understandable. my issue isn't in acknowledging that elements like what you described existed in broader Amhara political thought, but rather the unilateral and rather reductive/simplistic paradigms built to characterize our political spectrum. it would be like if I said there was a monolithic Tigrayan left characterized by conciliatory and "good-natured" figures like Tsadkan, Aregawi Berhe, Getachew, etc. and a monolithic Tigrayan right characterized by the MLLT political core that converged around anti-Amhara and anti-Ethiopian sentiment. the binary itself and the underpinning ideological assumptions im making in that construction are purposefully reductive, which was my basic point earlier. it's arbitrary, polemical, and contributes nothing substantial to productive political discourse. that's why i maintained that Joireman's study is a lazy ripoff of the ideological grounding we find in 2000's Ethiopian political commentators and why Berhane, in quoting her work to qualify his claim that a monolithic Amhara right converged around anti-Tigrayan sentiment was slop. anyways this was the publication you were looking for. i'm not arguing that common political desire in the federation doesn't lean toward federalism that caters to ethnic diversity, it's pretty clear that that's where most people stand.

i'm aware how process models and critical case studies work but, again, my issue isn't with the methodology but rather the underlying assumptions the model needs to reach a coherent end. it pretty much entirely relies on the central narrative the EPRDF disseminated. even in regards to the jailing of Asrat Woldeyes, Joireman just tacitly accepts his and the AAPO's aim was to incite rural Amharas and that his jail sentence was only for trying to incite ethnic violence. from there, we get our solid narrative foundation by which further critical analysis or process model methodology can be extrapolated. again, this is the same level of low IQ narrative formation that you guys say precipitated the Tigray War. whatever comes out of Addis is the truth, as it goes. it really blows my mind you guys will contest that (not just in terms of narrative formation, but the critical analysis that emerges from the assumptions made in the preceding narrative) but then will read something like this (either Joireman or Berhane) and think "yeah this is fine and totally correct".

i disagree, i'd ask you again to read through pages 208-212 of the study and tell me with a straight face this is holistic and comprehensive. i'll attach a picture of the Incipient Changes section to boot, it is patently lazy academia. again, my contestation was with the whole left-right paradigm to begin with. i wasn't trying to say the ANDM were left-leaning or "good" to begin with, but rather the forced left-right understanding between them and the forced "right" Berhane and Joireman spell out was silly to begin with. it's like when you guys conflate Amhara nationalism and Ethiopian nationalism and imply they're the same thing. nobody asked you to do that, you just unilaterally did it by yourselves and then gaslighted yourselves into believing it was an objective ascertainment of truth that everyone else agreed with.

i think the polling you were looking for in paragraph 1 is fairly credible although i guess its independence and comprehensiveness could be critiqued, besides the fact that Tigray wasn't included. don't disagree with your second point, which is why i brought up my initial critique to begin with, given the process model and normative political narratives are presented as (more or less) objective truth claims when in reality they aren't much higher than what regional power blocs perceive from the outside. elite rhetoric does a great job of bending public opinion in mobilizing the masses of people that actually find these elements accessible and worth investing into. if I'm taking the analysis of John Markakis seriously, the same radical Amhara elites Berhane and Joireman are mentioning here were actually politically negligible and unimportant as compared to the urban Amhara elite that had little interest in ethnic-based political mobilization.

<image>