IGAD and the Limits of Regional Mediation

The Intergovernmental Authority on Development began in 1986 as a drought and desertification body and was reconstituted in 1996 with a broader mandate covering peace and security. Its members are Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Uganda and Eritrea, whose participation has been intermittent. The secretariat is in Djibouti.

IGAD's record includes serious achievements. It mediated the process that produced the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan, which led to South Sudanese independence, and it convened the conferences that produced Somalia's transitional institutions.

The structural weakness is straightforward. A regional body composed of the region's own governments struggles to mediate disputes in which those governments are parties. When a member state is a protagonist, IGAD's leverage falls to whatever its other members are willing to apply, and they are frequently unwilling.

Consensus decision-making compounds this. Any member can slow a process it dislikes, and Eritrea's on-and-off participation has meant that some of the region's hardest questions were addressed in a forum from which one of the interested parties was absent.

The African Union operates at a different level, and Addis Ababa's position as AU headquarters gives Ethiopia a standing role in continental diplomacy that its neighbours do not have. In practice much Horn mediation has migrated to bilateral channels and to outside actors in the Gulf, Turkey and the West.

What IGAD does well is technical and unglamorous: drought early warning, livestock disease surveillance, cross-border pastoral agreements. That work rarely makes headlines and is arguably where the body's comparative advantage actually lies.