Ethiopian Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed received the 100th Noble Peace Price for his efforts to achieve peace with Eritrea. Indeed, he should be recognized for this achievement. This peace deal opens doors to sustain peace in a region which is pinpointed as one of the most conflict-prone regions of the world. He stepped into re-building strained relationships between Eritrea and Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia, as well as Eritrea and Sudan. Without diminishing these regional achievements, this post aims to highlight his work towards establishing peace in Ethiopia by introducing the “Medemer” concept – at a time when Ethiopia was on the verge of a civil war.

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This EDP Wire contribution summarizes the V-Dem Working Paper “Regime Legitimation Strategies (RLS), 1900 to 2018” that introduces new expert-coded measures of regime legitimation strategies for 179 countries in the world from 1900 up until 2018. The authors of the paper are EDP network member Johannes Gerschewski and his colleagues Marcus Tannenberg (University of Gothenburg), Michael Bernhard (University of Florida), Anna Lührmann (University of Gothenburg), and Christian von Soest (GIGA Institute). The paper is available as open access. The summary was prepared and edited by Nora Berger-Kern.

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This post details the major changes of the 2019 Organizations of Civil Society Proclamation No. 1113/2019 proclamation which aims to open space for CSOs to contribute to the country’s democracy and human right promotion. While the analysis ”Negotiating international civil society support: the case of Ethiopia’s 2009 Charities and Societies Proclamation” sheds light on the process of international negotiations of the old proclamation and outlines the consequences of the proclamation for international civil society support in Ethiopia, the current post presents the differences of the two laws. It concludes by looking forward to the upcoming 2020 general election of Ethiopia.

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This EDP Wire was developed as a contribution to the EDP co-sponsored event on “Concepts of Peace and Peacebuilding: Europe and Beyond” on March 7 in Erfurt in lieu of a presentation by Tobias Heider, Advisor on Security and Defence for The Greens in the European Parliament. Heider, who is working on the practical dimension of EU policies since 2004, argues that on the operational level, the EU has not yet fully developed a peace or peacebuilding policy. Nora Berger-Kern, web editor for the EDP network at PRIF, helped with the further development and writing of this contribution.

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This EDP Wire contribution briefly summarizes the PRIF Report “Preventing Civic Space Restrictions. An Exploratory Study of Successful Resistance Against NGO Laws” by Jana Baldus, Nora Berger-Kern, Fabian Hetz, Annika Elena Poppe, and Jonas Wolff. The report analyzes four cases (Azerbaijan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan and Zambia) in which governmental attempts to adopt restrictive NGO laws have been frustrated, aborted or, at least, significantly mitigated as a consequence of domestic and/or international resistance. It then identifies conditions and dynamics that help understand successful resistance against legal civic space restrictions.

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