In July 2026, after a series of bureaucratic delays that pushed its schedule to October, the Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission hosted the Ethiopian National Dialogue Forum, a massive gathering of more than 4,000 delegates from 1,200 districts convened in cooled conference rooms to tackle some of the country’s most intractable political problems. On paper alone, in the logistical organization of 55 structured speaking sessions and more than 1,100 side events, the forum seems a remarkable feat, an operation of crushing scale. Yet behind closed doors, a more subdued struggle is taking place. It is not one of guns and munitions, but of visions: a direct clash between two entirely distinct conceptions of time, of truth, and of the very act of restoring a fractured nation.
On one side is the state-building playbook: highly bureaucratic, document-oriented, legally driven, and strictly time-bound, all packaged rigidly by Proclamation 1265/2021. It is a world of lawyers and legal prose. On the other side is the time-honored, relational, social-linguistic matrix of Ethiopia’s oral customary laws, the projection of the shadow of the sacred sycamore tree. In this world, peace has nothing to do with signing documents and voting for policies; it is something slow and deliberate, a laborious effort to repair damaged relationships.
The real test of this dialogue becomes a huge translation challenge. As much as the Commission may want to reenact and incorporate the revitalizing, holistic spiritualities of reconciliation embodied by the ancestors, it must still translate such ancestral accords into the closed, bureaucratized box of a modern state. How Ethiopia manages this polarization will probably decide whether the summit results in a real, long-lasting social contract or instead another magnificently crafted and never-implemented government report.
To see where the gears are grinding, one must look at the form the process takes. The Commission is institutionally independent of government, outside the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Its design is straightforward and sequential: collect themes emerging from the ground up, discuss them regionally, distill the results into a concise rundown of topics to be discussed nationally, and, just before the forum in July, organize these into eight thematic pillars, including national identity; structure and authority of the federal government; religious pluralism; human rights; and reconciliation after conflict.
The challenge is that centuries of history, misery, and grievance cannot be neatly frozen into bullet points and then euphemistically “rationalized” for voting by delegates in timed sessions. Yet as the massive bureaucratic machine moved out of the capital into the highland plains, riverine valleys, and pastoral hilltops, it repeatedly came face to face with vastly different indigenous justice systems, entire worlds of their own, tuned to a very different note. For many Ethiopians, peace is not a bargain settled by rival political elites. It is the re-establishment of cosmic and social harmony.
Take, for example, the Oromo Gadaa system, which has governed community life for centuries. At its core is the Abbaa Gadaa, a traditional orator who presides over arenas where conflicts are arbitrated. Under the Oda, or sacred fig, tree, elders sit and speak, but there is no majority vote producing winners and losers. Rather, the participants keep talking for weeks, sometimes until they reach absolute consensus. Together with them is the Hadha Siiqqe, an institution of mediating women who, with spiritual and moral authority, step between the factions and, in one motion, freeze the conflict and set in motion the slow mechanics of reconciliation.
The Sidama model is conceptualized in much the same way. Invoked by a council of elders called the Cimeessa, the Afini is a deeply patient, restorative process that actively discourages participation by the wealthy or powerful and elevates compromise above all else. Idle assemblies are held where people speak their minds, they say, no matter how much it costs in respect. The community then works carefully to persuade the offender to admit guilt. Once shame is fully understood, the elders decide how much compensation will repair the damage, almost always in cattle. Finally, through a cycle of nourishment and prayer, forgiveness is delivered, first through sacred speech and then during a communal meal.
You find these same Indian Ocean concepts tucked away in every corner. Foresters in the Abar and Aften forests settle land and water conflicts through the Moabalo. In the Shabei plain, the Ogaden nomads use the Heer system, an oral pact that clans uphold for restitution, so that blood-feud rituals can end forever. In the north, the Afar and the Amhara turn to the Shimbaln, where dynastic elders, respected in their communities, use personal authority to bargain forgiveness and accommodation. None of these traditional fixes seeks instant solutions, top-down treatment, or punitive measures that dismantle the community fabric in the name of speedy state administration.
Historically, peace processes have broken down when such realities have been ignored. The most renowned transitions — whether in Poland in 1989 or South Africa in the early 1990s — were elite-driven negotiations that helped forestall crises. In both cases, negotiators managed to overhaul constitutional rules and avoid civil war. But because of their focus on elite bargains, they often neglected the psychological and relational scars borne by ordinary people.
Worse still, when formal peace processes become utterly disconnected from local realities, the consequences can be disastrous. The Yemeni national dialogue held in the early 2010s was highly praised by the international community for its structure and inclusion of women and youth. However, since the formal negotiations in Sana’a were entirely disconnected from the tribal arrangements that controlled ground security, the agreements collapsed and the country descended into civil war. The same logic applies to Colombia, where the government and FARC militants spent years negotiating a technically polished peace accord in Havana, only for it to be rejected by Colombian voters in a referendum. It was a vivid reminder that an agreement lacking popular ownership has no weight.
Ethiopia will therefore have to navigate a complex path to avoid these mistakes. The National Dialogue Commission will have to strike a difficult middle ground: it cannot adopt a structure modeled entirely on international templates from South Africa or Europe, nor can it neglect the administration of a modern state. It must forge a hybrid peace architecture.
The launch of the National Dialogue Forum in July 2026 has brought those tensions to a boiling point, particularly with ongoing security crises and political boycotts complicating the formal process. On the eve of the forum, the Tigray Regional State officially foreswore participation, calling it an isolated and unacceptable exercise and citing the federal government’s failure to fully implement the Pretoria Peace Agreement. Meanwhile, other opposition figures warned of dire consequences if a way cannot be found to incorporate armed groups fighting in the Oromia and Amhara regional states into the dialogue.
In these intense battlegrounds, the state machinery, formal and bureaucratic, is brought to a grinding halt at checkpoints and through political gridlock. Where the state cannot enter, traditional elders and religious authorities can step ahead of it. Because they have personal, cross-cutting ties that cut across ethnic and political lines, they are equipped to fill the gap, broker local ceasefires, facilitate safe passage for negotiators, and safeguard the prospect of dialogue when the state is locked out.
In fact, on some of the most productive and unheralded occasions so far, commissioners have achieved breakthroughs precisely when they, as government officials, have allowed themselves to act as mediators. In a number of regional consultations where discussions of difficult topics such as internal borders or historical injustices began to spiral out of control, the commission simply set aside the conference hall’s formal rules. Instead, it spoke with people in informal circles and allowed local elders, and sometimes traditional diviners, to use conventional consensus-building tactics to calm the antagonists. At that point, the commission, like its great-grandfather the honorable mediator, became an otherworldly receptacle for ancestral wisdom.
In the end, this dialogue will not be judged by how swiftly it can absorb its 4,000 delegates, or by the weight of the final report it puts before Parliament this fall. It will be judged by the degree of consensus it generates and the level of trust it engenders among ordinary citizens. If it merely becomes a technical, top-down, exclusionary exercise that leaves out important regional constituencies, it will produce nothing more than a handsome tome that can gather dust on a shelf while life goes on as usual. But by incorporating its traditional customary fabric into the state’s sacred tapestry, Ethiopia has a unique opportunity to demonstrate to the world a new model of building peace, one that underscores that a modern state cannot merely rely on designing institutions; it must be rooted in the civic foundations of the cultures of its people.
