Mehari Taddele Maru

Originally published in the Journal of Peace Building & Development This article argues that the distressing situation in Somalia offers an opportunity to introduce new legal institutions with less colonial path-dependence and greater sensitivity to the security and development needs of Somalians. Peace and stability could be enhanced by allowing customary law and Islamic courts ...

Originally published in ISPI’s policy brief No region is more plagued with violent conflicts than Africa. The presence of more than 11 peacekeeping missions composed of nearly 50,000 strong UN and AU peacekeepers in areas such as Darfur, Abyei, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as thousands of western military forces in ...

Originally published in Africa Insight Since 1991, Ethiopia has been implementing an ethno-linguistic federal system. This system established nine ethnically based regional states. In this article, I briefly discuss the moral and legal justification of group (collective) rights of ethno-cultural communities and introduces the concept of ethnic federalism in general, and Ethiopian ethnic federalism in ...

Originally published in 2007 in the Federations, Multiethnic Ethiopia has miraculously remained intact despite a dizzying 30 years that has seen it go from a monarchy to communism to a transition to democracy all while having to endure several droughts, famines and oppressive poverty. Its strength and its capacity to endure seem to lie in ...

Originally published as a report by Al Jazeera Center for Studies After winning 98.6 percent of the votes, President Paul Kagame was inaugurated for his third term in office on 18 August 2017. Rwandan political development is a holdover from its history of the 1994 Genocide and the political discourse that preceded it. Rwanda is ...

Originally published in Tana Forum 2019 Tana Papers Political Dynamics in the Horn of Africa: Nurturing the Emerging Peace Trends Strategically positioned at the major geopolitical and geo-economic nexus of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) region belongs to the African and Middle Eastern economic, religious, historical, migratory, ...

In Africa, there are an estimated 16.3 million migrants and close to 13.5 million internally displaced persons(IDPs) in 19 countries (UN, 2002; Norwegian Refugee Council, 2002). There are estimated to be some 3.25 million African refugees and asylum seekers. The International Labour Organization estimates that the number of labor migrants in Africa today constitutes one-fifth ...

Over the years, Africa has had to grapple with multifarious humanitarian situations arising from conflicts and natural disasters that have afflicted the continent, resulting in the massive displacement and flight of millions of peoples both within their territories and across borders. As a result, the continent has earned the reputation of being labelled the region ...

The escalating crisis proves that secession is not a panacea for peace and democracy. While the situation in Somalia remains fragile, the Republic of Sudan and the State of Eritrea face a precarious future. Most dreadful for the entire region, however, is the possibility of another state failure in the form of South Sudan. With ...

This article identifies the key contributions of the Kampala Convention through legal analysis and interpretation of its provisions. More importantly, it sketches the most notable and significant contributions of the Kampala Convention in terms of the protection gap it seeks to fill, and its novelty as well as its contributions to the international, regional and ...