Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa

Jean-Nicolas Bach, Jean-Nicolas Bach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429762529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política africana

The Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary survey of contemporary research related to the Horn of Africa.

Situated at the junction of the Sahel-Saharan strip and the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa is growing in global importance due to demographic growth and the strategic importance of the Suez Canal. Divided into sections on authoritarianism and resistance, religion and politics, migration, economic integration, the military, and regimes and liberation, the contributors provide up-to-date, authoritative knowledge on the region in light of contemporary strategic concerns. The handbook investigates how political, economic, and security innovations have been implemented, sometimes with violence, by use of force or by negotiation – including 'ethnic federalism' in Ethiopia, independence in Eritrea and South Sudan, integration of the traditional authorities in the (neo)patrimonial administrations, Somalian Islamic Courts, the Sudanese Islamist regime, people's movements, multilateral operations, and the construction of an architecture for regional peace and security.

Accessibly written, this handbook is an essential read for scholars, students, and policy professionals interested in the contemporary politics in the Horn of Africa.

1 General introduction

Jean-Nicolas Bach

DOI: 10.4324/9780429426957-1

The Horn of Africa, like any other region, is a historical and political construction whose definition might differ from one author to another, from one institution to another. A newcomer interested in the region may find a rather classical and quite common distinction between the ‘little’ or ‘strict’ Horn (Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somaliland), and the ‘greater’ Horn that includes Sudan and South Sudan. One may also meet a rather conventional way to introducing the region, referring to the member states of the regional economic community, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), broadening the latter perspective to Kenya and Uganda. In this Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa, we consider the region in its broader perspective, as synonymous with the Northeast Africa region (following a suggestion by Jon Abbink), also taking into account the Arabic Peninsula, and alluding any strict definition of the region in terms of formal state borders.

The rich contributions to this Handbook not only focus on country studies (Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, South Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Somaliland) but also offer broader international and transnational perspectives in terms of conflicts, population movements, multilateralism, foreign influences, and economic dynamics – in order to facilitate the reading, we gathered the country and region maps at the end of the book, for each map is illustrative of many chapters. Our ambition is to provide the keys to understanding a region that has raised increasing interest since the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, most often for the worse: Eritrea and Ethiopia confronted in one of the few interstate wars in Africa (1998–2000), while Somalia was becoming a new front in the global war against terrorism and attacks from ‘pirates’ multiplied off the coast of Somalia. The large-scale massacres in Darfur from 2003 also brought a renewed international attention (and International Criminal Court’s) on Khartoum Islamist regime, and Southern Sudan eventually became South Sudan in 2011 – a new state after a long civil war. In the last few years only, the pacific and popular Sudanese 2018 December Revolution put an end to 30 years of the Omar al-Bashir’s regime (April 2019), starting a transition marked by real hopes and huge challenges. Ethiopia and Eritrea made a historical step for reconciliation following the arrival of Abiy Ahmed as Ethiopian prime minister in 2018. But Ethiopia has been sinking into civil war since November 2020, raising huge concern for local populations and the stability of the whole region. Conflicts and their humanitarian consequences also still sadly characterize South Sudan and Somalia until today. At the international scale, the race for the control of the ports along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean has engendered a tense competition between notably Arab Peninsula States (and among themselves), Turkey, Iran, Russia, in the Red Sea region. China opened its first military base in Djibouti, facing the US recent military base, and the French historical position in the region.¹ Turkey also chose the region to settle its most important military base in Mogadishu. As for the European Union, its strategic interest has increasingly focused on the development-migration nexus, trying to limit the so-called ‘immigration crisis’, notably through the ‘Khartoum process’. Local politics and actors may converge with foreign interests, but local politics and long-term perspective must remain the entry point for those who want to understand the complex games in the region. This Handbook seeks to offer the reader such perspective, from the local to the global scales. We hope it will allow the beginners to allude common mistakes, and specialists to deepen their knowledge.

Due to its original characteristics, some have been considering this part of the world as ‘exceptional’. One of the most brilliant scholar on the region, Christopher Clapham, recently explained the ‘peculiarity’ of what he labels ‘non-colonial Africa’ (here Ethiopia as a ‘core’, and Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia on its ‘peripheries’) for Ethiopian Empire/State formed from within, with endogenous borders.² In this Handbook, we adopt an opposite perspective and we consider the region, its states and actors, as no exception. We consider all states as endogenous, here and elsewhere, in spite of different historical trajectories. As Jan Záhořík rightly reminded, the colonial reference is not sufficient to understand the African State in general, and the Ethiopian in particular.³ The colonial question is not absent of Ethiopian politics, and has been precisely structuring contemporary politics for ‘internal colonialism’ inherited from Menelik II’s empire at the end of the 20th century has remained a significant repertory for armed and pacific opposition groups. Also, in order to avoid an Ethiopian bias, we rather try to underscore here a multiplicity of perspectives from different parts of the region. Last but not least, considering the Horn of Africa as an exceptional region would reduce it to the common idea of a ‘laboratory’. As Aleksi Ylönen reminded us during one of our workshops, this image of a ‘laboratory’ is not only irrelevant but strengthen a stereotyped vision of the region as isolated from the rest of the world, where ‘experiments’ would be conducted from external actors, and then reproduced elsewhere. Contrary to the idea of laboratory, the contributions gathered in this volume explicitly or implicitly stress how connected the region is with the rest of the world, in terms of economics, political ideologies, or migrations.

Along with the idea of exceptionalism, we put away the references to ‘state-crisis’, or ‘weak-states’ or ‘failed-states’, as we do not believe these states should follow a universal path towards a specific form of political organization. Rather, in-depth analyses on politics in the sub-region reveal innovative ways to concentrate, exercise, delegate political power, or to engage in successful political liberation and separation - ‘innovative’ shall be understood here, as underscored by Emanuele Fantini during our discussions, in a critical perspective and not de facto ‘positive’. It is of course not our intention to defend authoritarian regimes that have been in place for decades, but it is a case of taking a step back to observe, beyond the shocking, what the region can teach us about the state of the world, the complex relation between authoritarianism-democratization, the various forms of exercise of political power, coercion, forms of political violence, liberation struggles, the construction of legitimacy, and the trajectories of the elites.

The first part of the volume, coordinated with Aleksi Ylönen, is dedicated to the original trends when it comes to ‘state-building/formation’ (to remind John Lonsdale’s distinction). The concentration of so many different and original regimes in the region is, however, rather exceptional: two new states were recognized by the United Nations (Eritrea in 1993 and South Sudan in 2011), and Somaliland can be considered a ‘de facto state’. In-depth studies have been dedicated to these new states and their regimes. We offer here a discussion about the roots, the original formula and challenges of Eritrean, South Sudan and Somaliland regimes. In order to complete this perspective, we added the perspective from the remaining amputated states: how did the Sudanese and Ethiopian regimes react and (re)build their legitimacy after the separation of South Sudan and Eritrea? The reader will also find another important perspective to complete these dynamics of state formation, i.e. the failed separatist projects (here the OLF and the ONLF).

The second part, coordinated with Patrick Ferras, focuses on armed people and international dynamics. At the state level, armies and their relation (conflictual or collaborative) to militias remain one of the main challenges for the region. For instance, once in power, the Ethiopian TPLF rebels went to great efforts in the 1990s to demobilize their army.⁴ At war again since November 2020, the TPLF has become rebel again, and mushrooming militias are playing an active and destabilizing role in this new conflict. In Sudan as well, militias have been manipulated, integrated formally into the defence forces (such as the Rapid Support Forces in 2017), and have become real political actor, as Hassan Elhag Ali’s contribution discusses. Contributors also broadly discuss the war in South Sudan, from the very local level, the reform of security sector, to the regional dimensions of the long crisis. This part also highlights the failure of African Union’s efforts to build the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA). It offers an illustration of how innovative the region can be in terms of producing new international norms and how challenging it remains for countries and international organizations to implement them.

A third part, coordinated with Jon Abbink, gathers contributions revolving around political change, authoritarianism and resistances in Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Kenya, Djibouti, Somaliland, and Somalia. A significant characteristic of these regimes has been the absence of democratization since the 1990s, while in other regions the ‘third wave’ (Huntington) led to diverse trajectories and academic debates in terms of ‘transition’, ‘consolidation’, authoritarian ‘restauration’, or ‘democratic rollback’. The resilience of these authoritarian regimes has been based on many forms of innovations: administrative control and encadrement until the very local level, domestication of elections, various forms of political violence, legislative manipulations – media, elections, or ‘anti-terrorism’ laws, or repeated ‘state of emergency’. Resistances and popular mobilization have continued to oppose these regimes, often with laudable strength and courage, like in Sudan since the 2018 December Revolution and its aftermaths. This part discusses the original, though authoritarian, configurations of power in these regimes, the models local elites have initiated, imported, reproduced, and adapted in order to build their domination. This sometimes led to original definitions of citizenship (like the Ethiopian ‘Nation, Nationalities, and Peoples’), original forms of devolution (a chapter compares Kenya and Ethiopia devolution), innovation allowing authoritarian survival (in Eritrea), or original forms or representation like the hybrid political and limited multiparty system in Somaliland.

The chapters gathered in the fourth part, coordinated with Stéphane Ancel and Hassan Mwakimako, discuss the various contemporary articulations between politics and religion in the region. The in-depth contributions about the mobilizations of Muslims in Ethiopia, and political Islam in Somalia, Sudan, and Kenya, remind the complexity of this relation and the numerous formulas existing in reality beyond the notion of political Islam or ‘Islamism’. The relation between religion and politics is to be understood at transnational and very local levels, and both shall be taken into account if one wish to understand religious forms of mobilization or violence (the contributions discuss these relations on the Kenya coast, in Sudan, in Somalia, and in Ethiopia). Governmental policies are as well decisive, as discussed in Uganda, Sudan, and Ethiopia, not only for dominant religious communities and their relation with the regime, but also for Pentecost minorities (Sudan, Ethiopia).

A fifth part, coordinated with Jan Záhořík and Azza Ahmed Abdel Aziz, is dedicated to people’s movements and their recent trends: migrations, IDPs, refugees, regular transborder movements. The chapters reveal the complexity of such problematics at various scales: from the very local level (sedentarization, cross-border tribes), to the regional one (movements between Sudan and Ethiopia/Eritrea, between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and between Ethiopia and Djibouti), up to the international policies related to migration. The contributions about the latter notably offer important critical views of the so-called ‘Khartoum Process’. Also at the international level, the reader will find a couple of chapters dealing with diasporas (Ethiopian and Somali), their influence in politics within their country of ‘origin’, or their complex social reconfigurations in hosting states.

The sixth and last part of the Handbook, coordinated with Emanuele Fantini and Clélie Nallet, explores the politics, policies, and processes of integration between the states of the Horn of Africa, as well as between this region and the global economy, through infrastructures, investments, and networks for what is usually labelled as economic development. This part revolves around three main themes: the interplay of geographical scales, the coexistence and competition between different interests and approaches to integration, and the political role of the state in determining the outcomes of these processes. In introducing these themes, the contributors point at the relevance of studying the Horn of Africa to further engage with broader classic debates in the social science and African studies. Ambitious policies related to dams, water, land, gas, hydroelectricity, infrastructures, and communication are discussed at the regional and international levels, taking into account local states’ interests and foreign ambitions (China notably), and at the local cross-border level between Uganda and South Sudan.

In spite of the numerous and rich contributions, this Handbook is, obviously, not exhaustive. One remaining challenge for a future edition shall be the insertion of environmental problematics. We also failed to gather expected contributions for a more important development initially dedicated to gender and the history of feminism in the region. The reader will however find these perspectives as a transversal discussion. Da Costa, Pendle, and Tubiana’s chapter shows for instance how women have been specific targets and instruments of war in the context of South Sudan. The reader will also find in the chapter by Fathima A. Badurdeen further information and readings as for women’s recruitment by al-Shabaab in Kenya. The articulation between gender, clan, and politics is discussed in the Somalian context by Istar Ahmed and Anisa Hagimumin. And while migration studies mostly focused on mem, three chapters dedicated to people’s movement offer a specific focus on gender and ‘intersectionality’ in the chapters by Katarzyna Grabska and Marina de Regt, by Rania Rajji, and by Amina Saïd Chiré, Bezunesh Tamru and Omar Mahamoud Ismael.

What do we eventually learn from the Horn of Africa? One of the main originality of the region, as noted above, is to be found in the success (or de facto success) of separatist projects in Eritrea, South Sudan, and Somaliland. These cases led to ambiguous interpretations in terms of citizenship, economic adjustments, and political violence. However, they clearly show that separatism is no guarantee for democratization, nor for peace. State borders may move, but elites’ political culture and practices remain. Furthermore, the relation between conflict and state formation refers to a classic problem, as violence is intrinsic to state formation and part to the processes of legitimization constantly renewed (cf. the classic works by C. Tilly, N. Elias, P. Bourdieu). In other words, if we accept that violence is an integral and ‘normal’ part of the processes of state formation, we must expect that separatism has little chance to be a factor of pacification, but shall rather generate new forms of violence in the newly independent states and in the amputated states.

Considering the remaining internal difficulties, including economic hardship, political instability, increasing popular contestation, violence, and wars faced by most of these regimes, one can ask how far the original models discussed along the chapters are viable for regime and state survival, where social justice would prevail. I would argue that innovations in terms of citizenship and devolution (Ethiopian ‘multinational’ federalism for instance), justice (e.g. Islamic Courts), and economy (developmental state, Islamic finance) are no sufficient factors to explain the remaining violence or the failure of some political project. The failure is first and foremost rooted in authoritarian practices at every scale. Multinational federalism in Ethiopia, Islamic State in Sudan, Islamic Courts in Somalia, ‘revolutionary’ regime in Eritrea, etc. all could all have been successful, if only their mode of government had been based on the sharing of power, wealth, social justice, acceptance of the other, and the formal orga...