Image credit: Umbra Space, Doraleh Multipurpose Port, Djibouti, 23 April 2023, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0; false-colour treatment.
Paper I: Conceptualizing Regional Reorganization through a Regional Relationship Network Framework
By Hiyabel Samuel, Junior Research Fellow
Glossary and Abbreviations
AMP Authoritarian Middle Power
State that possesses significant regional influence while combining authoritarian governance with the use of economic, diplomatic, security, and infrastructural instruments to shape political relationships beyond its borders.
GERD Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam
A hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia that has become a central issue in regional politics due to its implications for water governance, interstate relations, and bargaining among Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt.
RRN Regional Relationship Network
An analytically bounded configuration of strategically consequential relationships organized around a shared strategic object, issue, or political problem.
RSCT Regional Security Complex Theory
An approach that explains regional security through patterns of security interdependence among actors whose threats, vulnerabilities and strategic concerns are closely connected.
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- The Horn Poses a Regional Puzzle
The neo-realist reading of the Horn of Africa as a collection of separate crises, or a “chain of localisms” [PDF], in which external powers mediate individual security dynamics, overlooks how the region’s territorial disputes, security alignments, and strategic infrastructure intersect with extra-regional dynamics. These frameworks, while capturing important processes within the Horn, do not sufficiently explain how those processes become interconnected across the regional and global system.
Recent scholarship has highlighted the Horn’s strategic relevance beyond the region. Its proximity to the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Bab al-Mandab, Suez Canal, and the wider Indian Ocean positions it as a major artery of world trade and a site of competition among regional and extra-regional powers. As such, ports, railways, military facilities, and transport corridors have acquired significance beyond their commercial roles. They now generate new forms of dependencies, intensify territorial disputes and enable external actors to acquire political and security access.
It is precisely the Horn’s strategic relevance that has generated this linkage. Political decisions made in one part of the region increasingly reshape the behaviours of exogenous actors, tethering conflicts, infrastructure projects, and maritime access across multiple arenas. For this reason, isolated case analysis is inadequate for understanding the Horn because it treats these evidently connected processes as discrete phenomena. This poses a problem for regional analysis. Regional orders matter to global politics because the stability or breakdown of strategically important regions shapes the wider international system. These stakes make the Horn’s regional order an object of urgent analysis. The paper therefore asks: How has the formation of strategic relationships linking the Horn of Africa to actors across the wider Red Sea region transformed, and to what extent has their changing configuration reorganized political order within the Horn?
- Situating Regional Order in the Contemporary International System
Answering this question requires clarifying what polarity can and cannot explain. Unlike during the Cold War, an analysis of contemporary international politics cannot weigh polarity as significantly. Polarity traditionally refers to the distribution of material capabilities [PDF] among great, middle, and regional powers, and to the distribution of power centers within the international system. In the bipolar world order, international competition was primarily organized around two opposing blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. In the wake of the latter’s collapse, many scholars expected the resulting unipolar moment to produce a rules-based liberal order under U.S. hegemony. However, America’s unsuccessful and costly military interventions coupled with the repercussions of the 2008 financial crisis challenged the notion that system-level unipolarity translated into a coherent global political order.
Polarity may thus describe the distribution of global power and dictate the opportunities and constraints great powers face, but it does not effectively identify nor explain who brokers relationships, whose authority is recognized, or how political dependence is produced. This limitation becomes especially important at the regional level. The growing presence of powerful states within regional systems may describe the distribution of capabilities and further explain different alignments, hierarchies, institutions, or transactional arrangements. Polarity may therefore establish the conditions under which regional change becomes possible. Still regional orders must be examined through the relationships that translate capability into access, influence, and authority.
Acharya’s account of a multiplex international order provides a useful starting point for understanding these conditions. In the absence of unipolarity, multipolarity is not presumed either, as it would require multiple poles of equally distributed power. Multiplexity, on the other hand, is a system characterized by dispersed and asymmetrical centres of agency. His analysis explains that the weakening of the once-unipolar centre does not mean an absence of hierarchy or great-power competition. It does, however, indicate that the political space has widened, thereby providing regional actors the opportunity to simultaneously cultivate partnerships, exploit rivalries, and avoid exclusive alignment.
This expanded room for manoeuvre is particularly consequential for authoritarian middle powers (AMPs), whose fewer domestic constraints on resource deployment afford them more flexibility to form and revise regional partnerships. States such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye do not need to become great powers to alter political relationships with a neighbouring region. Indeed, their influence is exercised through ports and logistics, infrastructure finance, security partnerships, diplomatic brokerage, patronage, and support for state and non-state actors. In this regard, their position within the global hierarchy does not fully explain their regional influence. Their influence is also positional and relational: it depends on the strategic assets they control, the connections they construct and the alternatives they provide to other actors.
These changes in political agency make the regional level increasingly important, but they do not by themselves explain how regional relationships organize or how external involvement is mediated within regions. Buzan and Waever’s Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) provides the central point of departure for addressing this problem. They argue that security interdependence clusters geographically because threats are often geographically bound. To that effect, regions possess an analytical standing that can neither be reduced to domestic politics nor credited to the global distribution of power.
However, RSCT presents two limitations. First, despite its ability to accommodate non-state actors, RSCT remains strongly oriented toward state-based security relationships [PDF]. This limitation is especially consequential in the Horn because it is shaped by relationships involving states, armed groups, sub-state authorities and regional institutions. Though these actors do not possess equal authority, their relationships shape [PDF] the behaviours of other regional actors. Secondly, RSCT privileges security interdependence above all other forms of political organization. Contemporary Horn dynamics, in addition to security-based relationships, are increasingly organized through economic dimensions such as ports, maritime corridors, and infrastructural investments. The UAE’s involvement in Berbera and Assab, for instance, cannot be understood only as military positioning. A full analysis would require equal consideration of commercial management, geo-economic statecraft, territorial claims, diplomatic alignment, and political legitimacy.
The task is therefore not to reject RSCT or other scholarly theories, but to refine their insights and apply them to the Horn. This research will draw from RSCT’s explanation of why regional relationships cohere, and adopt Godehardt and Nabers‘ treatment of regional order as politically constituted rather than geographically given. Desoires and Cheeseman’s characterization and identification of AMPs as actors whose agency has become increasingly consequential under multiplexity will also be adopted. Finally, Chome’s analysis will be used to explain how, with greater room to maneuver, AMPs exercise regional agency and normalize transactional political relationships. Particularly, how these relationships are governed by flexible, issue-specific bargains and personalized brokerage rather than binding multilateral commitments.
Individually, these works do much to explain the contemporary Horn. Collectively, however, they still do not yet provide a method for tracing relationships from their formation around particular strategic objects to their cumulative consequences across the region.
The following framework addresses this gap by operationalizing regional reorganization through historical process tracing rather than replacing existing conceptions of regional order. By tracing the formation and transformation of strategic relationships, it examines how actors use them to secure and control access to resources and political arenas. It further examines whether and how these relationships reorganize regional order by redistributing authority, influence, access, recognition, and bargaining power.
Drawing on Godehardt and Nabers, this paper defines regional order as the contingent configuration of political relationships through which a region is organized at a given time. Regional reorganization therefore refers to consequential change in that configuration over time. This definition makes relationships, rather than the number of powerful states or the level of external involvement alone, the primary object of analysis.
- A Strategic Relationship Framework for Regional Reorganization
To track regional order and measure its reorganization over time, this paper introduces Regional Relationship Networks (RRN) as the analytical unit for tracing the emergence, evolution, and interaction of strategically consequential relationships. The RRN framework understands network structures as persistent patterns of relations that either enable or constrain actors. It is a configuration of relationships organized around a shared strategic object; these may include ports, corridors, territories, maritime spaces, sovereignty claims, or governance initiatives.
The RRN framework has two analytical levels. The first examines the emergence and evolution of individual RRNs. The second examines how interactions among RRNs reorganize political relationships across the Horn. Distinguishing these levels is crucial, as changes in an RRN may be politically consequential at the network level without constituting a reorganization of the regional order as a whole.
3.1 The Regional Network Level
Put simply, an RRN is the patterned interactions between actors whose behaviours have regional consequences. In this framework, ‘actor’ refers to regional states, middle powers and great powers, as well as firms, armed groups, regional institutions and sub-state authorities.
RRN emergence therefore occurs when actor interactions become sufficiently continuous, patterned, and consequential to alter the opportunities, constraints, or strategic calculations of other actors involved. For illustrative purposes, the following discussion uses the Assab Maritime RRN to demonstrate how an individual RRN may be identified and analyzed. Organized around the strategic significance of Assab Port, the example is used solely to clarify the framework’s analytical logic and does not constitute the empirical analysis itself.
Emergence is observed through strategic interaction mechanisms between actors, e.g. hedging, geo-economic statecraft, maritime engagement, infrastructure investment, patronage, mediation, brokerage, security partnerships, and resource bargaining. A mechanism alone, however, does not establish an RRN; it must generate relationships that actors reproduce or continually rely upon. In the illustrative case, the Assab Maritime RRN emerged from the convergence of a long-standing Eritrea-Ethiopia relationship [PDF] with pre-existing Emirati and Saudi diplomatic and economic ties with Assab and the wider Red Sea. As these relationships grow increasingly organized around maritime access, they generate patterned and consequential interactions that constitute an RRN.
Once an RRN has emerged, its changes are assessed through four relational properties which together capture how strategically consequential relationships evolve over time. Persistence asks whether strategically consequential relationships endure, recur, or adapt across crises, leadership changes, and shifting interests. Density concerns the number, depth, and multidimensionality of relationships within the network. Actor centrality identifies which actors occupy the most strategically influential positions within the region. This may derive from control over infrastructure, finance, and security or from relational influence through access, recognition, and brokerage. Relational asymmetry assesses how resources, alternatives, leverage, authority, and dependency are distributed.
Applied to the Assab Maritime RRN, relationships centred on Assab port have persisted beyond individual agreements, adapting to changing diplomatic and security conditions while continuing to shape regional strategic calculations. The network’s density increased as engagement expanded beyond maritime access to encompass infrastructure investment, military cooperation, diplomatic coordination, logistics, and regional security, increasing both the number and multidimensionality of relationships. Over time, the UAE has become increasingly central through its involvement in infrastructure investment, security partnerships, and maritime logistics [PDF] centred on Assab. Meanwhile, an asymmetric relationship developed due to Ethiopia’s dependence on coastal states for maritime access. Because Ethiopian maritime traffic was channelled through port and transit infrastructure developed and controlled by its coastal partners, those partners gained greater bargaining leverage over Ethiopian trade routes, even as Ethiopian trade remained economically important, particularly to Djibouti.
These properties make the RRN changes observable without conflating a new agreement between actors with regional transformation. At the Regional Network Level analysis, the framework establishes who participates in an RRN, how strategically consequential relationships emerge, and how changes within the network can be assessed through historical process tracing. It does not, however, determine whether regional order has been reorganized. That question is addressed only at the Regional Configuration Level, where interactions among multiple RRNs are examined.
3.2 The Regional Configuration Level
No individual RRN constitutes a regional order alone. Regional order resides in the wider configuration of interacting networks. The second level therefore examines how RRNs become strategically interconnected and how their interaction changes the resulting regional configuration. Four configurational processes make these relationships observable.
Overlap occurs when previously distinct RRNs become connected through shared actors, strategic objects, infrastructures, mechanisms, or political arenas. The Berbera Corridor RRN, for example, overlaps with the Ethiopia-Somalia Maritime Access RRN when Ethiopia’s use of Berbera becomes inseparable from Somalia’s sovereignty claims and Somaliland’s pursuit of recognition. Brokerage occurs when an actor, institution, or RRN creates, sustains, or redirects relationships between otherwise distinct networks. Türkiye’s mediation between Ethiopia and Somalia may therefore connect maritime-access politics, sovereignty bargaining, and regional diplomacy. Diffusion occurs when relational change originating in one RRN produces adaptation, conflict, alignment, or institutional response in another. It demonstrates that the relationship between networks is consequential rather than coincidental. Network substitution occurs when one RRN provides an alternative pathway, partner, mediator, or source of access that reduces an actor’s reliance on another network. Ethiopia’s pursuit of alternative maritime relationships may not end its dependence on Djibouti, but it could redistribute bargaining power and increase strategic autonomy.
These processes become visible through what this research calls Zones of Convergence. These describe the spatial, institutional, or issue-based arenas in which two or more RRNs recurrently interact. The Bab al-Mandab Strait, Berbera Corridor, Assab Port and Port Sudan may function as such zones in the wider Red Sea maritime arena. Zones of Convergence are where overlap, brokerage, diffusion, substitution, competition and reinforcement occur.
Once regional configurations are identified, their changes may be examined through two dimensions. Configurational centrality identifies the extent to which an RRN becomes structurally consequential for the wider configuration. High centrality occurs when changes within an RRN repeatedly affect several other networks, whereas peripherality occurs when those effects do not lead to broader consequences. Configurational cohesion assesses the extent to which interacting RRNs form an integrated and cooperative configuration. Fragmentation is therefore observed when these configurations comprise competing regional clusters. It is worth noting that greater connectivity does not necessarily produce greater cohesion, as interaction may not be cooperative.
3.3 Conditions for Inferring Regional Reorganization
Regional reorganization cannot be directly observed through a single agreement, investment, deployment, or mediation initiative. Rather, it is an analytical conclusion derived from cumulative relational evidence. Four conditions must therefore be satisfied.
Transmission requires a change originating within one RRN to produce observable adaptation in at least one additional network. For example, the development of the Berbera Port and Ethiopia’s subsequent acquisition of a stake in the project entangled a bilateral, port-centred relationship with Ethiopia’s wider maritime strategy and Somalia’s sovereignty politics. Redistribution requires those changes to alter alignments, dependencies, brokerage roles, strategic autonomy, bargaining power, influence, or access. For instance, Ethiopia’s pursuit of maritime access through Berbera increased its leverage with Djibouti, elevated Somaliland’s strategic significance, and placed the UAE at the centre of overlapping commercial, diplomatic, and security relationships in the Horn.
Stabilization requires cumulative changes to alter the authority structures, legitimacy claims, governance arrangements, or accepted practices through which regional politics are conducted. These patterns may take the form of recurring mediation, transactional routines, personalized brokerage, infrastructure-based dependencies, or normalized forms of external intervention. The repeated Turkish mediation process between Ethiopia and Somalia, together with proposals linking mediation to long-term infrastructure and security arrangements, illustrates how mediation and infrastructure-based access may become recurrent processes for organizing regional political relationships, even if their normalization remains incomplete.
Finally, durability requires arrangements to persist beyond an isolated agreement or crisis through continued reliance and stable political expectations. This criterion draws from scholarship on institutionalized relationships, which posits that consequential relationships form in contexts of repeated interactions and stabilized expectations. Following this logic, evidence of regional reorganization is not cited in a single port concession or mediation initiative, but rather, when such relationships continue to shape political behaviour across successive agreements, investments, and diplomatic engagements over time.
The four conditions must be satisfied cumulatively to constitute regional reorganization. A change in regional order is only inferred when cumulative relational changes transmit across networks, redistribute political relationships, stabilize new regional practices, and endure over time. The framework therefore distinguishes between the multiplication of relationships and consequential change in the regional political configuration.
- Research Design for the Linked Paper Series
The wider research program extends the framework developed in Paper I through two linked empirical papers. Paper II conducts the within-network, or network-level, analysis. Through process tracing, it reconstructs the constituent actors, strategic objects, interaction mechanisms, formative events, and subsequent evolution of six selected RRNs: the Berbera RRN, Assab RRN, Sudan Territorial Competition RRN, GERD RRN, Ethiopia-Somalia Maritime Access RRN and Red Sea Governance RRN.
Paper III conducts the across-network, or configurational, analysis. Drawing on the evidence generated in Paper II, it examines overlap, brokerage, diffusion, and network substitution across shared Zones of Convergence. It then evaluates configurational centrality and peripherality, alongside cohesion and fragmentation, before applying the four inferential conditions of Transmission, Redistribution, Stabilization, and Durability to assess whether the cumulative evidence supports a conclusion of regional reorganization.
The RRNs are purposively selected to provide theoretical variation across maritime access, infrastructure and logistics, territorial competition, hydropolitical bargaining, sovereignty, regional governance, external intervention, and mediation. The principal observation period begins in 2018. This date is treated not as the origin of every RRN, but as an analytical conjuncture in which previously developing maritime, diplomatic, infrastructural, security and commercial relationships became increasingly interconnected. Process tracing may therefore move backward before 2018 to reconstruct the formative origins of individual networks.
The framework thus proceeds from relationships within networks, to relationships between networks, and ultimately to the question of whether their cumulative changes durably reorganize the regional political order of the Horn. Papers II and III will assess whether these changes satisfy the four inferential conditions of Transmission, Redistribution, Stabilization and Durability, rather than presuming regional reorganization from the outset.
- Conclusion
This paper first establishes why the Horn of Africa cannot be adequately understood as a collection of discrete geopolitical crises, linked only by geography or external intervention. Instead, it asserts its regional connectivity and credits its strategic significance for producing a wider regional arena in which politically consequential relationships are created and sustained through infrastructure investments, maritime access, mediation and security partnerships. This paper thus posits the empirical challenge of the Horn, not only to explain the growing agency of relevant actors and the new forms of competition, but to explain how these relationships collectively reorganize regional politics.
This paper has argued that existing approaches each capture an important dimension of this transformation. Yet none comprehensively provide a systematic means of tracing how strategically consequential relationships emerge, interact and accumulate into broader regional change. The Regional Relationship Network (RRN) framework is therefore proposed to address this analytical gap by treating relationships as the primary analytical units whereby regional reorganization becomes observable. By distinguishing between change within individual networks and transformation across the wider regional configuration, the framework establishes observable processes and inferential conditions through which claims of regional reorganization can be evaluated rather than assumed.
Rather than building off of the assumption that the Horn has entered a new regional order, the RRN framework provides a means of empirically assessing whether cumulative relational change becomes sufficiently transmissive, redistributive, stabilizing, and durable to justify that conclusion. The following papers will apply this framework to examine whether the Horn’s increasingly dense web of strategic relationships represents not merely greater regional interaction, but a genuine reorganization of regional political order. In doing so, the framework also speaks to a broader analytical question. As the contemporary international order becomes increasingly fragmented and regional actors acquire greater strategic agency, understanding how regional political orders are produced, transformed, and sustained becomes essential to explaining wider shifts in the distribution of power beyond the region itself.
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