Contemporary states are generally presumed to be founded on the elements of nation, people, territory, and sovereignty. In the Horn of Africa however, the attempts to find a neat congruence among these elements created more problems than they solved. Leenco Lata demonstrates that conflicts within and between states tend to connect seamlessly in the region. When these conflicts are seen in the context of pressures on the state in an era of heightened globalization, it becomes obvious that the Horn needs to adopt multidimensional self-determination. In Structuring the Horn of Africa as a Common Homeland, Leenco Lata discusses the history of conflicts within and between Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and the Sudan, and investigates local and global contributory factors. He assesses the effectiveness of the nation-state model to forge a positive relationship between these governments and the people. Part 1 summarizes the history of self-determination and the state from the French Revolution to the post-Cold War period. Part 2 shows how the states of the Horn of Africa emerged in a highly interactive way, and how these developments continue to reverberate throughout the region, underscoring the necessity of simultaneous regional integration and the decentralization of power as an approach to conflict resolution. Motivated by a search for practical answers rather than a strict adherence to any particular theory, this significant work by a political activist provides a thorough analysis of the regions complicated and conflicting goals.

Contemporary states are generally presumed to be founded on the elements of nation, people, territory, and sovereignty. In the Horn of Africa however, the attempts to find a neat congruence among these elements created more problems than they solved. Leenco Lata demonstrates that conflicts within and between states tend to connect seamlessly in the region. When these conflicts are seen in the context of pressures on the state in an era of heightened globalization, it becomes obvious that the Horn needs to adopt multidimensional self-determination. In Structuring the Horn of Africa as a Common Homeland, Leenco Lata discusses the history of conflicts within and between Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and the Sudan, and investigates local and global contributory factors. He assesses the effectiveness of the nation-state model to forge a positive relationship between these governments and the people. Part 1 summarizes the history of self-determination and the state from the French Revolution to the post-Cold War period. Part 2 shows how the states of the Horn of Africa emerged in a highly interactive way, and how these developments continue to reverberate throughout the region, underscoring the necessity of simultaneous regional integration and the decentralization of power as an approach to conflict resolution. Motivated by a search for practical answers rather than a strict adherence to any particular theory, this significant work by a political activist provides a thorough analysis of the regions complicated and conflicting goals.

The authors show that with violent conflict in the developing world as the critical issue for the twenty-first century, and conflict prevention a central security problem for the developed and developing world, self-determination movements can only be understood, and conflict prevented, in the context of global economic and cultural forces

This book provides a unique comparative study of the major secessionist and self-determination movements in post-colonial Africa, examining theory, international law, charters of the United Nations, and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU)/African Union’s (AU) stance on the issue. The book explores whether self-determination and secessionism lead to peace, stability, development and democratisation in conflict-ridden societies, particularly looking at the outcomes in Eritrea and South Sudan. The book covers all the major attempts at self-determination and secession on the continent, extensively analysing the geo-political, economic, security and ideological factors that determine the outcome of the quest for self-determination and secession. It reveals the lack of inherent clarity in international law, social science theories, OAU/AU Charter, UN Charters and international conventions concerning the topic. This is a major contribution to the field and highly relevant for researchers and postgraduate students in African Studies, Development Studies, African Politics and History, and Anthropology.

Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.