Judd Devermont and Jon Temin
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lifted restrictions on civil society; and begun the process o privatiz-
ing the country’s telecommunications company and national airline.
Although his actions have proved wildly popular among Ethiopi-
ans, setting o a craze known as “Abiymania,” the dizzying pace o
his reforms has unsettled the political elite. Many o its members are
o the Tigrayan ethnic minority, a group from the country’s north
that has long dominated national politics and the security sector, and
they see Abiy’s reforms as coming at their expense. In October 2018,
he claimed to have stared down a coup attempt by the military. More-
over, by loosening the state’s tight grip on its population, Abiy’s re-
forms have exacerbated communal tensions that used to be contained.
Ethnic violence—often triggered by competing claims to land and
resources—has escalated under his leadership, displacing nearly three
million people inside the country’s borders. Abiy has called the vio-
lence “shameful” but has been unable to stop it. Yet he remains popu-
lar at home and abroad, and his twin goals o political pluralism and
a market-based economy are exactly what have been missing from
Ethiopia for the past two decades.
A new leader is upending Angola’s politics, too. For nearly 40
years, the country was ruled by José Eduardo dos Santos, who stole
Angola’s substantial oil revenues to enrich his family and associates.
In 2016, dos Santos, 73 years old and in poor health, announced that
he would step down, and the next year, he endorsed a successor from
the ruling party: Lourenço, a former defense minister. In oce,
Lourenço quickly deÃed expectations that he would do the bidding
o the dos Santos family, instead pursuing corruption investigations
and breaking its near monopoly on the economy and politics.
In a country ruled by a formerly Marxist political party, Lourenço
has broken with precedent by seeking warmer ties with the United
States and even with his country’s former colonizer, Portugal. He has
also broken a taboo against accepting international assistance that
comes with conditions attached by welcoming an aid package from
the International Monetary Fund. Although he has not turned away
from China, he has promised to cease providing it with oil as collat-
eral for credit lines, a practice that left Angola in considerable debt.
And whereas his predecessor rarely deployed troops to multilateral
peacekeeping missions, he has Áexed Angola’s muscle in regional cri-
ses, contributing soldiers to a South African–led peacekeeping op-
eration in Lesotho and insisting on a political transition in Congo.