The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland (review)

Leenco Lata's timely study of self-determination and state formation in the Horn of Africa (taken to include Sudan) provides the kind of fresh thinking that is sorely needed in the present era of transnational identity politics and borderless warfare. Recent conflicts in the Horn have challenged not only specific regimes but also the very existence of states, with Somalia being the most conspicuous example. Efforts to resolve the region's inter- and intra-nation conflicts have been stymied, according to Lata, by adherence to outdated views of the state's functions and capabilities. 'The elements out of which modern independent statehood is supposedly constructed (sovereignty, people, nation, territory)' are being transformed by the forces of globalization, with the result that 'state authorities and their wannabe successors ... end up fighting over powers and principles that are steadily becoming obsolete.'

One of those principles is self-determination. In part 1, Lata reviews the various meanings of the concept over the past two hundred years, from its French revolutionary associations with ideas of democracy and popular sovereignty, through its role in the struggles to emancipate peoples subject to imperial rule in the early twentieth century (chapter 1). As applied to Africa after the Second World War (chapter 2), self-determination referred simply to the 'decolonization' of the haphazardly constructed European colonial territories, and decidedly not to the 'liberation' of distinct nationalities or language groups within those territories. One result was that many subordinated groups in the Horn continued after independence to assert their rights to self-determination, challenging the African regimes that governed them.

Chapters 3 and 4 provide very competent reviews of the literature on the post–Cold War state and on recent claims by ethnic groups around the world for recognition and political autonomy. Some of the material will be familiar to students of political theory and international relations, but it serves as an essential backdrop to the author's iconoclastic conclusions. With analysts like Pierre van den Berghe and T.J. Oommen, Lata believes 'the time has come to remove nation-building and the homogenization agenda that it entails from the functions of states,' so as to diminish conflicts stemming from identity politics.

Part 2 applies these observations to the Horn of Africa, where appeals to self-determination by many groups have been particularly strident. Following individual chapters that summarize the histories of modern state building in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia and highlight how those histories interrelate, the author proceeds to (re)imagine a Horn where states might serve as umbrellas under which different forms of local sovereignty could be exercised. Lata also argues for a 'multi-dimensional self-determination ... that would simultaneously institute empowerment at the grass-roots level and integration at the regional level.' In this model, traditional grass-roots 'democratic' institutions like the Oromo gada system or the Somali shirka guurti (assembly of elders) would be revitalized rather than diminished.

In urging readers to think about ways of defining self-determination that are conducive to integration rather than disintegration, the author draws upon his extensive personal experience (and frustrations) with nationality politics in the Horn. A former member of the Oromo Liberation Front, Lata frankly acknowledges and occasionally vents his bias against Ethiopia's central government. On the whole, however, his is a very tempered approach to the fiercely contested claims of separatists, secessionists, and irredentists in the Horn. One only wishes that Lata had added Islamists to the list, given the recent resurgence of political Islam in Sudan and Somalia and the tendency of Islamic ideologies to complicate our secular Western discourses about popular sovereignty and self-determination. This reader also missed seeing a reference to I.M. Lewis's edited collection on Nationalism and Self-Determination in the Horn of Africa (1983), which was the first volume to look at these themes across the entire region.