Infrastructure Scramble: Geopolitics, Logistics, and Stability in the Horn of Africa

Abstract

The Horn of Africa (HoA) has changed dramatically, from a region inundated by local conflicts, droughts and famines into a must grab critical arena for 21st-century geopolitical competition. At the core of this competition is geopolitics and logistics infrastructure driving the region's contemporary stability, conflict, and integration dynamics. The glitter of HoA has pitted the global and regional powers in a “new scramble” for influence. It is a mortal combat primarily manifesting through a race to finance and control ports, railways, and military bases. The research leverage a multidisciplinary methodology combining geopolitical mapping, a logistics infrastructure audit, and policy framework analysis. This moves the study beyond cataloguing investments to critically analyse how controlling logistical networks can confer power, create dependencies, and reshape alliances.Thus, a fundamental contradiction framed in the rhetoric of “development” and “connectivity” is revealed. The study shows how infrastructure competition in HoA actually undermines regional integration and sovereignty. Reviewing the projects like the UAE’s port in Berbera and Turkey’s investment in Mogadishu shows deepened fractures, rifting regional relations, and extra-continental rivalries. On another angle infrastructure needs in the HoA have driven cooperation, as seen in the Ethiopia-Djibouti railway or the Ethiopia-Eritrea rapprochement. Notwithstanding, the rsearch finds that external strategic imperatives systematically override local developmental needs. They lead to debt-trap diplomacy, the weaponisation of logistics, and the heightened militarisation of vital trade chokepoints like the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The study concludes, without a concerted effort for agency by the HoA states and regional institutions, this new scramble will produce a legacy of unsustainable debt, strategic dependency, and a deeply fractured regional relations that set the stage for future conflicts.