Panel 50: The Horn of Africa at the Brink of the 21st Century – Coping with Fragmentation, Isolation and Marginalisation in a Globalising Environment

A first look at the states of the Horn in the year 2010 exposes an area which seems to have lost contact to the global political and economical developments of the rest of the world.

The failed Somalia intervention of the allied forces in the early 1990s, followed by a fragmentation of the country, and the failure of the Western concepts of democratisation through the support of the so-called "new generation of African leaders" like in Eritrea and Ethiopia, as well as the isolation of Sudan as "terrorist regime" again put the stamp of a region in permanent turmoil on the Horn of Africa. As of 1998 as the latest, all hope on securing stability in the area had been lost, and at the brink of the 21st century the entire region appeared as an "ungovernable area" which at its best could be partially controlled, but had to be strategically considered as an object of permanent containment.

Does this view on the political events during the last two decades match reality? This panel aims at investigating to what extent the assumed marginalisation of the Horn of Africa is realistic or rather unidimensional. We expect papers which on the one hand contribute to an historical, economical, political and socio-cultural analysis of the region, and on the other hand welcome contributions which document case studies of current developments of the Horn societies within the above given frame.