THE RAPPROCHEMENT OF ETHIO-ERITREAN DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS

After Eritrea became officially independent from Ethiopia on 24 May 1993, the relationship between Ethiopia and Eritrea was mainly a friendly and cordial one. Nevertheless, such harmonized honey moon relation was hampered by the 1998-2000 war and followed by ‘no peace no war scenario’ until 2018 rapprochement. Despite, to cover this study the researcher employed qualitative methodology. In so doing, purposive and snow ball sampling method was employed with exploratory design to collect the data. Hence, data collected both from primary sources through in-depth interviews with key informants and secondary source data was collected from publications, news release and online websites to literature review, discussion and analysis was based on the triangulation with the primary data in order to make a sound conclusion. However, the coming to power of Ethiopian Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed to political position heralded the new hope of peace and restoration of diplomatic relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea by his novel foreign policy calculation and political philosophy of ‘medemer’_ (“synergy”) triggered a rapprochement which blank out the countries relationship for the last twenty.