Somali Territories Research Articles

Platform kinship and the reshaping of political order in the Somali territories

Abstract Numerous studies show that digital technologies facilitate diaspora engagement in homeland affairs. However, communities in home countries also adapt digital platforms to harness diasporic support and drive socio-political change. Despite a rich literature on ‘digital kinship’, there remains a limited understanding of kinship's broader political and developmental impact, especially in (post)conflict regions. This article draws on fieldwork in the Somali territories to argue that a distinctive model of governance, platform kinship, is emerging as an alternative to existing state and international development programmes. Focusing on WhatsApp, it highlights how the platform's specific features are adapted to Somali segmentary clan structures, enabling kinship groups to bridge digital divides, preserve oral traditions and uphold egalitarian principles. Platform kinship has state-like effects. Through an ecosystem of WhatsApp groups, geographically dispersed kin mediate disputes, coordinate development projects, fund political campaigns, and respond to conflicts and crises. However, it also empowers new actors, including youth, politicians and business elites, while marginalizing elders. Furthermore, because platform kinship strengthens the clan as the central political unit, it can deepen divisions between kinship groups and undermine state-building projects and conceptions of national identity. This has important implications for policy-makers and academics working on digital governance, development and peacebuilding.

Solidarities on the move between the Horn of Africa and Italy: Somali migrants’ disconnection and networking practices in the 2010s

ABSTRACT Through the reconstruction of the de-activations and re-activations of solidarity in different phases of migration trajectories, this article analyses transnational migration from the Somali territories during the 2010s. Somali migrants who arrived in Italy between 2011 and 2017 provide the ethnographic basis for a historically situated, socio-cultural theory of transnational migration from below. The article addresses the moral, social, economic and political milieu within which the migrants defined their intention to travel to Europe and assembled their trajectories. The analysis focuses on the interaction between the all-pervasive presence of networks of smugglers and traffickers in the Horn of Africa and their capacity to respond to the practical necessities and aspirations of young individuals. The second object of analysis is the transformative and productive dimension of the journey. The migrants re-adapted their theory of practice of solidarity and social networking to very specific circumstances imposed on them during the journey. Finally, the paper addresses the creative readaptations of ideas and practices of solidarity in Italy, under the combined pressure of inherited moral codes, the emotional and socio-economic effects of the previous steps in the migrants’ trajectories, and everyday life in a securitised and precarious context.

From Celebration of Independence to Disintegration: The Somaliland Experience in the Post-Failed Union with Somalia

The state-making of Somaliland has been borne out of the experiences gained from the aborted union between the British Protectorate of Somaliland and Italian Somalia. The driving aim behind the proclamation of statehood was to reinstate Somaliland’s sovereignty and independence that was lost in 1960. Somalilanders were galvanized by the euphoria of Somali nationalism in the pursuit of the greater Somali Republic in the Horn of Africa that all five Somali territories unite into one nation-state. Their zeal merely earned them destruction. Such destruction includes the tyranny and genocide which was inflicted upon the land and people for over the thirty years whilst the failed union lasted. Therefore, this article re-examines historical mistakes in the post-colonial period and the negative consequences of the union of thirty years with Somalia. It explores Somaliland’s experiences of this failed merger, and Somaliland’s achievements and challenges over the past thirty years since Somaliland regained its sovereignty. The article compares and contrasts how Somaliland fared during each of the thirty-year periods. The article also analyses the challenges posed by the non-recognition on political grounds that prevented Somaliland to attain its sovereign rights. Despite the critical and difficult conditions that confronted the state-making process of Somaliland, the interplay between state and non-state actors had become the means and methods to create durable peace and political stability which prevented vengeful acts, anarchy, and political turmoil in Somaliland. The historical backdrop of the unsuccessful merger, too, has become a salient factor and thriving agenda for Somaliland to prove its internal sovereignty, statehood, and a workable political system based on multiparty, competitive elections, and a check and balance of the state organs. The Republic of Somaliland has likewise become a potent regional and international player for the fate of peace, security, and regional economic integration.

Precarious labour – Precarious lives

Displacement and mass migration have contributed to extremely rapid urbanization in the Somali territories of the Horn of Africa. Often displaced from rural areas, newcomers to cities hope to find safety and the means to rebuild their lives. However, displaced people often find themselves stranded in dilapidated settlements and entangled in exploitative labour relations or exhausting forms of petty entrepreneurship in order to survive. This article builds on photographic and testimonial accounts from urban in-migrants to provide a snapshot of the ways in which these labour relations perpetuate socio-economic precarity while also underpinning the dynamic (re)construction of modern Somali cities.

Revenues on the hoof: livestock trade, taxation and state-making in the Somali territories

ABSTRACT This article considers the relationship between livestock taxation and local state formation dynamics in the northern Somali territories. While the economic importance of livestock in Somalia is undisputed, its significance as a source of revenue and legitimacy for public administrations and competing state-building projects has been overlooked. Drawing on fieldwork in Somaliland’s main livestock markets and the Berbera corridor, we highlight the interplay between public administrations that seek to maximize livestock revenue and traders who attempt to minimize taxation. State attempts to capture these ‘revenues on the hoof’ by both coercive and consensual means, shifting livestock trading routes and fluctuating animal trading volumes produce different taxation patterns across the Somali territories. As a result, fiscal contracts between livestock traders and public administrations are marked by various degrees of reciprocity and coercion.

News media and political contestation in the Somali territories: defining the parameters of a transnational digital public

ABSTRACTThis article examines the extent to which different forms and technologies of media production facilitate popular participation in a ‘digital public’ across the politically fragmented Somali territories. Based on textual analysis of local media and comparative examination of news production and consumption, the article emphasises the dual character of the public sphere in the Somali context. Here, local media production centred in individual capitals of different political administrations coexists and overlaps with a transnational arena of Somali-language broadcasting and debate from various externally-based media networks. In this distinctive Somali media ecology, multiple forms of ‘old’ media intersect with digital technologies that have emerged throughout the post-1991 period of statelessness, conflict and political reconfiguration. Local public spheres of media production and public engagement help create state-like identities and political imaginaries. Nonetheless, these are articulated in the wider transnational Somali-language digital public that such administrations have limited ability to control. In this context certain notions of a transnational Somali ethnolinguistic or religio-cultural community are maintained not in spite of conflict and fragmentation, but rather as a result of a media ecology and digital public that itself exists as an outcome of political instability and flux.

Counter-insurgency in the Somali territories: the ‘grey zone’ between peace and pacification

Counter-insurgency in the Somali territories: the ‘grey zone’ between peace and pacification

Cartoons in conflict: Amin Arts and transnational geopolitical imagination in the Somali-language public sphere

Amin Amir is the most popular and prolific political cartoonist in modern Somalia. His work is disseminated digitally and in print across the Somali territories on a daily basis. His appeal to such broad audiences is remarkable given the extreme political fragmentation of the media environment and that his renderings of broad themes of Somali political discourse (as well as highly localised developments) are all transmitted digitally into the region from the diaspora. This article explores certain recurring discourses in these ‘texts’, including corruption, political violence, ‘clanism’, and endemic external interference in Somalia. Building on theories of popular geopolitics and diasporic civic agency, it argues that analyses of such material must be attentive to the particular political, linguistic and socio-cultural features of the cartoon form within distinctive media settings. Considering the technological context of these texts’ dissemination into dynamic public spheres of Somali political debate, it argues that the artist collapses conventional distinctions between diasporic production and local consumption. The cartoons – being both ubiquitous in and spatially detached from on-the-ground realities of political change – epitomise the wider transnational character of the global Somali public sphere. This facilitates the reproduction of particular tropes of shared cultural, ethno-nationalist or religious identity of the ‘Ummadda Soomaaliyeed’ (the Somali Ummah) across multiple political boundaries.

Courts, Clans and Companies: Mobile Money and Dispute Resolution in Somaliland

One of the world’s most ambitious experiments in mobile money is underway in the Somali territories. In the absence of a strong central government and internationally recognized banking institutions, remittance companies and the telecoms industry have been innovating to provide services unique to the Somali context, which is making the economy increasingly ‘cashless’. Mobile money has posed new regulatory and legal challenges, particularly when disputes involving consumers are involved. This article focuses on a case study from Somaliland (the northern, self-declared independent region of Somalia) and examines Zaad, the dominant mobile money platform. Given the weak state institutions, there are a variety of actors, including private companies, government police and courts, sharia courts and traditional elders that play an active role in resolving conflicts that result from mobile money transactions, forging a hybrid judicial approach. We examine how these different actors intervene and create an enabling environment to allow innovation and foster trust in a region of the world that is frequently characterized as violent and lawless.

From Hybridity to Standardization: Rethinking State-Making in Contexts of Fragility

Having been top of the agenda for the past two decades, debates on state fragility have recently witnessed the emergence of pluralist concepts. While the concept of ‘hybrid political orders’ has invigorated our thinking about fragile states, it yields to the fallacy that pluralism constitutes the birth certificate of statehood. This article introduces an alternative concept to better grasp state trajectories, proposing an understanding of state developments in terms of institutional and identity standardization. Rooted in existing accounts of state-making, the analytical prism of ‘rule standardization’ is original in that it conceptually bridges the gap between statebuilding and nation-building as well as between state-making and state-breaking. Substantiating the theoretical discussion with three case studies from the Somali territories, the paper fundamentally proposes that what is required to sustain states should not be confused with what is required to initiate them.

Towards a diagnostic approach to media in fragile states: Examples from the Somali territories

Media interventions by international organizations and NGOs in conflict and post-conflict situations seek to develop and shape a media system to contribute to specific political and social ends. The analyses and assessments that inform these interventions are often based on an overview of the formal media and governance structures, such as mass media and state institutions, and overlook informal structures that may be instrumental for political and development goals. This article proposes a framework that can incorporate both the formal and informal modes of communication and participation that characterize a society. This framework encourages a ‘diagnostic’ approach centred around three areas: power, flows, and participation, and enables researchers to take into consideration features that are often overlooked such as customary law; a range of public authorities from politicians to Imams and local elders; information flows that may vary from poetry to mobile phones; and the culture of communication. Examples from the Somali territories, which are characterized by a weak central government, are employed to highlight how informal structures and actors intervene in shaping information flows and the importance of accounting for them.

Displacement in contested places: governance, movement and settlement in the Somali territories

South–central Somalia is the epicentre of one of the worst displacement situations in the world in terms of both the numbers of people affected and the dire conditions in which many are living. Key aspects of Somali displacement – the protracted and unresolved nature of much displacement, the contested nature of the places where people seek refuge, and the scale and significance of movement – unsettle common assumptions about internal displacement, and point to the importance of understanding the situation of displaced people at destination. Based on primary research with displaced people, political, aid and business actors, as well as secondary sources, this paper highlights the key forces and frameworks which mediate the situation of displaced people. The relevance of local social relations, macro-political authorities and the international humanitarian regime are examined, including how these structures articulate with each other. The paper concludes that much more research is needed to explore the perspectives of displaced people themselves, and to understand the impact of displacement in the Somali territories.

Erratum: Failures of the state failure debate: Evidence from the Somali territories

AbstractThe above article (DOI: 10.1002/jid.1482) was published online in Early View on 6 October 2008. A printing error was subsequently identified in the article.Page 8, line 47: ‘that’ should read ‘khat’.

Failures of the state failure debate: Evidence from the Somali territories

AbstractMuch of the current literature on state failure and collapse suffers from serious conceptual flaws. It ignores the variegated types of empirical statehood that exist on the ground, it conflates the absence of a central government with anarchy, it creates an unhelpful distinction between ‘accomplished’ and ‘failed’ states, and it is guided by a teleological belief in the convergence of all nation‐states. Particularly African states figure prominently in this debate and are frequently portrayed in almost pathological terms. Proposing a comparative analysis of politics in the Somali inhabited territories of the Horn of Africa, this article challenges state failure discourses on both theoretical and empirical grounds. We draw attention to the multiple processes of state‐building and forms of statehood that have emerged in Somalia, and the neighbouring Somalia region of Ethiopia, since 1991. The analysis of the different trajectories of these Somali political orders reveals that state formation in Africa contradicts central tenets of the state failure debate and that external state‐building interventions should recognise and engage with sub‐national political entities. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Modern Political Movements in Somaliland. II

Opening ParagraphIn a preceding article I discussed the organization and aims of modern Somali political movements in the light of the traditional political structure. Three types of political organization were distinguished: clan, regional (or tribal), and nationalist. These three types reflect traditional variations in the social structure and culture of different regions of Somaliland and also varying degrees of political evolution. I drew attention to the extent to which all parties—especially those with nationalist aims—have adopted a religious ideology and pointed out that Islam, through the traditional organization and aims of the Sufi Dervish Orders (ṭariiqas), has provided a precedent for pan-Somali solidarity. I now attempt to assess the extent of nationalist feeling in the different Somali territories, and examine the degree to which recent constitutional changes in government and administration have recognized the growth of nationalist aspirations and promoted their extension. I discuss first the present position in the five Somali territories: French and British Somaliland; Harar Province of Ethiopia; Somalia; and the Northern Province of Kenya. Finally, I consider the importance of Islam in furthering nationalism and in helping to overcome the cleavages of clan and Dia-paying group affiliation which oppose the formation of a unified Somali nation.

Modern Political Movements in Somaliland,

Opening ParagraphIn this article I give a brief outline of Somali social organization and describe the constitution and aims of the main political parties as they existed in 1957. It is hoped in a second article to examine the activities of the parties in individual Somali territories in the light of particular events in these territories and in relation to recent constitutional changes already effected or proposed.