This work explores Somalia's state collapse and the security threats posed by Somalia's prolonged crisis. Communities are reduced to lawlessness, and the interests of commercial elites have shifted towards rule of law, but not a revived central state. Terrorists have found Somalia inhospitable, using it mainly for short-term transshipment.
Like many African nations at the end of the 1980s, Somalia faced economic, social and political problems. Many of these countries were still struggling to survive the upheaval in this period, but Somalia could not solve its problems as a healthy nation. Instead the problems led to its disintegration and dismemberment in a bloody civil war roughly four fifths of its population displaced. These displaced people have lost their past and their future and that of their children. Subsequently, the country has been divided into fiefdoms ruled by separate armed clans. The political and economic systems collapsed. The human agony is beyond imagination. What caused this agony and the collapse of civil society? What were the forces which shaped it? Was it part of an inevitable evolutionary process? To what extent did the colonial partition contribute to the calamity? By examining the Somali politico-historical perspective, this book explores the impact of the colonial legacy on the political, social and economic life of the Somali nation, and posits that it is one of the main factors which led to the collapse of the modern Somali state in the early 1990s. It will also briefly consider some immediate post-collapse outcomes. Abdisalam M. Issa-Salwe (PhD) is Somali scholar, researcher, lecturer, and author as well as celebrated veteran of Somali Studies. He is written, edited, many scholarly articles and books. Some of his published works include: 'The Collapse of the Somali State: The Impact of the Colonial Legacy (1996); 'Cold War Fallout: Boundary Politics and Conflict in The Horn of Africa (2000); 'Oral Culture and Computer Mediated Communication: Social Dynamics of Mailing Lists (2010). He is currently Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Head of the Deanship of Curriculum Development. Dr Abdisalam is also Professor.
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 2,3, University of Potsdam (Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät ), course: State Failure, Crisis, and Conflict Management, language: English, abstract: Nation-states are more numerous than they were half a century ago. In 1919 there were fifty-nine nation-states. In 1950 that number climbed up to sixty-nine. A decade later, after much of Africa gained independence, the number of nation-states reached ninety. The constant increase of independences in Africa, Asia and the Oceanic territories in addition to the implosion of the Soviet Union, have brought the total number of nation states in 2002 up to 192. Given these explosive numbers, the indigenous fragility of many of the new states and the inherent navigational dangers of the post Cold War economic and political surroundings, the possibility of failure among some of these new nation-states remains ever present.1Because they can no longer provide positive political goods to their citizens, nationstates fail. The government respectively the nation-state itself becomes illegitimate. At the moment only a few of the worlds nationstates are categorized as failed or collapsed. In spite of that, several dozen are weak and walking at the edge of failure. The aftermath of 9/11 led to the assumption that failed states harbour nonstate actors like warlords and terrorists which makes it necessary to understand the drivers and dynamics of nation state failure for the war on terrorism. This paper is an attempt to analyze which factors have led to the crisis of state collapse in Somalia and why does state collapse continue to be the order of the day? The first part of the paper is supposed to give an overview of Rotberg’s classification of state failure and state collapse. It will provide some general definitions and presents the indicators of the above mentioned terms The second part examines the Somali situation of collapsed state mostly in a chronological order. In a conclusion at the end, the question of prolonged state collapse in Somalia will be summarized.
Does statelessness necessarily mean anarchy and disorder? Clan elders, religious leaders and businessmen have worked together to provide stability and security in large parts of Somalia. Urban centres continue to suffer violence, political chaos and economic disruption. Do money, international trade and investment survive without a state? Somalia has been without a state, a Ministry of Finance, or a central bank, but the Somali Shilling was more stable during the second half of the 1990s than during the 1980s. Economic agreements with transnational firms and sovereign states go ahead. Do town-dwellers fare as well as pastoralists? With the collapse of the state, herders and traders have benefited from reduced restrictions on movement and there is a booming unofficial export and import trade. Settled populations have fared less well. Do pastoralists care about development and social improvement? Throughout the Horn western-funded development projects have had disastrous results. Nevertheless the Somalis have selectively accepted certain elements; phone and internet services are surprisingly cheap.BR> Published in association with the International African Institute North America: Indiana U Press
This work uses 11 African case studies in its exploration of the phenomenon of collapsed states. The writers consider the causes of collapse; symptoms and early warning signs; and how the situation was met. They also assess the strengths and weaknesses of various responses, such as UN action.
Mohamoud's work considers the underlying causes for the breakdown of the state across both time and space. Time is considered across the triple history - the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial processes. Space is used in the sense of taking the whole of Somalia as a unit of analysis. This approach enables the discovery of different structural crises over a period of time and examines these cumulative effects on the current upheavals in Somalia. Among the approaches, State Collapse and Post-Conflict Development in Africa covers the constraints in the harsh material environment; the subsistence pastoral mode of existence; the colonial intervention and the subsequent division of the land into five parts; Cold War geopolitics; decades of armed struggles; and the post-colonial crisis of governance. Dr. Abdulla (Awil) Mohamoud runs SAHAN, an academic research and consultancy agency, which conducts policy oriented research and fact finding missions abroad, mainly in Africa, undertakes evaluation and monitoring activities, provides training and offers advisory services on integration and multi-cultural issues. He holds an MA degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and earned his PhD at the University of Amsterdam. Mohamoud has served regularly as an election observer in UN, EU, Council of Europe and OSCE missions to conflict and war-torn societies (to East-Timor, Kosovo, Nigeria, Serbia, and Zimbabwe).
The threat of terror, which flares in Africa and Indonesia, has given the problem of failed states an unprecedented immediacy and importance. In the past, failure had a primarily humanitarian dimension, with fewer implications for peace and security. Now nation-states that fail, or may do so, pose dangers to themselves, to their neighbors, and to people around the globe: preventing their failure, and reviving those that do fail, has become a strategic as well as a moral imperative. State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror develops an innovative theory of state failure that classifies and categorizes states along a continuum from weak to failed to collapsed. By understanding the mechanisms and identifying the tell-tale indicators of state failure, it is possible to develop strategies to arrest the fatal slide from weakness to collapse. This state failure paradigm is illustrated through detailed case studies of states that have failed and collapsed (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, Somalia), states that are dangerously weak (Colombia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan), and states that are weak but safe (Fiji, Haiti, Lebanon).
Many of the existing juridical states in the Third World remain fragile and prone to collapse. Yet, these conditions have not always given way to anarchy. In some cases, the breakdown of weak and often arbitrary states has given way to more coherent and viable, though not necessarily benevolent, political entities. This book examines the extent to which these sub-units - ' states within states ' - represent alternatives that the international community could look to in a long-term effort to bring stability, security and development to peoples in the Third World.
