The Horn of Africa’s Architecture of Permanent Conflict

Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 appeared to offer a viable model for ending wars across the Horn of Africa. Brokered under the auspices of the African Union—led by Ethiopia and supported by the United States—it brought the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army to the negotiating table on the promise of redistributing oil revenues, and set the stage for southern Sudan’s secession in 2011. The agreement was flawed, not least in its failure to integrate Darfurian groups and other stakeholders, yet it endured. Its success, however, depended on a coherent coalition of external powers wielding sufficient leverage, combined with domestic elites willing to compromise and adequate financial resources to broker a viable settlement. None of those conditions persists today.

The Horn of Africa has changed profoundly in the two decades since the Naivasha accord. War has returned to Sudan, Ethiopia has been consumed by large-scale internal conflict and lost its regional dominance, while Somalia remains trapped in yet another cycle of civil war, and Eritrea’s shrewd ruler, Isaias Afwerki, continues to wield outsized influence over his isolated kingdom. The region has transitioned from a state-centric conflict system—one in which wars concluded through negotiations offering power-sharing and revenue sharing—to a transnational war economy in which capturing the state is no longer a prerequisite for predation.

Geostrategic rivalries, principally between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates but increasingly drawing in Israel, Türkiye, and Iran, have pulled the Horn into a cascading series of interconnected conflicts. Transnational conflicts have deep roots in the region, but their current scale and intensity represent a marked intensification. Fresh proxy wars have erupted along both historical and emerging fault lines, fueled by arms and financing from Ankara, Doha, Riyadh, and above all the assertive UAE. At the centre sits the spiralling Sudan conflict, with the Emirates constructing supply lines for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) from Libya through to Ethiopia, while several foreign patrons—including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Türkiye—back the Sudanese military.

Much of the discourse on Gulf-Horn of Africa relations has centred on the patron-client dynamics and the fluid alignments that have formed and dissolved over the past decade. Yet more revealing is the question of whether current developments reflect an older logic of predation—now amplified by contemporary technology and Gulf architects—or evidence of something more structural in the disintegration of the sovereign order across the Horn.

The ‘state’ in the Horn persists, but its economic and military infrastructure has been progressively co-opted by foreign patrons, whether through UAE-linked ports in Puntland and Somaliland or Turkey’s military restructuring of Ethiopian and Libyan security architectures via drone deployments. Nearly every central authority in the region now competes for political rents and influence with transnational networks of armed groups, commercial actors, and foreign patrons whose interests are sustained by ongoing conflict. The proliferation of sub-national armed actors capable of projecting devastating force from the periphery—increasingly armed with drones—has fundamentally altered the logic of conflict itself.

The Horn now confronts a transformed conflict system in which the boundaries between war and peace, state and non-state, and domestic and external are dissolving, and new conflicts are perilously absorbed into entrenched transnational war economies.

Spatial collapse and transnational war economies

As each conflict theatre across the post-Pax Americana Horn of Africa and Middle East becomes increasingly interwoven, escalations in one arena rapidly metastasise across the system. The aftershocks of the US-Iran war are already reaching the Horn’s shores, beyond the surging costs of fuel and fertiliser. Competing coalitions—one led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye, the other by the UAE and Israel—have hardened as they jostle for dominance along the Red Sea, whose strategic importance has surged following the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Recent Iranian-backed Houthi attacks on infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and transiting vessels underscore the fragility of the maritime order along this waterway. Even the consensus that once underpinned the protection of international maritime navigation—exemplified by the suppression of Somali piracy in the late 2000s—has been upended by American adventurism in the Middle East.

The regional conflict system has now reached a threshold at which any new war is rapidly absorbed and amplified by the existing architecture of foreign patronage and transnational war economies. Fears of a potential conflict involving Tigray, Eritrea, and Ethiopia are instructive: observers worry not about the consequences of confrontation in isolation, but about the impossibility of containing such a conflict within existing boundaries. A new war in northern Ethiopia—currently teetering on the edge amid recent probing attacks in Tigray—would acquire the same self-sustaining, multi-patron dynamics that have rendered Sudan’s war so resistant to resolution, given its overlap with the Saudi-Emirati rivalry and Addis Ababa’s increasingly overt role in facilitating cross-border RSF support.

The blurring of peace and war extends across the entire Horn. South Sudan and Ethiopia are both sites of contested peace accords where diffuse violence persists. Years-long insurgencies in Ethiopia’s most populous regions of Oromia and Amhara show no sign of abating, hollowing out state authority and straining any monopoly on force exercised by Addis Ababa, even as the government faces a coalescing of domestic and regional opposition. Somalia, too, contends with the twin pressures of Al-Shabaab and political fragmentation, with a rising tide of armed hostilities between the centralising Turkish-backed Mogadishu administration and peripheral actors—including the Emirati-backed Puntland and Jubaland—that increasingly look to foreign patrons rather than Mogadishu for security and economic opportunity. The political settlements that historically anchored these states are fracturing.

With economic and humanitarian crises gripping each of these countries, the splintering of domestic political settlements, and the influx of Middle Eastern capital, the traditional pathway to peace—as demonstrated by the CPA—of bringing armed actors into the state through the offer of power and revenue is becoming ever more difficult to deliver. As states and sub-national actors alike accrue wealth and arms at alarming speed from Middle Eastern powers, the lure of a state’s diminishing spoils is fading.

The RSF epitomises this transformation. A sweeping hybrid political-military-commercial enterprise, its transnational war economy stretches from Dubai to Benghazi in Libya. Shielded by the UAE, the RSF has committed innumerable war crimes and faced accusations of genocide against Darfurian communities, yet endures thanks to flows of bullion and weapons, while what remains of the international community averts its gaze. The RSF is but one of several subnational actors operating beyond state lines, alongside proto-states such as Al-Shabaab and the Houthis, and the Emirati clients of Somaliland and southern forces in Yemen.

In sum, political authority in the Horn is being refashioned into a sweeping interconnected system spanning the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, binding increasingly fragmented territories into a self-reproducing regional conflict system.

Drones and coercive power

Drone technology is instrumental in enabling this transformation. The Horn’s conflict system is being further remade by the growing proliferation of drones in both state and non-state hands—supplied predominantly by Middle Eastern powers. Medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) drones furnished by the UAE and Türkiye have become commonplace in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan, reshaping the political economy of coercion by offering a qualitatively different fiscal and political alternative to committing ground forces.

MALE drones have already played decisive roles in the Tigray war and in Sudan. Ankara and Abu Dhabi’s provision of drones to Addis Ababa in 2021—including Chinese Wing Loong 1s and Bayraktar TB2s—helped force Tigrayan rebels into retreat, while civilian targets across the region were indiscriminately struck. At the time, the Tigrayans possessed no effective defence against such attacks. Recent reports suggest, however, that the TPLF—now allied with Eritrea—will not repeat such vulnerability, and is actively sourcing its own drone and anti-drone technology.

Sudan has since become the fuller demonstration of the drone model, with both sides wielding unmanned aerial vehicles to immense devastation—at least 1,000 civilians were killed in the first months of 2026 alone. The Sudanese army retook Khartoum in 2025 aided by the widely favoured Turkish Bayraktar drones as well as Iranian Qods Mohajer-6, and has since controversially deployed them in cross-border attacks targeting RSF supply lines in Chad. The UAE, for its part, has equipped its paramilitaries with considerable UAV capabilities, which have relentlessly terrorised towns and cities across Sudan with incessant, indiscriminate drone strikes—not least during the siege of El Fasher, which pummelled the city before its fall in October 2025.

Drones are also feeding into the ‘grey conflicts’ of the Horn, with deniable, unattributed strikes on the rise. Turkish operations off Puntland’s coast and Ethiopian strikes near Mekelle in recent weeks are just the latest examples, becoming a favoured weapon for those seeking plausible deniability. In Somalia, concerns are particularly mounting around purported strikes by Turkish air assets against a former opposition-allied military commander—targeting something other than the jihadist objectives as claimed.

The technology further upends the directional logic governing relations between armed actors and the state. The great armed movements of the late twentieth century in the Horn—including the TPLF and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army—regarded the state as the vehicle through which sovereignty could be exercised, with violence oriented toward capturing it. Even in 2021, the TPLF sought to bring down the Abiy government.

But as Sudan has demonstrated, drones have partly severed that assumption. A non-state actor no longer needs to seize the centre if it can strike from afar, sustained by external patrons immune to diplomatic pressure. Following their ejection from Khartoum by the Sudanese army, a flurry of RSF drone strikes on Port Sudan in May 2025 underscored the continuation of war by other means, as the former state paramilitaries degraded military assets from a distance. Keeping one’s enemies beyond the city gates is now a far more complex proposition in 2026 than in previous decades.

Not all drones are MALE, however. The Iranian-backed Houthis have most radically pioneered low-cost, high-impact drone deployment as a military and political instrument, turning them against Red Sea shipping—first Israeli-linked vessels, now Saudi interests—since 2023. Their reach is expanding across the Horn, fostering non-state to non-state ties with predominantly Islamist movements, including army-linked Sudanese groups and Al-Shabaab. Military expertise and technology moving horizontally between non-state actors and proto-states, rather than simply downward from states, represents another significant shift in the Horn’s conflict theatre. The Houthis have demonstrated that a non-state actor can impose strategic costs on global commerce and constrain the military options of vastly more powerful adversaries, including the United States and Israel—lessons eager to be adopted by other armed groups.

Permanent conflict

Whether characterised as ‘new wars’ or continuities of older conflicts, the decisive shift lies in the structure of incentives. The state-centric settlement mechanisms that historically resolved Horn conflicts become far less effective when armed actors gain access to alternative sources of supply outside state structures.

The conflict system now operating across the Horn functions as a series of interconnected war economies of various kinds—not the temporary militarisation of state resources for a declared conflict, but the structural embedding of predation and armed competition as the baseline political logic. The gap between juridical and empirical statehood—which the post-colonial order papered over and the liberal peace managed at the margins—is now being torn open by actors with both the resources and the interest to exploit it. No single mediator possesses the leverage to impose a settlement from above, with the United States ever less interested in exerting influence over its Gulf allies and consumed by the aftermath of its war with Iran.

This is not a passing phase of instability but a structural recalibration of politics, with wars becoming harder to contain, distinguish from peace, and bring to an end.

Matthew de Waal is a freelance analyst on peace and security focused on the Horn of Africa and Red Sea, based in Nairobi. Until recently, he was Deputy Head of Research and Publications at Sahan Research, a think tank focused on conflict and governance in the region. Matthew has a particular focus on the geopolitics of the Horn and Al-Shabaab.

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