Project description
Tracking the origins of weak or failed states
Understanding the features of weak or failed states is a challenging issue. The Horn of Africa is widely known as a geographic region that is characterised by disintegrated systems of governance and weak legitimate authority. The EU-funded StateHorn project proposes a new method based on archaeology that will provide a new vision of how statehood has been conceived, studied and analysed in the Horn of Africa. The project will focus on the medieval period in northern Somalia and south-eastern Ethiopia. This is considered a period during which actual political, economic and demographic characteristics emerged. StateHorn envisages developing a theory able to analyse regions with weak or failed states.