethiopian influence palatable—and even attractive—to his former enemy: Ethiopian peacekeepers in South Sudan and Darfur did not pursue regime change in Sudan and helped Bashir resist more coercive forms of UN interventionism; Tsadkan's successor as ENDF chief of staff, Samora Yunis, was publicly honoured by the Sudan Armed Forces, symbolizing reconciliation between old rivals.⁵⁶ Approaching peacekeeping as an extension of regional diplomacy strengthened trust in Ethiopia so much that when Sudan and South Sudan went their separate ways after a plebiscite, they could only think of Meles as a mediator of the post-referendum arrangements for the secession of South Sudan. Similarly, both parties accepted Ethiopian blue helmets to prevent contested Abyei from reigniting war between them. In this way, the political partnerships lubricated by peacekeeping paid dividends. Most consequentially, Sudan abandoned decades of hydropolitical alignment with Egypt in 2012, when Bashir endorsed the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Ethiopia's most ambitious developmental project ever.⁵⁷

Such successes were instrumental in convincing sceptics within Ethiopia's national security establishment of the value of regional cooperation with historical rivals through peacekeeping, including in Somalia.⁵⁸ Since the mid-1990s, EPRDF policy had turned increasingly interventionist, mixing security operations against Islamists on Somali territory with a direct involvement in peace talks outside Somalia to undermine ‘anti-Ethiopian’ hardliners.⁵⁹ Yet while Ethiopia claimed it supported the establishment of a functional government in Mogadishu that would respect its security concerns, its ineffectiveness was exposed when the Islamic Courts Union liberated most of south-central Somalia from warlords, many of them occasional proxies of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006–2007 splintered the Courts but ensured the jihadists of Al-Shabaab could swell their ranks by banging the nationalist drum of resistance against foreign invaders and calling on all Somali clans to mount a unified defence of the homeland against an old enemy. The rapidly escalating rebellion resulted in hundreds of Ethiopian casualties and an inglorious withdrawal, with insurgents seizing territory and paralysing the Ethiopian-backed official government.

The AU troops which replaced ENDF forces struggled even more against Al-Shabaab, requiring renewed Ethiopian strikes to contain them between 2008 and 2013. The security threats this presented—including to efforts to integrate the region around the Ethiopian developmental state—led Ethiopian intelligence to create buffer zones inside Somalia; the idea was that durable partnerships with Somali elites could be forged in such ‘islands of governance’. As the EPRDF learned in Sudan, peacekeeping missions could build trust between Ethiopian peacekeepers and local authorities while providing global diplomatic cover and financing. For long-serving Ethiopian foreign minister Seyoum Mesfin and his chief-of-staff Abdeta Dribssa Beyene,

outside countries may … encourage and pay for such actions, through a peacekeeping mission or through an arrangement that is not publicly disclosed. That is why the creation of the buffer zone does not weaken formulated international norms and succeeds in contributing to the security of the intervening state.⁶⁰

Many Somali politicians had long quietly hoped Ethiopian military power would advance their interests by containing Al-Shabaab, but held back as they feared being perceived as Ethiopia's stooges. The new approach lessened such dilemmas and opened routes toward new partnerships because of the cover it provided to both Somalis and Ethiopians. From 2014 onwards, AMISOM multilateralized the projection of Ethiopian power and made it less controversial, without ENDF losing operational control of its troops.⁶¹ Multilateralization allowed Ethiopian intervention to improve ties with Somali political operators, from the presidency in Mogadishu to local power brokers in Galmudug. The resultant networks gave Ethiopia considerable ability to balance against encroachment in Somalia by regional rivals such as Egypt and the Gulf states. Most importantly, Eritrean influence among Somali elites was effectively terminated. Ethiopia succeeded in pushing for AU and UN sanctions to be imposed on Eritrea—and maintained for a decade—for Asmara's having dallied with Al-Shabaab while having Ethiopian peacekeepers lauded for defending Somalia's official government. Combining buffer zones with peacekeeping and international backing of Addis' methods rendered Ethiopian influence hard to dislodge.⁶²

The ENDF in the political economy of EPRDF Ethiopia

The role of peacekeeping in EPRDF foreign policy was complemented by the ENDF's increased prominence in ‘illiberal state-building’, pursued at home. EPRDF's project of fortifying party-state authority, extending its reach across the territory and transforming state–society relations, entailed a concentration of power not just in formal political institutions but also in economic and military affairs.⁶³ Neither an autonomous private sector nor an army simply guarding Ethiopia's borders would suffice: to mimic the east Asian ‘tigers’, administrators, entrepreneurs, generals and politicians were to all work together, each with their own expertise and instruments but sharing the same objective. Meles relentlessly instilled unity of purpose across the civil service, army and state-owned enterprises⁶⁴—as his chief economic adviser Newai Gebreab testified, a developmental state could not exist without it.⁶⁵

Peacekeeping was a significant factor among others underpinning the army's growing prominence in the state-building project. The ENDF's assumption of pivotal external tasks (through peacekeeping) as well as internal ones (through its prominence in the developmental state) served intertwined ideological and strategic purposes. As a Marxist–Leninist liberation movement that captured power through armed struggle, the EPRDF never considered the ENDF an apolitical force—even following its transition to a national army after 1991.⁶⁶ Maintaining Chairman Mao's maxim that ‘the Party commands the gun’,⁶⁷ the ENDF remained principally the armed wing of the EPRDF and an instrument at its disposal. The strengthening of the ENDF was thus coterminous with the reinforcing of the EPRDF, and sought to deter—and where necessary counter—internal threats (such as insurgencies in Ethiopia's Oromia and Somali regions) and external enemies (chiefly Eritrea). If throughout the 2000s and 2010s community policing, rapid intervention forces and local militia became the public face of authoritarian control rather than the army,⁶⁸ it was because the ENDF's overwhelming power dissuaded opponents from direct military confrontation.

Peacekeeping offered opportunities for internationalization and professionalization, which buttressed the ENDF's ability to help maintain the party-state's hegemony. Participation in UN and AU missions entailed the specialized training of ENDF personnel; visits abroad and associated per diems and network development; collaboration with the armed forces of powers ranging from India to the United Kingdom; and donations by China, Russia and the US of high-quality equipment—C-130 aircraft, operations centre computers, night-vision devices, cargo trucks—which the ENDF struggled to afford. Additionally, foreign missions generated finances. Peacekeeping reimbursements (more than US$1,000 monthly) far exceeded what staff with domestic duties earned, not least in well-remunerated commands (even if occasionally ENDF officers lacked sufficient academic training for the most senior UN positions).⁶⁹ There were immaterial advantages too: peacekeeping brought prestige at home, as lifestyles and professional assignments became increasingly ‘modern’ and ‘internationalized’.

For the ENDF as an institution, peacekeeping complemented, and helped lubricate, its growing presence in the economy. First, missions became a net generator of foreign exchange, with millions of dollars being sent to Ethiopia each month for salaries.⁷⁰ Second, payments for UN peacekeeping are made directly in US dollars to the National Bank of Ethiopia and are paid out in Ethiopian birr to ENDF personnel, allowing the state to control scarce foreign currency and cream off some of the difference for ‘institutional strengthening’ through investment in economic projects. Since the 1990s, and increasingly since 2001, the latter have predominantly been launched in the construction, energy and manufacturing sectors, including in production and assembly of buses, construction machinery, locomotives, plastics and much else, both through pre-existing industries and newly created companies under ENDF command. These activities, with an emphasis on import substitution and nurturing a more self-reliant Ethiopian defence industry—and Ethiopian industrial knowhow more broadly—were intended to shrink the trade deficit and, just as with peacekeeping, to generate foreign exchange as part of the economy's structural transformation. In 2010 the EPRDF merged dozens of state-owned and semi-independent enterprises into the Metals and Engineering Corporation (METEC), which employed some 20,000 people in approximately 80 factories. Such responsibilities generated financial rents for officers while embedding the ENDF in Ethiopia's industrialization drive. METEC was tasked with grand projects such as helping to construct the GERD, on which the developmental state relied for its economic success and legitimacy.⁷¹ The resultant infrastructures rendered EPRDF ideological constructs such as ‘good governance’ more tangible.⁷²

The ENDF's visibility in the economy and peacekeeping dovetailed with the perceived need to rebrand EPRDF state-building as reviving national strength—a ‘renaissance’. After a decade in power with its controversies around ethnic federalism and the confrontation with Eritrea, the party-state re-emphasized a shared Ethiopian outlook rather than differences between Ethiopia's nations and nationalities. Among other things, this entailed celebrating the Ethiopian millennium and new public holidays to underline unity in diversity, rebuffing critiques that the government was dominated by ethnic minorities.⁷³ Peacekeeping conveyed the image of a strong, united Ethiopian state: fighting terrorists and stabilizing the Horn was a message serving both foreign audiences—Ethiopia as a reliable partner whose re-emerging hegemonic role need not be threatening—and domestic constituencies, who could take pride now that Ethiopia was being treated with regional admiration at long last.

The ways in which officials tried to leverage peacekeeping to recast EPRDF state-building is evident from how government newspapers covered operations. The English-language Ethiopian Herald dedicated both its front page and editorial to peacekeeping news whenever it surfaced: the departure of troops for deployment somewhere in Africa, the return home of a contingent or the awarding of UN medals to ENDF officers. Time and again, coverage focused on three themes. First, ENDF's iron discipline as the defining feature of its peacekeeping: ‘the conduct of Ethiopian forces has been hailed by all as they displayed the most refined military discipline and were so highly effective in the humanitarian task’.⁷⁴ Contrary to the 1970s and 1980s when Ethiopian soldiers mistreated their own people during the ‘Red Terror’ and the civil war, the message was that the revamped ENDF excelled at protecting civilians and deterring warmongers and criminals. Second, the ENDF's ability to forge partnerships even amid Africa's most complex conflicts generated international respect for Ethiopia. Whether in Burundi or Sudan, Ethiopian press-cum-propaganda highlighted that:

What makes the Ethiopian presence in all these operations important is that the troops had been able to deliver services that would outlive the peacekeeping operations. In the short period of their stay, they always managed to forge mentality of partnership, the revitalization of co-existence in the midst of differences, the sharing of resources however meagre they are, and so on.⁷⁵

Third, the coverage underscored that the regional responsibilities which Ethiopia assumed were connected to EPDRF state-building domestically. Peacekeeping thus became a piece of Ethiopia abroad. For instance, in 2005 the Ethiopian Herald contended that just as the EPRDF's restoration of security in Ethiopia had enabled breathtaking economic growth, ENDF peacekeepers could lay foundations for an African revival: ‘peace and development are directly connected, development cannot be achieved in a situation where peace doesn't prevail’.⁷⁶ The recognizability of the challenges facing the peacekeepers became a major cited rationale behind Ethiopian intervention: ‘Ethiopians realise too well the consequence of monstrous war machine which has cost their country so many lives, property worth billions and a good deal of foregone development opportunity.’⁷⁷ Such justifications also foregrounded cultural norms important to Ethiopian publics. News reporting emphasized peacekeepers' care for the elderly, intolerance of anarchy and banditry, and respect for ethnolinguistic and religious differences. The Ethiopian state's reputation depended on ENDF peacekeeping, so the messaging went. As the first ever contingent sent by EPRDF, the Guna battalion, left Rwanda in 1995, Siye Abraha commented: ‘The replacement force will have to struggle with determination and dedication … upholding the reputation of the Guna battalion would be tantamount to upholding the honour and reputation of the transitional government and that of [the] armed forces’.⁷⁸

Although we cannot ascertain how persuaded readers were, these recurrent themes show which aspects of its interventionism EPRDF wanted to emphasize for valued audiences. As newspaper coverage enabled the party-state to showcase to the Ethiopian public the respect from the UN, AU and global powers that Ethiopian peacekeepers came to enjoy, the public component of peacekeeping revolved around restoring the prestige of the army, which had dwindled in the preceding decades: doing so helped legitimize the ENDF's prominence in the developmental state and allowed the EPRDF to highlight its revival of a national institution. Furthermore, in expounding on the connections between peacekeeping and state-building at home, the EPRDF sought to explain its pursuit of a foreign policy that differed substantially from that of its predecessors: Ethiopia was able to reinvent itself and its surrounding region through magnanimous sacrifices and far-sighted leadership. In justifying peacekeeping through these frames, the EPRDF told Ethiopians to be proud(er) of the vanguard that was garnering this international acclaim and pioneering domestic transformations.

Conclusions

In recent decades, African states have increasingly intervened militarily on the continent in ways that were practically and normatively unthinkable in the immediate post-decolonization period. Our concern in writing this article has been less with the effectiveness of interventions in solving conflicts and more with how peacekeeping assemblages have helped inform, and reflected, rearticulations of political order in intervening states. We proposed that peacekeeping can become a means of pursuing the internal and external dimensions of a state-building agenda. For Ethiopia's post-1991 ruling coalition, participation in peacekeeping missions helped discover and articulate regional security priorities concomitant with its ideological outlook while mitigating the hostility that has historically been provoked by Ethiopian ambitions for regional hegemony. Moreover, peacekeeping furthered the domestic consolidation of power as it generated material benefits for the ENDF and its role in the developmental state, as well as aiding the restoration of the army's prestige.

Peacekeeping thus yielded impressive advances for the EPRDF state-building project: it fostered extensive global sympathy for Ethiopia, contributing to the influx of billions of aid dollars and the downplaying of external critiques of EPRDF illiberalism. It allowed Meles Zenawi to present the vision of his party-state as coterminous not only with Ethiopian national interests but with those of the region and the international community as a whole. His doing so reaffirmed Ethiopia's role as the Horn of Africa's ‘natural’ leader, but with the crucial difference that its neighbours were increasingly tied to it in non-conflictual ways and therefore welcomed (some) Ethiopian interventions. Ethiopian peacekeeping might not have succeeded in pacifying Darfur, Somalia or South Sudan, but it distinctly improved Ethiopia's relations with its former adversaries, the regimes in Sudan and Somalia. Thereby, it considerably reduced the historically contested character of Ethiopian hegemony and limited the damage that Isaias' Eritrea could do via proxy warfare. Such regional advances facilitated relative domestic stability: except for Eritrean belligerence and patronage, external support for rebellions inside Ethiopia fell dramatically in comparison with the periods of imperial and Derg rule. In combination with growing Nile Basin-wide buy-in for Ethiopia's dam-building programme, these were vital gains for the internal and external dimensions of state-building.

Our argument about the entanglements between state-building and evolving peacekeeping practices contributes to broader conversations in the field. Ethiopia's (re)discovery of peacekeeping in the 1990s and 2000s underscores the usefulness of the prism of assemblages as contingent processes in which a multitude of actors are not only shaped by the global regimes in which they partake, but also rekindle their logics through interactions in host countries, on the home front and among the wider international community.⁷⁹ The processes of co-production we analysed, in which ways of thinking about and legitimizing intervention are understood to be inseparable from the ways in which peacekeeping is practiced and experienced,⁸⁰ can become crucial in struggles over what constitutes legitimate political order. Initially, the EPRDF focused on overwhelming internal challenges, regarding foreign entanglements as burdensome distractions. It was only gradually, and by its practice, that peacekeeping became integral to illiberal state-building and yielded tangible benefits. Ethiopian interventionism, from Rwanda to Sudan, was thus not the result of a sole stable set of interests. As scholars conceptualizing assemblages in international relations suggest,⁸¹ this highlights the advantages of thinking about peacekeeping not as having set departure points or a pre-determined ultimate objective, but rather as an open-ended process of sense-making by heterogeneous actors that sometimes identify overlapping meanings and interests by interacting.

These findings go beyond the well-established theme of weak African states inserting troops into conflicts in which they have little stake as they respond to material incentives (e.g. payments to treasuries) and immaterial promises (e.g. of diplomatic support) by great powers.⁸² As the case of EPRDF-governed Ethiopia illustrates, even if peacekeeper salaries and calcifying partnerships with the US create important motivations, reality can be more complicated than mercenary, short-term quid pro quos. The evidence marshalled here underlines the extent to which an African sovereign state has operated as a strategic actor over significant time horizons that facilitate both the development of new interests and identities through peacekeeping and the harnessing of interventions to mitigate longstanding structural dilemmas in their international relations.

We have thus also identified a key African case in conversations regarding regional projections of power. In the scholarship on regional African powers, the matter of state-building has been mostly absent. For instance, it does not feature in discussions of Nigerian interventionism.⁸³ Debates regarding the first decade in power of the African National Congress in South Africa anchored peacekeeping in processes of domestic accumulation and creating regional markets, but stressed how South African interventions aided neo-liberal logics rather than contributing to the (party-)state's sovereignty.⁸⁴ The experience of EPRDF-governed Ethiopia differs significantly because of how, through progressive participation in peacekeeping operations, seemingly disparate objectives came to be articulated as part of a cogent narrative around the Ethiopian developmental state, African security and regional integration. Ethiopia's emergence as a highly prolific peacekeeper reflected changing ideas about its regional role and about Ethiopia in the world. Conversely, peacekeeping activities and experiences were pivotal in helping the EPRDF politburo and ENDF officers discover new ways of approaching old international relations dilemmas in the Horn of Africa.

The importance of EPRDF state-building driving Ethiopia's role as regional policeman is affirmed by how the dissolution of the party-state in 2018–2019 affected foreign policy in general and peacekeeping in particular. By December 2022 fewer than 900 ENDF soldiers were serving in UN operations—only about 10 per cent of the total deployment four years earlier. Immediately after assuming the premiership in 2018, Abiy Ahmed began dismantling the EPRDF project's institutional pillars, reversing regional alignments and accusing METEC's leadership of corruption. Although he had served for years in EPRDF security organs (including as a peacekeeper in Rwanda), the prime minister's policy reversals entailed recalling thousands of troops from Abyei, Darfur and South Sudan—beginning a drawdown that was subsequently accelerated by the outbreak of war with the TPLF in November 2020. Abiy proclaimed that his new Ethiopia required a reset of regional priorities.⁸⁵

This U-turn has policy implications beyond Ethiopia's fracturing state–society relations.⁸⁶ The key question is not whether Ethiopia's abdication as regional ‘policeman’ will lead to shortages of African peacekeepers or declining levels of intervention. As Martha Finnemore has noted, it is not the fact of intervention in international relations that changes but rather the reasons for it, the meaning which lies behind and the modalities of intervention.⁸⁷ The view that sovereign states can adopt ‘interventionist tropes and practices so as to put them at the service of the (re-)enforcement of political order and to detach them from their earlier association with regime change and Western-style democracy-promotion’ remains broadly shared among African rulers.⁸⁸ This remains true of elites accepting peacekeeping on their territory as well as of those intervening. Moreover, what constitutes legitimate political order continues to be violently contested from within and without the Horn, leading to the redrawing of sovereignties and territories. This context of historical grievances, the destabilizing waxing and waning of state-building efforts, and the incessant regionalization of conflicts is likely to spur further interventions in this region.

From a policy standpoint, the more pressing question is whether consensual peace operations, without the thrust of an aspiring hegemon to address individual conflicts and structural problems of regional insecurity, will still prove feasible in the Horn in the foreseeable future. The interventionism of the EPRDF years—and the contrasting post-EPRDF shift away from peacekeeping—reflect controversies surrounding the extent to which regional powers can, or should, deliver public goods such as security or economic integration. Not all states with (claims to) military or political preponderance in a region enunciate such an agenda or seek global partnerships to solidify it.⁸⁹ But partnering with those who do is complex. On the one hand, disagreement over the sources of international order between the world's most powerful actors and the regionally dominant state can make this highly strenuous (e.g. the US and Russia in the post-Soviet space); peacekeeping without alignment between the most potent state in a region and global powers is extremely challenging. On the other hand, pragmatic alignment between global understandings of regional security and those of the preponderant regional state does not guarantee success either. In many regions the status of regional hegemony has been intensely contested (e.g. Pakistan's challenge to Indian hegemony in south Asia or tussles in the Middle East between Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia) and regional powers frequently experience less acceptance of their leadership claims in neighbouring states than at the global level, complicating their ability to lead peacekeeping agendas in their region.⁹⁰

This underlines how unusual the convergence of global and regional approaches to security in the Horn was in the early twenty-first century and the kind of policy options it enabled—options which today no longer appear to be on the horizon. As demonstrated, fears of Ethiopian dominance doomed collective understandings of regional security, rendering regional peacekeeping unthinkable until the 2000s. It was the embedding of Ethiopian intervention-as-peacekeeping in carefully cultivated, mutually beneficial arrangements with regional elites that enabled Ethiopian-led operations. Remarkably, during this period, Ethiopian leadership was openly contested only by Eritrea. This was an ‘imperfect hegemony’⁹¹ that could not resolve the root causes of conflict nor remedy the blind spots in global agendas for the region, but it offered resoundingly different policy options to regional states and global powers—that the Horn has not had before, or since.

Today, without an overarching strategic vision—backed by diplomatic savvy and material power—of how to address the interrelated problems of Ethiopian preponderance, regional insecurity and unstable domestic orders, the Horn is likely to remain deeply divided about what constitutes legitimate intervention in regional affairs. Ironically, such absence and divisions increase the likelihood of regionalized conflicts and of spurring intensified extraregional intervention in the Horn, while complicating peacekeeping. The Tigray War and the civil war in Sudan at the time of writing are tragic cases in point.

Footnotes

Author notes