Summary of main points:  There are a number of protracted and interlocking crises at work in the Horn of Africa. The nationalist and Islamist insurgency against the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and Ethiopian Woyanne forces in Somalia appears to be in the ascendant. The TFG now controls only parts of Mogadishu and the town of Baidoa.

The Ethiopian Woyanne Government is anxious to withdraw at the earliest juncture. The presence in the country of its forces has been a recruiting sergeant for the insurgents. Efforts are underway to form a more inclusive and credible government, but they are hampered by deep divisions both within the TFG between the President and the Prime Minister and amongst its opponents. Meanwhile, there is a humanitarian crisis of massive proportions, with up to 40 per cent of the population needing assistance.

Almost unnoticed, there are ongoing tensions between neighbouring Somaliland and Puntland over disputed border areas. Both countries are due to hold important elections in the coming months. In recent weeks, there has been a resumption of armed bombings in both Somaliland and Puntland by supporters of the insurgency in Somalia. Somaliland’s quest for international recognition as an independent sovereign state continues but there is no sign of a breakthrough on that front. Puntland, which is a semi-autonomous region of Somalia, is highly unstable and has become the main locus of operations for the pirates that currently plague the Gulf of Aden.

Meanwhile, the possibility remains of a resumption of hostilities between Ethiopia and Eritrea over their long-running border dispute. For the moment, the UN – at the behest of the Security Council – has effectively withdrawn from the mediating and peace-keeping roles it has played since the end of the 1998-2000 war. Eritrea accuses the international community of failing to ensure that Ethiopia honours the 2002 decision of the border commission that was established to adjudicate on the dispute. Its ‘spoiler’ role across the region reflects this sense of betrayal. While neither country wants to return to conflict, the border area is heavily militarised and mutual mistrust could yet spark a renewed conflagration.

Both parties view each other as illegitimate and are seeking to encourage ‘regime change’ in the other. They also continue to fight each other through proxies in Somalia. Both countries have experienced domestic political crises since the end of the war. In Eritrea’s case, this has led to the abandonment of any democratic pretensions. Ethiopia, having experimented with a relatively fast-moving ‘democratic transition’ has, since the 2005 elections – in which the ruling party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, performed unexpectedly poorly – slowed it down again.

In the Ogaden, which is part of Ethiopia’s Somali regional state, there has also been a humanitarian crisis as a consequence of ongoing fighting between Ethiopian troops and insurgents. The Ethiopian Government has been criticised by donors, including the UK, for placing obstacles in the way of distributing aid to those who need it. The Ogaden is one of the biggest tests of the ruling party’s policy of ‘ethnic federalism’, under which political power is in theory decentralised to ethnically-based regional states. The Somali-inhabited areas of eastern Ethiopia have always been economically and politically marginalised, and despite increased investment in recent years, remain so. Nonetheless, it seems clear that support for the insurgency among Ethiopian Somalis is limited to two sub-clans of the Ogadeen clan. Eritrea is providing the insurgency with support.

Earlier this year Eritrea launched an incursion into Djibouti and is yet to withdraw its forces. Unless Eritrea’s stance changes soon, it could find itself subject to both UN and African Union sanctions, although whether the UN Security Council has the appetite for taking such action remains in question. Djibouti’s President Guelleh has called for sanctions if the issue is not resolved in the near future. This is another dimension of Eritrea’s role as a regional ‘spoiler’, but it also feels threatened by the growing vibrancy of Djibouti port, while its own ports, Assab and Massawa, are currently heavily under-utilised.

A range of factors have been described as ‘root causes’ of conflict in the region by commentators and policy-makers. A common thread that runs through them all is their varying impact on the viability and legitimacy of the ‘failed’, ‘emergent’ or more established states that together make up the region.

With regard to Somalia, complex and perpetually shifting clan politics has often been given great importance as a cause of conflict. However, some analysts argue that its role can sometimes be exaggerated and that, beneath the surface, class and the struggle for control over resources are also important. On this view, one of the reasons why it has proven so difficult to rebuild the state is that competing factions all view the state as a vehicle for doing the same on a ‘winner take all’ basis. Moreover, the experience of Somaliland suggests clan politics are not, given the right conditions, intrinsically compatible with statehood and a degree of democracy. Ethnicity has also been cited as a root cause of conflict in the Horn.

There is no doubt that ethnicity has indeed often played an important role, perhaps most of all in Ethiopia. However, ethnicity must be understood in a historical and political context. Ethnic identities are not ‘primordial’. Indeed, many of them emerged and then hardened under colonial rule. Ethnicity – like clan in the context of Somalia – is rarely a factor by itself. It always combines with other affiliations and interests.

Environmental insecurity is also often cited as a root cause of conflict in the region. This insecurity is based on the increased degradation and scarcity of natural resources, falling productivity, population growth and increasingly unviable livelihoods. All this has led to conflicts between cultivators, conflicts between pastoralists and conflicts between cultivators and pastoralists across the Horn. Perhaps the most pervasive of these in the Horn is conflict between pastoralists, particularly over access to scarce grazing land and water.

The impact of climate change is likely to intensify such conflicts. The current drought and famine in the Horn is reportedly having an immediate impact on relationships between pastoral groups. However, the link between environmental insecurity and conflict is not direct. A wide range of other political, economic and cultural factors influence how the environment affects conflict. As a result, although it is becoming an ever more important variable, it makes little sense to view environmental factors in isolation.

The ‘failed state’ of Somalia has often been described as a breeding ground for terrorist organisations, including al-Qaida. This has led to fears that parts of the Horn of Africa could become a heartland of militant Islam and that what might initially have been a symptom of conflict could metamorphose into a ‘root cause’. However, many scholars are sceptical about such claims, arguing that al-Qaida has not found a promising base in Somalia. As for the Islamists who briefly held power in large parts of Somalia during the

second half of 2006, some analysts claim that, for a moment, they appeared to offer a potential escape from perpetual clan conflict in Somalia. The dominant tradition of Islam amongst Somalis has been the Sufi tradition. This tradition tends to be relatively relaxed on doctrinal matters and has a mystical orientation.

The ineffectiveness and inappropriateness of outside interventions in the Horn of Africa, allegedly based on a poor understanding of the dynamics at work across the region, has long been viewed by some commentators as a key promoter of conflict. There has been particularly strong criticism of the US role in Somalia in recent years, on the grounds that it has viewed developments excessively through the prism of the ‘war on terror’. Ethiopia has also come in for much criticism from those who are sceptical about both the motivations behind and the likely fate of its military presence in Somalia.

More broadly, some commentators have questioned why since 2004 the international community has allowed itself to become closely associated with a TFG which has a narrow clan base and which now seems close to collapse. Finally, analysts have also highlighted how the efforts of countries in the region to achieve policy objectives through the sponsorship of proxy forces has a long history in the Horn of Africa and needs to be given greater weight by outsiders who are seeking to shape the course of events.

In the short- to medium-term, the keys to peace and security in the Horn of Africa lie in: first, resolving the stalemate between Ethiopia and Eritrea over their common border; and, second, in constructing a durable domestic political and economic settlement in Somalia that is acceptable to the majority of Somalis and to external actors. Also crucial will be the outcome in Sudan, which has not been discussed in this paper, where an elusive quest for peace continues but is subject to powerful stresses and strains.

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