The Horn Is Now One War

For years, the world looked at the Horn of Africa and saw a collection of separate problems.

Sudan’s civil war was Sudan’s problem. Ethiopia’s internal conflicts were Ethiopia’s problem. Somalia’s insurgency was Somalia’s problem. South Sudan’s political collapse was South Sudan’s problem. Each crisis had its own diplomatic track, its own humanitarian response, its own set of international mediators flying in and out of capitals with frameworks designed for a single country in a single conflict.

The Global Peace Index 2026, released this month by the Institute for Economics and Peace, argues that this entire way of thinking is now dangerously wrong.

The Horn of Africa is no longer a set of separate conflicts. The conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan, and Somalia are now interlocked through every channel that causes conflicts to spread.

That is not an analytical observation. It is a warning.

The Architecture of a Single War

The Horn of Africa, comprising Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Djibouti and South Sudan, is the clearest example of all nine conflict diffusion mechanisms operating at the same time. Nine mechanisms. Simultaneously. In one region.

What does that mean in practice?

It means that a weapons shipment crossing from Sudan into Ethiopia affects the military balance in the Amhara conflict. It means that gold smuggled from Darfur finances the RSF’s continued capacity to fight, regardless of what any foreign government decides to do about sanctions. It means that refugees fleeing Sudan’s civil war arrive in Ethiopia and South Sudan carrying trauma, hunger, and in some cases armed faction loyalties that reshape the political environments of the countries receiving them. It means that the Gulf states competing for influence over Somali ports and Eritrean coastlines are simultaneously funding rival sides of the Sudanese war, making every conflict in the region a proxy battlefield for the same external actors.

Researchers say the region now functions as a connected ecosystem of conflict where instability in one country rapidly affects neighbouring states.

The ecosystem metaphor is exact. In a natural ecosystem, removing one species does not solve the problem if the conditions that allowed the imbalance to develop remain unchanged. In the Horn of Africa today, resolving one conflict while leaving the others untouched does not produce stability — it produces a temporary pause while the connected system finds new pathways for violence to flow through.

Sudan: The Engine at the Center

Sudan’s civil war is the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis, with an estimated 150,000 people killed, over 12 million displaced, and famine confirmed across multiple regions.

Those numbers deserve a moment of stillness before the analysis continues. One hundred and fifty thousand dead. Twelve million displaced. Famine confirmed across multiple regions of a country that was already one of the world’s most food-insecure before the war began.

But the GPI’s most alarming finding about Sudan is not the humanitarian catastrophe itself. It is what the report reveals about the war’s self-sustaining financial architecture.

The war in Sudan is partially self-financing through gold. The Rapid Support Forces produced an estimated ten tonnes in 2024 alone, worth approximately US$860 million. With gold prices rising to historic highs, the financial incentive to control mines has skyrocketed, making it unlikely that withdrawing external state sponsorship will stop the fighting.

Read that again. Even if Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and every other external sponsor of both sides in Sudan’s war simultaneously withdrew their support tomorrow, the RSF’s gold revenues alone would sustain its capacity to fight. An estimated 400 tonnes of Sudanese gold were smuggled between 2012 and 2024 into the UAE via Chad, Libya, the Central African Republic and Uganda.

This is not a war that can be ended by cutting off foreign funding. It is a war that has developed its own financial metabolism — one that runs on a commodity whose global price has never been higher. The conflict has, in the most literal sense, become a business. And businesses do not stop operating because external stakeholders withdraw their approval.

Ethiopia: The Fault Line That Could Split Everything

Ethiopia sits at the geographic and demographic center of the Horn. It is the region’s most populous country, the seat of the African Union, the anchor of East African economic integration, and the origin point of the Blue Nile that supplies Egypt and Sudan with most of their water.

It is also, right now, a country fighting multiple wars simultaneously on multiple fronts.

The Ethiopian government has accused Eritrea of supporting armed groups inside Ethiopia, including alleged cooperation with the TPLF and Fano. Meanwhile, Addis Ababa has hosted Eritrean opposition groups and reportedly explored mobilizing segments of the Afar population in ways that could affect Eritrea’s control of the port of Assab.

In the Amhara region, the Fano militia continues fighting federal forces across more than sixty administrative zones. In Tigray, the Pretoria peace agreement has produced a ceasefire without reconciliation, with displaced populations still unable to return to contested territories and Eritrean troops still occupying Tigrayan land. In the Ogaden, the long-running grievances of the Somali region have not disappeared simply because they receive less international attention than they once did.

Reports suggest Ethiopia has become an important node in the UAE’s support network for the RSF. The same country that is fighting internal insurgencies is now also serving as a logistics hub for a foreign proxy war in a neighboring country. The entanglement goes in every direction simultaneously.

IEP’s conflict escalation risk matrix identifies Ethiopia and Eritrea as at risk of large-scale armed conflict. The two countries fought a devastating war between 1998 and 2000 that killed over eighty thousand people. The conditions for a repeat are, by multiple analytical measures, more present today than at any point since the 2018 peace agreement that briefly made Abiy Ahmed a Nobel laureate.

Somalia: The War Inside the War

Somalia’s conflict appears, from a distance, to be the most contained of the Horn’s crises — a long-running insurgency against al-Shabaab, an established international peacekeeping framework, a federal government that has survived and is even, by some measures, consolidating.

That picture is misleading in ways that matter.

Al-Shabaab continues to hold territory, collect taxes, and recruit from communities that the federal government has not reached with institutions worth trusting. The military offensive launched in 2022 has stalled. Turkish combat forces are now fighting directly on Somali soil — a development that stabilizes in the short term while deepening dependency in ways whose long-term consequences remain uncertain.

And Somalia is not insulated from the regional conflict system. The same arms trafficking networks that supply factions across Sudan and Ethiopia also move weapons into and through Somali territory. The same Gulf rivalry that is reshaping Sudan’s war is simultaneously reshaping Somalia’s political landscape — with Saudi Arabia backing the federal government’s consolidation while the UAE’s expulsion from Mogadishu pushed Abu Dhabi toward supporting Somaliland and Puntland as alternative vectors of influence.

Countries including Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia have become increasingly important in regional power struggles, with external actors seeking military, economic and political influence along the coastline.

Somalia is not simply fighting al-Shabaab. It is simultaneously navigating the Saudi-UAE rivalry, the Ethiopia-Eritrea tension, the Somaliland recognition crisis, and a regional conflict system in which its own stability is partially dependent on the stability of countries it cannot control.

The Iran Multiplier

No analysis of the Horn’s conflict system in 2026 is complete without addressing the factor that the GPI identifies as a force multiplier for every other dynamic in the region.

The Iran war is a force multiplier for the spread of conflict. It has amplified existing pathways by raising prices in import-dependent states, distracting Gulf countries.

The war between the United States and Iran that began in February 2026 has not directly involved any Horn of Africa country. But its indirect effects are already visible across the region. Gulf states that had been managing their Horn of Africa proxy competitions with some degree of strategic patience are now operating under the pressure of a wider regional conflict that demands their attention and resources simultaneously. Oil price volatility driven by the Iran war is hitting import-dependent Horn of Africa economies with inflation that weakens governments and creates the conditions for further instability. Iranian proxy networks that operated across the region — including Houthi connections that already made the Red Sea a conflict zone — are now part of a wider, more explicitly declared confrontation.

The Horn of Africa did not ask to be part of the Iran war. It is part of it anyway, through the same mechanisms of interconnection that the GPI has now formally documented.

The Number That Should Alarm Every Policymaker

The economic impact of violence worldwide rose by 3.2% to a record US$21.81 trillion. This is equivalent to 10.5% of global GDP. For the ten countries most affected by violence, the average impact was 23.4% of GDP, compared to just 2.2% for the ten least affected.

For countries already among the world’s poorest — Sudan, Somalia, South Sudan, Eritrea — a conflict cost equivalent to nearly a quarter of GDP is not an abstraction. It is the difference between a generation that goes to school and a generation that goes to war. It is the difference between infrastructure that gets built and infrastructure that gets destroyed. It is the difference between institutions that gradually develop the capacity to govern and institutions that are permanently overwhelmed by the demands of managing violence.

The Horn of Africa’s conflict system is not only destroying lives in the present. It is consuming the human and financial capital that would otherwise be building the future.

Why Separate Solutions Will Not Work

The GPI’s core finding has a direct implication for how the international community approaches the Horn of Africa — and it is an implication that most of the current diplomatic architecture is not designed to accept.

For years, policymakers treated Sudan’s civil war, Somalia’s insurgency, Ethiopia’s internal conflicts and South Sudan’s political instability as distinct challenges requiring separate solutions. The Global Peace Index argues that the approach is increasingly outdated.

Every peace process currently operating in the Horn of Africa is designed for a single country. The Pretoria Agreement addressed Ethiopia and Tigray. The various Somalia peace frameworks address Somalia. The Berlin Sudan conference addressed Sudan. None of them are designed to address the connections between these conflicts — the arms flows, the proxy sponsorships, the refugee movements, the gold smuggling networks, the Gulf rivalries — that make each conflict harder to resolve because of what is happening in all the others.

A peace agreement in Sudan that does not address the RSF’s gold revenues will not hold. A stabilization strategy for Somalia that does not account for the Ethiopia-Eritrea tension on its northern flank is missing a major variable. A diplomatic framework for Ethiopia that ignores the UAE’s simultaneous role in Sudan’s RSF and Somaliland’s recognition politics is negotiating with one eye closed.

The Horn of Africa needs a regional framework. Not nine separate bilateral processes. A framework that treats the conflict system as what the GPI has now formally confirmed it to be — a single, interconnected crisis requiring a coordinated, regional response.

That framework does not currently exist. And until it does, the conflicts will continue to feed each other — each one making all the others harder to end, in a cycle that the world’s current diplomatic architecture is simply not designed to break.