Northeast Africa has a long history of violent conflicts spanning long periods of time and covering large geographical spaces. The cycles of conflicts predate the colonial period, and only got worse and more complex during the colonial and postcolonial periods. None of the past conflicts have been on the scale, intensity and damage of the 2020-2022 Ethiopian civil war in Tigray region. The aspirations of the region’s citizens for democratization and respect of human rights were thrown back by decades. Even though a ceasefire signed in November 2022 in Pretoria, South Africa, still holds, neither the root causes of the conflict nor its attendant humanitarian challenges are addressed. Meanwhile, conflicts in other parts of Ethiopia persist as does the repression in Eritrea; Somalia continues to grapple with the herculean task of resuscitating the state that had collapsed in the 1990s; and Sudan’s treacherous transition from a threedecade Islamist rule broke down with the outbreak of conflict in April 2023.