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ABSTRACT
This paper frames Somalia’s modern history as a trajectory from aspiring high modernist nation-state formation to ‘disassembled’ state, examining how this has been accompanied by – and in part driven by – processes of identity formation and the penetration of marketised political relationships. The paper shows how armed conflicts and post-conflicts contributed to the emergence and consolidation of ‘clan units’ at the congruence of political-military entrepreneurship and emerging norms of public authority. It documents how failed wars and elite security politics (putchism and coup-proofing in both government and opposition) created the conditions for a parallel process of the monetisation of patronage, leading to the creation of a political marketplace in Somalia. The paper shows how peace processes and efforts to build social order from below contributed to a potential for consensus on the political ‘rules of the game’, but how this opportunity was squandered through the prioritisation of building a conventional state apparatus and the war on terror.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Schlee, How Enemies are Made; Hagmann ‘From State Collapse’; Menkhaus ‘Governance without Government’; Hagmann and Hoehne, ‘Failures of the State Failure Debate’.
2. See de Waal, Real Politics, 109–110 for some examples.
3. Bakonyi, ‘Failures of the State Failure Debate’.
4. Cf. Schlee, How Enemies Are Made.
5. Lund, ‘Twilight Institutions’.
6. Douglas, How Institutions Think; North ‘Institutions’.
7. Bayart, The State in Africa.
8. Pritchett et al., ‘Capability Traps,’ call it ‘isomorphic mimicry’.
9. de Waal, Real Politics.
10. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 1.
11. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States.
12. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society; Sharman, Empires of the Weak.
13. Mamdani, Define and Rule.
14. Schlee, How Enemies Are Made.
15. Balthasar, ‘State-making in Somalia and Somaliland’.
16. Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights.
17. Abrahamsen and Williams, ‘Security Beyond the State’.
18. Hills, ‘Security sector or security arena?’
19. Hagmann and Hoehne, ‘Failures of the State Failure Debate’; Menkhaus, ‘Governance without Government’.
20. Schlee, How Enemies are Made.
21. Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy.
22. Abbink, ‘The Total Somali Clan Genealogy’; Cassanelli, ‘Speculations on the Historical Origins’.
23. e.g. Schlee Identities on the Move.
24. Lewis A Pastoral Democracy.
25. I owe this insight to Peter Chonka.
26. Ruhela, Mohamed Farah Aidid, 150–1.
27. Samatar, ‘Destruction of State and Society’; Kapteijns, ‘I. M. Lewis and Somali Clanship’.
28. Lewis, Blood and Bone.
29. c.f. Brubaker, 2009.
30. Schlee, ‘Ethnicity, Race and Nationalism’; Kapteijns, ‘I. M. Lewis and Somali Clanship’.
31. Pronounced heer and written that way prior to the establishment of the Somali script in 1972.
32. Laitin and Samatar, Somalia; Chonka and Healy, ‘What Happened to Somali Self-Determination?’
33. Kapteijns, ‘Making memories of Mogadishu’, 64.
34. Ferguson, Global Shadows. There is also an ironic and heterodox use of ‘modernity’ to refer to the contemporary integration of Somalia into the global order that bypasses or supplants the requirement of conventional statehood; see Hagmann, ‘From State Collapse to Duty-Free Shop’.
35. Lefebvre, Arms for the Horn, 159–60; Robinson, ‘Revisiting the Rise and Fall’, 240.
36. De Waal, Real Politics, 112–15.
37. Ghalib, The Cost of Dictatorship.
38. Ibid., 168–70.
39. Ibid., 174–5.
40. c.f. Roessler, Ethnic Politics and State Power.
41. Compagnon, ‘State sponsored violence’.
42. Compagnon, ‘Somali armed units’, 176.
43. de Waal, Real Politics, 109–130.
44. For more detail see de Waal, ‘The Prairie Fire’, which in turn draws upon African Rights ‘Grass and the Roots of Peace’.
45. E.g. Elmi, The Somali Conflict; Ghalib, The Cost of Dictatorship, and authors’ interviews with Gen. Mohamed Farah Aideed and others, 1992–94.
46. Behnke, ‘Range Enclosure in Central Somalia’; African Rights, ‘Grass and the Roots of Peace’; de Waal, ‘The Prairie Fire’.
47. African Rights, ‘Grass and the Roots of Peace’.
48. Elmi, The Somali Conflict.
49. Authors interviews with USC leaders in Mogadishu 1992–93.
50. Elmi, The Somali Conflict, 29.
51. Compagnon, ‘Somali armed units’.
52. Ghalib, The Cost of Dictatorship, 186.
53. Bakonyi, ‘Moral Economies of Mass Violence.’
54. Africa Watch, Somalia.
55. Janssen, ‘JESS Report’.
56. Little, ‘Traders, Brokers and Market “Crisis”’.
57. Author’s interview with Aideed, February 1992.
58. Ghalib, The Cost of Dictatorship, 192.
59. Bradbury, Becoming Somaliland.
60. Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy.
61. Ghalib, The Cost of Dictatorship, 186.
62. c.f. Allen, ‘Understanding African Politics’.
63. Kapteijns, Clan Cleansing; Besteman and Cassanelli, The Struggle for Land.
64. Kapteijns, Clan Cleansing.
65. de Waal, Famine Crimes, chapter 8.
66. Hoehne, ‘The Rupture of Territoriality’.
67. Bradbury, Becoming Somaliland; Balthasar, ‘State-making in Somalia and Somaliland’; de Waal, Real Politics, 130–140.
68. Heinrich, Building the Peace.
69. Gundel, Humanitarianism and Spoils Politics, p. 154.
70. Sahnoun, Somalia.
71. Omaar, ‘One Thorn Bush at a Time’.
72. Issa-Salwe, The Collapse of the Somali State, 134.
73. Hashim, The Fallen State.
74. Menkhaus et al., A History of Mediation, 44–5.
75. Menkhaus et al., A History of Mediation.
76. Africa Confidential, ‘The Sodere Spirit’, 2.
77. Fisher, ‘AMISOM’.
78. North, ‘Institutions’; Leftwich ‘Thinking Politically’.
79. c.f. Lund, ‘Twilight Institutions’.
80. Khan, ‘Political Settlements’.
81. Menkhaus, ‘Governance without Government’.
82. Hagmann, ‘From State Collapse to Duty-Free Shop’.
83. Ahmed, Jihad and Co.
84. c.f. Chayes, Thieves of State.
85. Chonka Spies, ‘Stonework, and the Suuq’; ‘Glocalised Jihad’; Harper, Everything You Have Told Me is True.
86. Hills, ‘Security sector or security arena?’.
87. Verjee et al., ‘The Economics of Elections’.
88. Fisher, ‘AMISOM’.
89. Williams, Fighting for Peace in Somalia.
90. de Waal, ‘Pax Africana’.
91. Chonka and Healy, ‘What happened to Somali national self-determination?’
92. Kapteijns, Clan Cleansing, 139–41.
93. Chonka, ‘Glocalised Jihad’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alex de Waal
Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation, Research Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and Professorial Fellow at the London School of Economics. He has worked on the Horn of Africa and on humanitarian issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner.