Issue No. 108

The history of the contemporary Horn of Africa is littered with abandoned and abrogated peace agreements-- as well as a handful of successes. A petri dish (or Pandora's box) of issues related to sovereignty, inter- and intra-state conflict, and the nature of the state itself, the region has also been a laboratory for numerous forms of peacemaking and dealmaking. Yet in such a fractured regional order, 'peace' and 'conflict' should not be considered binaries, but rather as part of a sliding scale, where civilians may be targeted during the active fighting in South Sudan or suffer as part of a 'negative peace' in Tigray. Today, with predatory peace in South Sudan, Sudan, and perhaps now Tigray, having given way to renewed violence on a broad scale, what is the nature and future of peacemaking in the Horn of Africa?

Once on the US-designated terrorist sanctions list, it is unsurprisingly rather difficult to come off it. And with the US designating the 'Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood' as terrorists, elements of Khartoum's military government may now have the dubious honour of being on it twice. First time out in 1993, Khartoum was deemed a US State Sponsor of Terror in the wake of a raft of jihadist plots linked to the Islamist authorities in Sudan. Nearly three decades later, and only after Sudan's partial ascension to the Abraham Accords, the title and punishing sanctions were lifted for the civilian-military transitional government. Today, though the warring Sudan is no longer home to an Osama bin Laden or Carlos the Jackal, a US labelling of 'terrorist' has returned to Khartoum.

At the end of February, Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed departed on a rather unusual visit to Baku, Azerbaijan. Slated as a meeting between two emerging powers, a focus on trade and investment frameworks was particularly emphasised by Foreign Minister Gedion Timotheos. More importantly, of course, was the signing of a comprehensive defence agreement by the two countries on 27 February. Spanning drone technology, armoured vehicles, artillery shell production, and air defence, the new agreement builds upon a framework from November 2025, which also included reference to refurbishing T-72 tanks, electronic warfare, and military-industrial manufacturing. Though war has not yet returned to Tigray as many feared, Abiy's vision of a militarised domestic —and regional —posture no doubt requires more hardware.

Earlier this month, dozens of heads of state and government gathered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the 39th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union (AU). The theme of this summit prioritised water security and sanitation, discussing various ways to address these issues amid the unrelenting climate crisis. A worthy subject, no doubt, but the geopolitical backdrop of the summit remains unremittingly grim. Taking place in Addis —amid war looking ever more likely in Tigray —the gathering of leaders again served to uncomfortably emphasise the decline of the AU.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, the Puntland Maritime Police Force in Somalia, or the Liyu Police in Ethiopia are far from isolated curiosities or aberrations of the modern security state in the Horn of Africa. Quite the opposite; each example of these 'paramilitary groups' are part of a longer tale, a reflection of the persistent outsourcing and politicisation of violence in the region. With no state historically able to exercise a monopoly of force, paramilitaries and parallel security structures have routinely sprung from the elite to mediate their authority, 'coup-proof' their regimes, and to deliberately fragment coercive power. But historical variation within and between the litany of paramilitary forces in the Horn is vast, spanning a wide breadth of political aims and ambitions, territories, armaments, and compositions. And yet, the results are often decidedly mixed, as perhaps best evidenced by the destruction of Sudan's ongoing war.

One merely has to drive a few miles down the sweltering tarmac road past the town of Isiolo to encounter the Kenyan army. Small Kenyan Defence Forces (KDF) checkpoints and outposts litter these roads and others, playing several roles in Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) regions. Principal among them is, of course, interdicting the drips and drabs of Al-Shabaab militants infiltrating in small numbers from Somalia. But another prevalent role of past years – particularly since the 2020-2023 drought and ensuing intercommunal violence—has been the army's role in subduing the occurrence of pastoralist-based climate-accentuated conflict.

Dead men do not just walk in Juba — they can now be appointed to election task forces. In one of the most bizarre stories in recent memory, Salva Kiir's government selected Steward Sorobo Budia last week for a new task force comprised of signatories to South Sudan's long-collapsed 2018 peace agreement. Three days later, the president's office was forced to admit that Hon. Sorobo—a former politician from a negligible party —had died 6 years prior, making him unable to serve on the farcical "Leadership Body of the Parties Signatory to the R-ARCSS for Dialogue on Election-Related Matters."

Earlier this month, Sudan passed yet another grim milestone– 1,000 days of war. Since the conflict erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, many milestones have been crossed– the obliteration of a capital city, the persistence of IPC Level 5 levels of hunger, another genocide in Darfur, the ripping apart of Sudan's social fabric, the weaponisation of rape and sexual violence– to name but a few. And each day, the war has metastasised further and further, drawing in a morass of vying foreign powers and laying waste to much of the country. Now, Sudan is witness to the world's largest hunger, displacement, and protection crises. With little suggestion of a viable peace process on the horizon– and the domestic and international drivers of the conflict only intensifying– the calamitous war shows every sign of lasting another 1,000 days.

'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold'-- or can it? The peripheries of the South Sudanese state all but collapsed long ago, victim to the predatory exploitation of the ailing Salva Kiir's cabal in Juba. For years, the Machiavellian spider at the centre of South Sudan's web has presided over extreme gluttony, perpetually shuffling the capital's contorted patron-client networks to maintain his hold on power, while violence and poverty have surged in consequence. But has the government finally overplayed its hand? Having systematically violated the 2018 peace agreement, significant fighting between the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-In Opposition (SPLM-IO) and government troops has flared since the end of December.