Tensions rising between Ethiopia and Sudan, only less than a week after Sudan accused an Ethiopian military aircraft of crossing into the country, reports Deutsche Welle, a German international media company. The border between Ethiopia and Sudan has been highly disputed for more than a hundred years, with several failed attempts to work out an understanding on exactly where the border should run. However, reports say the already uneasy truce between the two countries began to become unraveled in November of 2020 after a conflict broke out in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region along the disputed border. South Sudan has offered to help mediate the standoff.
There are always going to be border conflicts between smaller countries because there is a constant power struggle in clustered regions to gain more control, South America and Central America are good examples of this. I think that they are both making it difficult to tell who actually incited this sudden border aggression so that countries that want to help are purposefully left in the dark about the specifics of the border conflict, because both sides are claiming the other provoked them. Ethiopia said that Sudan was putting their military on the border. Sudan responded by condemning something called Ethiopian aggression. It makes me think that both of them want a conflict to break out and to wipe out the other with the help of larger, more powerful countries.
To connect this conflict to something we are discussing in class, we are currently discussing geostrategy and liberal hegemony. More specifically, how liberal hegemony is tied to the concept of liberal internationalism and democratic peace theory, and how the United States should act as the global sheriff, interjecting itself into conflicts that the United States won’t gain anything from, but will still step in to preserve as much peace in the world as possible. This Ethiopian and Sudanese border conflict seems like the right thing to stop before it escalates into a much bigger conflict. But in reality, we probably aren’t going to negotiate with these two countries because we can’t convince our Senate that it’s worth spending resources to reestablish a peace, making me believe that it’s restraint we are seeing here.