This chapter offers a pathbreaking urban history of the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands. Eastern Ethiopia’s cultural distinctions and tense interethnic relations are often described in terms of broad contrasts between Somali nomadic pastoralism and the sedentary agriculture of Ethiopian highland populations. A close reading of historical accounts tells a different story. Beginning with a discussion of present-day ethnic competition and cooperation in the marketplace, I trace Jigjiga’s social relations back in time, showing how towns including Jigjiga have been crucial sites of interethnic encounters, identity formation, and cultural change. Shifting the focus away from Ethiopia’s tense history of ethno-territorial politics, I suggest that in the city, everyday interactions between identity groups are significantly shaped by expectations about transactability: who is trustworthy, who is not, and who is a legitimate target for cheating or for collaboration. This argument places urban encounters at the center of understanding the salience of ethnic and clan identities in eastern Ethiopia. I argue, furthermore, that urban encounters in Jigjiga play an important role in how distinct identity groups relate to geopolitical borders outside the city and have done so throughout Jigjiga’s history.

This chapter examines Iran’s growing security interests in Africa during the 1970s, as its sphere of influence broadened following the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf in 1971. The shah spoke in this period about his Indian Ocean policy – the plan to form an economic and security union of the countries bordering the Indian Ocean, which would work together to free the area from imperial power interference. This formed the basis of Iran’s grand strategy in the mid- to late 1970s. The chapter explores Iran’s increasing preoccupation with Soviet expansion in the Horn of Africa, and how this prompted the shah to develop relations with countries such as Sudan and, after the Ethiopian Revolution and the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974, Somalia.

Building on Chapter 5, which established the basis of Iran’s security concerns in Africa, this chapter looks at the reasons for and nature of Iran’s support for Somalia’s Siad Barre in his war against Ethiopia in 1977–78. The chapter examines the complex relationship between the shah’s Iran and the Carter administration, and questions the extent to which the shah’s much-talked-about independent foreign policy was actually independent from US interests and demands. For although the shah wanted to support the Barre regime in Somalia, he was constrained by the United States, which would not allow him to supply US-made weapons to the regime. On the other hand, the shah’s lobbying on behalf of Barre, and his pledges to come to Somalia’s aid if it were attacked by Ethiopia, were taken seriously by, and influenced policy-making decisions in, not only the United States, but also Ethiopia, Cuba and the Soviet Union.

By 1977–78, the Horn of Africa became a key area of Soviet–American rivalry, with both superpowers supporting rival regimes. Both the Soviets and the Americans wanted their clients to embrace specific legitimating discourses, such as human rights or Marxism-Leninism, establishing patterns of deference, recognition, and legitimation. By the late 1970s, China concluded that involvement in Africa was not worth the cost and retreated, while the Soviets continued despite the costs. Driven by inertia of proletarian internationalism, Moscow sought involvement in faraway struggles, seeking recognition as the leader of revolutionary forces. As before, the Soviets failed to see the contradiction between detente with the United States and supporting third world revolutions. Meanwhile, in the late 1970s, the Cold War was reshaped by China's transformation under Deng Xiaoping, who shifted focus from revolution to development. This strategic pivot led China to lean toward America, which the United States welcomed to contain the Soviet threat. Despite being based on tactical choices rather than shared values, this alignment deeply worried Soviet leaders.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the extensive summaries and paraphrases of books 1 and 5 of Agatharchides’ lost work On the Erythraian Sea (written c.145 BC) that were made by Diodoros (book 3), Strabo (book 16), and especially Photios (Bibliotheke, codices 213 and 250). Additional testimonia and fragments are arranged as five extracts. The chapter introduction reviews Agatharchides’ career, his writings, and his scholarly milieux in Alexandria and later (probably) Athens, and upholds the view that On the Erythraian Sea was a self-contained work, not part of a larger whole. The geographical and ethnographic material in this work–a historical work–is distinctive for being based on information from Ptolemaic commanders and explorers, and remarkable for its sympathy with some of the Ptolemies’ oppressed subjects. Agatharchides’ depiction of these peoples implies an evolutionary scheme of development–from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists to farmers–such as Dikaiarchos (Chapter 9 of this volume) had suggested in his philosophical works. The surviving summaries include remarkable passages on elephant-hunting and the sufferings of gold-miners; but Agatharchides’ work was more often accessed through its reworking by Artemidoros (Chapter 18) than read in its own right. A new map highlights the principal places and peoples mentioned by Agatharchides in East Africa and Arabia.

Drought is a complex phenomenon with a long-lasting global impact on human society and natural ecosystems suggesting the need for greater attention to its underlaying causes. Here, we evaluated drought conditions in ESK (Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya) countries of East Africa during 1964–2015. We evaluate the severe droughts that occurred during 1973–1974, 1984–1985 and 2010–2011 in ESK, based on the drought severity levels. Results show that the drought characteristic parameters of drought duration and intensity increase over time, but drought frequency does not. Higher spatial drought trends were observed in large areas of the ESK countries with mean trend values of 0.0064, 0.0028, 0.00064 and -0.00095 yr–1 for SPEI-1, SPEI-3, SPEI-6 and SPEI-12, respectively. The total land area of the ESK under drought was 38–43, 46–80 and 25–46 per cent during 1973–1974, 1984–1985 and 2010–2011, respectively. Dire drought impacts have affected northeastern and southern Ethiopia, eastern Somalia and northeastern Kenya during the drought years. The spatial drought pattern analysis suggests an increase in drought in vulnerable areas which calls for better drought management strategies to reduce the risks on the natural and human systems.

In postcolonial Muslim-majority contexts, particularly in areas struggling with political violence, achieving the ideal of the rule of law is straightforward neither in theory nor in practice. Plural and overlapping legal orders – derived from Islamic principles, from the traditions of indigenous communities, and from the laws and institutions imported by colonial administrators or foreign aid workers and managed by postcolonial state leaders – shape how citizens come to understand different values associated with legal order. In these states, common ideals and shared visions of what law is and how it should work are scarce. Litigants may shop around among different legal systems (each one derived from an amalgam of traditions) for a desired outcome of their disputes, as they are pulled in one direction or another by family members, religious and community leaders, and lawyers.

Only in his twenties, Tayyib was already one of Somaliland’s most promising lawyers. I met Tayyib early on a sunny morning, and we sat down on a couple of plastic chairs along the dirt path outside the Hargeisa courthouse. I asked him why he worked in legal aid programs designed to help poor people have free legal representation in court, what cases he was arguing that day, and what events had shaped his career and the broader development of law in Somalia and Somaliland. As we neared the end of our meeting, I invited him to share his professional goals. I wondered if he hoped to enter politics, private practice, or the United Nations system. These paths would provide more stability, renown, and salary than his current position did, and they were often taken by the most prominent professionals. He looked away, toward the dilapidated courthouse and one-story government buildings. Then he turned back to me and said he “would like to stop” being an attorney altogether.

This chapter presents the first empirical test of the theory using a paired case comparison of two rebel groups that are highly similar organizationally, had the same knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance, operated in the same place and the same time in Eritrea, but had two different goals: the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). The ELF leadership articulated moderately transformative goals and although rebel leaders were familiar with the CCP’s governance, they decided to introduce but a partial imitation of it. By contrast, the EPLF articulated more transformative, revolutionary goals and explicitly decided to imitate the CCP’s governance almost exactly, even when the EPLF’s governance provoked violent civilian resistance. Because these two organizations were similar in all ways but the transformativity of their long-term goals, the empirical evidence strongly supports the theoretical claims. The chapter draws heavily from archival materials collected in the United States, United Kingdom and rebel primary sources.

This chapter leverages a within-case variation in the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), a rebel organization that operated in a country that neighbored Eritrea at the same time as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) from Chapter 5. The SPLM/A initially articulated less transformative goals, and despite knowing about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance, refused to introduce any elements of it, consistent with expectations. In 1994, however, the SPLM/A articulated a new set of moderately transformative objectives and correspondingly introduced governance initiatives that more closely approached, but did not replicate exactly, the CCP’s strategy, also consistent with expectations. The SPLM/A in conjunction with the EPLF and Eritrean Liberation Front cases in Chapter 5 offers a comprehensive test of the theory using the full range of variation in the independent variables (transformativity of rebel goals) and the corresponding range of the dependent variable (rebel governance strategies).

This chapter looks at the Brotherhood’s post-2013 history up until 2018 – a period that saw a growing confrontation between a new class of second-rank apparatchiks in Egypt and the traditional leaders abroad. It highlights the key debates that shaped the internal political climate during that time, and how geopolitical events occurring in the larger Middle East and North Africa region affected the Brotherhood’s organizational evolution. The chapter further reveals how, within the context of an aggravating security crackdown in Egypt, the leaders of the respective coalitions set up different committees and offices, which led to growing organizational splits that further weakened an already subdued Society. Based on over forty Oral History interviews with Brotherhood leaders, rank-and-file members and youth members, conducted during a combined six months of fieldwork in Istanbul, Doha, London, Berlin and Geneva between 2015 and 2019, a close reading of the narratives that were propagated on different Brotherhood-affiliated websites, and an overview of relevant policy analyses and legal documents, the chapter shows how the leadership struggles having marred the Brotherhood’s internal political life before the Egyptian uprising of 2011 exacerbated the organization’s gradual fragmentation in the post-2013 period.