The Rift Valley Institute and Peace Research Facility published in 2023 a study titled "Squeezing the Ogaden Basin: Power and Protracted Oil and Gas Exploration in the Somali Region" by Juweria Ali, University of Westminster.
Ethiopia's Somali Region is rich in oil and gas reserves in the Ogaden Basin. Attempts by the federal government in Addis Ababa to access these resources are bound up in long histories of violence and dispossession. There is no federal government road map to resume oil and gas exploration and future extraction in the Ogaden Basin following the 2022 expulsion of China's Poly-GCL company.
There is evidence that the federal government is pursuing a policy of co-opting community figures in order to gain greater legitimacy for its top-down decision-making on oil and gas management, at the expense of public participation.
