Yared Kunbi is Horn Updates' Editor for Eritrea and Regional Security. He covers one of the least reported and most consequential states in the Horn — a country whose government has operated with near-total opacity since independence, and whose strategic decisions on the Red Sea and in the region consistently shape outcomes far beyond its borders.
His primary regional focus is South Sudan, where he has followed the country's trajectory from the optimism of independence in 2011 through successive rounds of civil war, the 2018 peace agreement, and the long series of delays and partial implementations that have followed. His explainer on South Sudan's polycrisis — covering the intersection of oil collapse, armed factionalism, and recurrent famine — is one of the most detailed English-language analyses of that country's current situation published outside a think-tank or academic context.
Beyond South Sudan, Yared applies the same approach to the broader structural questions that shape the Horn: why peace agreements fail, how resource dependence distorts governance, and what the historical record tells us about the durability of different kinds of political settlement. He joined Horn Updates because he believes the explainer format — done seriously — is one of the most undervalued modes of journalism on complex, long-running conflicts.
Eritrean politics and the Isaias Afwerki government; Red Sea strategic competition; South Sudan's political economy and the failure of the RCSS peace process; the intersection of oil revenue and elite violence in fragile states; the African Union's peacekeeping architecture and its limitations; famine as a political outcome; elections in post-conflict environments.
