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Join us for this discussion about how to make sense of the current crisis in Ethiopia.\n\nHow should progressives make sense of the government of Ethiopia, alongside the Amhara regional militia, launching a genocidal attack on the country\u2019s northern Tigray region \u2014 even going as far as inviting neighboring Eritrea to join in on the atrocities? NGOs have documented some of the torture, sexual assault, starvation and state violence uniquely directed at Tigray \u2014 including Eritrean refugees who lived there prior to the war \u2014 but without providing broader analysis of the historical and contemporary political forces driving the conflict. The panelists in this forum will juxtapose the Tigray genocide with the #OromoProtests movement \u2014 which ousted the previous regime \u2014 seeking to rectify legacies of conquest and enslavement in an Ethiopian empire best described as a \u201cprison house of nations\u201d.\n\nThe mainstream media and humanitarian organizations count casualties from the standpoint of nowhere, and some claiming to represent the international left, like the ANSWER Coalition and the Black Alliance for Peace, which co-organized the November 21 coordinated rallies, approach the war through a US-centric prism and defend the Abiy government. In contrast, a grounded political analysis that rejects US imperialism and genocide is possible if we ask a different set of questions. How should we understand the #TigrayGenocide in relation to conscription in Oromia by the federal government and reports of the Tigrayan Defense Force committing atrocities in Amhara, Afar and against Eritrean refugees? What do the Qimant, Somali or those of the 83+ nationalities forcibly incorporated into Ethiopia tell us about how state formation got us here and what\u2019s politically possible to get us out?\n\nSpeakers:\n\nJ. Khadijah Abdurahman is founder and Director of We Be Imagining at Columbia University\u2019s INCITE Center and the American Assembly\u2019s Democracy and Trust Program. They are also a Tech Impact Network Research Fellow at NYU\u2019s AI Now Institute in partnership with UCLA\u2019s C2I2 and UWA Law School. Their research focus is on predictive analytics in the New York City child welfare system and the role of tech in mass atrocities in the Horn of Africa.\n\nMaebel Gebremedhin is the founder and president of Tigray Action Committee, a nonprofit committed to helping end the suffering of millions of Tigrayans due to the #TigrayGenocide.\n\nAyantu Tibeso is a scholar focusing on transnational Indigenous Oromo knowledge production and archival erasure in the construction of Ethiopian national narratives. She is a Cota-Robles Fellow and doctoral student in Information Studies at UCLA.\n\nRecent article by Ayantu Tibeso & J. Khadijah Abdurahman: \u201cTigray, Oromia, and The Ethiopian Empire\u201d: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/against-genocide/tigray-oromia-and-the-ethiopian-empire \n\nRecent from Maebel Gebremedhin: "Will My Tigrayan Family Ever Really Be Free?": https://www.thecut.com/2021/10/my-tigrayan-family.html\n\nModerator:\n\nPromise Li is an activist and writer from Hong Kong and Los Angeles. He organizes international solidarity work with Internationalism from Below and Lausan Collective.\n\nThis event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Internationalism From Below, Africa Is A Country, and Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE).\n\nWatch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/sMTdgtzoiro\n\nBuy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org\n\nFollow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks