Leenco Lata. The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland: The State and Self-Determination in the Era of Heightened Globalization. Waterloo, Onterio: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. xi + 219 pp. Maps. References. Index. $24.95. Paper.

Abstract

Leenco Lata. The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland: The State and in Era of Heightened Globalization. Waterloo, Onterio: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. xi + 219 pp. Maps. References. Index. $24.95. Paper. The author of this book stated in an interview (http://info.wlu.ca/~wwwpress/Catalog/ Interviews/lata.html) that this is the work of a political activist motivated more by search for answers to practical questions than scholarly theorization. The book indeed bears mark of a strongly committed political commentator with specific views on issues of nationalism, ethnic identity, and self-determination in Horn of Africa in a global perspective. But it also contains a well-informed and very interesting, sometimes provocative, analysis of Horn and its historical background, based mainly on secondary literature and personal experience. A central place in account is accorded to old concept of self-determination, seen here in primarily ethnic/national terms and not in those of popular and democracy, as it originally emerged before and during era of French Revolution. Leenco Lata is a former member of Ethiopian Transitional Government (1991-92) and of Oromo Liberation Front, an armed movement fighting Ethiopian and now resides in Canada as an independent consultant and scholar. The literature on political history and contemporary politics of Horn of Africa is already voluminous, but I found Lata's book an original and engaged contribution to debate with new thoughts on politics and conflict in region, to which a brief review cannot do justice. It contains a historically based examination of nature of state failure and oppression in tormented region of Horn, of interdependence of intraand interstate problems, as well as of potential of state (re)formation. Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia all have a record of highly problematic and violent politics and show a serious lack of legitimacy and national integration-despite large differences among them. Ethiopia, for example, has a very long central state tradition and a history of partly conflicting, partly shared power arenas, in contrast to Somalia, with an inbuilt, essentially antistate, centrifugal clan-based politics. Part 1, Self-Determination in History, ranges over self-determination as popular sovereignty, a concept that emerged in feudal France in early eighteenth century; decolonization in Africa characterized as aberrant self-determination; post-Cold War trends in nature of state; and recent trends in self-determination. Part 2, entitled Resonance of Conflicts in Horn of Africa, focuses on five countries of Horn, with emphasis on Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia. The author sees self-determination as quest for (political) correspondence between state, nation, territory, people and (4, 16, 27, 85, passim), a precarious and perhaps impossible thing even in best of circumstances. The most problematic units are of course nation and people, because they cannot be clearly defined or delineated in any exclusivist sense. Also, ideas of sovereignty must be decentered. The country histories in chapters 5 and 6 are often controversial and revisionist and are written from a perspective primarily shaped by contemporary concerns. I was also struck by fact that in chapter 7 on Ethiopia, successive Ethiopian governments up to present are blamed for every conceivable wrong in country's recent history and not seen as having any merit whatsoever-perhaps an unfair and unhistorical analysis. …