State Failure in Somalia Causes of Instability and Insecurity (original) (raw)
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The trajectory of Conflict and state failure in Somalia
For over two decades, the Somalia Republic has received massive amounts institutional building assistance from the UN, US and several other states. Nonetheless, the country remains one of the world's poorest. In fact it is often cited as a " failed state " by many scholars and political analysts even after the announcement of a post-transitional federal government in 2012 (Menkhaus, 2014). At present Somalia is wracked by famine and drought and has for several decades been epitomized by civil war ever since the collapse of its central government in 1991. The country has faced profound challenges in instituting meaningful structures of governance over the last couple of years even after having received huge amounts of external institution-building aid. Furthermore, faced with extreme poverty and famine, the country has experienced severe clan conflicts over limited resources, especially those over land and water resources. The instabilities partly emerged from conflicts between the state structures imposed during the colonial era and the clan structures which traditionally played a crucial role in the pastoral lives of Somalis. However, the main causes of the conflict in Somalia are competition for resources and/or power, the colonial legacy, and repressions by the military regime. Clan identity, availability of weapons, and the presence of large numbers of unemployed youth are usually cited as contributing factors to the conflict.
Understanding Somali Conflict: Causes, Consequences and Strategies for Peace-Building
Understanding Somali Conflict: Causes, Consequences and Strategies for Peace-Building , 2021
Over the past decades, Somalia has experienced civil wars, inter-clan conflicts, militias warlords, terrorism, and other several violent conflicts. These conflicts resulted in the deaths of many innocent civilians and destroyed the state institutions, structures, and trust in governance and consequently affected the agricultural production of the country, which resulted to nationwide famine. Thus, this article aims to critically understand the causes and consequences of the conflict in Somalia. It also aims to discuss opportunities and strategies for peacebuilding and reconstruction of Somalia. The article reveals that clan and clannism are the leading causes of Somalia's destabilization. Furthermore, the article argues that radical extremism, corruption, the militarization of clan members, inequalities and extreme poverty, and massive youth unemployment are the most common factors that lead to Somalia's never ending conflict. On the other hand, this article examined that mass migration, extremism, the emergence of piracy, and the loss of Somali unity and nationalism are the results of the prolonged conflict. Moreover, the article found that the previous peacebuilding approaches such as the promotion of democracy, elections, free market-based reforms, and building local institutions combined with modern state standards adopted from the international community have failed to promote peace and stability in Somalia. Thus, this article recommends that social reconciliation should be held and led by the local people. This in return, we believe will help Somalia to restore peace, the rule of law and ensure long term stability.
SOMALIA: AN OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORICAL AND CURRENT SITUATION
Social Science Research Network, 2016
In Somalia as in many other conflict ravaged societies, “history is deadly ammunition in today’s political wars.” In that respect, to comprehend the depth of apparently unsolvable and protracted crisis in Somalia, it is essential to identify and analyse the underlying causes of these predicaments that have been unfolding since the colonial era. Additionally, understanding the causes and intricacies of the current political turmoil is also necessary for finding the way to end this madness, as other analysts rightly acknowledged with reference to the Somali conflict “an understanding of what went wrong is indispensable to the search for solutions to the president predicament.” In that respect, this paper provides some background information and analysis on the key events leading up to the complete collapse of the Somali State in 1991 and its devastating aftermath. Furthermore, this paper examines human rights records of subsequent Somali governments as well as non-state actors. Finally, it highlights and studies the challenges and problems associated with attempts to reconstitute collapsed state institutions.
Somalias turbulent path to peace and stability
International Journal of Peace and Development Studies, 2017
After gaining its independence in 1960, Somalia tried in vain to unite all Somalis in the Horn of Africa. As part of that project, Siad Barre launched a full-scale invasion of the Ogaden in 1977 in an attempt to take this vast territory from Ethiopia. But Somalia's crushing defeat in the 1977/78 war brought about far reaching repercussions. Armed resistance against Siad Barre's government eventually led to state collapse in 1991. While the former British Somaliland declared its independence, civil war and anarchy began to rock Mogadishou and southern Somalia. To make matters worse, a devastating famine claimed the lives of thousands of Somalis. The UN and US intervention to mitigate the humanitarian crisis ended in disaster. Neighbouring countries like Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya made their own efforts to set up a new government in Somalia. Ethiopia's intervention in support of the Transitional Federal Government triggered armed resistance by al Shabaab. On its part, the US government has been very much worried that Somalia has become a safe haven for terrorists. As a result, the Horn of Africa became a battle ground in the war on terror. The United States has been using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to hunt down al Shabaab leaders and destroy the terrorist groups. Using both secondary and primary sources including archival documents of the Ministry of National Defence based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this paper attempts to examine Somalia's thorny path towards peace and stability. The findings show that Somalia's clan based politics, the stockpiles of arms acquired during the cold war that eventually fell into the hands of the warlords and the inability of the international community to put an end to anarchy and civil war, have contributed to Somalia's insatabilty for over two decades.
Third World Quarterly, 1999
Somalia and Somaliland are both inhabited basically by SomalisÐ w ith small Oromo minorities in both, and a large Swahili minority in the latter. Both have multiple clans, sub-clans, lineage and blood groups and in both Islam is central to social values. Somalia had no history of a stable state before Italian rule but Somaliland did (Haud-Hargeisa-B erbera-A rabia trade axis centred). The United Republic of Somalia (rejected in the referendum by Somaliland) passed from political instability to two decades of Said Barre' s increasingly centralised and repressive dictatorship w hich waged war against the Northwest (Somaliland) and Northeast (Bosaso) as well as against Ethiopia. The dictatorship collapsed in 1991 basically because of the 1987± 91 Somaliland Liberation w ar. The economies of Somalia/Somaliland turn on pastoral production, commerce and remittances. These have recovered in part in Somalia and fully in Somaliland. However, only a fraction of the Barre regimes dissolution of service delivery and user friendly law and order capicity has been made good in Somaliland and virtually more in Somalia. USA/UN intervention did limit starvation andÐ for a timeÐ open violence. That was at a high cost in ® nances, in the reputation of peacekeeping and to Somalis. UNOSOM answered political and civil questions before having any real grasp of civil, political and economic realities. The price was to entrench warlords and militias and to marginalisè peacelords' (elders and merchants). Somaliland, never occupied by UNOSOM , has engaged in a series of large, long peace conferences of elders from all parts of its territory leading to a real if fragile national/territorial identity with personal security in most areas, an elected president and two house parliament, a user friendly police force and court system and the beginnings of a restored professional civil service.
Conflict In Somalia: Drivers And Dynamics
2005
Somalia's history of conflict reveals an intriguing paradox--namely, many of the factors that drive armed conflict have also played a role in managing, ending, or preventing war. For instance, clannism and clan cleavages are a source of conflict--used to divide Somalis, fuel endemic clashes over resources and power, used to mobilize militia, and make broad-based reconciliation very difficult to achieve. Most of Somalia's armed clashes since 1991 have been fought in the name of clan, often as a result of political leaders manipulating clannism for their own purposes. Yet traditional clan elders are a primary source of conflict mediation, clan-based customary law serves as the basis for negotiated settlements, and clan-based blood-payment groups serve as a deterrent to armed violence. Likewise, the central state is conventionally viewed as a potential source of rule of law and peaceful allocation of resources, but, at times in Somalia's past, it was a source of violence an...
Chapter 1 – The reasons and results of international intervention in Somalia
International intervention in Somalia has been marked by failure, and has systematically contributed to conflict within Somali society. A study of patterns since colonial times reveals that many of the cherished ideals of international intervention have been shipwrecked in Somalia, the latest being that of humanitarian intervention and the Global War on Terror. Since the 1950s, efforts to build a Somali state have been wholly driven by external actors; the Somali constituency of modernized, urban forces to which such efforts appeal is narrow and its attitude to the state being built is predatory: the state is an external resource, which provides access to funding and political legitimacy, to be captured. There has been notably no effort at making the state sustainable, as its clientelist relationship to the international patrons supporting it is precisely what makes it valuable. Meanwhile, Somalis have their own traditional systems of governance, inevitably hybridised by exposure to the outside world; whenever the international community has withdrawn from Somalia, as in 1995-2004, Somalis fall back on these systems, and a certain measure of peace and stability returns to the country. The Somali attempt to create a political entity based on these systems, in opposition to externally imposed state-building, resulted in the Islamic Courts Union, which was rapidly destroyed by external intervention (ostensibly motivated by the fear of another 'Taliban'-like regime emerging in the Horn of Africa). Despite some indications of progress in the external state-building project, now orchestrated by the UN, since 2004, Somalia remains a 'failed state' by all definitions.