Our Series on Federations takes us to Ethiopia, a country in Eastern Africa that has been independent since the nineteenth Century, except for a short period of Italian domination between 1936 and 1941.
The modern history of Ethiopia has been chaotic, with the withdrawal of the ruling Selassie dynasty in 1974, the annexation of Eritrea in 1962 followed by its secession in 1993, unrest in many regions, in particular Tigray, and overall, the difficulty of ruling an ethnically diverse and very poor nation of over 100 million (a mark reached around 2015).
The 1995 constitution of Ethiopia instituted Regions, or Regional States. It was the first attempt at creating a federation on an ethnically based level. As of 2022, there are 11 regions plus two independent cities, including the capital, Addis Ababa.
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Ethiopia in 2022
