The lands and coasts across the Bab el-Mandeb—the tiny strait that separates the Red Sea from the Indian Ocean at the southern tip of the Red Sea—have for centuries had a forbidding reputation as lands of piracy and privation. The author looks at the twenty-first-century challenges facing the region from civil war, piracy, radical Islamism, terrorism, and the real risk of environmental and economic failure on both sides of the strait.
Copyright 2011.