The Red Sea region is at the center of a new geopolitical intrigue. By considering African actors as co-designers of the emergent collaborations, this panel seeks to explore the array of political, economic, and social relations across the Red Sea.
Long Abstract:
The Red Sea region is at the center of a new geopolitical intrigue. The intensity and diversity of political, economic, and social cooperation between states in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East is unprecedented. Conventional explanations tend to emphasize national interests that drive actors in the Middle East to project their power into the Horn of Africa--a view that casts African actors as mere spectators in a geopolitical game. This panel suggests instead that African actors are co-designers of their relationships to players in the Middle East. We posit that political interactions between states rely on the establishment of a common ideational ground. The latter may build on imaginaries of uniqueness, on shared legacies of exchange and connectivity, or shared spatial visions for the region.
The panel seeks to explore the entanglement of East African/Horn of Africa states in the Red Sea region in the past, present and future. We invite papers that empirically or conceptually explore the multiplicity of those ties by zeroing in on how notions of space, history, and identity are mobilized for making claims about as well as enacting new political orders in the region.
Empirically, the panel is open for a broad range of cases and policy areas, such as security arrangements, infrastructure projects, or issues of migration. Theoretically, contributions may build on perspectives within political geography (from logistics, infrastructure studies to critical geopolitics), international relations, or anthropology. In addition, the panel encourages proposals with a diverse set of methodological approaches.
How are history and cultural references mobilized to legitimize contemporary political, economic and social interactions in the Red Sea region? This paper utilizes the concept of geocultural power to comprehend the manifold geopolitical dynamics in the region.
Paper long abstract:
The Red Sea region is at the center of a new geopolitical intrigue. The current intensity in political, economic, and social cooperation between states in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East has aroused quite a stir in foreign policy debate and analysis. Leading Western and African think thanks consider the investments by Middle East companies and governments in infrastructure and logistics across the Horn or the various bilateral agreements on topics including security and migration as expressions of a new geostrategic play determined by a purely transactional logic.
In this paper, we sketch an alternative research agenda that aims at coming to terms with the above dynamics in a way that explores historical and cultural frames that underpin the diverse contemporary interactions between the Middle East and actors in the Horn of Africa. Our point of departure here is that the establishment of a common ideational ground is pivotal for effective interaction.
We take our cues from Tim Winter’s concept of “geocultural power” that explores how history as well as cultural references (artifacts, symbols, practices) are mobilized as mechanisms for projecting power (Winter 2020, 2021). While Winter locates geocultural references primarily in official government narratives, we are interested in identifying how such geocultural narratives reverberate across society. As an initial point of illustration, we will be discussing Turkey’s vibrant economic and political engagement in the countries of the Horn, and situate it within the country’s Neo-Ottoman foreign policy.
Turkey has strived to enhance its political and economic influence over Africa for recent 15 years. Sudan has played a central role in Ankara’s “influence-building” approach toward the continent. This policy has four fundamental pillars. These are intensifying financial activities and becoming dominant in engineering and infrastructure development, being involved in the restoration of historical artifacts, including Ottoman buildings, to “demonstrate” Turkey’s constructive capability and to “remind” its historical affiliation with Sudan, adopting a protective attitude toward Sudan and its former president Omar Al Bashir against international allegations of humanitarian crimes, and finally employing “cultural intimacy” by emphasizing the “Islamic fraternity” between the two countries and the “glorious Ottoman past,” which “protected” Sudanese people from Western encroachments. This study suggests that Turkey’s endeavor to establish political and economic influence over Sudan is closely connected with the traditional paradigm, “Millet-i Hakime (the Ruling Nation),” which became the dominant element of the Ottoman political elite’s mindset in the late 19th century when the colonial rivalry started to target the Islamic world. “The Ruling Nation” refers to the hierarchical precedence of Turks over other Muslim communities of the Empire, as well as to the protective role of the Empire in the Islamic world. This paradigm retained the mindset of the Turkish political elite throughout republican history, even though the governments found the opportunity to put it into practice in recent decades.
Our paper investigates imaginaries that accompany investments in port infrastructures at the Gulf of Aden. We show how infrastructures insert themselves in urban lifeworlds and shape future trajectories by connecting an imagined past (present past) with an expected future (present future).
Paper long abstract:
Our paper investigates narratives and imaginaries that accompany international investments in port infrastructures along the African side of the Gulf of Aden. A broad range of international actors are currently developing infrastructures in the Horn of Africa, and especially ports are often identified as entry points for the new scramble for Africa. This ‘new scramble’, however, is but one imaginary in which contemporary infrastructure developments are embedded. Other narratives link infrastructures to capitalist visions of a socially detached and frictionless world of consumption. Our paper comparatively examines such narratives that accompany the modernization of three urban seaports: Djibouti (Djibouti), Berbera (Somaliland), and Bosaso (Puntland/Somalia). Analytically, we build on Koselleck’s (2004) theory of historical times and show how international and national actors and investors are engaged in future-building in the Horn of Africa as they are promoting spatial imaginaries, invigorating (shared) memories, and formulating new aspirations. These narratives are inserted into everyday realities where they are absorbed, contested, adapted, and aligned with new meaning. Infrastructures, in this way, evolve as a material and discursive connection between an imagined past (present past) and an expected future (present future), a connection that is continuously (and sometimes violently) rearticulated while it materializes in installations that are themselves shaping social trajectories and lifeworlds and, thereby, increasingly influences how the future unfolds.
The Horn of Africa is located in a highly sensitive and strategically extremely critical part of the world. This strategic location constitute a locus of attraction of world powers, big as well as medium. This reality underpin the convergence of international powers in the region. Throughout the post-colonial period, the region suffered from interventions of major world military powers. The interventions include the Cold War superpower, US global war on terror, piracy and scramble for resources. Today, the region is the most militarised part of Africa. This geopolitically and geo-strategically driven world military interventions and presence partly explain the rampant conflicts and wars devastating the Horn of Africa. The conflicts, wars and low socio-economic development, in turn, render the region vulnerable to external interventions whether from near or distant. The paper analyses the role geopolitics plays in peace, security and stability in the Horn of Africa. It argues geopolitics constitutes a catalyst of instability in the Horn of Africa.
The Gulf States have longstanding historical, sociocultural, political, and economic relations with the Horn states. They have long been involved in the Horn politics. The Gulf States' involvement in the Horn politics, which has hitherto been predicated on geopolitical and geostrategic interests, has largely contributed to the intensification of conflicts in the latter. Nonetheless, new patterns of political relations that have allegedly been driven by shared narratives and policy orientations have emerged between the Gulf States and their counterparts in the Horn region. This emerging political engagement appeared to have contributed to regional peace and development in the Horn. This paper analyzes the new form of political relations between the Gulf States - the UAE and the Saudi - and the Horn states - Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somaliland - and its contribution to regional peace and development.
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