Governing the Machine of War Autonomous Weapons, Economic Instability, and the Case for Pluriversal AI Governance in the Horn of Africa

The proliferation of autonomous weapons systems across the Horn of Africa between 2015
and 2026 introduces economic consequences of extraordinary severity and long-term reach.
This article argues that the technical fragilities inherent in current autonomous weapons,
including algorithmic unpredictability, goal misgeneralization, and the irreversible erosion
of human oversight, translate directly into quantifiable macroeconomic instability across a
region already burdened by climate-induced scarcity, unresolved territorial disputes, and
fragile public finances. The article further contends that existing frameworks for
understanding and governing these risks are fundamentally inadequate because they remain
anchored in monocultural, Western-centric epistemological assumptions that are
structurally incapable of accounting for the plural knowledge systems, ethical traditions,
and governance logics of the Horn of Africa. Drawing on the author's original Pluriversal
AI framework, first published in June 2025 and formally deposited under DOI
10.5281/zenodo.19161652, this article proposes a governance paradigm that is
epistemically plural, culturally embedded, and grounded in African philosophical traditions,
particularly Ubuntu, as the foundational architecture for the regulation of autonomous
weapons in the region.