The politics of 2015 can feel almost quaint in light of the international system today. In the years since, the post-World War II order has run aground, with a dizzing new world system now taking shape in Trump's second term. At that time, however, the petrodollar monarchies in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were once again beginning to flex their own geostrategic muscle on the Arabian Peninsula, expanding both their reach and gaze.
It is easy to reach for clichés when looking back at 2025 for the Horn of Africa: civil war in Sudan, insurgency in Ethiopia, a collapsed peace settlement in South Sudan, and youth discontent throughout Kenya, Tanzania, and beyond. But what is apparent is that, just a couple of weeks before 2026, the region is facing its worst moment for decades.
Last week, Oxfam released a damning report detailing the scale of Kenya's wealth disparity, revealing that just 125 individuals control more wealth than 77% of the population-- 42.6 million people. The report, entitled 'Kenya's Inequality Crisis: The Great Economic Divide,' outlined that since 2015, those living on less than KES 130 a day had risen by 7 million, while the wealthiest 1% had captured nearly 40% of all new wealth created between 2019 and 2023. Such glaring inequalities are self-evident across much of Kenya, with gleaming new highrises jutting up against slums throughout Nairobi. But so too are these patterns of wealth inequalities reflected across the broader Horn of Africa, driving a surge in youth discontent that has bubbled over in Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
The past weeks have seen a glut of international attention on Sudan. First, the gruesome and long-anticipated fall of El Fasher in North Darfur to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) at the end of October, precipitating, as all anticipated, reports of the most egregious human rights violations, including widespread massacres. At the same time, the renewed push for a ceasefire between the paramilitaries and the Sudanese army is generating widespread speculation that —for the first time since a few brief hours at the outbreak of the war in April 2023 —there may just be a window of opportunity to ease the suffering.
The churn of Juba's political web continues, with the spider at its centre—South Sudanese President Salva Kiir—continuing his Machiavellian reshuffling apace. But last week, it went up a notch, with the president stripping his apparent successor, Benjamin Bol Mel, of his titles and powers in the latest twist in the court of Kiir.
Tanzania has often been dismissed as the somewhat 'sleepy' neighbour of Kenya, perceived as a more stable one-party state, unaffected by the spasms of protests and discontent of Nairobi's flawed democracy. Certainly, though Tanzania has upheld the trappings of democracy —including term limits and elections —the once-socialist ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) has suppressed most opposition. And so elections in Tanzania have been typically subdued affairs, with the result known well before anyone casts their ballot. That was, of course, until last month, when the perception of Tanzania as a regional bastion of stability came crashing down in brutally violent scenes over the rigged election by incumbent Samia Suluhu Hassan. Not only has it been the latest bloody expression of widespread youth discontent, but it has also cast a light on the increasingly authoritarian tactics shared by the region's unpopular regimes.
Despite rumours of declining health, Djibouti’s President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh’s (IOG) is maneuvering to extend his grip on power amid growing tensions over succession. The 77 year-old leader, who took power in 1999 as his uncle’s hand-picked successor, has pushed through constitutional changes that allow him to run again in 2026, with the age limit having been scrapped on 2 November – moves that have further ignited both public discontent and simmering rivalries between Djibouti’s Afar and Issa communities. Guelleh, has maintained a relatively low public profile in the past year. In late September 2024, social media reports claimed he had been hospitalised and flown to Paris due to critical illness, with some even suggesting internet outages in Djibouti aimed at suppressing news of his condition. His Finance Minister, Ilyas Moussa Dawaleh, flatly disputed reports that Guelleh was critically ill, confirming only that the president had an issue with his right knee. But these denials, along with his refusal to establish a clear succession plan, have only intensified speculation about Djibouti’s political future. As IOG clings to power, the prospect of a succession crisis looms large, threatening instability in the nation.
Across 18 months, through incessant bombardment and induced starvation, the capital of North Darfur held out against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Assault after assault was repelled by predominantly Zaghawa fighters under the army-allied Joint Forces, aware of the massacres of indigenous Darfurians at El Geneina, Nyala, and across Darfur at the hands of the Sahelian Arab paramilitaries in 2023 and 2003. But, eventually, the pressure proved too great, and the city of El Fasher has now fallen to the Emirati-backed RSF-- with all the litany of atrocities feared seemingly coming to pass. Ineffectual pleas from a disengaged international community for the paramilitaries not to burn, kill, rape, and pillage have inevitably fallen on deaf ears. And while Quad-centred negotiations collapsed in Washington, El Fasher's fall redraws Sudan's map in stark and potentially irreversible terms.
Many thousands of miles from the Horn of Africa, the small Caribbean nation of Haiti and its capital, Port-au-Prince, remain engulfed in brutal gang warfare. Since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, the country has slipped ever further into chaos, with rival paramilitary gangs seizing control over most of the capital and inducing a widespread humanitarian crisis. No elections have been held since 2016, most government services have ground to a halt, and the transnational drug gangs-- led by notorious individuals such as Jimmy Chérizier 'Barbecue'-- continue to act with impunity, with the Haitian police badly outnumbered and outgunned. Over two years ago, and in light of a problematic history of foreign interventionism in the country, the US and others—following a request from ousted Haitian PM Ariel Henry—pushed for a nation from the Global South to take the lead in responding to the collapsing state.
The 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire once famously quipped that the "agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." The satirical critique was such that the empire had become little more than an amorphous collection of states and territories that was bound together by neither a common religion, nor a direct lineage to ancient Rome, nor even by a centralised authority. Historians may continue to debate the extent to which Voltaire exaggerated the fragility and nature of the empire, but there are likely to be fewer disputes about the status of Somalia's putative 'federal parliamentary republic'. The federation is in tatters, its parliamentary system bulldozed by an overweening presidency, and its public so thoroughly disenfranchised that the term 'republic' resembles less an aspiration than a cruel joke.
Land remains perhaps the single most contentious issue in Kenya, from the grazing competition in Turkana to the infamous unrest over the Laikipia conservancies in 2022 to the rapid construction boom of Nairobi. Kenya is pockmarked by such—often violent—competition, increasingly accentuated by the climate crisis and intersecting with systemic issues of political neglect. But it is not simply growing agropastoralist communities tussling over dwindling arable land; others are also involved, not least Gulf powers looking to divest their hydrocarbon investments in the interest of food security. And another much-overlooked competitor for Kenya's land is on the block —companies seeking to develop the country's carbon credit industry.
Carthage, Biafra, Stalingrad, Aleppo, Sarajevo, Tigray, Gaza and El Fasher in Sudan. Deliberate starvation as a weapon of war and as part of siege tactics dates back millennia, a brutal, attritional ploy that does not discriminate between civilian and enemy combatant. For some commanders and regimes, it is motivated by a vicious 'surrender or die' rationale-- but for others, it veers toward the genocidal, an attempt to wipe out an entire people or population. And in the case of the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces' (RSF) months-long siege on the city of El Fasher in Darfur, it is hard to view the choking siege and induced starvation as anything other than genocide.
On 12 September, the members of the 'Quad'-- the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt–– announced a joint roadmap for ending Sudan's destructive civil war. It is a significant development; the first agreement by the belligerent's main Arab sponsors that has eluded negotiators. The statement offers some progress on the Sudan file, not least reflecting the efforts by the US to deconflict the Arab interests in the war. Elements of the statement —though parts are contradictory and unrelated to Sudan —should be welcomed, including moving past the binaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army in a post-war administration. But there is a litany of concerns as well, not least the absence of firm guardrails to ensure that the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt do not simply continue to funnel weapons to their favoured proxies. And for the Sudanese, with these powers now seemingly in the driving seat, the space for issues of constitutional rule, restitution, democratic governance, civilian leadership, and transitional justice in any post-war Sudan is greatly diminished.
After months and years of creeping, violent consolidation, the ailing South Sudanese President Salva Kiir has again moved decisively to cement his successor. In just a couple of weeks this September, Kiir has promoted 'First Vice-President' Benjamin Bol Mel to a full general in the National Security Service Internal Bureau, and levelled an array of trumped-up charges against Riek Machar. Though internationals have again furiously warned of contraventions against the 2018 peace deal, it was already in tatters long ago, systematically undermined by a rapacious Juba government that has fully captured the state. The simultaneous elevation of Bol Mel and the charging of Machar are simply another chapter in the sad betrayal of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) origins.
When the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) finally recaptured Khartoum's Republican Palace in March from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), they inherited a burnt-out shell of a building. Months of grinding fighting in the surrounding neighbourhoods and repeated shelling had left it decimated, with blackened walls and gaping holes in the highly symbolic complex. But it was just a handful of-- albeit significant-- buildings in a devastated city. Even with the war's end improbable for some time to come, the Pyrrhic 'victory' of the Sudanese army over the paramilitaries, with most now pushed from the ruined capital, leaves immense questions about restoring and restituting Khartoum, once one of the finest cities in the region.
Later this month, world leaders, diplomats, and politicians from across the world will gather in New York for the 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting under the banner 'Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights.' Under current circumstances, the theme of 'better together' feels more evocative of a plea to save a failing marriage than any anticipated genuine commitment to multilateralism. It comes as no surprise that the multilateral order is badly adrift, with the age of the Middle Powers--alongside China and the US--bearing down upon the grim-seeming decades to come. What celebrations will be planned for the UN's 80th birthday will have to be seen, but with the Gaza Strip lying in ruins and the contours of the 'illiberal globalised' alliance in shape, it is hard to envisage anything beyond a continued attempt to maintain the slipping status quo. And though Gaza and Ukraine will—understandably—absorb much of the international oxygen, the Horn of Africa is facing its most intense crisis for decades.
Peacekeepers in Somalia, tackling the Daesh-linked Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), securing Juba from a supposed rebel threat-- the Ugandan military certainly has spread itself widely. But is it all as it seems? Kampala likes to cast itself as the 'big brother' of the Great Lakes region, a more stable and secure interlocutor for both the West and Middle Powers than its neighbours. Just in recent weeks, Ugandan forces have spearheaded military operations against Al-Shabaab in Lower Shabelle, Somalia, recapturing several bridge towns – although of dubious strategic value. But it also ruthlessly extracts lumber and minerals in neighbouring South Sudan and the DRC, verging on an irredentist security policy masked by the fragility of these unstable frontier economies. Fused with the government and today led by the mercurial Muhoozi Kainerugaba– the son of President Yoweri Museveni, the Ugandan People's Defence Forces (UPDF) is more than the sum of its parts.
Darfur has always sat uneasily within the Sudanese state, a frontier of the early mercenary, mercantile, exploitative capitalism that formed the country. In the decades since independence in 1956, with minimal economic output and occupied by 'African' tribes, governance of the periphery was too often a violent afterthought of Khartoum's Riverain elite-- a region to suppress or exploit rather than govern.
The heyday of multilateralism appears to be well and truly over, with nearly all bodies, from the UN to the African Union to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), increasingly depleted and wrestling with crises of legitimacy and relevance in 2025. The erosion of the norms that underpinned these institutions that have anchored the international peace and security architecture has many origins-- and many casualties. Principal among the losses from this multilateral decline has been peacekeeping operations, with the traditional international community ever less willing to invest in cumbersome, multinational missions. Yet the Horn of Africa still hosts two-- increasingly fraught-- peacekeeping missions in Somalia and South Sudan.
On 30 June, Kenya's Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling affirming the inheritance rights of children born out of wedlock to Muslim fathers. Amid ongoing debates about the relationship between religion and the state in Kenyan society today, the unanimous decision has thrown down a gauntlet to traditional interpretations of Islamic inheritance law, which typically deny estate rights to out-of-wedlock children. Intended to bring such statues in line with mainstream Kenyan law and better ensure these children's rights, it has triggered uproar in the Muslim community surrounding Kenya's pluralistic legal system.