Young people in Ethiopia have been central to political protest and mobilisa tion for change, in the past and more recently. The election of a reformist Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, in 2018 is broadly recognised as connected to widespread anti-regime protests by the Oromo youth movement popu larly known as Qeerroo, which used social media to mobilise support and advocate for political and economic reform (Abebe, 2022; Dias and Yetena, 2022). However, although those protests involved both peaceful and vio lent methods, the years since Abiy’s coming to power have seen a period of escalating ethnic violence in diferent parts of the country. Clashes over con tested land and resources at the borders between Somali and Oromo regions have resulted in mass displacement, and, after years of hostilities, 2020 saw the start of two years of intense armed confict between the Ethiopian gov ernment and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), with widespread involvement of young people in regional and federal forces as well as milita rised groups of youth.
The role of the Qeerroo movement in Ethiopia’s recent political trans formation has been equated with the youth protests against unemployment and government corruption that heralded the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, with analysts emphasising the connections between youth marginalisation and precarity and their political mobilisation (LeFort, 2016; Abebe, 2020). However, this framing risks obscuring the unevenness and diversity of par ticipation opportunities over time, and how these opportunities are linked to the specifcities of politics in Ethiopia. As in most studies of youth protest, there has been little attention to how experiences of participation are medi ated by gender as well as ethnicity and education. Under Abiy’s premiership, Ethiopia has also moved from a period of upheaval and security concerns towards a peace process, which has implications for how youth movements interact with institutional politics and what spaces exist for young people to exercise voice and agency. To present a nuanced view of the role of youth movements, this case study draws on interviews and participatory research at multiple points in time with adolescents and young people from Oromo region, to exploring their voice, agency and political participation between 2018 and 2022.