Camille Pecastaing looks at the twenty-first-century challenges facing
the region around the Bab el Mandeb-the tiny strait that separates the
Red Sea from the Indian Ocean-from civil war, piracy, radical Islamism,
terrorism and the real risk of environmental and economic failure on
both sides of the strait. The author takes us with him into Somalia and
Yemen, Eritrea and Djibouti, with excursions into Ethiopia and the
Sudan, as he reveals how the economic and environmental crisis currently
in gestation could lead to more social dislocation and violence in this
strategically important region.