Orthodox Christian Churches and War Politics in Ethiopia and Ukraine

Guest editors: Romina Istratii and Lars Laamann

In November 2020 a conflict erupted in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Religious discourse was used to propagate ideas favourable to war by both members of the public and church-affiliated individuals, including close advisors to the Prime Minister. Soon ethnicity became a clear dividing factor in Ethiopian society and the Church, resulting also in the declared separation of the Tigray Diocese from the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (EOTC). A convergence of faith and politics was also seen in the crisis that erupted in Ukraine in February 2022. Not only was there a strong identification of political and Church leadership in Russia from the beginning that favoured the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, but religious identity was invoked as a distinctive characteristic of an ‘Eastern’ identity in need of protection from encroaching Western expressions of secular modernity. In this case too, the political events resulted in rifts and divisions between Orthodox Churches in Russia and Ukraine, endangering unity in the broader Eastern Orthodox world.

From the outset of the war in Ukraine, the media conveyed the impression that the Moscow Patriarchate or, more specifically, Patriarch Kirill, either held substantive power over political decisions or was entirely enslaved to political leadership. Conversely, in representations of the Ethiopian conflict the EOTC has often been identified with either the Patriarch’s isolated condemnation of violence against Tigrayans or the inflammatory pro-war narratives of visible Church representatives. In relation to both conflicts, we saw tendencies among observers to reduce complex relations and narratives to homogenising pro-/anti-war lines of thinking, not recognising psycho-political experiences on the ground characterised by struggles of consciousness, self-censorship in the face of stark repercussions and the pressures of group think.