Kibret grew interested in politics from a young age due to the Soviet-era literature in his childhood home, and from hearing of the violence following the contested 2005 Ethiopian general election, the first in which he could vote.
[2] In 2011, Kibret turned to blogging as a medium for discussing Ethiopian human rights, after the newspaper Addis Neger was shut down by the government.
[1] After being released after just over a year behind bars, Kibret continued to be harassed by government officials including confiscating his passport so that he could not accept an award for the Zone 9 Bloggers in Paris from Reporters Without Borders.
In 2016 he emigrated to the US and took on an African Leadership Initiative fellowship during the presidency of Barack Obama at the University of Virginia and the College of William & Mary.
a visiting scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law.