The Greater Horn of Africa under the Bipolar World Order: Superpower Rivalry in the Regional Politics from the 1960s to 1991

In the first subpanel, we will discuss, in particular, the ways in which diplomatic relations and military events in the GHA of the 1960s-1980s reflected the global perspectives of inter- superpower relations, what strategies the regional governments used to draw various kinds of resources from their superpower alignments (or a contested neutrality), and what made some of them switch Cold War-time alignments. It will be argued that the Cold War powers often didn’t use their capacity to prevent acute regional conflicts from escalating, but rarely directly provoked or inspired the latter.