War and Peace in Somalia
War and Peace in Somalia

Author: Michael Keating

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 622

ISBN-13: 0190057963

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For the last thirty years Somalia has experienced violence and upheaval. Today, the international effort to help Somalis build a federal state and achieve stability is challenged by deep-rooted grievances, local conflicts and a powerful insurgency led by Al-Shabaab. Consisting of forty-four chapters by conflict resolution specialists and the world's leading experts on Somalia, this volume constitutes a unique compendium of insights into the insurgency and its impact. War and Peace in Somalia explores the legacies of past violence, especially impunity, illegitimacy and exclusion, and the need for national reconciliation. Drawing on decades of experience and months of field research, the contributors throw light on diverse forms of local conflict, its interrelated causes, and what can be done about it. They share original research on the role of women, men and youth in the conflict, and present new insight into Al-Shabaab--particularly the group's multi-dimensional strategy, the motivations of its fighters, their foreign links, and the prospects for engagement. This ground-breaking volume illuminates the war in Somalia, and sets out what can and should be done to bring it to an end. For policymakers and researchers covering Somalia, East Africa, extremism or conflict resolution, this is a must-read.

Fighting for Peace in Somalia
Fighting for Peace in Somalia

Author: Paul D. Williams

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-06-20

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0192560417

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Fighting for Peace in Somalia provides the first comprehensive analysis of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), an operation deployed in 2007 to stabilize the country and defend its fledgling government from one of the world's deadliest militant organizations, Harakat al-Shabaab. The book's two parts provide a history of the mission from its genesis in an earlier, failed regional initiative in 2005 up to mid-2017, as well as an analysis of the mission's six most important challenges, namely, logistics, security sector reform, civilian protection, strategic communications, stabilization, and developing a successful exit strategy. These issues are all central to the broader debates about how to design effective peace operations in Africa and beyond. AMISOM was remarkable in several respects: it would become the African Union's (AU) largest peace operation by a considerable margin deploying over 22,000 soldiers; it became the longest running mission under AU command and control, outlasting the nearest contender by over seven years; it also became the AU's most expensive operation, at its peak costing approximately US$1 billion per year; and, sadly, AMISOM became the AU's deadliest mission. Although often referred to as a peacekeeping operation, AMISOM's troops were given a range of daunting tasks that went well beyond the realm of peacekeeping, including VIP protection, war-fighting, counterinsurgency, stabilization, and state-building as well as supporting electoral processes and facilitating humanitarian assistance.

Somalia - The Untold Story
Somalia - The Untold Story

Author: Judith Gardner

Publisher: CIIR

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9780745322087

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Explores the experiences of women in Somalia and how they have survived the trauma of war.

When There Was No Aid
When There Was No Aid

Author: Sarah G. Phillips

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-03-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1501747169

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For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. Sarah G. Phillips's When There Was No Aid offers us one such example. Using evidence from Somaliland's experience of peace-building, When There Was No Aid challenges two of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South. First, that intervention by actors in the global North is self-evidently useful in ending them, and second that the quality of a country's governance institutions (whether formal or informal) necessarily determines the level of peace and civil order that the country experiences. Phillips explores how popular discourses about war, peace, and international intervention structure the conditions of possibility to such a degree that even the inability of institutions to provide reliable security can stabilize a prolonged period of peace. She argues that Somaliland's post-conflict peace is grounded less in the constraining power of its institutions than in a powerful discourse about the country's structural, temporal, and physical proximity to war. Through its sensitivity to the ease with which peace gives way to war, Phillips argues, this discourse has indirectly harnessed an apparent propensity to war as a source of order.

Me Against My Brother
Me Against My Brother

Author: Scott Peterson

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 9780415930635

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American journalist Scott Peterson describes the violent events that have torn apart Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda during the 1990s, including the involvement of the U.S.

The Somali Conflict
The Somali Conflict

Author: Mark Bradbury

Publisher: Oxfam Working Papers

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780855982713

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This paper aims at identifying practical ways in which NGOs might contribute to the peacemaking process in Somalia and Somaliland. It covers the Somali Civil War up to October 1993. The author believes that Somalia has become a testing ground for the UN, the U.S. and NGOs, a theatre in which many ideas pertinent to a possible future world order are being worked out. He believes the heart of the challenge is how humanitarian agencies learn to respond to the results of armed conflict in complex and protracted emergencies. A wide range of suggestions is offered to NGOs. They need to recognise that peacemaking is a long term process and should consider sponsoring research into the causes and impact of the Somali conflict. UN efforts have failed because they represented external intervention rather than a Somali initiative, so NGOs may need to get involved on a political level. They could assist by promoting "peacemaking" rather than "peace enforcement", for example, by advocating an enquiry into human rights abuses by UN personnel and by Somali warlords. Peacemaking needs to address the underlying causes of conflict- in Somalia land ownership and land use is a significant source of conflict and this is another area where NGOs could usefully focus resources. Finally, the author considers that peacemaking and development can usefully be seen as similar processes, both of which benefit from a participatory approach. Thus NGOs have an important role to play in promoting local initiatives.

War and Conflict in Africa
War and Conflict in Africa

Author: Paul D. Williams

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-06-23

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1509509089

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After the Cold War, Africa earned the dubious distinction of being the world's most bloody continent. But how can we explain this proliferation of armed conflicts? What caused them and what were their main characteristics? And what did the world's governments do to stop them? In this fully revised and updated second edition of his popular text, Paul Williams offers an in-depth and wide-ranging assessment of more than six hundred armed conflicts which took place in Africa from 1990 to the present day - from the continental catastrophe in the Great Lakes region to the sprawling conflicts across the Sahel and the web of wars in the Horn of Africa. Taking a broad comparative approach to examine the political contexts in which these wars occurred, he explores the major patterns of organized violence, the key ingredients that provoked them and the major international responses undertaken to deliver lasting peace. Part I, Contexts provides an overview of the most important attempts to measure the number, scale and location of Africa's armed conflicts and provides a conceptual and political sketch of the terrain of struggle upon which these wars were waged. Part II, Ingredients analyses the role of five widely debated features of Africa's wars: the dynamics of neopatrimonial systems of governance; the construction and manipulation of ethnic identities; questions of sovereignty and self-determination; as well as the impact of natural resources and religion. Part III, Responses, discusses four major international reactions to Africa's wars: attempts to build a new institutional architecture to help promote peace and security on the continent; this architecture's two main policy instruments, peacemaking initiatives and peace operations; and efforts to develop the continent. War and Conflict in Africa will be essential reading for all students of international peace and security studies as well as Africa's international relations.

Clan Cleansing in Somalia
Clan Cleansing in Somalia

Author: Lidwien Kapteijns

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-12-18

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0812207580

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In 1991, certain political and military leaders in Somalia, wishing to gain exclusive control over the state, mobilized their followers to use terror—wounding, raping, and killing—to expel a vast number of Somalis from the capital city of Mogadishu and south-central and southern Somalia. Manipulating clan sentiment, they succeeded in turning ordinary civilians against neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Although this episode of organized communal violence is common knowledge among Somalis, its real nature has not been publicly acknowledged and has been ignored, concealed, or misrepresented in scholarly works and political memoirs—until now. Marshaling a vast amount of source material, including Somali poetry and survivor accounts, Clan Cleansing in Somalia analyzes this campaign of clan cleansing against the historical background of a violent and divisive military dictatorship, in the contemporary context of regime collapse, and in relationship to the rampant militia warfare that followed in its wake. Clan Cleansing in Somalia also reflects on the relationship between history, truth, and postconflict reconstruction in Somalia. Documenting the organization and intent behind the campaign of clan cleansing, Lidwien Kapteijns traces the emergence of the hate narratives and code words that came to serve as rationales and triggers for the violence. However, it was not clans that killed, she insists, but people who killed in the name of clan. Kapteijns argues that the mutual forgiveness for which politicians often so lightly call is not a feasible proposition as long as the violent acts for which Somalis should forgive each other remain suppressed and undiscussed. Clan Cleansing in Somalia establishes that public acknowledgment of the ruinous turn to communal violence is indispensable to social and moral repair, and can provide a gateway for the critical memory work required from Somalis on all sides of this multifaceted conflict.

Somalia and Operation Restore Hope
Somalia and Operation Restore Hope

Author: John L. Hirsch

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13:

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"Somalia" has become a symbol for the unacceptable costs of humanitarian intervention, for the type of foreign involvement that should be avoided. But the authors of this timely book, themselves key participants in the U.S.-led operation there, argue that substantial good was done--the tide of famine was stayed, hundreds of thousands of lives saved, and steps toward political reconciliation begun. Despite the recent renewal of political violence, the humanitarian situation remains stable. In launching Operation Restore Hope, the multinational coalition faced a complex, tense, and rapidly unfolding situation. The authors detail how the carefully limited mission achieved its goals, including mutual understanding with the Somalis, by combining political, military, and humanitarian actions. But the authors also describe how different U.S. and UN concepts of the mission and subsequent changes in the mission's scope led almost inevitably to confrontation. Hirsch and Oakley raise fundamental questions about how to conduct such operations, and in particular about the limitations of peacekeepers in nation building. Drawing lessons from Vietnam and Lebanon as well as more recent operations, the authors provide an analysis that will help policymakers and scholars as they debate the future of peacekeeping.