Both Ethiopia and Eritrea have moved military forces toward their shared border, according to Al-Ahram, in a mobilisation that has alarmed regional observers and raised the spectre of a return to open warfare between two nations whose last conflict left tens of thousands dead and whose underlying grievances have never been resolved.
The mobilisation is the news. What it portends requires context that Western editors have consistently and damagingly underplayed.
The 1998 to 2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian War — fought over a border that had never been formally and finally demarcated — resulted in an estimated 80,000 deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians on both sides. The conflict ended with the Algiers Agreement of December 2000, which established a boundary commission that subsequently awarded the disputed town of Badme to Eritrea. Ethiopia refused to implement the ruling. For nearly two decades, an uneasy no-war no-peace stalemate persisted along one of Africa's most volatile borders.
When Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopia's prime minister in 2018 and moved with dramatic speed to normalise relations with Eritrea's President Isaias Afwerki, the rapprochement was celebrated internationally — and earned Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. That settlement proved fragile in ways the Nobel Committee could not have anticipated.
The Tigray conflict of 2020 to 2022 transformed the bilateral relationship once again. Ethiopian federal forces and Eritrean troops fought alongside each other against the Tigray People's Liberation Front — and Eritrean forces committed grave human rights violations during that conflict, according to multiple international investigations. The Pretoria Agreement of November 2022 ended the Tigray war but left a series of unresolved tensions, including the status of Eritrea's continued military presence in parts of the Tigray region and deep political resentments between Asmara and Addis Ababa.
The current mobilisation sits within this accumulated weight of unresolved grievances.
The stakes extend far beyond a bilateral border dispute. The Horn of Africa is one of the world's most food-insecure regions; any renewed conflict would accelerate displacement and famine risk among populations still recovering from compounded crises. Eritrea's coastline commands access to the southern Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb strait — a chokepoint through which roughly 10 percent of global trade passes — making the geopolitical implications acute for powers far beyond the immediate neighbourhood. China, which has established its only overseas military base in neighbouring Djibouti, and the Gulf states, which have invested heavily in Horn of Africa port infrastructure, are monitoring events closely.
The African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa — itself a complicating factor given that the AU's host nation is a party to the dispute — has not yet issued a formal response to the reported military movements. The organisation's record of effective crisis prevention in the Horn of Africa has been, at best, uneven.
For populations in the border communities between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the memory of the last war is not historical. It is personal. The sight of military forces moving toward the frontier carries a weight of experience that no policy communiqué can adequately capture.
