You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to Tom

Stevenson, a contributing editor at the

LRB. His book, Someone Else's Empire, British Illusions and American Hagemonie, was published last November.

He has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on the war in Ethiopia's Tigray region. It's a review of

understanding Ethiopia's Tigray War by Martin Plort and Sarah Vaughn.

Hello, Tom, and thank you very much for joining me today.

My pleasure.

Between November 2020 and October 2020, as you write in the piece,

hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in a civil war that drew very little

attention internationally.

We'll come to some of the possible reasons for that neglect a bit later.

But first, Tom, perhaps you could talk us through the question of how and why the war broke out,

which, as you say, goes far beyond the events of a few days in early November 2020.

Yes, I mean, it's an enormously contentious question, actually. I mean, the war itself,

as little known as it is, was also subject to a major debate over exactly how it started, one which is not, it must be said, entirely resolved in every detail.

The story according to the Ethiopian government, Abiyahmits government, was that the Tigray region, and so we're right in the

north of Ethiopia along the border with Eritrea, started to try and break out of government

control by declaring its own regional elections, and then subsequently by staging attacks

on army outposts, on federal forces outposts, within the Tigray region itself, and thus

initiated a kind of an insurgency of its own. And therefore, from the government of Ethiopia's

perspective, the war was simply a kind of a police operation, a limited sort of special military

operation, let's say, to try and repress a domestic insurgency. However, I think

...