Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
Declared Oct 9 2016 amid Oromo and Amhara protests that had killed an estimated 500+ people and disrupted foreign investment sites. The six-month state of emergency restricted assembly, communication, and movement; allowed warrantless arrest; renewed for four months Mar 2017. A second SoE followed Feb 2018 immediately before Hailemariam's resignation.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.