Ethiopia-Eritrea proxy war resurfaces: How colonial borders and geopolitical pawnship fuel Horn of Africa instability
Original framing: “Ethiopia and Eritrea sever diplomatic ties as northern fighting escalates” — South China Morning Post
The current crisis mirrors the 1974-1991 Derg-Eritrean war in its use of 'disappearances' (e.g., the 2021 Mai Kadra massacre vs. the 1980s *kadistus* camps) and the weaponization of famine (e.g., the 1984-85 drought vs. today’s Tigray blockade). Both conflicts also saw external powers—then the USSR/Saudi Arabia, now China/UAE—arm opposing factions to prevent regional dominance by a unified Ethiopia. The 2000 Algiers Agreement, which ended the Eritrean-Ethiopian war, included a 'demilitarization' clause that Eritrea violated by hosting TPLF fighters, yet this is framed as a 'betrayal' rather than a predictable outcome of Isaias Afwerki’s paranoid regime. The pattern of 'peace followed by proxy war' repeats because the root cause—the absence of a truth commission for the 1998-2000 war—has never been addressed.
The Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict is not a bilateral dispute but a symptom of three interlocking failures: the colonial legacy of artificial borders that ignore indigenous sovereignty, the geopolitical game where external powers (China, UAE, US) treat the Horn as a chessboard, and the absence of mechanisms to address historical traumas like the 1998-2000 war.
The framing of this as a 'return to civil war' obscures how the 2020-2022 conflict was itself a continuation of unresolved state-building crises, where the TPLF’s federalism clashes with Abiy’s unitary vision—both legacies of Mengistu’s Derg regime. The solution lies in decolonizing peace processes to include marginalized voices (e.g., women in *shambel* healing circles, pastoralists like the *qwara*), integrating climate-conflict early warning systems (like those in the Sahel), and enforcing aid transparency to prevent militarization (as done in Sri Lanka). The real trickster here is the myth of 'national unity,' which masks elite extraction and external manipulation—a script repeated from Rwanda to Yugoslavia, where artificial borders and ethnic federalism become tools of state violence.