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The word ‘genocide’ echoes globally today, amid the violence in Gaza. Yet another genocide unfolded with far less global attention: the war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. Between 2020 and 2022, the conflict became one of the world’s deadliest, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and exposing civilians to staggering levels of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), including reproductive violence intended to prevent Tigrayan births. Estimates suggest that 40–50% of women in Tigray experienced conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), much of it systematic and ethnically targeted. Because Tigray was largely cut off from the world for nearly two years, as a result of communication blockades, the full scale of these atrocities remains under-documented. Current reports suggest that SGBV violence continues in conflict-affected areas and may have exacerbated broader forms of GBV in post-conflict settings.
Drawing on my MSc dissertation research and a Feminist Political Economy lens, in this blog I argue that sexual violence in Tigray was not a collateral effect of chaos, but was deployed strategically, along ethnic lines, through patterns indicating coordination and command responsibility, functioning as a weapon of terror, punishment, and group destruction. As the conflict shifted into a fragile post-peace agreement phase, however, forms of GBV increasingly reflected different dynamics shifting from predominant, systematically perpetrated CRSV through lines of military command to GBV shaped by displacement, economic precarity, weakened policing and justice systems, and the conditionality and scarcity of aid.
To capture this shift, the blog adopts a multi-regime lens that distinguishes between wartime, command-driven CRSV and post-war exploitative, opportunistic and circumstantial GBV. This distinction is crucial for both legal accountability and effective response: it clarifies responsibility for atrocity crimes while guiding survivor-centred, reparative interventions that address the specific political, economic, and institutional drivers of post-war violence, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all GBV responses.
The following sections illustrate how these regimes of violence unfolded in Tigray — from strategic wartime CRSV to post-conflict persistence — and draw concrete implications for practitioners and policymakers working in conflict-affected settings.
Explaining Variation: Why Some Conflicts Escalate to Extreme CRSV
Wartime sexual violence is neither inevitable nor uniform across conflicts. While some armed groups engage in widespread sexual violence, others commit few or no such acts, underscoring the need to explain variation both across and within wars.
Earlier approaches often treated rape as a regrettable “spoil” of war or an unavoidable by-product of social breakdown, implicitly assuming that men rape simply because they are men or soldiers in chaotic settings. However, atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda during the post-Cold War era catalysed a major shift in international understanding, leading to the recognition of rape as ‘a weapon of war’ and as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.
Building on this shift, recent scholarship shows that sexual violence in war is not a simple product of chaos or impunity, but is often shaped by the internal structures of armed groups themselves—their chains of command, their codes of discipline, their recruitment practices, and their ideologies. These factors help explain why some armed actors maintain low levels of sexual violence, while others rely on rape, gang rape, and sexual slavery as tools of terror and control. For instance, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador largely avoided sexual violence due to strong internal discipline, ideological commitments, and dependence on civilian support. By contrast, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone systematically deployed sexual violence, including gang rape and sexual slavery, as part of its coercive strategy.
Beyond these variations, research has highlighted important complexities regarding the identity of both perpetrators and victims. State forces are frequently implicated in sexual violence, often more so than non-state armed groups, challenging assumptions that rebels are always the primary perpetrators. At the same time, male and LGBTQ+ victims have been releatively invisible in policy and research, even though they also experience forms of sexualised violence, including rape and genital mutilation, intended to humiliate, emasculate, or destroy social bonds. These insights point to the need for intersectional and gender-relational approaches that recognise how different bodies are targeted in various ways and that resist reducing CRSV to violence against women alone.
Tigray’s Extreme Escalation: Strategic, Coordinated, Genocidal
As in every conflict context, the conditions for the systematic use of CRSV in Tigray was laid long before the war. Since 1995, Ethiopia’s ethnic federalism and decades of militarised governance had politicised identity and normalised violence as a tool of rule. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), comprised of powerful Tigrayans – in contrast to the Tigray ethnic group representing only 6% of the population and facing some of the harshest living conditions in the northern highlands – had dominated the federal coalition for nearly three decades, holding onto political power through a culture where force, hierarchy, and ethnic loyalty dictated access to power. As resentment grew among politically underrepresented ethnic communities, political competition became fiercely ethnicised—creating fertile ground for violence that was inevitably both ethnicised and gendered.
This tinderbox was ignited by the political crisis of 2018. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s rise and his centralisation of power severed the TPLF’s last ties to the federal government. Critically, his strategic 2018 peace pact with Eritrea—which won him a Nobel Prize—transformed a longstanding border stalemate into a military alliance with a single objective: the dismantling of the TPLF. This political rupture was accompanied by a surge in state-sponsored and social media hate speech that gradually but systematically dehumanised the people of Tigray as a whole, framing them as a “cancer” or “weeds” to be eradicated. Such rhetoric created the permissive ideological conditions for the internationalised, retaliatory war and the atrocities that followed.
Against this backdrop, the sexual violence documented in Tigray was neither random nor opportunistic. Multiple sources—survivor testimony, medical data, and UN investigations—point to systematic and coordinated patterns that indicate clear command responsibility and explicit ethnic intent. In practical terms, this meant widespread attacks carried out by all armed groups involved, each operating under a military-style command structure. These included the Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF), the Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF), and allied militias such as Fano.
While patterns varied across perpetrators, reports suggest the EDF were frequently associated with the most extreme reproductive harms, whereas the ENDF and allied militias systematically used sexual violence as a tactic of terror, collective punishment, and forced displacement. Credible reports also document instances of retaliatory sexual violence committed by Tigrayan forces during the conflict; however, existing investigations emphasise that such abuses were neither comparable in scale nor characterised by the same level of systematic coordination as the command-driven CRSV perpetrated against Tigrayan civilians by Eritrean, federal, and allied forces.
The documented methods—gang rape, sexual slavery, abduction, forced pregnancy, and sexual mutilation—reveal an intent that goes far beyond individual criminality. Survivors and investigators describe explicit orders and coordinated assaults, including genocidal directives such as “We want Tigrayan wombs infertile” or commands to kill men and boys “to prevent future resistance.” This campaign was enabled by a parallel strategy of infrastructural violence: the deliberate destruction of healthcare, communications, and aid networks, which amplified the destructiveness of each assault. The systematic targeting of health facilities and a total communication blackout isolated Tigray and prevented documentation. Importantly, the impact was not uniform. Evidence suggests that while urban women faced higher rates of direct sexual abuse (48.6%), rural women and those with little education endured compounded physical (44.6%) and psychological abuse (48.3%), as well as the engineered famine—revealing how the violence exploited the deepest class and geographic fault lines within Tigrayan society.
Additionally, a critical factor in this extreme escalation was the structural culture of the EDF. Although comprehensive data is limited, there exists research into Eritrea’s national service system that suggests a long-standing institutional environment of coercion, gendered abuse, and sexual violence, reinforced by total impunity.
Whereas GBV is now one of the main features of Ethiopia’s ongoing conflict, this extreme escalation has historical precedent. Evidence from earlier wars, such as the Derg’s Red Terror, indicates that sexual violence was often systematic, though it was rarely documented with quantitative rigour. The war in Tigray is distinguished not by the mere fact of sexual violence, but by its overwhelming scale, explicit ethnic targeting, and—crucially—the unprecedented depth of evidence from surveys, medical records, and investigations that meticulously detail its organised, command-driven nature.
For these reasons, CRSV in Tigray must be understood as a strategic, genocidal crime, not an inevitable by-product of conflict. Recognising this intentionality is essential for legal accountability and for designing post-conflict responses that match the gravity and coordinated nature of the violence.
When ‘Peace’ Fails Survivors: The Pretoria Agreement
The Pretoria Agreement, signed in November 2022 and widely celebrated as an “African solution to an African problem,” did not bring safety to survivors of sexual violence in Tigray. Instead, GBV continued — in some cases at rates equal to or higher than during active conflict. The Tigray Health Bureau recorded 852 cases of CRSV in just the two months following the peace deal, while research by Physicians for Human Rights found that 95% of sexual violence against children and adolescents occurred after the agreement.
The agreement represents what many describe as a victor’s peace— a narrow political settlement aimed at stopping open fighting rather than addressing the structures that produced the violence. Its limitations are stark when viewed through a gender lens:
- Exclusionary process: Negotiations involved only armed male elites — the federal government and the TPLF. Women, civil society and survivors were excluded, and key perpetrators, including Eritrean and Amhara forces, were not party to the agreement yet remained active on the ground
- Gender-blind content: The text offers only vague promises of a “comprehensive transitional justice policy“, with no concrete provisions for CRSV accountability, reparations, psychosocial support, or survivor protection.
- Persistent impunity: Wartime power structures were left intact. Eritrean troops remained in Tigray despite commitments to withdraw, while prosecutions were limited to a few low-ranking soldiers, shielding institutions and senior commanders.
This outcome is what peace scholar Johan Galtung terms ‘negative peace’: the absence of direct violence alongside the structural injustices that sustain gendered harm.
Tigray is not unique in this regard. Evidence from other post-conflict settings—including Rwanda—shows that large-scale violence can reshape demographic and social structures in ways that intensify intimate partner violence (IPV) long after the guns fall silent. In Rwanda, for example, research by La Mattina found that in communities where the genocide had killed a disproportionate number of men, the resulting scarcity of men reduced women’s bargaining power in marriage and significantly increased their risk of IPV in the post-genocide period. The lesson is clear: mass violence does not simply “end”; it restructures gender relations in ways that reproduce harm inside households.
In Tigray, similar structural pressures — displacement, loss of livelihoods, male deaths or disappearances, economic precarity, and weakened policing — have created conditions in which post-war GBV becomes increasingly opportunistic and survival-based, even as wartime CRSV remains largely unpunished. For women and girls, peace has not “taken off”: the afterlife of violence persists because of pre-existing Ethiopia-wide patriarchal cultural norms and standards that fostered gender inequalities and abuses, and conflict-related militarised structures that enabled the wartime atrocities were never dismantled.
Taken together, these failures reveal why violence persisted after Pretoria. Many survivors in Tigray now live with what researchers call anticipatory violence—the constant expectation that harm may return because the forces, institutions, and inequalities that enabled wartime CRSV were never dismantled. As Donahoe reminds us, “formal peace may be negotiated in the state house, while domestic violence continues in the family house.” This gap between elite-led peace and everyday community-level insecurity is crucial for understanding why, for many women and girls, violence did not end with the ceasefire but simply changed form.
What survivors actually need: Lessons from the ground
One of the most significant gaps between top-down peace processes and survivors’ realities is the mismatch in priorities. An Indigenous Tigrayan survivor-led group organisation, such as Irob Anina, reports that most survivors do not prioritise retributive justice. As one woman expressed:
“I want my land back. I want to grow food. I want a safe home. I want mental and psychological help. The rest can come later.”
This testimony reveals that survivor-centred justice requires addressing immediate material needs and structural inequalities—not just symbolic prosecutions. Key priorities include: Economic security (especially land rights and livelihoods); Access to healthcare, including medical care and mental health support; Social reintegration and community-based healing; and Safety and protection from ongoing violence and displacement.
Recommendations for Policymakers and Practitioners
1. Differentiate wartime CRSV from post-war GBV: As evidenced in a systematic review by Project dldl, responses must recognise that genocidal, command-driven CRSV requires accountability and reparations, whereas post-conflict opportunistic or survival-driven GBV requires rebuilding institutions, livelihoods, and protection systems.
2. Ensure meaningful inclusion: Peace processes must include women and survivors as genuine decision-makers, not symbolic participants. Meaningful gender perspectives require both procedural inclusion and substantive provisions that address conflict-specific harms, supported by accessible grievance mechanisms and robust monitoring and reporting systems.
3. Contextualise interventions within religio-cultural systems: Responses to GBV and CRSV must engage seriously with the religio-cultural institutions that mediate survivors’ reintegration, particularly in contexts where religious authority structures everyday life. In Tigray, survivors’ access to care, social acceptance, and psychological recovery are often shaped by Orthodox religious norms and clergy responses, which can either enable healing or reinforce stigma. Effective interventions should therefore work with religious leaders as critical, though ambivalent, intermediaries—supporting survivor-affirming practices while actively challenging religiously sanctioned stigma and exclusion.
4. Provide rapid, comprehensive response: Timely medical treatment, mental-health support, and safe reporting mechanisms are essential, alongside early-warning systems that can detect resurgent violence.
5. Address structural inequalities: Long-term peace demands investment in women’s land rights, economic security, and redistribution of care burdens—areas where vulnerability to post-conflict GBV is often reproduced.
6. Support Local and Survivor-Led initiatives: International actors should partner with women-led organisations such as Irob Anina and EWLA (Ethiopian Women Lawyers’ Association), providing training and resources to strengthen survivor-centred referral pathways. This requires understanding security as everyday safety and dignity—not merely the absence of gunfire.
Conclusion: No Peace without Gender Justice
The Tigray case shows that peace agreements that prioritise elite bargains while ignoring gendered violence fail to deliver real peace. There, sexual violence was strategic and command-driven during the conflict, then persisted in diffuse forms after the ceasefire—fuelled by displacement, economic collapse, and institutional breakdown. Treating these as separate phases obscures both accountability for atrocities and the continuum of violence that endures post-war.
Viewed through a Feminist Political Economy lens, this continuum is not accidental. It is the logical outcome of structures built on militarised, patriarchal control over resources and women’s bodies and labour. Peace, therefore, cannot be defined by the absence of fighting alone. It requires a confrontation with these very structures. Survivors’ own demands—for land, livelihoods, safety, and dignity—offer the clearest blueprint for this transformation. Ultimately, the lesson from Tigray is unequivocal: peace without gender justice is neither sustainable nor complete.
A Note on Methodology and Positionality
This analysis draws on my MSc dissertation, conducted using a qualitative approach grounded in Feminist Political Economy and relational gender theory. Given restricted access to Tigray, the research relied on triangulated secondary sources — including ICHREE reports, human rights investigations, and Ethiopian feminist organisations.
As an Ethiopian woman researcher working at the intersection of academic study and feminist activism, my positionality shapes how I interpret gendered harm. Far from a limitation, this insider perspective provides crucial insight into the social meanings of violence and actively informs the survivor-centred analysis that follows.
This blog is based on research submitted in partial fulfilment of the MSc degree requirement and draws on extensive documentation by survivor-led organisations and human rights bodies. All survivor testimonies referenced are drawn from published reports with appropriate ethical protocols.
About the Author
Meron Shawel Aychiluhim is a Research Associate at IDVRM and holds an MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on feminist political economy approaches to conflict-related sexual violence and post-conflict peacebuilding. Meron can be reached at: meron.merry@gmail.com
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