Infrastructure Statecraft and Coalition Reordering: Chinas Political Footprint in the Horn of Africa

This article develops infrastructure statecraft as an analytical lens for understanding china's political footprint in the horn of africa: infrastructure statecraft, debt leverage, and the reconfiguration of domestic coalitions. It argues that Chinese engagement in the Horn of Africa reshapes domestic coalitions less through a simple debt-trap mechanism than through the political effects of infrastructure finance, elite-to-elite ties, security cooperation, and selective institutional learning. Drawing on comparative political economy analysis of three cases; project-level dataset of chinese loans, contracts, and state-owned enterprise operations (aiddata); process tracing of political alignment shifts in au and unga votes; interviews with chinese embassy officials and african finance ministers., the paper links the theoretical debates identified in power transition theory; infrastructure statecraft (rolland; hillman); dependency theory updated for the chinese context (brautigam; gallagher); comparative political economy of foreign investment effects on host-state governance. to a comparative and historically grounded reading of South Sudan and the related cases assembled in the research design. The article advances three core claims. First, Chinese projects alter coalition politics by redistributing access to contracts, transport corridors, and executive discretion, thereby empowering some bureaucratic and commercial actors while marginalizing others. Second, political effects vary sharply across Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Djibouti because regime type, strategic geography, and resource endowment mediate how external finance is absorbed. Third, African agency remains substantial, but it is most effective when governments can negotiate from coherent domestic strategies ra