Abdul Mohammed

While the world’s attention is fixed on the war with Iran and its widening fronts across the Middle East, the Horn of Africa is being drawn into the same strategic theatre. The Red Sea no longer separates two regions. It connects their wars.

Since the United States and Israel began their war with Iran in late February 2026, pressure on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has increased the strategic importance of the southern Red Sea. The Houthis have turned that vulnerability into leverage at Bab el-Mandeb. Their control of Mocha, Mayun Island and the Hanish islands has strengthened their position. Missiles, drones, selective attacks and the uncertainty they create can redirect ships, raise insurance costs and convert geography into political power.

The consequences reach the African shore. Djibouti lies close to Houthi-held positions while hosting foreign bases. As fighting between Iran-backed Houthi forces and Saudi-backed government forces intensifies during the past week, it is reported that some 3000 people fleeing Yemen crossed the sea into Djibouti, prompting the authorities in Djibouti to call for international help.

Eritrea’s coast and islands have gained strategic value. Somalia’s trade routes are exposed, Somaliland’s recognition campaign is becoming entangled with offers of security access, and Sudan’s war draws support through the same maritime space. Ethiopia’s search for reliable sea access now unfolds amid military blocs and chokepoint politics.

The Tilly inversion

Charles Tilly famously argued that war made the state and the state made war. In early modern Europe, violent competition compelled rulers to raise taxes, build administrations, organise armies and concentrate authority. In the contemporary Horn, the conditions are almost the reverse.

International recognition can preserve the juridical shell of a state after its institutions fracture. Governments and armed movements obtain weapons, finance and protection from abroad without building durable relationships with citizens. Extraction, illicit commerce and external rents can replace taxation, while drones give actors with little administrative capacity unprecedented destructive reach.

Military survival therefore no longer requires state-building. A government may retain international recognition while losing territorial authority. An armed movement may control populations, trade and territory without accepting the obligations of government. Foreign sponsors can keep both alive. War now makes armed networks, and those networks unmake the state.

State-unmaking is cumulative. Institutions lose people and resources, commanders acquire independent power, and citizens seek protection through communal or militia structures. External insecurity accelerates this fragmentation. Powers seeking ports, bases and strategic depth may deal directly with armed movements, federal entities, local authorities and commercial networks, as well as national governments. Sovereignty survives formally, but its exercise is fragmented.

It is under these conditions that permanent war becomes a reality. It does not require uninterrupted combat in every country. It describes a regional condition in which coercion becomes a normal means of bargaining, wars mutate rather than end, and the institutions needed to make peace weaken with every cycle of violence. States remain on the map while their authority, legitimacy and social foundations steadily erode.

The Red Sea becomes one theatre

The process of the collapse of the Red Sea as a border separating the Horn of Africa and the Gulf has been underway at least for the past decade. The Iran war has exposed the strategic unity of the Gulf, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. Pressure at Hormuz and Houthi leverage at Bab el-Mandeb operate as paired chokepoints. A conflict centred on Iran can therefore affect food and fuel prices in the Horn, Gulf energy exports, Suez Canal revenues and the security calculations of every coastal state.

Gulf states are diversifying partnerships while retaining American protection and reopening channels with Iran. Their search for security, not just military but other forms, has reached and will increasingly reach across the Red Sea.

Indeed, alliance formation and competition for influence and control of ports and trade routes are intensifying. Ports and military facilities now sit at the centre of this contest. Djibouti, Berbera, Bosaso, Assab and Port Sudan attract interest as commercial gateways and nodes in wider security networks.

Investment can bring genuine benefit. But opaque agreements and exclusive military arrangements can turn domestic disputes into international commitments and strengthen subnational actors at the expense of national settlements.

For Horn governments, the lesson is sobering. Imported alliance systems cannot provide durable security. An external patron may offer weapons, finance or diplomatic support, but its commitments change with its interests. A partnership designed to solve one immediate problem can import a much larger geopolitical confrontation. Strategic autonomy requires diversified relationships, not dependence on a different guarantor.

The economic asymmetry is equally important. Gulf states possess sovereign funds, storage capacity and infrastructure; most Horn states have far smaller buffers. Disrupted shipping, higher food and energy costs, falling port revenues or attacks on infrastructure can quickly become fiscal, humanitarian and political crises. Economic disruption in a wealthy state may become institutional disintegration in a fragile one.

Militarisation compounds the danger. Governments facing drones, proxy forces and maritime insecurity will devote scarce resources to weapons, interceptors and regime protection. Public institutions, services and economic transformation receive less. The prioritisation of military survival does not merely damage the state; it changes what the state is for.

It is also notable that the security geography on both sides of the Red Sea has integrated faster than diplomacy.

Three fronts of state unmaking

Sudan remains the clearest case. The war that began in April 2023 as a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has become a conflict among broad and unstable military coalitions. The army’s recovery of Khartoum in March 2025 restored confidence and parts of the national administration. But the RSF retains strategic depth across much of Darfur and has built parallel arrangements. Militias, former rebels, foreign fighters and war economies have acquired interests of their own.

Each principal belligerent can prevent the other from ruling Sudan, but neither has demonstrated a credible path to reunifying and legitimately governing it by force. The longer the war continues, the more de facto partition acquires institutions, revenues, external relationships and political constituencies. Sudan may retain one flag and one seat at the United Nations while being unmade from within.

The Iran war has increased the value of coastlines, ports, islands and airfields. A matter for negotiation through trade and transit can become a military security dilemma. In this context, a second danger lies in renewed confrontation among Ethiopia, Eritrea and forces in Tigray. The Pretoria agreement ended the main fighting but did not settle the underlying disputes. Ethiopia’s demand for dependable sea access has become entangled with wider regional alignments and rising insecurity, gravely affecting Ethiopia’s economic security.

If the current trajectory is not reversed and war is not averted, the consequences would be more devastating than any of the wars of the past three decades. Drones, proxies and external sponsors would accelerate escalation. Even victory would leave devastated borderlands, deeper division and greater foreign dependence, unmaking political order on both sides.

Somalia presents a different form of the same crisis. Its state-making process remains incomplete but has produced consolidating federal institutions and a political order sustained by continuous negotiation. That progress is threatened by tensions between the federal government and member states, Al-Shabaab, and the growing practice of external powers cultivating separate relationships with Somali authorities.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland in December 2025 changed the regional setting. Somaliland’s claim deserves consideration on its history, the will of its people, its record of governance and a negotiated relationship with Somalia. If recognition becomes a transaction for military access or alignment in the Iran war, however, Somaliland risks entering international politics as a forward security platform before it enters as an autonomous political actor. Somalia is weakened by the same logic. State-making cannot be outsourced to competing alliances without producing dependency and further fragmentation.

Peacemaking as statecraft

The region’s mediation machinery has not kept pace with this transformation. The African Union and IGAD confront fragmented wars, divided members and external actors that are simultaneously mediators, patrons and participants. Both are way behind the curve and have yet to adapt their tools and assumptions, including on peacemaking and mediation, to these profound transformations.

Mediation must therefore be treated as statecraft, not as a succession of meetings. It requires sustained political leadership, strong analysis, knowledge of the parties and their social bases, and leverage over the external networks that sustain violence. In other words, mediation today requires ‘sustained political architecture’. Arms transfers, foreign fighters, financial networks and security agreements must become subjects of mediation rather than matters treated as external to it.

African institutions need a standing strategic capacity that connects mediation, civilian protection, conflict economics, and regional diplomacy. It should be financed predictably, including through the African Peace Fund.

The AU and regional bodies like IGAD also need a common framework for the Horn and Red Sea, leveraging and building on existing regional bodies such as IGAD and the Gulf Cooperation Council. This should not be another military bloc. It should support shared threat assessment, political consultation, transparent rules for ports and bases, infrastructure protection, preventive diplomacy and collective engagement with outside powers. Acting together will not eliminate national differences, but it can stop those differences from being organised by rival external alliances.

Rebuilding the state against permanent war

Peacemaking, as a condition for regional and continental integration, must recover state-making as its objective. Ending combat is indispensable, but a ceasefire alone does not recreate sustainable peace and public authority. Political settlements must rebuild constitutional legitimacy, accountable finance, professional institutions and local systems able to provide security and services without militia permission.

Domestic settlement is also the foundation of strategic autonomy. States divided within are easily penetrated from outside. Stronger AU and IGAD also advance strategic autonomy, providing a shield from external pressure and repurposing mediation for changing conditions.