The Horn of Africa is one of the most complex and volatile regions of the world. Its people are divided approximately evenly between Muslims and Christians, with many followers of traditional spiritual beliefs, as well as vast ethnic diversity and multiple language groups. It comprises three large countries that in the last 25 years have become de jure five and de facto six, following the secession of Eritrea (1993) and South Sudan (2011) and including the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland. International borders have been drawn, redrawn and contested, and almost every border has been crossed by armies in offensive military operations. Its governments are rarely democratic and have practiced diverse forms of authoritarianism, ranging from exclusionary politics to ruthless armed suppression of dissent, from garrison socialism to Islamist theocracy. The Horn has been a point of geostrategic concern for the world’s superpowers since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, through the Cold War and the Arab–Israeli conflict, to the present day. Indeed, much of the domestic political configuration of the region stems from that history of strategic engagement, pursued without concern for the well-being of the people who live there. The region is also poor and environmentally fragile, and has historically been beset by recurrent famine.

It is an enormous challenge to provide a comprehensive political history of the Horn of Africa, including an analysis of its political economy and prospects for peace and security, in a short book. Kidane Mengisteab has bravely taken on this task, and The Horn of Africa is a tremendous condensed compendium of the numerous elements of the chronic crises that beset this region. It is a daunting read, at times like an encyclopedia of every political, economic, and social pathology that could beset a nation.

The core of Mengisteab’s argument is that the states of the Horn are detached from society and intrinsically undemocratic. He provides a catalogue of the terms that scholars of Africa have used to describe the nature of the state in Africa, including “state without citizens,” “vampire state,” “predatory,” “juridical and not empirical,” “quasi-state,” “suspended state,” “collapsed state,” “lame Leviathan,” “bifurcated state,” “disconnected state,” and “imported state” (p. 70). We could, of course, add the term “failed state” used commonly to describe Somalia.

Missing are the aspirations of Hassan al-Turabi of Sudan’s Muslim Brothers for an Islamic state, of John Garang of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) for a “New Sudan,” and of Meles Zenawi of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) for a “democratic developmental state.” One of the elements that is backgrounded in Mengisteab’s account is the role of ideology in the politics of the region. It is notable that the three men mentioned are all deceased, and none has left a successor of comparable stature. It might appear that strong state-based ideological projects are also passing into history, perhaps to be succeeded by a more pragmatic politics. We should ask the question, what does the current leadership vacuum mean for the prospects for democratization and state building?

As befits the complexity of the Horn of Africa, the book has too many themes to detail here. Four key strands warrant emphasis.

First is the challenge of governing diversity. The region as a whole, and the larger countries, possess unparalleled diversity, which has in turn given rise to a fascinating panoply of identity politics. Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan have all adopted federal constitutions, but their forms of federalism are very different. The Ethiopian Constitution of 1995 provides, in theory, for each of the country’s constituent nations to exercise the right of self-determination, up to and including independence. It is a controversial dispensation and, combined with the collapse of the prospects for a multiparty system following the dispute over the 2005 election outcome, it means that ethnic identity has become the main means of expressing political dissent in the country. For the other countries, federalism is ostensibly more a means of bringing government closer to the people and, in the case of Somalia, allaying the deep distrust of central government. Too often, however, federalism has the reverse outcome: It instead provides the chief executive with a bigger apparatus of patronage and more opportunities for divide and rule. The decision by South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir to create 28 new states out of the existing 10, served less as a means of embracing diversity and more a ploy for paying off loyal followers at a time of austerity.

Mengisteab rightly twins the challenge of governing diversity with that of nation building. The avowed nation builders of the region have tended to build centralized, highly authoritarian systems, with the apparatus of state power serving as the vanguard to forge a unified national identity. This was the case for the socialist regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, the Sudanese Islamists in the 1990s, and Eritrea today. None has succeeded. Balancing central executive power with recognizing diversity is a feat yet to be achieved.

A second important theme is the need for a richer institutional ecology for governance. Mengisteab frames this in terms of the separation of powers of a liberal constitutional state. There is a tension here, not fully explored, between liberal central institutions and the governance of diversity. Sudan is an interesting case: During its parliamentary periods (1953–58, 1964–69, and 1985–89), it had exemplary liberal institutions, with an independent judiciary and vibrant parliamentary politics, but the political sphere was dominated by elite parties that were largely uninterested in the grievances of the country’s marginalized peoples. It required either authoritarian leaders (President Jaafar Nimeiri in the 1970s) or a negotiated power-sharing agreement (the Comprehensive Peace Agreement’s interim period, 2005–11) to respect the country’s ethnic plurality. Kenya’s new constitution may provide a potential solution to this conundrum.

Mengisteab makes a special appeal to opposition parties to play a more constructive role, respectful of the fact that a nation’s political life is enriched by a loyal opposition. His attention is particularly focused on Ethiopia, and he closes the book by noting the failure of the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD, Kinjit in Amharic), which performed very well in the 2005 elections but which, by refusing to contemplate anything short of outright victory, provoked the ruling EPRDF and was thus part culprit in the violent crackdown that followed, setting back Ethiopian democratization in a disastrous manner (p. 207). The excesses perpetrated by the government in the crackdown were inexcusable, but the CUD’s actions did look more like a power grab than an exercise in democratic politics. Ten years on, Ethiopia’s political life might look very different—and much healthier—if there were a vibrant opposition holding a substantial number of parliamentary seats, and running some municipalities or even state governments.

A third theme is regional integration and building an architecture for peace and security. The regional organization, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), is weak and is heavily associated with Ethiopia’s foreign policy. A partnership between IGAD and the African Union could form the basis for a more cogent regional security community.

A final theme particularly worthy of emphasis is the enduring poverty of the region, and the concomitant need for any government to address the issue of jobs and livelihoods. This is not just an economic issue but also a governance challenge: How are the traditional authorities that hold sway in most rural areas to be accommodated within a governing structure? Mengisteab points to the bifurcation of the economic sectors and governance apparatus, and to the way in which governments have ridden roughshod over traditional forms of governance—particularly land tenure—in pursuit of modernization. He questions the wisdom of selling very large land leases to commercial investors when a growing local population is shortchanged in the immediate term, and loses future access to land that it may need. He also points to the need for economic transformation because of the fragility of agriculture, and paints an alarming future scenario (p. 178–79):

There are signs that this pessimism may be overstated. For the last 40 years, similar forecasts have been made of environmental crisis and overpopulation. The region has had more than its share of calamities, but the success of Ethiopia in overcoming the current drought is a hopeful sign. Whereas the drought of 1984–85 contributed to a contraction of GDP by more than 13% and the deaths of at least 600,000 people, a more severe and widespread drought in 2015 has only cut the growth rate (which, at the most pessimistic estimate of 4.5%, is still faster than population growth) and is not expected to cause starvation deaths. There may be more space for optimism than Mengisteab concedes.