With war looming in the north of the country, Ethiopia threatens to make headlines again, as it has in recent years due to the wars, insurgencies and intercommunal violence that have raged across its highland core - in the regions of Tigray, Oromia and Amhara. Amid such large-scale violence, conflicts affecting minority groups in peripheral regions are likely to go unnoticed, even more so than is usually the case. Yet they tell a story that speaks to the state of the country as a whole.
"Why is it always raining when there is war? Look, last time it was raining, and now again .... It is God crying over the people who were killed."
The two Me'en men conversed inside a small hut, among dozens of other huts nested together in a camp that was set up only a few weeks before, with a double fence of thorny bush, and semi-circles of stones on each side of the gate to protect the men from grazing bullets when lying on the watch. The next day, the sky was still cloudy when we reached the place where one of the last victims of the war had been shot and his body hastily buried under a thin layer of soil. Near the grave of Baradhi, an influential orator and ritual expert, son of the rain-maker, we found the empty cartridges of the Mun raiders, the plastic bag that had contained their ammunition, and their gourd exploded in the exchange of fire that followed Baradhi's killing. The party of Me'en men who had accompanied him in his tracking of the Mun roaming near his home fought back until the middle of the night to prevent their enemies from grabbing their friend's ornaments and clothes. The Mun raiders, who had lain in ambush in a warthog's hole, had eventually fled, unscathed.
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The September 2025 violence between Me'en and Mun - known to outsiders as Bodi and Mursi - is the latest episode of a war that started in 2023. Me'en and Mun are agro-pastoralists inhabiting the lower Omo Valley in southern Ethiopia, numbering around 15,000 people each, who speak different but related languages and maintain friendly relations in times of peace. In this part of the valley, where the lowlands meet the highlands, the most recurring type of conflict is between the mobile agro-pastoralists and sedentary farmers. In recent years, countless episodes of violence between lowlanders and highlanders have occurred. In a country historically shaped by the political dominance of the highlands, the "pastoralists" - whose shifting cultivation is casually dismissed or simply ignored - are inevitably cast as troublemakers by an administration with an agrarian bias. Their basic needs are ignored. The Me'en-Mun war was not anticipated by the local authorities, who failed to respond to its premises. Me'en and Mun fight with striking regularity: since the mid-20th century, there has been a war about every 20 years. Their recent war should not be reduced to the somewhat anachronistic practice of two peoples who, despite the reality of state encroachment, persist in considering themselves as autonomous political entities, who would independently make use of violence against their neighbours if sufficiently provoked. State encroachment in this Ethiopian periphery has taken a particular turn over the past decade. State presence is more likely to be embodied by a contingent of the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) than by a team of development agents, the once zealous arms of the EPRDF-ruled government at the local level. Patterns of violence, here as elsewhere, have evolved under political and economic shifts at the national level. Markedly more deadly than previous wars, the recent Me'en-Mun war, in its build-up and developments, reflects the impacts of a recent state-run development project and of the militarised governance it has ushered in, in an era when the state's use of brute force has become the norm.
The Me'en-Mun war of the early 1970s (documented and analysed by the late anthropologist David Turton) occurred at a time when state presence in the valley was extremely weak, and the war followed certain conventions, such as avoiding killing women and children, who could remain safe in the cultivation areas while men were attacking the cattle camps. During the war of the late 1990s, men did not engage in large and coordinated attacks like those of the 1970s, but only in small, spontaneous raids and counter-raids. This restraint was ostensibly due to state presence - a police post established in 1974 in Hana, in Me'en territory, had developed into a small town and administrative centre. While the number of fatalities during previous wars is not remembered, people agree that the war of the 2020s led to comparatively more victims (17 Me'en and 15 Mun according to the police report), including women, children and the elderly. This break of conventions has fuelled the retaliation cycle. When six Me'en women and girls were shot by Mun on their way to collect water in February 2025, their male relatives went into Mun to avenge their deaths with an acute sense of outrage.
When I visited the Me'en in 2017, relations between the two groups were already tense. A Me'en woman, on a visit to her Mun friend, was killed by another Mun. Me'en neighbours of the aggrieved husband predicted that war was then imminent and dubbed it "the Women's War", for other Me'en women had been killed by Mun before. While killings between Me'en and Mun during peace time are customarily settled by payment of compensation in cattle to prevent escalation, in these instances, the Mun did not disclose the identity of the killer, and no compensation was paid. Eventually, war did not break out in 2017. But when in October 2023, a Me'en couple was killed by Mun on the road to Jinka, this, for the Me'en, was two deaths too many: a party of Me'en men set out to kill eight Mun at once (including women and children), plunging the two groups in a state of war that would last two years, in the course of which scores of people would be killed on either side.
I have carried out ethnographic research among the Me'en over the past two decades and have come to understand the events mostly through their eyes. Going into Mun territory to access Mun perspectives was unthinkable in October 2025 due to the insecurity, but in Hana town, I could discuss the possible causes of the war with Mun government workers. They expressed discontent at their ritual leaders. In their dealing with the state, Me'en and Mun consider their respective ritual leaders to have the moral authority to hand over the killers or the thieves among them to state authorities. Me'en had killed Mun too in the years before the war started, but overall, they were more prompt to denounce the killers, probably due to them being more easily reached by the local administration, with its headquarters in Me'en land, than their southern neighbours, the Mun. However, their relative isolation had not prevented the Mun from settling the killings of Me'en with compensation in earlier times, without pressure from state officials. What had refrained the Mun ritual leaders from disclosing the identity of the killers, and thus preventing war?
Denouncing people from one's own group to the authorities is tantamount to a break of the group's solidarity - hence the deferment of this unpopular task to ritual leaders. But current conditions may have made this duty even more difficult for them to accomplish. Prosecution followed by imprisonment is not only a deprivation of freedom for Me'en and Mun convicts: it is costly. In jail, food is insufficient, and inmates' families regularly travel to provide them with cash obtained from cattle sales. New regulations for the prosecution of thefts and killings, set out in the "Modality agreement" by the South Omo zone security administration in 2013, combine legal prosecution and customary compensation in fixed terms: a person who stole one cow must return four, including the stolen one, and a killer must pay 20 head of cattle. If anything, as a preventive measure, it may have only succeeded in discouraging people from denouncing killers and thieves. The convict's family may harass the denouncer into repaying the cost - as a "blood price", since imprisonment is a form of temporary social death.
These recent regulations, imposing heavy compensation on convicted people, are being implemented in a context of rapid impoverishment of the agro-pastoralists of the Lower Omo Valley. The first blow came in 2011, when the government launched the development of the Kuraz sugar estates on both sides of the Omo river, a mega-project first planned to cover 175,000 hectares, that was part of the government's strategy of state-led development meant to propel Ethiopia into becoming a middle-income country. First the Me'en, then the Mun lost land to sugarcane plantations; but the most critical loss came in 2015, when the Gibe III hydropower dam was completed and the Omo river's flow was regulated: gone was the annual flood that used to fertilise the banks and allow bumper harvests at the peak of the dry season. The remaining livelihood strategies have been livestock husbandry and rain-fed cultivation. To make up for the missing dry season harvest, agro-pastoralists sell cattle to buy maize. The drought of 2022 put increasing pressure on households, who had to rely solely on cattle sales. The food situation worsened to the point that in late 2022, scores of Mun were dying of leishmaniasis, a malnutrition-related disease. Measles, chicken pox and cholera are also reported. Cattle do not fare better: with their movements restrained by the state-run plantations, they are regularly affected by epizooties. Just as the local administration has paused vaccination campaigns for Me'en and Mun, its veterinary service has also stopped providing treatment for cattle for at least six years, citing security concern for its workers and an insufficient budget; meanwhile, bush encroachment has led to a rise in the tsetse fly population, increasing the number of bovine trypanosomiasis cases. Consequently, Me'en and Mun have to dedicate a significant part of their cattle sales to buying cattle medicine from private merchants. Due to all these causes, their herds have thus steadily decreased over recent years.
Since the start of the Kuraz sugar development, violence has been on the rise. Me'en and Mun have responded to the killing of their people by vehicles rushing onto the new asphalt roads with revenge killings of vehicle users, to which the government retaliated with military operations. Military presence has been a constant - units of the ENDF, stationed in different parts of the district, are obviously there to protect the state-run plantations. The "Modality agreement" of 2013 was meant to secure development in the district, with new regulations for prosecution and arms controls. In 2019, a military operation went further, with forced disarmament. The killing of about 40 Me'en villagers (including women, children and the elderly) during the operation compelled the Me'en to hand over more than 500 guns. The Mun were also disarmed, but only their northern section - the south being unreachable by vehicle. Being the only group in the region to have been totally disarmed, the Me'en gradually rearmed themselves, again with the sale of cattle. Reports of unprecedented cattle theft within Me'en are indicative of a desperate situation for many.
Mun government workers, like Mun speakers in public meetings, stressed the ceaseless cattle theft they have endured from Me'en - and the killings of Me'en that went uncompensated could just as well have been the continuation of relations already strained by theft. A few weeks before Baradhi's killing in September 2025, a Mun went to Me'en territory to look for his stolen cattle and was killed by Me'en as he returned empty-handed - a prelude to yet more tit-for-tat killings. It was not the first time that cattle theft had reignited the war since 2023. Earlier, it had taken a more complex turn, involving a third group: in late 2022, Suri raiders from western Omo had looted cattle from Mun, but were intercepted by Me'en when they passed in their territory. When Mun finally retrieved their cattle, which had been dispatched to different Me'en households to facilitate their husbandry, they noticed that some were missing, and accused Me'en of theft.
In this as in other instances, the Me'en and the Mun handle their affairs without the assistance of a local administration that has little incentive to intervene among a population whose political weight is virtually nil. After war between the Me'en and Mun broke out in 2023 and Mun had retaliated to the first Me'en attack, the administration ushered in a peace-making ceremony, in which the Mun participated half-heartedly, as they felt that the count of fatalities was then to their disadvantage. During the public debate that concluded the ceremony, and as the government officials watched, Baradhi aired a shared grievance among the agro-pastoralists, that of the government's double standards:
"When one of our women was killed [by a Mun], we did not want war and we appealed to the government. It did nothing! Recently another young woman was killed. We went and we appealed to the government; it did nothing! When a Highlander is killed today, it mobilises today. And we [Me'en] act quickly. When a Mun kills a Highlander today, the government gathers fast and goes to Mun. When we [Me'en and Mun] fought yesterday, the government waited for ever! If it had helped earlier, would there be dead people today? Many people were killed. We appealed to the government. If those killings had been resolved, would the land not be peaceful? Government, you have responsibility for this war."
In conflicts that pit pastoralists against farmers, Me'en and Mun have observed the prompt reaction of the government, and its systematically taking sides with farmers, accusing agro-pastoralists of being the sole instigators of violence. When Me'en and Mun are in conflict with each other however, the government does not intervene to diffuse the violence early on. "To them, it is like baboons fighting each other," Me'en would explain, knowing full well the contempt - if not outward racism - officials have for them. Me'en and Mun share their district (the Sala-Mago woreda) with sedentary farmers: the Dime in the eastern highlands, and Konso settlers brought from their food-insecure homeland as part of a governmental scheme in the early 2000s to settle in Me'en dry-season grazing land. The Mun are also neighbours of the Aari, a large group of highland cultivators. Despite the Me'en and Mun being more numerous than the Dime, the absence of a school system adapted to pastoralist lives means that they do not yet have a large educated elite. The local administration is dominated by workers from agrarian communities or from northern descent, which serves the interests of the farmers better than those of the agro-pastoralists. Nothing is done to resolve killings between Me'en and Mun before the violence flares up. Meanwhile, local officials are lured by the sirens of the "corridor development", an urban development project first launched in late 2022 by the federal government in the capital city. At the top of the Sala-Mago woreda head administration's agenda is the construction of streetlights along the road that cuts through the bush from Hana town to the bridge over the Omo. Following in the footsteps of many Ethiopian cities that have undertaken costly urban renovations, this seemingly remote part of the country is a striking echo of the attitude at the centre, where Addis Ababa gets a facelift while conflicts rage across vast regions of Ethiopia.
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Just as central government has repeatedly made use of brute force to quash rebel groups, local government, when cycles of retaliation between Me'en and Mun go on, resorts to what has become its default mode of intervention: sending in the ENDF. "Now the government, for its 'operation', it just shoots people without any consideration", a former government worker said. In November 2025, as the Me'en-Mun war was still unresolved, the military set Mun houses on fire, burning elderly residents alive, and shot four people; four Me'en were also shot by the ENDF in December. Torture methods were applied during the 2019 operation, typically forcing people to stand in the sun all day; but reports of even more gruesome methods have surfaced regarding the recent ENDF campaign, such as forcing people to drink boiling water until they vomit blood. In charge of the executive in the district, the military's latest directive is to force Me'en and Mun to settle in large villages. This way, the rationale goes, the thief would be easily known when one cow is reported missing.
Villagisation had already been forced on the Me'en and Mun, whose agro-pastoral livelihood relies on scattered settlements and seasonal movements. In 2011, the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation had designed three villages next to the sugar estate, where Me'en were allocated irrigated plots for maize cultivation, along with infrastructures such as water pumps, mill houses and a school. The water pump broke, the teachers did not show up, the plots were too small, the grazing pastures were too far away, and eventually a few years later, everyone had returned to their former homes. The plans, which bypassed consultation with the concerned population, were far removed from the reality on the ground. The military is now attempting forced villagisation without supporting infrastructure, at the peak of the dry season when cattle grazing is most extensive. This objective signals a deepening plunge into security delirium.
Before the events took this even uglier turn, back in the small hut of the fortified camp, rain was falling softly on people's grief. As though thinking aloud, one of the men echoed the speech Baradhi had delivered at the peace-making ceremony - that, in retrospect, seemed eerily prescient of his own death:
"When people fight, if only the government workers would come early.... But they wait for a long time, and when they finally come, many people have died. They say the land belongs to the government, so it should step in. Where is it?"
Indeed, while the local government's response to killings between Me'en and Mun has always been slow, state services, such as veterinary support, are now absent from Me'en and Mun land, partly due to security concerns over ongoing conflicts that are themselves fuelled by the disintegration of livelihoods due to large-scale development projects and local government withdrawal. This vicious circle is doomed to spiral further if nothing is done to break it. But with the state's response relying so heavily on military might and ignoring people's most pressing needs, change seems unlikely.
Lucie Buffavand is a social anthropologist currently affiliated with the Institut des Mondes Africains in France. She has conducted most of her field research among the Me'en, an agro-pastoral people of the Lower Omo Valley in Ethiopia. Her work has focused on identity formation, place-making practices, villagisation, state-building, religious representations and material culture.
