CITIZENSHIP AND STATELESSNESS IN THE HORN OF AFRICA \Y context, access to official recognition as a citizen of a particular state — able to call on the state resources for protection and support — becomes more important. A further category of border populations at risk of statelessness are those living in areas of contested borders—in the Horn of Africa often also the areas mainly populated dispute between by pastoralist groups. Ethiopia and Sudan over the fertile agricultural region of Fashaga, A border recently re-ignited into conflict.224 Other border disputes have also erupted into war: between Ethiopia and Somalia border in 1977-78 and between Ethiopia and Eritrea in 1998. The “llemi triangle”, a zone of grazing land half the size of Djibouti on the Kenya-South Sudan-Ethiopia border, was never clearly delineated during the colonial period and is claimed by all three countries.2#° The borders between Somaliland and Puntland are also contested.??° Most often, the concern of states in these contexts is to focus on control of the land, rather than the rights of those who live there, including their recognition as nationals of one or other state. Long-term refugees and their descendants The Horn of Africa hosts a very large number of refugees, of whom most live in refugee camps. The ongoing lack of security in Somalia means that, despite some returns in recent years, there remain more than 640,000 Somali refugees outside the country (including approximately 270,000 in Kenya, 211,000 in Ethiopia, 47,000 in Uganda, and 112,000 in Yemen); as well as some 2.9 million IDPs.??’ Eritrea hosts only a handful of refugees, but there are hundreds of thousands of Eritrean refugees in other countries, including 145,000 in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is the third-largest refugee-hosting state in Africa, with more than 785,000 refugees as of June 2021, Sudan, as well as those from Somalia including 373,000 refugees from South Sudan and 45,000 from and Eritrea, some of these residents for many decades.??8 Djibouti is primarily a transit country for migrants, but it also hosts around 30,000 refugees, mainly from (in order of size of population) Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Eritrea.?2° Long-term refugees, and especially their descendants above all if they have never registered with UNHCR born in exile, may be at risk of statelessness; or formally claimed refugee status through a national 224 See entry “El-Fashaga - 14°N 36°E” in “international Disputes” at Global Security website, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/fashaga.htm; “The long history behind the current Sudanese-Ethiopian border clash”, Eritrea Hub, 19 December 2020 hitps://eritreahub.org/the-long-history-behind-thecurrent-sudanese-ethiopian-border-clash; Mulatu Wubneh, ‘This Land Is My Land: The Ethio-Sudan Boundary and the Need to Rectify Arbitrary Colonial Boundaries’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 33, no. 4 (2015): 441-66, https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2016.1143602. 225 Members of five ethno-linguistic communities — the Turkana, Didinga, Toposa, Inyangatom, and Dassanech; who are also variously found in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, or Sudan — traditionally migrate to graze in the triangle: Nene Mburu, ‘Delimitation of the llemi Triangle: A History of Abrogation of Responsibility’, African Studies Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2003): 15-37; see also Gilbert M. Khadiagala, ‘Boundaries in Eastern Africa’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2010): 266-78. 226 Omar S. Mahmood, “Overlapping claims by Somaliland and Puntland: The case of Sool and Sanaag”, Institute for Security Studies (South Africa), November 2019 https://media.africaportal.org/documents/Overlapping claims by Somaliland _and_Puntland.pdf 227 information from UNHCR collated at https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/horn and from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre at https://www.internal-displacement.org/countries/somalia. 228 UNHCR Ethiopia Fact Sheet, June 2021 https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/details/87839. 223 “Guide du CRRF — note conceptuelle: opération de Djibouti”, UNHCR Djibouti and Ministére de I’Intérieur-ONARS, January 2019. https://www.globalcompactrefugees.org/sites/default/files/201912/Guide%20to%20the%20comprehensive%20refugee%20response %20in % 20D jibouti420%282019%29. pdf; see also https://reporting.unhcr.org/djibouti. UNHCR — December 2021 53