Intergovernmental Authority on Development

June 15, 2011 | World Defense Review

Around the Troubled Horn

Even by the much-reduced expectations of the subregion, the news emanating from the geopolitically-sensitive, but ever-volatile Horn of Africa has not been at all good these last few weeks....

June 13, 2011 | World Defense Review

What’s at Stake in Sudan’s Abyei

In this column space three months ago, I warned that the tensions were so heightened that the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended the decades of civil war between the Arab-domin...

February 1, 2011 | J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Somalia in Need of New Approach Two Decades after State Collapse

Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of the night when Mohamed Siyad Barre, president of the last entity that could plausibly be described as the government of Somalia, fled Mogadishu in hi...

September 30, 2010 | World Defense Review

A Subtle, But Significant, Shift in U.S. Somali Policy Opens the Door to Realism

Last Friday, speaking in New York to reporters one day after attending a major meeting on Somalia chaired by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the margins of the 65th session the Un...

July 20, 2010 | Daveed Gartenstein-Ross The Long War Journal

The African Union’s Beleaguered Somalia Mission

Co-Authored with  Seungwon Chung Being an African Union peacekeeper in Somalia must be one of the world's worst jobs, even in a down economy. The African Union Mission...

May 27, 2010 | J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Ballots and Bullets: The Tale of the Two Somalias

Last week, Somalis marked the fiftieth anniversary of their achievement of independence from colonial rule. The contrasting manner in which two parts of the onetime Somali Democratic Republic obs...

October 15, 2009 | World Defense Review

Eritrea: Spoiler Exacerbates Crisis in the Horn of Africa and Beyond

By Dr. J. Peter Pham One of the frustrations with which Africa's friends have had to repeatedly cope over the years has been the seemingly utter incapacity of the African l...

September 24, 2009 | World Defense Review

Putting Puntland’s Potential into Play

By Dr. J. Peter Pham In last week's column, I noted that the United States military and intelligence communitie...

June 23, 2009 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Fiddling While Somalia Burns

Difficult as it may be to conceive, the already-bad security situation in Somalia deteriorated further over the weekend. Yet as Islamist militants brought their offensive to the edge of Mogadishu...

April 11, 2007 | Dr. J. Peter Pham World Defense Review

Peacekeepers with No Peace to Keep

Somewhere along the crooked path that runs from the collapse of the Soviet Union that signaled the emergence of the United States as the world's lone superpower to the seemingly intractable...

January 4, 2007 | World Defense Review

Sweeping Up in Somalia

The reports continue to stream in of the hasty retreat of the militants of Somalia's Islamic Courts Union (ICU) in the face of an unexpectedly heavy offensive by Ethiopian air and land force...

December 29, 2006 |

In Somalia, An Africa Hawk Rises

With most Westerners in the throes of holiday mirth this week, an estimated 20,000 Ethiopian troops deployed to neighboring Somalia went on the offensive against the forces of the Islamic Courts...

December 21, 2006 | World Defense Review

The Next Sudanese Conflict

Almost all of the attention which policymakers in the West have given to Sudan over the course of the last year has been rightly focused on what even the United Nations describes as "the world&#0...

December 14, 2006 | World Defense Review

Not Being Had by Al-Itihaad

The news from the Horn of Africa continues to be worrisome. The recent catastrophic floods that swept through the region have not slowed the advance of the radical Islamists, who in June seized c...

July 5, 2006 | World Defense Review

Sheikh Aweys Won’t Go Away (At Least by Himself)

Regular readers of this column know that I have long warned of the against giving Africa the short shift in the war on terrorism, pointing to the militant Islamism's rise in Sub-Saharan poor...