Paper long abstract:

No region of Africa has seen more frequent inter-state and intra-state war. Nowhere has experienced more secessions -internationally recognized and unrecognized- than the Horn. Political orders here have been consistently unstable, threatened both from within by coups, popular mobilization and insurgencies, and from without by regionalized conflict in which states undermine or even break up one another. While governments recraft modes of belonging and (re)create citizens, liberation fronts appear in defence of old or future homelands across both the region’s rumpstates and the polities that have separated from them- Eritrea, Somaliland, South Sudan. Border conflicts have existed for decades and are increasing- every international border in the region is at least partially contested.

Competing nationalisms, I argue, are central to war and peace and to “future borders”, both in ways that are recognizable for scholars of other regions and in ways that render the Horn unique in Africa. The paper accounts for the enduring salience -and even primacy- of these competing nationalisms in not only structuring politics within the key regional states -Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan- but also between them. Indeed, it is my contention that projects of nation-building, state-building and revolutionary transformation and the nationalist opposition which they generate cannot be understood separately from the international relations of the Horn of Africa: the question of nationalism on the one hand and the structural and normative IR context on the other are deeply interlinked in ways that have proven hugely destabilizing to the peoples and states of the region.