By Mahder Nesibu

The headline encapsulates the idea of how Ethiopia’s approach can be a blueprint for a new African diplomacy.

Ethiopia’s foreign policy in recent years has adopted a doctrine that a country’s most consequential relationships are with its nearest neighbours. Branded as “Neighbours First,” or “Horn First,” the doctrine has repositioned Addis Ababa’s diplomatic energy toward the countries it shares borders and waterways with, after decades of looking further afield for partnership. The logic animating it, and the early record of its application, carry lessons well beyond the Horn of Africa.

The doctrine operates along three broad lines, according to Ethiopia’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (IFA). The first is connectivity and integration, covering trade corridors, power grids, investment facilitation, and logistics cooperation designed to lower transaction costs and create shared economic stakes. The second is cooperative security, encompassing border management, counterterrorism coordination, and crisis diplomacy intended to reduce transnational threats before they escalate. The third is strategic self-reliance, a rebalancing toward regional problem-solving that strengthens Ethiopia’s hand in bargaining with the wider world.

Prosperity Party’s Director General for International Relations Nebiyu Sehul has described Ethiopia’s position as a “catalyst state,” whose core function is promoting regional integration across the Horn. The framing is deliberate. It positions Addis Ababa as an anchor generating shared momentum, rather than a regional hegemon imposing order.

The shift did emerge from a specific historical reckoning. Ethiopia’s foreign policy before the current administration struggled to translate regional proximity into regional partnership. The Horn of Africa remains one of the world’s most conflict-prone environments, and successive governments in Addis Ababa responded by investing heavily in managing threats emanating from the neighbourhood rather than building cooperative frameworks to address their root causes. Security consumed the diplomatic bandwidth that integration required.

In more recent history, Ethiopian governments maintained a version of the same outward orientation. During the Cold War, the Derg aligned with Moscow. After 1991, the EPRDF cultivated close partnerships with Washington and Beijing, becoming one of China’s largest African borrowers and receiving tens of billions in infrastructure financing, while relationships with immediate neighbours remained largely securitised or transactional. The imbalance was structural, and for a long time it was treated as natural.

That changed when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018 and named regional integration as one of the pillars of what he called “Ethiopia’s Renaissance.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, he stated the logic plainly: “History has demonstrated time and again that neighbours with intimate, rule-based, and diverse trade and economic relations are unlikely to resort to conflict. That is why we believe that integration must be viewed not just as an economic project but also as crucial to securing peace and reconciliation in the Horn of Africa.”

Integration recast as the precondition for peace: that is a meaningful shift in how a government understands its interests, and meaningful shifts of that kind change behaviour.

The clearest material expression of the doctrine is energy. Ethiopia’s hydropower buildout, anchored by the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, is the country’s most consequential infrastructure investment. Addis Ababa has used the resource to extend electricity supply to neighbouring countries including Sudan, South Sudan, Djibouti, and Kenya, building tangible interdependence along the way. At the GERD’s inauguration in 2025, the primary guests were the heads of state of neighbouring countries, a deliberate signal that Ethiopia’s largest national project was a regional one.

At the political level, the frequency of high-level engagement between Addis Ababa, Mogadishu, and Djibouti City has no real precedent in the region’s recent history. Leaders of the three countries have met repeatedly, coordinating on security, trade, and port logistics. The regularity of that contact reflects a deliberate investment in political capital, rather than crisis management.

Institutionally, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) continues to serve as the Horn’s primary multilateral platform. The more recent Horn of Africa Initiative adds a focused economic instrument, concentrating on infrastructure connectivity, integration, resilience, and human capital, operating with a defined business model that brings together finance and economic ministries from member states.

The initiative has its limits. The historic peace process between Addis Ababa and Asmara, for example, has failed to materialise into the durable institutional relationship it promised. The gap between political goodwill and anchored, lasting agreements remains the doctrine’s most serious unresolved challenge.

That caveat matters, and it does not undermine the broader argument. The structural conditions that drove Ethiopia toward the Neighbours First doctrine describe, with varying intensity, the diplomatic predicament of most African states.

Security challenges within and across borders remain the continent’s most persistent governance problem. In the Sahel, a decade of jihadist insurgency destabilised Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in ways that cascaded across borders, triggering military coups and displacing millions. The failure of the security responses was partly a failure of the same logic Ethiopia is working to move past, one centered on external frameworks, fragmented regional coordination, and the treatment of insecurity as a condition to be managed rather than structurally addressed.

The second structural problem is the enduring orientation of African diplomacy toward former colonial powers. France’s relationship with its former West and Central African territories is the most visible example. Paris has historically shaped the foreign and economic policies of Francophone states through currency arrangements, security agreements, and elite networks established at independence and maintained ever since. Britain and Belgium operate similar, if less formalised, networks. Many African states remain more diplomatically integrated with their former colonisers than with their nearest neighbours, a geographic inversion that a Neighbours First logic directly challenges.

Third, the structure of African economies has historically worked against regional integration. Most African states remain commodity exporters, oriented toward extractive production, with value added outside the continent and finished goods reimported at a premium. African neighbours frequently compete in the same export categories rather than complementing each other along supply chains. Intra-African trade as a share of total African trade stood at around 15 percent as of the mid-2020s, compared to roughly 60 percent for Europe and over 50 percent for Asia. That figure captures the structural estrangement embedded in the current model.

These three conditions; recurring insecurity, externally-oriented diplomacy, and peripheral integration into global value chains, reinforce each other. They are also precisely the conditions the Neighbours First doctrine is designed to disrupt.

The Ethiopian approach offers two translations at the continental scale.

The first is horizontal replication, with African states in other sub-regions placing immediate neighbours at the centre of their foreign policy. What makes the Ethiopian model instructive is its underlying logic rather than its specific instruments. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed did not name regional integration as a policy objective among others. He elevated it to a pillar of national development, inseparable from Ethiopia’s own trajectory. That elevation is what changes behaviour, because it makes neighbourhood relations a matter of core interest rather than diplomatic courtesy.

The second translation is continental, and it is where the genuine ambition of the argument lies. Africa has already produced the institutional architecture for what an Africa First orientation would require. The African Continental Free Trade Area, the most ambitious trade agreement in the world, is designed to redirect African economic energy inward, building supply chains and trade flows across the continent rather than perpendicular to it. Visa liberalisation initiatives, the African Passport, and the Single African Air Transport Market point in the same direction. These are, in effect, a Neighbours First doctrine applied at continental scale.

The gap is vision in practice. The AfCFTA remains unevenly implemented, with tariff schedules, rules of origin, and non-tariff barriers still limiting the trade volumes the agreement was built to unlock. The political will to subordinate short-term national preferences to continental integration has yet to be consistently demonstrated. What the Ethiopian example offers here is a political model: leadership that treats regional integration as a survival strategy.

The underlying argument holds whether the neighbourhood is the Horn of Africa or the continent as a whole. Countries that tie their development to their neighbours’ development are harder to isolate, harder to exploit, and better positioned to bargain with the rest of the world on their own terms. That is the promise of Neighbours First. Taken to its logical conclusion, it is also the promise of Africa First.