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.