Almost unnoticed, in the wake of the overthrow of Emperor Haile-Selassie, the coming to power of the military, and the ongoing independence struggle in Eritrea, a band of students launched an insurrection from the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray. Calling themselves the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), they built close relations with Tigray's poverty-stricken peasants and on this basis liberated the province in 1989, and formed an ethnic-based coalition of opposition forces that assumed state power in 1991. This book chronicles that history and focuses in particular on the relationship of the revolutionaries with Ethiopia's peasants.

This extended treatment of insurgent fragmentation provides an innovative new theory tested through analysis of the Horn of Africa's civil wars.

It is presented from the point of view of an external observer learning as she goes along. The book is based on three journeys through the war zone, which not only show different points in the process of revolution, but different states in the author's understanding of the history, causes and evolution of this struggle. Jenny Hammond unlocks the hitherto hidden history of the EPRDF liberation movement. She provides the reader with a unique insight into the origin and evolution of the movement and describes the social and political transformations of the society during the war period.

The focus of this book is on the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) from its formation in the early 1970s to its victory in 1991, and its transformation from liberation front to ruling party and government of independent Eritrea.

In this eminently readable, concise history of Ethiopia, Harold Marcus surveys the evolution of the oldest African nation from prehistory to the present. For the updated edition, Marcus has written a new preface, two new chapters, and an epilogue, detailing the development and implications of Ethiopia as a Federal state and the war with Eritrea.

"...a comprehensive and critical study that seamlessly integrates the theoretical issues of ethnic self-determination with real life events, processes and empirical observations of the complex history of the TPLF."--

In this bold study of modern ethno-regional nationalism, the author examines the divergent paths taken by the nationalist insurgencies in Tigray and Eritrea. The author argues that Tigrayans, south of the Mereb River, and Kebessa (highlands) Eritreans, north of the Mereb, are ethnically one people, tied by common history, political economy, myth, language and religion. Both fought against a common enemy, an oppressive Amhara ethnic state, for a period of seventeen and thirty years, respectively. In the process of the armed struggle, however, each evolved separate political identities and, after jointly marching to military victory in 1991, they followed separate political paths - Eritreans created the newest state in Africa and Tigrayans remained within the Ethiopian body politic.