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The overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 left Ethiopia with a power vacuum to be filled and a revolution to be defined. When a council of low-ranking military officers, known as the Derg, took charge of the revolutionary process, its legitimacy was vehemently disputed by leftist civilian organizations, which drew their strength and political perspectives from the formidable Ethiopian student movement. By late 1976, a double helix of conflicts was rapidly engulfing urban Ethiopia-one strand was the confrontation between the military regime and its civilian opponents, the other the contest among the civilian left itself. In the following two years, thousands of Ethiopians, most of them young and many of them educated, lost their lives to competing campaigns of revolutionary terror. This violence was carried out in the name of the opposition Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), or more commonly, of the military regime and those political organizations, led by the All Ethiopia Socialist Movement (Meison), that had allied themselves with the government. The Terror transformed not only the political but also the social and cultural landscapes of Ethiopia. No realm of urban life remained untouched by the period's violence.
The Ethiopian Terror years have been written about and memorialized as a period of sustained state terror.1 The EPRDF's "Red Terror trials," which ran for the better part of two decades following the overthrow of the Derg 2 limited themselves to the prosecution of violence carried out in the name of the state and assumed considerable centralized control in their verdicts on senior government figures.3 Similarly, the "Ethiopian Red Terror Martyrs' Memorial Museum," which opened in Addis Ababa's Meskel Square in 2010, conveys a simple narrative of state perpetrators and civilian victims, with no regard to shifts in agency and mode of violence. Such conceptualizations are problematic, obscuring as much as they reveal. For not only do they marginalize or disregard the competing campaigns of revolutionary violence that defined the Terror, most notably the EPRP's sustained assassination campaign4; they also ignore the complex nature of the state's own violence, which underwent consequential changes as the agency of local actors and the control of the military regime shifted over time. State terror in revolutionary Ethiopia was the outcome of...