Sources and Research on Liberation and Revolutionary Movements in the Horn of Africa

The last decades of the twentieth century saw the transformative rise and gains of armed revolutionary movements and insurgencies in the Horn of Africa. Just as their feats were difficult, so too is studying them decades after the fact. Besides the movements’ continued political relevance and their contested legacies, questions of sources and their accessibility constitute significance obstacles to rigorous scientific research. Notwithstanding, sizeable scholarship developed over the decades and, more recently, a growing number of the participants wrote auto/biographies and memoires. Coupled with scattered and difficult to access primary sources, these sources of material offer useful—if not complete—picture of those movements and their struggles. This essay reflects on the substantive and methodological challenges and opportunities of studying the insurgencies in the Horn of Africa. More specifically, it offers a survey of the scattered and diverse primary sources and a sketch of the published popular and scholarly literature—with a focus on Eritrea and Ethiopia.