What makes the Horn of Africa a region

Where the edges fall

Read narrowly, the Horn is Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, and that is the reading the catalogue files. Read as physical geography alone, it is the peninsula itself, which leaves Eritrea outside the line. Read as a political neighbourhood, it reaches as far as the membership of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a body set up in 1986 to coordinate drought relief and reconstituted in 1996, whose roster adds Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda. All three readings are in print. The United Nations Statistics Division uses none of them: its M49 standard files every one of these under Eastern Africa, and says of its own groupings that they carry no political meaning.

The coast, and the state without one

Djibouti, Eritrea and Somalia hold shoreline along the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. At Bab el-Mandeb the water narrows to about 30 kilometres between Djibouti and Yemen, and shipping between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean passes through the gap. Ethiopia has none of that coast. It was admitted to the United Nations in 1945 with a Red Sea frontage; Eritrea was federated with it by a General Assembly resolution in 1952, the federation was dissolved in 1962, and Eritrean independence took effect on 24 May 1993 after a referendum held that April, taking the shoreline with it. What Ethiopia has instead is the corridor to Djibouti: a road, and since January 2017 an electrified standard-gauge railway of roughly 750 kilometres from Addis Ababa to the port.

Where the borders cut

The Afar live in Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and Somali speakers in Somalia, Djibouti, the Somali region of Ethiopia and northern Kenya, so the lines drawn between these states run through populations rather than around them. Both of those languages are Cushitic; Amharic and Tigrinya are Semitic; all of them sit inside the Afroasiatic family. Arabic is recorded as official or working alongside French in Djibouti, alongside Tigrinya and English in Eritrea, and alongside Somali in Somalia, while Ethiopia's federal working language is Amharic. Djibouti and Somalia belong to the Arab League, which they joined in 1977 and 1974; Eritrea and Ethiopia do not. Every one of them keeps a single clock at UTC+03:00 and drives on the right.

What the states date from

Ethiopia was admitted to the United Nations in 1945, in the organisation's first year. Somalia dates from 1 July 1960, when the former Italian trust territory joined the former British protectorate, five days after the northern territory had become independent on 26 June. Djibouti, administered by France as the Territory of the Afars and the Issas, became independent on 27 June 1977. Eritrea was admitted to the UN on 28 May 1993. Two questions of standing stay open on the record and are recorded rather than settled here. Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in May 1991 and no United Nations member state has recognised it, so the catalogue files that territory under Somalia. And the boundary commission established by the Algiers Agreement of December 2000 issued its delimitation decision in April 2002, which both governments had undertaken in the agreement to accept as final and binding, and which they addressed again in a joint declaration signed in July 2018.