Eritrea Is Not the Problem; Selective Analysis Is

by Alula Fezghi

When Ethiopia’s leaders speak of “sovereign access” to the Red Sea as an existential necessity, they are not making a technical economic argument. They are challenging a basic rule of international order: that no state has a right to another state’s territory.

Yet a recent article in The Conversation treats this rhetoric not as a legal red line, but as a reasonable grievance, while casting Eritrea’s response as provocative. That framing is not neutral analysis. It is advocacy dressed up as scholarship.

Eritrea is a sovereign state. Its borders are internationally recognized and legally settled. Africa’s post-colonial order rests on a simple principle adopted in 1964: inherited borders are inviolable. Without that rule, the continent would be trapped in endless conflict. Ignoring it is not an oversight it is a distortion.

The article also blurs a crucial distinction. Ethiopia already has commercial access to the sea through lawful agreements with its neighbors. What international law does not recognize is a right to own or control another country’s ports. Access is negotiable. Sovereignty is not.

Under the UN Charter, even threatening force against another state’s territory is illegal. When senior officials frame port access as a “historical correction,” that is not pragmatism, it is revisionism. History offers a clear lesson: once borders become negotiable, stability collapses.

Eritrea’s security posture is often caricatured in Western commentary, stripped of context. It emerged after a devastating war, Ethiopia’s refusal to accept a binding international border ruling, and years of sanctions and isolation. Whether one agrees with Eritrea’s policies or not, portraying them as the root cause of regional instability reverses cause and effect.

The real danger in the Horn of Africa today is not Eritrea defending its sovereignty. It is the gradual normalization of territorial entitlement by rhetoric and the willingness of analysts to explain it away.

If academic platforms and media outlets want to prevent conflict, they must apply international law consistently. Selective analysis does not reduce tensions. It fuels them.