Beyond the Red Sea: Ethiopia’s Strategic Reorientation and the Indo-Pacific Frontier

This article uses Ethiopia’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Somaliland as a case study to examine how a landlocked African state can develop maritime aspirations, challenging prevailing assumptions about who counts as an Indo-Pacific player. Subjecting the case study to the assumptions of neoclassical realism and neoliberal institutionalism, we contend that internal legitimacy pressures and ethnic fragmentation intersect with institutional constraints and opportunities generated by global partners. Using the Forum’s five-parameter analytical framework (trade ties; political-normative interests; security interests; external pressures; current posture/trends), we demonstrate that Ethiopia’s pursuit of sea access leveraging geocultural memory is both innovative and destabilising: it connects Nile politics with Red Sea corridors, externalises domestic fragility into regional arenas and draws extra-regional rivalries into the Horn of Africa. This clarifies the conditions under which a landlocked state can act as an unconventional Indo-Pacific actor, and the consequences this poses to regional order and institutional norms.