Published December 12, 2025
Just three years after the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA) ended the 2020-2022 Tigray War that killed upwards of 600,000 people, northern Ethiopia is once again on the brink of conflict, with a high risk of renewed mass atrocities occurring in the near future. While the CoHA put an end to the country’s most recent large-scale conflict, many of the war’s human rights violations have continued without accountability, and recent clashes risk triggering further escalation. The country faces a number of risk factors for large-scale, systematic violence against civilians, particularly as the major drivers of historical conflicts remain unaddressed. These ongoing risks are so alarming that the Early Warning Project has ranked Ethiopia in the top 10 countries most likely to experience a new mass atrocity for the last five years in a row.
This atrocity risk assessment, authored by Ethiopian and American atrocity prevention experts, analyzes worst-case but high probability scenarios in northern Ethiopia, including Tigray and its borderlands with Eritrea, Afar, and Amhara. If these scenarios occur, they will likely precipitate mass violence against civilians while also causing a widespread regional crisis. It also identifies central risk factors, key actors, triggers, and resiliencies that could affect the course of conflict.
In the first scenario, the brewing conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea could escalate and quickly engulf the northern region of Ethiopia, drawing in Ethiopian and Eritrean state security forces, various ethnically affiliated armed groups, as well as neighboring states and international actors. In the second plausible scenario, the longstanding territorial dispute between Amhara and Tigray over the region of Western Tigray could erupt into violence, with opposing forces fighting for control over contested territory and pursuing campaigns of ethnic cleansing. These scenarios—identified through research, interviews, and decades of expertise—could unfold together, with one fueling the other, or arise independently. Regardless of how they play out, these scenarios would almost certainly involve extreme violence against civilians, including ethnic and gender-based targeting by all armed actors participating in the conflict, which could amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and/or genocide.
The scale of potential violence demands urgent global attention while actors still have leverage to mitigate the risks of conflict and its consequences. Atrocities in Ethiopia are not inevitable, but preventing them demands early and coordinated action. A full set of recommendations can be found at the end of the report.