Irregular Warfare And (In)Security In The Horn Of Africa

The paper will focus on the transformation of war (associated with phenomena such as human displacement, famine, violence against civilians, and commercialization of military troops) and on the refugee flows and insecurity within refugee camps which amount to humanitarian tragedies. The second chief aim of this paper is to investigate tenets of the extended analytical framework of security and to emphasize the relevance of constructivist and critical security studies. The pivotal line of arguments will revolve around specificities of violent conflict in the Horn of Africa which trigger the need to revisit mainstream approaches on state security by analyzing intra-state (and internationalized) violence and by including types of post-colonial insecurity, food insecurity and environmental degradation. The main underlying research question is: why is human security a valid framework of analysis in the case of irregular warfare in the Horn of Africa?