Ethiopia’s recent experiment with a developmental state model delivered double-digit economic growth and significant expansion of public services for nearly two decades. However, a wave of violent protests that began in 2014 culminated in a leadership change and the termination of the developmental experiment in 2018 as well as a regionalised civil war in 2020. In this working paper, we explore why Ethiopia yet again succumbed to political violence and instability by investigating the relationships between ethnic behaviour, economic development and political violence in the period 1997–2020. First, we explore trends in economic growth, horizontal and vertical economic inequality, as well as social mobility under Ethiopia's developmental state. Secondly, we account for temporal and geographic patterns and correlates of political violence in 1997–2019 by using ACLED data. Finally, we account for the microfoundations of political discontent using survey data on political preferences from 2020. Our survey data explores perceptions of individual and group-level relative deprivation, aspiration gaps, future expectations and social mobility.