La Chronique de l’Est

  By Naguib Ali Taher September 26, 2026 Nearly 4,000 Yemenis have crossed the Bab el-Mandeb to Djibouti. By Thursday, 3,200 had arrived. More than 10,000 may follow. UNHCR’s Djibouti operation is only 15 percent funded. A country of fewer than 1.2 million people is being asked to absorb the consequences of a regional war while international support remains dangerously inadequate. But this is more than a refugee emergency. It exposes a deeper imbalance in the international system: those with the least influence over the causes of a crisis can sometimes bear the greatest responsibility for managing its consequences. The principles of international law and multilateralism remain firmly proclaimed. Yet there is an increasingly visible gap between those principles and the resources and political will available to implement them. When responsibility becomes negotiable, smaller states are left carrying burdens they cannot sustain. Djibouti is where that imbalance is now becoming visible....

  Transactional Sovereignty and the New Geopolitics of the Horn of Africa   Strategic Analysis By    Al-Aghbari   Sovereignty in the Horn of Africa is no longer protected by law alone. Increasingly, it depends on strategic leverage: how many powers need a state, how indispensable its territory is, and how effectively its government can balance competing external interests. The post-1945 international order was built on the principle that sovereignty and international law could restrain power. That principle was always imperfectly applied, but for small states it provided a diplomatic language and, at times, a measure of protection. In the Horn, that protection has weakened. The region has become a dense arena of competition involving Gulf states, China, the United States, Turkey, European powers and regional governments. Ports, military facilities, trade corridors and political relationships now carry strategic value far beyond their immediate economic functions...