The Abiy Project
The Abiy Project by Tom Gardner is one of 2026's most credible books, appearing on 1 of the year's most respected lists, including The Economist, for a Consensus Score of 15 out of 100.
Appears on these lists
Our take
AI-draftedGardner covered Ethiopia through the Tigray war for The Economist until the government expelled him, and that ground-level reporting is what separates this from a conventional political biography of a Nobel laureate turned wartime prime minister. He takes Abiy Ahmed's syncretic Pentecostal faith seriously as a driver of policy rather than a footnote, tracing how prosperity-gospel thinking and self-reinvention narratives shaped decisions that ultimately produced mass violence in Tigray.
In the press
“The tale Gardner tells is a tragedy of how magical thinking led to extraordinary brutality and mass starvation.”
Literary Review“A nuanced, unsparing examination of a leader trying to hold together a republic being undone by its imperial legacy.”
African Arguments
How the Consensus Score is calculated
Our Consensus Score is our own transparent editorial metric — not a user rating. It weighs each list by the credibility of its source, how recent the listing is, and any award status. Here is the full breakdown.
| Source | Authority | Recency | Award | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Economist | 0.95 | 0.70 | 1.00× | 0.67 |
| Weighted sum → Score | 0.67 → 15 | |||
Similar consensus books
Because they appear on some of the same lists.
Frequently asked
What lists is The Abiy Project on?
The Abiy Project appears on 1 list in our 2026 corpus, including The Economist.
What is its Consensus Score?
The Abiy Project has a Consensus Score of 15 out of 100, our transparent editorial measure of how many credible lists agree on it.