Today's column is based on two premises. One, unhealthy politics leads to an unhealthy state. Two, the state is more secure when the people are secure. The problem is not simply that states pursue security, but that the pursuit of state security through dominance, militarisation and strategic competition can undermine the very human security it is supposed to protect. Be it Ukraine, the Arabian Peninsula, the wider Middle East, Ethiopia, Sudan or the many African states afflicted by civil war, it is the state rather than the people who have increasingly become the primary referent object of security. Politics around the world is based on the prevailing political assumption that people are secure when the state is secure.

Yet this logic often produces a tragic cycle. First, the state oppresses its own people, which invites a military intervention by big powers claiming a moral and international obligation to liberate the people from domestic oppression. The intervention, then, provokes resistance from the very people it claims to protect, who rise against a foreign military presence. The intervening power eventually withdraws. Generally speaking, at the end of the cycle, and after much death and destruction, there is little change in the lives of the people. In some cases, people continue to live under the same regime or one no less oppressive than the one they had originally sought to escape.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Iran and Yugoslavia have all become victims of this tragic cycle. Now Ethiopia appears to be a potential laboratory for similar experiments. Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a devastating border war between 1998 and 2000, before eventually moving towards reconciliation. In........

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