Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Civil war resurges in Ethiopia’s Tigray region after four years, African countries seek greater sovereignty and representation at the United Nations, and Chad accepts a surge of Sudanese refugees fleeing war.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Civil war resurges in Ethiopia’s Tigray region after four years, African countries seek greater sovereignty and representation at the United Nations, and Chad accepts a surge of Sudanese refugees fleeing war.

A long-predicted resurgence of Ethiopia’s civil war began last week when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) seized three airports in the country’s northern Tigray region. The rebels also launched attacks in the neighboring Afar and Amhara regions days after forming an alliance with six other armed groups to oust Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal government.

“We are in the situation of full-blown war now,” TPLF Vice President Amanuel Assefa said shortly after fighting broke out.

On Monday, pro-government forces claimed to have captured Alamata, a strategic town about 75 miles south of Tigray’s capital of Mekelle. The conflict has escalated just as a powerful El Niño threatens crop production in Ethiopia, risking a broader humanitarian crisis.

There has been rising friction between the TPLF and the federal government since the end of the two-year Tigray war in 2022. That conflict, which killed an estimated 600,000 people, concluded with the Pretoria Agreement, whereby the TPLF agreed to disarmament and reintegration into Ethiopia’s political system.

Grievances over the treaty’s terms have since culminated in the collapse of the deal. Hard-line TPLF factions believed that it sidelined them, while TPLF officials who negotiated the deal secured roles in Tigray’s interim ruling administration appointed by Abiy. Tensions rose in May 2025, when Ethiopia’s electoral board banned the TPLF from the June 2026 national elections. This led the TPLF to reestablish its prewar legislative council this May, effectively ousting the interim government.

The latest wave of fighting initially began on Aug. 1, according to data from ACLED, when the two sides clashed in Shererina near Ethiopia’s border with Sudan following months of troop buildup. But it was not until last week that this turned into all-out warfare.

Security observers worry that the conflict could eventually draw in other actors in the Horn of Africa, especially Eritrea.

The TPLF and Isaias Afwerki, who has been Eritrea’s president since its independence from Ethiopia in 1993, were once allies while fighting against Ethiopia’s communist Derg government. But after Eritrea became independent and a TPLF-led government came to power in Ethiopia, the two countries fought a brutal border war followed........

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