The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland

The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland

Leenco Lata

Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3C5

088920456X $24.95 www.wlupress.wlu.ca

The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland: The State and Self-Determination in the Era of Heightened Globalization is a sober treatise, written with scholarly attention to detail yet addressing an issue of great immediate concern to far more than scholars. Nation-states established among the Horn of Africa have boundaries that were drawn with little regard to the natural and cultural divisions, creating nation-states that have conflicts within and between them in an overlapping pattern. Author Leenco Lata, who has lived in most of the nations of the Horn of Africa between 1978 and 1993 and experienced the conflicts firsthand, draws the conclusion that the Horn needs to adopt multi-dimensional self-determination. Chapters discuss the political history of the Horn since decolonization, inlcuding emerging trends in self-determination, interactive state formation, and the difficulties of nation-building. The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland is vital and timely reading, not only for its identification of severe problems, but for its reasoned, rational, and practical suggestions for solutions. Also highly recommended is Lata's "The Ethiopian State at the Crossroads", a comprehensive study of why transition to democracy did not succeed in Ethiopia.

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