The Unsettled Southern Ethiopian-Somali Boundary on the Eve of Decolonization: Political Confrontation and Human Interactions in the Ogaadeen Borderland

Historically, the Ethiopian-Somali borderland has been marked by significant confrontation and recurring struggle. Since the Scramble for Africa during the late nineteenth century, and even more so since the end of the Second World War, it has remained one of the most contested terrains in Africa. During the 1890s, the Ogaadeen region was included in the Ethiopian empire “to secure its sovereignty” against European maneuvers, as part of the process of state reform and modernization led by Emperor Menilek II, which culminated in the victory over the Italians at Adwa in 1896.¹ While the general pattern of the European conquest and partition of Africa was related to diplomatic bargaining among the colonial powers, without any acknowledgment of African kingdoms, polities, or social hierarchies, the Horn of Africa was a remarkable exception to this trend, since the Ethiopian empire took part in the sequence of diplomatic events that resulted in the boundary agreements signed in 1897 by Emperor Menelik with Italy, Britain, and France. This was the direct effect of the Italian defeat at Adwa, the withdrawal of Italian claims to protection over Ethiopia, and the subsequent international recognition of Ethiopian autonomy.

These same circumstances were speciously used by Somali nationalists after the end of the Second World War to argue that Ethiopia had participated in the Scramble for Africa. On the European side of this history, Italian colonial rule over the Horn of Africa, and, after the Second World War, the para-colonial rule of the British Military Administration (BMA) and the Italian Trust Administration in Somalia (AFIS: Amministrazione Fiduciaria Italiana della Somalia) acted directly and indirectly to disconnect the Ogaadeen region from Ethiopia and reconnect it to the process of Somali state formation. Thus, the border worked in a divisive way, partitioning the relatively homogeneous Somali-speaking lands. On the eve of national independence in the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian-Somali borderland represented one of the major cases of interstate confrontation, as distinct from the prevalent continental pattern of infrastate conflicts among ethnically different regions.

Since the early colonial period, the boundary between Ethiopia and Somalia had never been marked on the ground, and as a result, the unsettled condition of the border provided a reason—or at least a pretext—to fuel reciprocal territorial claims and future “destructive wars.”² In December 1934, the Wälwäl crisis along the Ethiopian-Somali border provided a casus belli for the Italian Fascist aggression against Ethiopia, which ended in 1936 with the proclamation of the Italian Empire and the reorganization of the former Italian colonial dependencies under the umbrella of Italian East Africa (IEA). After Somali national independence, tensions along the border escalated into fully fledged conflicts between the two neighboring states, first in 1963‒64, and then again in 1977‒78. A further chapter in this long history involved the Ethiopian military intervention in southern Somalia from 2006 to 2009. Although the confrontation in the Horn has been widely studied in the scholarly literature, which has emphasized the divisive aspects of the Somali-Ethiopian border,³ the possible interactions across the border have not “attract[ed] the same attention of researchers and academicians.”⁴ The history of the Somali-Ethiopian border creation is not simply that of a series of complex and unsuccessful diplomatic attempts to fix the boundary line; it is also that of a progression of political and administrative strategies that aimed to govern the borderland and manage its porosity in light of human mobility and space construction, in spite of or in connection to the international negotiations. The trend on the eve of Somali national independence was the increasing overlapping of international rivalries across these local dynamics and the competing attempts of the respective central governments to secure reliable supporters for their state policies.

The Colonial Legacy

The boundary between Ethiopia and Italian Somalia was initially defined, only very approximately, on the basis of the Italo-Ethiopian agreement of 1897. According to Article 4...