Issue No. 121

The Pandora's Box of Peace

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?

It is tempting to conflate or generalise about peacemaking in the Horn, which ranges from the myriad patchwork clan agreements crisscrossing Somalia to the multinational efforts of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, which paved the way for South Sudanese independence. But these-- and others-- share a number of elements, including a patrimonial logic that seeks to unite a fragmented security arena by doling out patronage to prevent active fighting, aka a 'payroll peace.' But in such systems, loyalty must be continuously secured through material inducement, and so in these contexts, peace agreements represent attempts to temporarily fix the terms of elite alignment. These processes can seldom change a country's political economy or imbue the central state with legitimacy it previously lacked. Rather, they typically reorder rather than eliminate violence, concentrating coercive power in select actors but leaving underlying territorial and political disputes unresolved. And so, the 'peace' that emerges is often highly fragile, liable to break down when the Hobbesian nature of the conflict shifts again.

Nowhere is this more evident than in South Sudan and the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) from 2018, emblematic of the nature-- and some of the shortfalls-- of peace deals in the Horn of Africa. The war itself was a classic 'feast vs famine' scenario, with the protracted civil conflict between 2013 and 2018 having sprung from the collapse of oil financing that had maintained the fragile Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) coalition. But after five years of gruelling conflict, the 2018 deal represented a virtual surrender by the Nuer-majority opposition forces led by Riek Machar, with the divvying up of posts and patronage intended to hold together the fragile police. Rather than reshape the predatory nature of the South Sudanese state, it displaced and legitimised coercive power in the hands of Salva Kiir, providing the president with a vehicle to distribute rents, i.e., via state positions. 

But that, too, is drying up, with Juba's oil money having fallen far below its peak. If peace agreements in the Horn have come about at times of plenty-- when enough patronage could be dispensed to keep vying factions within the tent-- this is a time of famine, with just a handful 'feasting.' And as available resources shrink amid broader economic crunches, the cost of maintaining elite coalitions has risen, accelerating fragmentation and defections. Kiir's perpetual reshuffling of his cabinet and fractious elite coalitions reflects this dynamic, with the ageing leader struggling to hold on to his disintegrating state. In turn, the lead-up to the renewal of large-scale hostilities in South Sudan was partially driven by Juba's attempts to wrest control of peripheral checkpoints-- and patronage-- into its hands. Today, the R-ARCSS agreement represents little more than a shell, clung onto by a disengaging international community even while armed conflict spreads throughout the country and millions remain mired in a grim humanitarian crisis. 

R-ARCSS speaks to another problem with peace deals across the Horn as well — a disregard by leaders for implementing accords that might require the transfer of patronage or power. Addis has become a particular culprit of this, with Abiy Ahmed's government having learnt to the detriment of Ethiopia how to weaponise peace accords. In particular, the Pretoria agreement — a hastily expanded cessation-of-hostilities deal that ended active fighting in Tigray in 2022 — was signed without a durable political-economic rationale, running counter to established mediation best practices and peace frameworks. Absent a coherent balance of interests underpinning it and credible guarantors, the agreement has struggled to move beyond a thin cessation of hostilities —with many now gravely concerned that fighting will soon erupt again. Other deals with splinter cells within the Oromo Liberation Army and the Fano insurgency have not only failed to quell the violence, but have also further fragmented an already diffuse landscape of armed actors. One might further argue that the deeper discord between Eritrea and Ethiopia —similarly threatening to boil over into active conflict — has its roots in the failure to implement the Algiers Agreement and normalise relations between the two.

Finally, South Sudan hosts another peacemaking relic of a bygone era-- a UN-sanctioned peacekeeping force, the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). Though funding has been cut for UNMISS, it staggers on amidst escalating conflict, perpetually failing to live up to its mandate of civil protection against the government. Numerous, costly iterations of UNMISS and the African Union operations in Somalia may have kept some violence-- or jihadists-- at bay, but they have simultaneously allowed their respective political contexts to atrophy. In Somalia, since the retaking of Mogadishu and other major cities by regional peacekeepers in the early 2010s, the Somali political elite have repeatedly prevaricated on confronting the deeper ills of their country, happy to consign their security to external forces while reaping billions in foreign aid. This externalisation of political financing has further decoupled ruling elites from their domestic constituencies, reducing both the necessity and urgency of forging durable peace settlements.

But with the gutting of USAID and cuts to foreign aid by London, Paris, and Berlin, the international funding flows that had helped prop up fragile coalitions in Somalia, South Sudan and beyond are disintegrating. In their place, there is the new injection of capital from the Middle East and the Gulf into the ruling cliques, sustaining a ruling or warring coterie that would perhaps have collapsed or been forced to cut broader deals in other circumstances. The result is not a regional competition for influence that might eventually produce a settlement, but rather a multi-alignment that has comprehensively fragmented diplomatic space, with no single external actor having either the leverage or the incentive to push for a durable peace. 

What might this mean for peace agreements or lack thereof? In Sudan, certainly, the civil war is an internationalised one, driven by feuding Gulf powers that have shown little regard for international law or multilateral architecture. Moreover, with the absence of fiscal exhaustion or external constraint, there is little reason for Sudan's belligerents to come to the table. And so long as these actors can access independent revenue streams from trading gold and gum arabic, coupled with external backing, the resources required to sustain war remain intact. 

Despite the African Union's emphasis on the 'primacy of politics' in its founding peace and security framework, regional peacemaking is devolving into mere attempts to 'silence the guns.' The art of mediation and preventive diplomacy, too, is falling by the wayside, more casualties of the violently shifting global order. Bleakly, it is hard to imagine a comprehensive settlement underpinned by political and economic coherence like the CPA in 2026, with the trend undoubtedly towards fragmented, localised deals that can merely 'manage' conflicts. And explicitly transactional external backing from the Gulf and beyond is likely to accentuate this issue, reducing incentives for the ruling elite to negotiate seriously.

Another argument might be made, however. With diminishing international money and interest, foreign capitals would be better placed to emphasise-- like the AU once did-- a 'primacy of politics' as the starting point for durable political settlements, and away from the precariousness of peace in the Horn. Vast sums spent on capacity-building for armed forces or workshops have done little to end the states of permanent emergency across much of the region. More successful-- and far cheaper-- would be understanding how to better redirect patron-client networks or prevent the breakdown in the first place. Whether the contraction of international engagement proves to be a further accelerant of the region's permanent emergency, or the pressure that finally forces a reckoning with its underlying politics, may be the defining question of the next decade of Horn peacemaking.

​The Horn Edition Team