ROME — On 9 July, a few hundred metres from the Vatican walls at the NH Roma Centro, diplomats, military analysts and African policy specialists will gather for “Africa 2026: Perspectives from the Horn of Africa,” a high-level workshop convened by the NATO Defense College Foundation (NDCF). The subtitle Preventing Malign Actions. Vital Supply Lines captures precisely why a region three thousand kilometres from Brussels now sits near the top of the Alliance’s southern agenda.
The NDCF, established in Rome in 2011 and the only think-tank bearing the Alliance’s name, has organised the afternoon in cooperation with Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CSF and the NATO Defense College. The organisers describe the Horn as part of a strategic security continuum stretching across the Sahel, where terrorism, trafficking, irregular migration and maritime insecurity increasingly converge with the security interests of NATO Allies.
Why the Horn, and why now
The timing is anything but academic. The waters off the Horn have become one of the world’s most contested maritime spaces. The EU’s defensive naval mission Aspides, launched in 2024, remains deployed to shield merchant traffic across the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Meanwhile Djibouti hosts a dense cluster of foreign military bases American, Chinese, French, Japanese a telling snapshot of how much strategic weight now rests on this narrow corridor between Africa and Arabia.
Layered on top is what the organisers call the growing presence of hybrid threats, malign external influence and strategic information manipulation a diplomatic phrasing for the disinformation campaigns and influence operations that have proliferated across the region, undermining critical infrastructure, supply chains and economic security. 
An afternoon of heavyweight panels
The programme, running from 16:30 to a networking cocktail at 19:45, is compact but dense. NDCF President Alessandro Minuto-Rizzo — a former NATO Deputy Secretary General — opens alongside Marjorie Apruzzese of the NATO Defense College and Nicoletta Pirozzi of Fondazione CSF, with Italy’s Ambassador to Ethiopia, Sem Fabrizi, delivering opening remarks remotely from Addis Ababa.
The first and longest session assembles an unusually wide institutional span: El Hadji Ibrahima Diene, the African Union’s Special Representative for Somalia and head of its Support and Stabilization Mission (AUSSOM); Luca Miehe, chef de cabinet to the EU Special Representative for the Horn of Africa; Alberto Munisso of NATO’s Strategic Direction South Hub in Naples; and, from the Italian side, Fabio Massimo Ballerini of the Prime Minister’s Mattei Plan for Africa task force and veteran Africa hand Giuseppe Mistretta. That AU–EU–NATO–Rome line-up on a single panel is itself the point: the workshop explicitly aims to reinforce cooperation among these organisations rather than discuss the region about, but without, its own institutions.DreamstimeDreamstimeAlamyResults from the web(opens in new tab)A second, shorter conversation — chaired by journalist Gaja Pellegrini-Bettoli — pairs Niagalé Bagayoko, chair of the African Security Sector Network, with Nicola Minasi, head of the Farnesina’s Crisis Unit. The closing panel shifts to the analysts: Alan Boswell of the International Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa programme in Nairobi, Bitania Tadesse of the International Peace Institute, Jesutimilehin O. Akamo of Addis Ababa’s Institute for Peace and Security Studies, and Jalale Getachew Birru of the conflict-data organisation ACLED, under the chairmanship of Patrick Smith, editor-in-chief of Africa Confidential. Nicoletta Bombardiere, the Foreign Ministry’s Director General for Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania, closes the day.
Ethiopia as a case study, prevention as the thread
What distinguishes this workshop from a standard chokepoint-security conference is its emphasis on prevention. Building on research developed with African partners and using Ethiopia as a case study, the sessions will examine preventive diplomacy, AI-supported early warning and African-led approaches to crisis prevention — a recognition that by the time frigates are escorting container ships, much of the strategic damage has already been done. The framing dovetails with Italy’s broader repositioning toward the continent under the Mattei Plan, and with NATO’s post-2024 effort to give substance to its “southern neighbourhood” agenda through the Naples-based Southern Hub.
For Rome, hosting the conversation is also a statement: that Italy intends to be Europe’s interlocutor of choice on the Horn — a region where, as one panel title implicitly concedes, the challenge is no longer identifying the threats, but preventing them.
Africa 2026 takes place Thursday, 9 July 2026, from 16:30 CEST at NH Roma Centro, Via dei Gracchi 324. Registration is available through the NDCF website (natofoundation.org/africa-2026), and the full draft programme is downloadable there.
