The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland: The State and Self-Determination in the Era of Heightened Globalization

Barb Bloemhof is an assistant professor in the Department of Sport
Management at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

The contribution of The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland is Lata’s
careful linking of the political theories of nationalism and the state
to the history of the East African states of Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea,
Djibouti, Somalia, and Somaliland. The Horn of Africa includes the only
African state that was never successfully colonized (in some tellings,
Ethiopia was a colony of Italy for three days). The analysis illustrates
important themes and lessons about institutional evolution precisely
because of how different these countries’ experience of ascendancy to
their current statehood was compared to that of other African states.

Lata’s well-paced, economically written, and thoroughly integrated
explanation of the important distinctions between nation and state is
clear, compelling, and well supported. In the first section of the book,
Lata describes the empirical origins of these concepts—and the related
concepts of people, sovereignty, and territory—in Europe. This sets
the stage for their theoretical application in the context of the Horn
of Africa, in the book’s second section. This choice is particularly
fruitful because of Europe’s strong imperialist presence in the
continent, and the pivotal role played by Britain and Italy in
opposition to France in shaping the future institutional and economic
endowments of the Horn of Africa. The insights about self-determination
as it actually came about that Lata provides in the second section are
richer for the support of his careful analysis in the first section.
This book deserves to be widely read.