ABSTRACT
The inclusion of Ethiopia in any comparative study of sub-Saharan Africa invariably raises issues that derive from the country’s peculiar historical record. Ethiopia’s transition to democracy, in so far as there can be said to have been one, is no different. Even though an ostensible process of democratisation has been under way since the overthrow of the MarxistLeninist regime of Mengistu Haile-Mariam in May 1991, both the route which Ethiopia followed up to that point and the discernible outcomes in what are now the two separate states of Ethiopia and Eritrea, are appreciably different from much of the rest of Africa.
