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.
Ethiopia’s Cycle of Violence Spins On In October 2023, in its final report, the UN's International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) urged the international community to redouble its efforts to protect civilians and hold perpetrators "accountable" for the "staggering" human rights abuses that had been carried out in Ethiopia. Eighteen months later, these calls have gone entirely unheeded, while the Commission's warning that there is "no deterrence for future atrocity crimes" has borne fruit in a number of conflict-riddled regions of the country. It was a severe error to bow to pressure for the ICHREE to close prematurely-- leaving it unable to form a determination on the question of genocide in Tigray-- and one that has let down past and future victims of breaches of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in Ethiopia