A few months after coming to power in April 2018, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed signed a peace deal to end a decades-long insurgency in the country’s Oromia region. The same summer, he struck a peace agreement with Eritrea, resolving a border dispute that since the late 1990s had produced a two-year war and several smaller-scale clashes. That effort earned Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. But his reputation as a peacemaker did not last. By 2020, the Ethiopian government was fighting a brutal war in the Tigray region; the conflict would go on for two years, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing more than a million Tigrayans. The 2022 Pretoria Agreement ended hostilities and aimed to secure a lasting peace through measures related to disarmament, humanitarian access, and transitional justice. Yet today, as Ethiopians prepare to go to the polls on June 1—and all but certainly deliver Abiy’s party another term in office—Tigray remains combustible, and insurgencies continue in several other regions.

Rather than bringing stability, the deals the government has brokered with various armed groups have fomented uncertainty, mistrust, and fresh violence. They have caused new factions to emerge with fresh grievances. Some of these splinter groups have objected to the terms of the peace agreements—including the prospect of having to disarm and demobilize—while others have resented the government’s halfhearted implementation of key provisions, such as power-sharing. And growing friction between Ethiopia and its neighbors has added to the volatile mix as diplomatic disputes threaten to escalate into proxy fights or even open confrontation.

Ethiopia’s security problems are solvable. Openings for regional diplomacy exist, and following through on the terms of current peace agreements could go a long way to address the grievances that are now fueling armed conflict, as well as set the groundwork for future negotiations. Yet the necessary action will require political courage and an earnest commitment by the government to reforms. If Ethiopia’s leaders instead keep the country on its current path, they run the risk of letting the security crisis simmer until tensions eventually boil over and send the country into war.

Much of the instability in Ethiopia stems from disagreements around the country’s ethno-federal system. That system emerged in the early 1990s after the end of a protracted armed struggle that had resulted in the overthrow of a military dictatorship. Today, Ethiopia has 12 ethnically defined territorial states, each of which has the right to draft its own constitution and a degree of autonomy in administering its budget. Each “nation, nationality, and people” also has the right to secession.

However democratic and egalitarian such a system was on paper, in practice a single group dominated political life throughout the country. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), a coalition of four ethnic parties dominated by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), controlled the federal government and used heavy-handed repression to stamp out opposition to its rule.

Mounting frustration with the coalition’s authoritarian tendencies and with Tigrayan domination gave Abiy a wide berth to present himself as a reformer when he took over as prime minister in 2018. Abiy put forward a vision of centralized authority that would replace ethno-federalism. Part of this plan included replacing the EPRDF’s........

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