Over roughly the past decade, global actors have transformed the Red Sea/Horn of Africa littoral from a peripheral theatre into a dense hub of port concessions, military facilities, and diplomatic activism. These past 10 years have seen an unprecedented explosion of activity in the region, becoming a stage for great power competition between the US, EU and China. In addition to the influx of these global players, the regional powers of the Persian Gulf have turned their attention and resources towards the Horn with similar fervour. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey have all acquired or sought port concessions and bases along the African shore: Djibouti, Eritrea (Assab), Sudan (Suakin), Somalia/Somaliland (Bosaso, Berbera), among others^[1]. In the region, we now see multiple Gulf and Turkish bases and access agreements on the African shore; as well as the adoption of long-term commercial concessions dominating key chokepoints near Bab el-Mandeb. Classic Horn of Africa literature treated Gulf involvement as episodic or secondary; however the pattern which has emerged in recent years is sustained, multi-dimensional, and increasingly institutionalised^[2]. Scholars have turned their attention to an emerging “Red Sea arena” that sees the collision of previously distinct Middle Eastern and African security systems^[3], as assertive Arab military and political engagement reshapes existing African peace-and-security norms.

What explains this sudden, intense Gulf interest in the Horn’s Red Sea coastline, and does the pattern of bases, ports and diplomatic initiatives amount to a new regional security order – or merely to overlapping, ad hoc projections of Gulf rivalries into African space?

The explosion of Gulf interest in the Horn of Africa began largely in response to the fallout of the 2011 Arab Spring. Shaken by the threat to the old regional order and the unseating of four regional “presidents for life”; Gulf monarchies started looking for new partners, influence, and “backup” allies around the Red Sea and in Africa as a hedge against the threat of future, similar region-wide unrest, beginning the “Race to the Horn’^[4]. Later developments contributed to a rapid integration of the region in the geo-strategic security interests of the Gulf states, leading to the development of a conception of a “Red Sea Arena” which increasingly involved the Horn of Africa and the African Red Sea Coast in the understanding of security in the Red Sea^[5]. The 2015 Saudi-led intervention in Yemen made control of the Red Sea and Bab-al-Mundab a priority for Saudi Arabia and its allies. Abu Dhabi and Riyadh moved quickly to achieve this, signing security deals with Eritrea in 2015 for a 30-year lease of the Eritrean port of Assab as an operational naval and logistics hub^[6]. This move occurred concurrently with Djibouti’s “base boom” in the mid-2010’s, where Djibouti opened itself up to hosting a multitude of foreign bases to foreign powers including the US, EU and China; demonstrating how lucrative and strategic base-rental could be, for both the renter and host. Neighbors like Eritrea and Somaliland followed suit, allowing UAE military use of Assab and Berbera respectively in return for port investment^[7]. The 2017 Qatar diplomatic crisis between a Saudi-led coalition and Qatar saw the need for engagement with the Horn stressed to policymakers in Doha. The blockade of Qatar pushed both sides to hunt for allies, ports, and media/military partners in the Horn. This led to the development of competing alignments between Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, as Doha looked to secure its supply of food and minerals sourced from the Horn, forcing governments to “pick a side”; consequently internationally extending the bilateral competition even further afield. Soon after, in 2017, Turkey opened its largest overseas military base in Mogadishu, adding a strong Qatar-aligned actor to the mix and sharpening the sense of a multi-sided base race^[8]. Put together, these events turned the Horn from a peripheral concern of Gulf policymakers into prime real estate for bases and ports, making today’s “race for the Horn” a direct outgrowth of Yemen’s war, the Qatar crisis, and the realization that Red Sea real estate equals leverage over global trade and regional security.

Alex de Waal captures this moment of division between Mogadishu, Hargeisa, Asmara and Khartoum spurred by the “Race to the Horn”, as a clash between an African “Pax Africana” model of institutional security governance and a Middle-Eastern security alliance logic based on shifting coalitions and regime survival^[9]. The Horn, once buffered from such Gulf fault lines, now sits directly on them. De Waal warns that such a development represents a shift in the wrong direction for regional security, sidelining stabilising norms centred on the African Union and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) in favour of Middle-Eastern style coalition politics, and opening the region’s politics to destabilising proxy dynamics^[10]. For the Horn governments, the Faustian bargain offers promises of infrastructure development, new patrons and rents; but at the cost of more external competition, and militarisation within their borders stoking greater, more threatening tensions with their neighbours^[11].

In questioning whether these developments constitute a new regional security order, or simply a spillover of Gulf politics into a proxied periphery; Harry Verhoeven argues that what we are seeing is a structural shift in security interdependence rather than a transient burst of opportunism. Historical ties between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn are being re-securitised, producing “changing geographies of security” and “competing visions of regional order”^[12]. In this reading, the Red Sea is no longer a boundary between two regional security complexes but the spine of a single one. The Horn is now the hinge through which Gulf domestic politics, great-power competition and African regionalism now intersect.

For African institutions, this shift is deeply ambivalent. On one hand, Gulf money and diplomatic attention have helped to unlock peace deals; the 2018 Ethiopia-Eritrea rapprochement, for instance, owed much to Saudi and Emirati mediation^[13]. On the other, de Waal warns that external coalitions risk eroding AU and IGAD norms about constitutional order and African-led security, as Horn elites leverage Gulf patronage to shore up regimes and sidestep continental scrutiny.

The result is a double movement. The Horn’s Red Sea coastline has clearly become more central to global policymaking; a newly recognised hinge for Gulf security, and a new theatre of great-power competition in which China, the United States and Europe are present.  But this centrality also makes local politics more precarious: ports become prizes in wider rivalries; military bases tie fragile states into distant conflicts; and African regional organisations struggle to keep pace with a rapidly reconfigured security map.

Ultimately what can be seen in the Gulf states’ strategic approach to the Horn of Africa and its newfound importance in policy can be said to be a shift in conception of the region from buffer to hinge. The Horn is no longer a marginal shock absorber between regions. It is a pivotal space on which multiple security and economic projects now depend. The pressing question is whether this new hinge can be governed in ways that reinforce -rather than undermine- African agency and regional stability, or whether it will buckle and break under the weight of the rivalries now resting upon it.