When states feel secure but people don't

Today's column is based on two premises. One, unhealthy politics leads to an unhealthy state. Two, the state is more secure when the people are secure. The problem is not simply that states pursue security, but that the pursuit of state security through dominance, militarisation and strategic competition can undermine the very human security it is supposed to protect. Be it Ukraine, the Arabian Peninsula, the wider Middle East, Ethiopia, Sudan or the many African states afflicted by civil war, it is the state rather than the people who have increasingly become the primary referent object of security. Politics around the world is based on the prevailing political assumption that people are secure when the state is secure.

Yet this logic often produces a tragic cycle. First, the state oppresses its own people, which invites a military intervention by big powers claiming a moral and international obligation to liberate the people from domestic oppression. The intervention, then, provokes resistance from the very people it claims to protect, who rise against a foreign military presence. The intervening power eventually withdraws. Generally speaking, at the end of the cycle, and after much death and destruction, there is little change in the lives of the people. In some cases, people continue to live under the same regime or one no less oppressive than the one they had originally sought to escape.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Iran and Yugoslavia have all become victims of this tragic cycle. Now Ethiopia appears to be a potential laboratory for similar experiments. Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a devastating border war between 1998 and 2000, before eventually moving towards reconciliation. In 2018, their rapprochement culminated in a peace agreement for which Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. Yet the promise of peace proved short-lived. In 2020, Eritrea joined Ethiopian federal forces in the war against the People's Liberation Front of Tigray. The Tigray leadership demanded greater constitutional and political autonomy, while Addis Ababa viewed the Tigray leadership as an obstacle to its broader national ambitions, including securing reliable access to the Red Sea. Eritrea's port of Assab lies only about 40 km from Ethiopia's northern frontier, although Tigray lies between the two.

The human cost of this conflict has been catastrophic. The 1998–2000 Ethiopia-Eritrea war is estimated to have claimed tens of thousands of lives, while the conflict that erupted in Tigray in 2020 produced an even greater humanitarian catastrophe. Estimates of deaths associated with the conflict including those resulting from fighting, famine and the collapse of medical services vary, with some reaching hundreds of thousands. At roughly 140 million, Ethiopia is Africa's second most populous country. It is a strategically located state whose internal instability has consequences that extend well beyond its borders. The recent deterioration in Ethiopia-Eritrea relations is particularly alarming because it suggests that the peace that once earned international acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize is once again giving way to the logic of confrontation.

The geopolitical dimensions of the crisis make the situation even more complicated. Saudi Arabia has cultivated close relations with Eritrea, because of the latter's strategically important position along the Red Sea, a maritime corridor of vital significance to Saudi security and commerce. Egypt also maintains close relations with Eritrea, largely because of its deep concerns over Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile, upon which Egypt depends heavily for its water supply. Sudan shares a long border with Ethiopia and has its own historical, ethnic and territorial interests along the frontier. The communities living on either side of the border have strong social and family connections.

Ethiopia, on the other hand, has developed a close relationship with the UAE, which has become an important economic and strategic partner and investor. Turkey and Israel further complicate this emerging geopolitical picture. Analysts view the relationships among Israel, the UAE and Turkey through the broader lens of competition for influence in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea. Israel, in particular, has maintained a longstanding relationship with Ethiopia, providing military assistance, training and technology since the 1960s, when Ethiopia was confronting the Eritrean insurgency. Israel also wants to maintain strategic relevance in the Horn of Africa by securing a meaningful stake in the evolving architecture of Red Sea maritime security. The result is a domestic conflict whose strategic geography is attracting a wide circle of regional and extra-regional powers.

Ethiopia clearly demonstrates the central dilemma of modern international security. A domestic conflict rarely remains domestic once it intersects with the strategic interests of surrounding states and major powers. What begins as a struggle over constitutional authority, political autonomy, territory or access to resources can gradually become a contest over ports, trade routes, maritime security, regional influence and geopolitical alignment. The danger is that people are caught in the middle again, and their security calculations become secondary.

Both primacy, with its pursuit of global and regional dominance, and restraint, grounded in the principles of liberal internationalism, have failed to deliver lasting global peace. As competing grand strategies, neither has succeeded in preventing great-power wars or the proxy conflicts waged in the shadow of great-power rivalry. The world must therefore look beyond these competing approaches and confront a deeper source of international instability - the security dilemma. Through the security dilemma, one state's pursuit of security becomes another's source of insecurity, setting in motion a cycle of fear, militarisation and confrontation.

As states increasingly securitise their national interests in the name of protecting sovereignty and territorial integrity, the modern international system sees states become more heavily armed and more determined to defend their borders. Yet the people living within them become increasingly insecure, exposed to violence, death and destruction. Breaking this cycle requires a different way of conceptualising international order - one that moves beyond the endless pursuit of dominance and the limitations of restraint. The answer may lie in 'civilisationalism', an emerging concept that seeks to rethink how civilisations coexist and engage with one another in an increasingly contested world. Still a work in progress rather than a fully developed theory, civilisationalism offers a possible starting point for reimagining global peace. Details on it in my next article.