Counter-Insurgency Operations of the African Union and Mitigation of Humanitarian Crisis in Somalia (original) (raw)
Related papers
unpublished, 2021
There is an ongoing debate on evaluating peacekeeping missions sent to conflict settings and whether such interventions be successfully achieved or not. Assessing the challenges that peacekeepers face in a conflict environment, like Somalia, is difficult, yet the reasons have not been evaluated extensively. Many scholars tried to consider peacekeeping missions internally, such as funding, capacity, and the composition of peacekeepers. However, the role of internal factors such as the knowledge and the ability of local people is overlooked, and the voices of the Somali traditional leaders seems missing. Therefore, this paper delves into this by examining the challenges and the prospects that the African Mission in Somalia, known as AMISOM, faces, from the Somali point of view in stabilizing and building peace in south and central Somalia. This case study of Somalia uses interviews with an open-ended questionnaire to collect data from 12 respondents, including males and females from different Somali communities. The empirical findings of this thesis presented that AMISOM is not practically doing the work it is mandated to do due to some fundamental challenges. Every troop-contributing state of AMISOM has different and separate interests, overlapping and challenging the overall mission mandate. It further revealed that international peacekeeping principles are either non-applicable to AMISOM or not deliberately applied and chosen from other unknown and conflicting principles. The study also proposes that engagement of local knowledge with peacekeeping efforts and removal of neighboring countries from the peacekeeping efforts would ease the peacekeeping challenges in Somalia.
Research Paper, 2017
This research proposal is divided into six chapters including the conclusion. Each chapter will be introduced on its own. This is the first chapter which is going to be the research paper design itself. It will start with a detailed explanation of the background of the study, which focuses on the issue of security from the perspective of the post-colonial state formation in Africa. The study will discuss some of the main historical factors that contribute to the problem of lack of insecurity in Africa as a continent and Somalia as a case study. The theoretical framework will be in the next section. It will briefly highlight two main theoretical underpinnings that I will take to fit it into the context of Africa. Primarily it will explain their basic theoretical premises regarding analysis of the state formation process while I will link to the issues of sovereignty and security. I will outline the research problem followed by the scope and justification of the study, the main objectives, the research questions, and the methodology I will apply to conduct the research paper. This chapter will end by indicating some of the limitations that I will face during the research.
2016
This study generally looked into the challenges of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in maintaining peace in the country. The study also looked into the challenges the mission faced from March 2007, when it was first deployed to Mogadishu, and August 2012, when Somalis elected a new federal government to replace the old existing transitional governments to date. It had further gone to scrutinize how the mission was perceived by the people of Somalia in relation to the political dimensions of the Federal Government of Somalia and as well what has been done and what has not been achieved by the AMISOM (African Mission in Somalia) in fulfilling its mandate of peacekeeping. The key aspects was the initial international political context in which the mission deployed; problems of internal coordination between the mission‟s components; the lack of a reliable local partner with which to wage a counter-insurgency campaign; problems of strategic coordination among external partne...
Institut Català Internacional per la Pau (www.icip.cat), 2013
The political and security context in Somalia has improved substantially over the last year. The security situation remains fragile, however, and the African Peace Support Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) is in need of a new mandate. In light of these developments, a Special Committee of Experts from the African Union assessed the mandate of AMISOM, after six years of deployment. This policy paper, which is targeted at both researchers and practitioners working in the field of peace and security, analyses AMISOM’s successes and failures so far, in order to define the crucial elements that have to be taken into account when renewing the mandate. Examining the trends that AMISOM might develop in the coming months, it provides several strategic recommendations for identifying how AMISOM can best contribute to the stabilization of Somalia and allign its activities to the priorities of the Federal Government of Somalia.
Somalia has been labelled a failed state since 1991. The persistent threat from Somali Warlords, Islamic Courts and al Qeada & al-Shabaab had wreaked Somalia beyond repair. The international community's response was to institute an active, regional peacekeeping mission. It is mandated to stabilise Somalia. Under its protection, in 2012, Somalia had its first presidential election since 1967. This year Parliament elected former PM Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, as president. The paper discusses the challenges posed by al-Shabaab, led mostly by foreign extremists that impose a foreign ideology brutally on the Somali people. It is the main threat to peace that AMISOM is fighting; in what has become al-Shabaab's raison d'être. The presence of foreign troops has allowed it to flourish with its despotic pious decrees. Without a battle against peacekeepers to unite it, al-Shabaab would likely splinter into nationalist factions. The move to increase martial power to AMISOM must resist the temptation to allow history to repeat itself. Instead, the leadership should negotiate with the moderate elements of the protagonists. The recommendations augur on a Strategy of Constructive Disengagement for international community, premises of Alternative Conflict Management (ACM) whose approaches derive from several factors that shape conflict management articulation of process and strategy-openness, political agency and ideology and identifying the root causes of the conflict. It argues for developing a culture of and constituency for peace in Somalia, building bridges between peoples, religious factions and the state and healing the wounds of war and displacement. In the end, we have seen how disastrous it is to rely exclusively on martial action to stabilise nations. The Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen military intervention has only produced mayhem on the local populace killing more than a million citizens and displacing half of their populations. Dialogue for peace with all stakeholders will finally prove that Somalia's sheer un-governability is both its curse and its blessing. Key words: Somalia, AMISOM, al-Shabaab, Alternative Conflict Management
Stabilisation and humanitarian access in a collapsed state: the Somali case
Disasters, 2010
Somalia today is the site of three major threats: the world's worst humanitarian crisis; the longestrunning instance of complete state collapse; and a robust jihadist movement with links to Al-Qa'ida. External state-building, counter-terrorism and humanitarian policies responding to these threats have worked at cross-purposes. State-building efforts that insist humanitarian relief be channelled through the nascent state in order to build its legitimacy and capacity undermine humanitarian neutrality when the state is a party to a civil war. Counter-terrorism policies that seek to ensure that no aid benefits terrorist groups have the net effect of criminalising relief operations in countries where poor security precludes effective accountability. This paper argues that tensions between stabilisation and humanitarian goals in contemporary Somalia reflect a long history of politicisation of humanitarian operations in the country.