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The Horn of Africa: state formation and decay
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2018
Year
African HistoryColonialismAfrican ConflictInternational RelationsSouth-south CooperationAfrican American StudiesAfrican DiasporaState FormationSocial SciencesMiddle Eastern StudiesAfrocentricityChristopher ClaphamLanguage StudiesAfrican PoliticsGlobal StudiesAfrican StudiesWonderful BookAfrican Development
This is a wonderful book written with great erudition and affection for the peoples and countries of the Horn of Africa, by a longstanding expert who is now enjoying emeritus creativity at the University of Cambridge's Centre for African Studies. It is also yet another valuable contribution to regional studies from London's excellent publisher, Hurst. Christopher Clapham uses his extensive first-hand and academic knowledge of the Horn of Africa to look critically at the success and failure of state formation in modern Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. He looks briefly at the early and modern history of the region but properly starts his analysis from 1991—which he considers ‘Year Zero in the Horn’ (p. 60). This was the year that President Mengistu Haile Mariam and the Derg were overthrown in Ethiopia by the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) which captured Addis Ababa, as well as the year that the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) took Asmara after their long insurgency. Also, in Somalia, 1991 was the year that President Siad Barre fled in his one remaining functioning tank.