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Countries in the Horn are proving their mettle as resilient and are increasingly able to resolve internal conflicts, manage and promote diversity to rescue democratic revolutions and consolidate their gains with home-grown efforts without any external intervention.

Globally, liberalism is tottering, and retreating. But in the Horn of Africa, democracy appears to be on the march. Here, the state is as fragile as ever. But countries in the region have proven their mettle as resilient and increasingly able to resolve internal conflicts and heal their own wounds without external intervention. The region is awash with home-grown experiments that seek to manage and promote diversity to rescue democratic revolutions and consolidate their gains. In Ethiopia, politics is on the threshold of a new dawn. On November 22, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali unfurled a new Prosperity Party.

This is a merger of three of the four ethnicallybased parties in the governing coalition, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), that currently controls every seat in parliament and has ruled the country since 1991. Upon coming to power in April 2018, Abiy introduced sweeping liberal reforms, which have exposed the promise and perils of democracy in ethnically divided countries.