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Why is the Horn such a distinctive part of Africa? This book, by one of the foremost scholars of the region, traces this question through its exceptional history and also probes the wildly divergent fates of the Horn's contemporary nation-states, despite the striking regional particularity inherited from the colonial past. Christopher Clapham explores how the Horn's peculiar topography gave rise to the Ethiopian empire, the sole African state not only to survive European colonialism, but also to participate in a colonial enterprise of its own. Its impact on its neighbours, present-day Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia and Somaliland, created a region very different from that of post-colonial Africa. This dynamic has become all the more distinct since 1991, when Eritrea and Somaliland emerged from the break-up of both Ethiopia and Somalia. Yet this evolution has produced highly varied outcomes in the region's constituent countries, from state collapse (and deeply flawed reconstruction) in Somalia, through militarised isolation in Eritrea, to a still fragile 'developmental state' in Ethiopia. The tensions implicit in the process of state formation now drive the relationships between the once historically close nations of the Horn.

When the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the Soviet Union and United States faltered during the administration of Jimmy Carter, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that “SALT lies buried in the sands of the Ogaden.” How did superpower détente survive Vietnam but stumble in the Horn of Africa? Historian Louise Woodroofe takes Brzezinski’s claim as a starting point to analyze superpower relations during the 1970s, and in so doing she reveals how conflict in East Africa became a critical turning point in the ongoing Cold War battle for supremacy. Despite representing the era of détente, the 1970s superficially appeared to be one of Soviet successes and American setbacks. As such, the Soviet Union wanted the United States to recognize it as an equal power. However, Washington interpreted détente as a series of agreements and compromises designed to draw Moscow into an international system through which the United States could exercise some control over its rival, particularly in the Third World. These differing interpretations would prove to be the inherent flaw of détente, and nowhere was this better demonstrated than in the conflict in the Horn of Africa in 1974–78. The Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia involved a web of shifting loyalties, as the United States and Soviet Union alternately supported both sides at different points. Woodroofe explores how the war represented a larger debate over U.S. foreign policy, which led Carter to take a much harder line against the Soviet Union. In a crucial post-Vietnam test of U.S. power, the American foreign policy establishment was unable to move beyond the prism of competition with the Soviet Union. The conflict and its superpower involvement turned out to be disasters for all involved, and many of the region’s current difficulties trace their historic antecedents to this period. Soviet assistance propped up an Ethiopian regime that terrorized its people, reorganized its agricultural system to disastrous effects in the well-known famines of the 1980s, and kept it one of the poorest countries in the world. Somalia’s defeat in the Ogaden War started its descent into a failed state. Eritrea, which had successfully fought Ethiopia prior to the introduction of Soviet and Cuban assistance, had to endure more than a decade more of repression.

West African participation in the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) grew considerably throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This article examines the causes and consequences of failed British and Saudi efforts to channel, regulate, and control the trans-Sahelian flow of pilgrims and enforce a regime of mobility along the Sahel and across the Red Sea. Focusing specifically on Red Sea ‘illicit’ passages, the study recovers the rampant and often harrowing crossings of dozens of thousands of West African pilgrims from the Eritrean to the Arabian coasts. It examines multiple factors that drove the circumvention of channeling and control measures and inscribes the experiences of West African historical actors on multiple historiographic fields that are seldom organically tied to West Africa: Northeast African regional history, the colonial history of Italian Eritrea, and the Red Sea as a maritime space connecting Africa with Arabia.

Conflict in the Horn of Africa examines how the Kenya-Somalia border problem has deep roots in pre-colonial and colonial times mirroring the phenomenon of shifting territorial and human frontiers and treaties which Britain, France, Italy, and Ethiopia made before and after World Wars I and II. This book documents the Kenya-Somalia border problem from the nineteenth century, when decisions ignored African concerns, to independence, when Africans acted as the principal players. Vincent Bakpetu Thompson analyses how the crises regarding Kenya and Somalia's domestic situations impacted their international relations in and beyond the region. This book furthers the discussion by looking at the current problems in the region that are obscured by instability, infiltrations, the repetitive influx of refugees crossing and re-crossing the border, and increasing terrorist attacks.

This article analyzes the ethnic denominations around the Gulf of Tadjoura. By using travel narratives from the nineteenth century and colonial archives from the twentieth, it provides a history of these denominations, their construction and evolution, and the representations they carry. In the nineteenth century, denominations proposed by African informers were used by European travelers to describe the political and social situation in the area as they understood it. Later, the colonial administration wanted to identify groups and individuals in order to manage the inhabitants and secure its domination over the country. We show how this practice was an impossible task because of the identity lability of individuals and groups and the impossibility of defining accurate limits between them, either physical or symbolic. Nonetheless, these constructions have been used until now to legitimate access to the State and country's resources.

Postwar Italian historiography tended for decades to exclude colonialism from national history, and the country largely forgot its colonial past. The interconnections between the academic schools and anthropological scholarly theories that focused on the Horn of Africa during Italian colonialism and twentieth century Italian literary and cinematic representations of the Horn and the Red Sea have been understudied and underestimated. This article will argue that during Italian colonialism, Italy and the Horn of Africa were interconnected through the Mediterranean and Red Sea by scholarly, literary, cultural religious, and imaginary links that contributed to the construction of a \"Mediterranean Africa,\" based on genetic continuities and the legacies with Latin antiquity and ancient Roman values. Such baggage affected or was affected by the building of Italian-ness after the country's unification, Italy's self-representation, the country's Southern question, and its articulation of \"modernity.\" As this article will show, the construction of \"Mediterranean Africa\" influenced the Italian literary and cinematic representations of Northeast Africa, throughout the 20th century; from the founder of Futurism—the Egypt born writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—in the first four decades of the century, to the leftist writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, in the 1960s and 1970s. The problematic transnational links constructed between Italy, the Horn of Africa, and the Red Sea would also surface in the works of the most prominent film directors during Fascism, Alessandro Blasetti and Mario Camerini, and other important writers, like Giovanni Comisso, Ennio Flaiano and Giorgio Manganelli.

I.M. Lewis's classic text on the history of the Somali peoples. The Fourth Edition of this history shows the amazing continuity of Somali forms of social organisation and the ingenuity with which the Somali way of life has adapted to all forms of modernity. North America: Ohio U Press