Governing the Horn’s External Linkages: Agency, Domestic Politics and Local Power in the Horn of Africa – Gulf Relations

Abstract

The Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf have millennial relations characterised by mutual interaction and influences. However, from the Cold War period onwards, international relations scholars focusing on strategic and security analysis have used a realist approach to depict these relations as largely one-way involvement and influence from the Gulf to the Horn of Africa. Yet, this approach portrays the Horn of Africa as a Gulf and other middle and great powers’ strategic chessboard and fails to account for the reality of political dynamics in the Horn of Africa and the agency of the local state and non-state actors in their external relations. This article argues that the realist approach’s depiction of foreign relations mainly as power struggles between unitary state actors is reductionist and presents an inadequate framework for the analysis of the Horn of Africa’s complex external relationships involving various state and powerful societal (non-state) actors. This privileges structure over agency disproportionally, requiring recalibration of the realist framework’s conceptualisation of the ‘state’ and ‘power’. As a result, the article proposes that a more nuanced actor-based account which includes domestic political dynamics and locally prominent internationally active societal actors is necessary for a more realistic analysis of the Horn’s external relations.