Hot Spot Horn of Africa Revisited: approaches to make sense of conflict (review)

This is a timely and extensive collection of scholarship (mostly from younger scholars) on Somalia/Somaliland, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The editors emphasize that the leitmotif of the volume is to ‘analyse conflict in the search for strategies towards peace’ (p. 11).

About half of the authors come from Germany, the others mostly from the Horn. The 19 chapters are almost equally divided between Somalia/ Somaliland, Eritrea and Ethiopia, with a slight preponderance of texts on the latter country. The Somalia/Somaliland section contains a couple of well-informed and partly innovative accounts of political situations and current developments, including external positions on Somalia and Somaliland. Weber deals with the situation in southern Somalia in 2006 and 2007. Terlinden focuses on the regions of Awdal and Sanaag, in western and eastern Somaliland respectively. In their joint chapter Terlinden and Mohammed describe the different trajectories within the successfully concluded peace-building and the ongoing state-building and democratization processes in Somaliland. Rosendahl outlines the role of European financial and other aid, particularly with regard to democratization and human capital development in Somaliland. The two weaker chapters in this section are by Seifert and Medhane. The first deals with the Ethiopian intervention in Somalia 2006/7. It operates within the much-criticized framework of ‘new wars’ and, at the end, illogically concludes that the Ethiopian intervention can be defined as a new war. Medhane tackles the rise of Islamism in Somalia. He does so from a very narrow perspective, subsuming the Shari’a courts and the United Islamic Courts (UIC) that came to power for a brief period in 2006 under the labels of ‘extremists’, ‘Wahabis’ and ‘Salafi-oriented’. Medhane is blind to the ideological tensions among Islamists. He wrongly dismisses the nationalist agenda of some Islamist leaders such as Aweys as ‘clearly rhetoric’ (p. 48). He ignores the role of Ethiopian and US counter-terrorism operations in bringing about a new ‘breed’ of militant extremists since circa 2003. In short, this is a distorted account of complex and non-linear developments.

The section on Ethiopia opens with a chapter by Tetzlaff on the role of ‘committed political leadership’. Gudina sketches the problems with the political process in Ethiopia, which climaxed in the disastrous election of 2005. Smidt assesses the skilled (ab)use of the ‘war on terrorism’ by the Ethiopian government to legitimate operations against internal and external enemies. Dereje, Sommer and Meckelburg deal in three separate chapters with conflicts in the Gambella region in western Ethiopia. To close the section, Johannsen develops a human rights perspective on the situation of street children in Ethiopia.

Hirt kicks off the Eritrea section with an insightful presentation of the relationship between that country and the USA. She outlines how Eritrea since independence has not managed to position itself favourably in the international arena and in relation to the USA. Abdulqadir offers a chapter on gender-specific violence in Eritrea. Most of her informants had served in the armed forces. Her purely qualitative data support the thesis that there is large-scale sexual (and other) abuse in Eritrea’s army, which conscripts virtually all young people over 18 years. The chapter on zones of peace by Abdulkader and Hirt explains how, despite much violence along the borders and ethnic and religious diversity inside the country, populations across considerable parts of Eritrea can actually live in relative peace with each other. Their findings point to the important role of traditional institutions of conflict settlement that operate sometimes in accordance and sometimes beside/beyond government interventions. This is an important and certainly under-researched topic (at least with regard to Eritrea). However, the conceptual apparatus developed by the authors, particularly their understanding of ‘traditional civil society’ and of traditional institutions in general, remains unconvincing. They hardly speak of any changes that may have influenced the ‘traditional’ institutions over the decades, and impose...