A pair of opposite security issues in the horn of Africa: Human security versus regime security in Ethiopia and Sudan

This commentary attempts to analyze the status of the two contradictory security issues of regime verse human security in the Horn of Africa. In this sub region, regime security is about the survival of the ruling elite and keeping of power in the hands of a specific clique of people and their cronies. Human security is about the welfare of the individuals rather than the defense of ruling elites. As the political state of affairs attested in the Horn of Africa, contrastingly regime security is the antithesis of human security and governments in the region are currently subscribed to giving priority to their regime survival. In terms of scope, this paper focuses only the time framework of 1991-2010 periods of these two countries. The paper identifies the negative role that the authoritarian regimes in both Ethiopia and Sudan played to achieve regime security at the expense of their citizens’ human security. This article argued that in the Horn of Africa sub-region, the realization of the first is the deterioration of the latter.