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Over the past 700 days, the government of Ethiopia and militias in the rebellious state of Tigray have fought a costly civil war over a question of national identity: Should the country remain a loose federation of ethnic states or embrace a common democratic future based on what Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed calls “Ethiopianness”?

The conflict has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced more than 2.6 million others, and put 9.4 million at risk of starvation, according to estimates by the United Nations and other sources. Each side blames the other for breaking a truce in August. They can’t agree on who should moderate talks led by the African Union.

There are signs, however, that a stalemate on the battlefield is galvanizing a consensus that Ethiopia should be united by shared democratic values, common interests, and cherished traditions rather than war. 

Women’s groups held marches on two consecutive days in the capital, Addis Ababa, in early September to protest war-related violence against women and children. That coincided with statements by three different groups of civil-society organizations, teachers unions, and media groups demanding an end to violence against civilians and a peaceful resolution of the war.

“There is no part of society that benefits from conflict and war,” the Ethiopian Media Council stated on Sept. 10. It called for preserving “the co-existence and solidarity of our society.”

For decades, since the end of the Cold War and especially colonialism, several African societies such as Rwanda and South Africa have grappled with forging national identities through forgiveness-based models of restorative justice. Ethiopia’s experience may be more analogous to the former Yugoslavia, which fell into ethnic conflict after the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.

Ethiopia’s experiment in ethnic federalism started after the 1991 fall of a longtime military dictatorship. The idea was enshrined in a new constitution in 1995 and was meant to recognize the diversity of a society with more than 80 ethnic groups.

When Mr. Abiy was elected in 2018, he embodied a new idea. His father was Muslim, his mother Christian. Each came from one of the country’s two largest ethnic groups. The new prime minister vowed to build a future based on a common sense of nationhood. His political reforms instead provoked war. Tigrayans, who represent just 6% of the population but ruled for most of the last 30 years, felt pushed out. In November 2020, they went to war to protect their regional autonomy.

A U.N. report last week underscored the urgency of finding a solution to the conflict in Ethiopia. It noted that fighting has spread beyond Tigray and, in at least one other state, “hate speech attacking and dehumanizing ethnic groups, a key indicator of future atrocity crimes, shows no sign of abating.”

Although the government, together with its allies from neighboring country Eritrea, has Tigray surrounded with an estimated half a million troops, the threat of a prolonged conflict to both national and regional stability, together with growing public protest, may be tilting the balance toward dialogue.

“This is the moment we have to look into our pasts to reconcile, to forgive each other,” Mohammed Dirir, a member of the National Dialogue Commission, told NPR last week. “There is no other choice.” That recognition may mark a hard-won turning point for Ethiopia after two years of war.