Vulnerable State’s Foreign Policy Navigation in a Multipolar World: Discerning Ethiopia’s Security Engagement with Turkey

Throughout its modern history, the Ethiopian state has operated in space that constraints its strategic autonomy. Since the mid of the twenty-first century, the Ethiopian state has consistently struggled to survive in the face of formidable challenges that manifested in the forms of irredentism, aggression, civil war, and external pressure. To deal with such security conundrums, maintaining strategic partnership for instance is not a new phenomenon in the tradition of Ethiopia’s foreign policy. Over the years, it has employed inter alia alliance, loose partnership, and asymmetric relationships with other states as well as collective security to ameliorate security risks originating from both inside and outside of its jurisdiction, albeit with different results. This instinctive drive to survive and maintain political independence has remained the cardinal guiding principles and practices of Ethiopia’s foreign policy. Currently, Ethiopia is facing a security storm that could jeopardize the survival of the state per se. To weather the unfolding security threats emanating from internal and external sources, the incumbent government is looking for possible security partners and further strengthening the existing ones. In this regard, the incumbent government was considered Turkey as a security partner to deal with security risks in an age of a ‘multipolar’ world. Nevertheless, little analysis has been given in the domain of Ethiopia’s international relations literature concerning a troubled state’s security engagement with a pivotal state. This paper therefore tries to discern the challenges compelled the Ethiopian state’s endeavor to carve a space for a security tie with Turkey amidst domestic and geopolitical changes. The endurance of the security tie between Ethiopia and Turkey will be in part factored by the changing external relations Cairo, Khartoum and Mogadisu have demonstrated with Ankara.