Tigrayan youth experiences in war: Solidarity building through engagement, pedagogy and praxis

• In Event: Challenges, crisis contexts, and complexities in education

Proposal

Purpose: In November 2020, a war broke out in between the regional state of Tigray in northern Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Federal Government and its Eritrean government allies. In the 3 years since, hundreds of thousands of Tigrayan civilians have been killed (York, 2022). In November 2022, a peace agreement was signed to “silence the guns.” There has been lack of care for civilians who were harmed during the active fighting with no support for Tigray soldiers who were injured or the over 100,000 adults and children who were the victims of systemic rape enacted by the Eritrean and Ethiopian forces (Gebremichael et al., 2023). Despite the peace agreement, the ongoing siege means that limited food aid and medicine is allowed into the region, and over 1300 people have died in the last six months as a result of starvation (Wasike, 2023). Tigrayans have in the last 3 years had only each other to rely on; this has resulted in new forms of solidarity building. This paper will utilize an anticolonial perspective to explore how Tigrayans engage in and practice solidarity and the pedagogies used to build anticolonial and decolonial solidarities.

This paper, co-authored by two research field workers based in Tigray and two scholars based in North America will be a response to the following questions:
1. How has the war against Tigray engendered new forms of solidarity amongst Tigrayans?
2. How has a Tigrayan onto-epistemology influenced Tigrayan solidarity building since November 2020?

Theoretical Framework: This paper is framed around a shared Tigrayan onto-epistemology that we have theorized through the concept of “Meadi” where for the participants their systems of knowing, seeing, and being in this world, of how they respond to their experiences and lives are drawn, largely, from their understandings of kinship, love, belonging, and justice rooted Tigrayan culture, community, and traditional ways of being, knowing, and seeing. It is a shared consciousness developed from a shared historical and cultural consciousness (AUTHORS). For the research participants, this paper illustrates solidarities emerging from living through a war, a solidarity built in shared historical and cultural consciousness of being Tigrayan.

Data Sources, methods and/or techniques: Tigray is a conflict zone in which over 6 million people are affected, of which over 50% of Tigrayans are under the age of 25. Most studies from the region since November 2020 have appropriately focused on those who have been the most violently affected by the war, such as survivors of gender based violence. However, little attention has been given to the experiences of young people between the ages of 16-25, especially during the siege and blockade from June 28, 2021 and since the signing of a peace agreement in November 2022. This study will fill an important gap in understanding the experiences of the largest demographic in Tigray whilst also working to better understand the changing forms of solidarity that have developed over the last 3 years.

Data for this paper comes from semi-structured interviews with participants between the ages of 18 to 25 living in Tigray. Phase 1 interviews were conducted from September – October 2022 with 20 participants, and phase 2 follow-up interviews were conducted with 14 participants in July – September 2023. Interviews ranged from 45-60 minutes and were conducted in Tigryna (the local language); during transcription, interviews were translated into English. Data was thematically coded. Thematic analysis helped in exploring patterns in the data without having established a predetermined set of themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Creswell, 2014). We followed Creswell’s (2007, 2014) stages of thematic analysis: organizing the data, reading and re-reading the data, coding, categorizing and refining codes, and describing codes (Creswell, 2014).

Results, conclusions and/or interpretations: An analysis of the data revealed that for Tigrayans the building of solidarity is a “generative process” (Gilmore, 2008, p. 238) wherein solidarity is actively produced and shaped, wherein shared values are created and “collective work produce[s] community solidarity” (Gilmore, 2008, p. 238). Solidarity, then, is a creative process bringing together relations and trajectories and “actively generating and shaping shared values and identifications” (Featherstone, 2012, p. 29). As the research participants in this study shared, the past 3 years has meant finding a shared consciousness with those who have been the most affected, those who have been dispossessed of their lives, lands, humanity, livelihood. This has resulted in changing cultural practices as participants indicated that weddings are now more muted, taking place as small intimate gatherings as opposed to larger public celebrations. The massive loss of life with over 800,000 dead has meant that burials have taken on greater importance even when the occupying forces have tried to deny this practice; combatants have taken the time to bury their comrades despite the pressures to keep moving. Furthermore, the participants indicated ongoing resistance to the November 2022 Pretoria Peace Agreement as millions of Tigrayans remain displaced from Western and Southern Tigray which remain under the control of occupying forces and where ethnic cleansing has occurred. As long as segments of the Tigrayan population does not have access and control to their land, those in the rest of Tigray will continue to struggle with them. Furthermore, it is important to note that Tigrayans have been fundamentally transformed by the war and their sense of solidarity now overwhelming is with those who have experienced the horrors of the last three years alongside them.

Significance: This study fills an important gap in understanding the experiences of the largest demographic in Tigray – youth aged 18-25. These are young people who over the past 3 years have had their lives transformed and have had to imagine new forms of engaging in solidarity, new forms of being in community, new ways of practicing their culture and new ways of honoring the struggle and what has been lost.

Authors

• Fisseha Gebremedhin, Queens University

• Thashika Pillay, Queen's University