Global commodity markets face upside risks from reduced grain supply, higher energy prices, higher fertilizer prices, and disruption to trade due to the closure of major seaports such as Pivdennyi, Odessa, Mykolaiv, and Chornomorsk, which account for about 80% of the total throughput of Ukrainian seaports.
France also started to discuss thorny issues between the two countries, such as the rights of the Pieds-Noirs, the French settlers in Algeria, who left Algeria after independence, and the right of return to their homeland of Algerian Harka, the Algerians who fought with France in the 1954-1962 war and who fled with the French army in 1962, including granting them a full pardon.
What is the nature of Turkey-Somalia relations? What role is Turkey playing both in Somalia’s state-building and capacity-building processes? How has this relation reconfigured the geopolitics of the HornofAfrica region?
A momentous visit
On August 19, 2011, then Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan paid a surprising visit to Somalia.
It was reported that Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Nechirvan Barzani, a good friend of both Erdoğan and MBZ, helped facilitate the rapprochement between Turkey and the UAE – two countries that confronted on almost all regional issues concerning Libya, Egypt, the HornofAfrica, Yemen, and the Eastern Mediterranean throughout the past decade.
Thus, Russia is turning to countries in Africa with which it had close ties during the Soviet period, especially in North Africa and the HornofAfrica, and has already signed economic and military agreements with Egypt, Algeria, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and the Central African Republic.
Read: The Great Reconfiguration of Global Supply ChainsThis waterway, located between the Arab Peninsula and the HornofAfrica, represents an economic and political entanglement of players in the Red Sea region, but also one of the straits most subject to violence, famine, piracy, and the global pandemic effects – most notably along the Somali coasts.
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In the same vein, even though the Guelleh government promised to respect the strategic interests of the United States, Washington does not view Djibouti’s economic policy prospects of emerging as an important commercial hub in the HornofAfrica positively.
Third, in the current tension, the military, political and economic roles of emerging actors such as China, Turkey, UAE, and Saudi Arabia are increasing in the HornofAfrica and Northeast Africa regions as never before.
While the UAE-Saudi Arabia axis continued its anti-Turkey policies, it also followed similar policies in the Eastern Mediterranean, the HornofAfrica, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and lately in the Maghreb region.
The first and foremost difference is that unlike pirate attacks in other parts of the world, such as the Straits of Malacca (located between Malaysia and Indonesia), pirate assaults in the HornofAfrica mostly target large vessels and bulk carriers that often transport coal and iron ore, and tanker ships that transport petroleum, chemicals, and crude oil.
Performing successful military operations in Syria, using the hard power elements in the HornofAfrica and Gulf regions as a foreign policy tool and, finally, engaging in an Eastern Mediterranean-centered foreign policy activism, Turkey is recently experiencing one of its most influential periods in regional policy.
The deepening of Saudi Arabia’s partnership with the YPG unfolds against the backdrop of scores of other issues that have severely tested Ankara-Riyadh relations in recent years from the Qatar crisis to the Jamal Khashoggi saga, and geopolitical competition in the HornofAfrica to the politics of post-2011 Egypt, as well as the failed coup plot against Turkey’s government in 2016.
Regional integration, which is PM Abiy’s third pillar of his reform agenda, in addition to democratization and economic liberalization, is breathing air for positive change in the HornofAfrica.
There is a lingering question: Where is Abiy Ahmed’s foreign policy pace and hubris sprouting from while domestic issues glare at him?
The HornofAfrica: the new Sino-American geopolitical playground
A geopolitical policy shift was evident in the U.
On the same token, contrary to European efforts that seek to establish off-shore asylum processing centers and in contrary to “selective migration management,” Turkey has emerged as a new model on peace-making and fair partnership due to its humanitarian missions and military operations against terrorism and piracy, especially in the HornofAfrica.