Governance without government in Somalia: Spoilers, state building, and the politics of coping

International Security

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 74-106

  Menkhaus, Ken ^a  

^a DAVIDSON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847245846     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2007.31.3.74     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. The Islamiste are also commonly called the Union of Islamic Courte.
2. For a detailed assessment of prospects for the TFG and the rise of the Islamist movement in Somalia in 2006, see International Crisis Group (ICG), "Can the Somali Crisis Be Contained?" Africa Report, No. 116 (Brussels: ICG, August 10, 2006).
3. Koen Vlassenroot and Timothy Raeymaekers, "The Politics of Rebellion and Intervention in Ituri: The Emergence of a New Political Complex?" African Affairs, Vol. 103, No. 412 (July 2004), pp. 359-383;
4. Ken Menkhaus, "Kenya-Somalia Border Conflict Analysis" (Nairobi: United States Agency for International Development, August 2005);
5. Georg Lutz and Wolf Linder, Traditional Structures in Local Governance for Local Development (Berne: University of Berne, May 2004);
6. and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Local Government Secretariat, "Traditional Authority in South Sudan" (Geneva: UNDP, March 2005).
7. Although the emphasis here is on contemporary instances of local adaptation to state failure, there is a wealth of earlier research by anthropologists, political scientists, and historians documenting the many forms of local governance in communities living beyond the reach or interest of central governments.
8. Stephen John Stedman, "The Spoiler Problem in Peace Processes," International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall 1997), pp. 5-53.
9. Among the many excellent studies of this period, see Ahmed I. Samatar, Socialist Somalia: Rhetoric and Reality (London: Zed, 1986);
10. and Terrence Lyons and Ahmed Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies of Political Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995).
11. David Rawson, The Somali State and Foreign Aid (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State, 1993).
12. By "state failure," I mean a situation in which a quasi state continues to enjoy juridical sovereignty but is unable to perform most basic functions associated with a state. Most of the literature on collapsed states actually describes variations on the theme of partial state failure.
13. Somalia's state failure in the 1980s closely mirrored the analysis of purposive state failure later described by William Reno in Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
14. David Laitin, "Somalia: America's Newest Ally," unpublished paper, 1979, p. 8.
15. The most careful empirical study of the total casualty figures in Somalia's 1991-92 famine and civil war is Refugee Policy Group, Hope Restored? Humanitarian Aid in Somalia, 1991-1994 (Washington, D.C.: Refugee Policy Group, November 1994).
16. Somalilanders argue that their May 1991 declaration did not call for secession but rather for a dissolution of its union with the rest of Somalia. Their claim is technically correct. British Somaliland was a separate colony from Italian Somalia, and earned its independence four days earlier than the Italian colony before joining it as a single state.
17. Most general observers are unaware of the extent to which public goods have been looted. Gravel under the runway at Mogadishu's international airport has been removed in places by contractors for building projects elsewhere; the old Parliament building has been entirely dismantled, its valuable red bricks now serving a new purpose in hundreds of ovens in the city; the largest industry in Somalia, the $250 million Jubba Sugar Project factory, was dismantled and sold for scrap metal in Kenya for $1 million.
18. See, for instance, Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst, eds., Learning from Somalia: The Lessons of Armed Humanitarian Intervention (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998).
19. Portions of this section are adapted and updated from chapter 1 of Ken Menkhaus, "Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism," Adelphi Paper, No. 364 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
20. Matt Bryden, "New Hope for Somalia: The Building Block Approach?" Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 26, No. 79 (March 1999), pp. 134-140.
21. International Crisis Group, "Negotiating a Blueprint for Peace in Somalia," Africa Report, No. 59 (Brussels: ICG, March 6, 2003), p. 8.
22. The term "minority" is politically loaded in the Somali context. In its more general usage, it refers to members of "low- caste" lineages, including and perhaps especially "hard-hairs" (jereer) who are physically distinct from ethnic Somalis; some of them are descendents of Bantu-speaking slaves from East Africa. In this paragraph, I use the term "minority" in the strictly numerical sense-a clan that is only 20 percent of the population in one district is a minority there, while it may be the majority lineage in the adjacent district.
23. Ken Menkhaus and John Prendergast, "Governance and Economic Survival in Post-Intervention Somalia," CSIS Africa Notes, No. 172 (May 1995).
24. Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 273, No. 2 (February 1994), pp. 44-76, at p. 72.
25. International Crisis Group, "Counter-terrorism in Somalia: Losing Hearts and Minds?" Africa Report, No. 95 (Brussels: ICG, July 11, 2005).
26. A detailed analysis of these economic trends can be found in United Nations Development Programme, Somalia Human Development Report, 2001 (Nairobi: UNDP, December 2001).
27. Ken Menkhaus, "Vicious Circles and the Security-Development Nexus in Somalia," Conflict, Security, and Development, Vol. 4, No. 2 (August 2004), pp. 149-165.
28. Mark Bradbury, Adan Yusuf Abokor, and Haroon Ahmed Yusuf, "Somaliland: Choosing Politics over Violence," Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 30, No. 97 (September 2003), pp. 455-478.
29. David H. Shinn, "Somaliland: The Little Country That Could," CSIS Africa Notes, No. 9 (November 2002);
30. and International Crisis Group, "Somaliland: Democratisation and Its Discontents," Africa Report, No. 66 (Brussels: ICG, July 28, 2003).
31. Stedman, "The Spoiler Problem in Peace Processes."
32. Andre Le Sage, "Somalia: Sovereign Disguise for a Mogadishu Mafia," Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 29, No. 91 (March 2002), p. 132.
33. A few analysts and organizations have recently produced excellent reports calling for "harmonization" of traditional/informal and formal governance in the Somali judicial sector; this is an especially important topic in any discussion of a mediated state because almost all justice in Somalia is meted out via nonformal mechanisms (e.g., customary law and blood payments, or sharia courts). See Andre Le Sage, "Stateless Justice in Somalia: Formal and Informal Rule of Law Initiatives" (Geneva: Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, January 2005);
34. and Puntland Development Research Centre, "Pastoral Justice: A Participatory Action Research Project on Harmonization of Somali Legal Traditions: Customary Law, Sharia, and Secular Law" (Garowe, Somalia: Puntland Development Research Centre, 2002).
35. Swen Voekel, "Upon the Suddaine View: State, Civil Society, and Surveillance in Early Modern England." Early Modern Literary Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (September 1998), pp. 1-27, http://purl.oclc.org/ emls/04-2/voekupon.htm.
36. Ibid.
37. Charles Tilly, "Reflection on the History of State Making," in Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 35.
38. I am indebted to Michael Barnett for identifying the mediated state concept as a tool for understanding problems of contemporary state building.
39. Details of this experiment with a mediated state in Kenya's border areas are the subject of a recent report by the author, "Kenya-Somalia Border Conflict Analysis" (Nairobi: Development Alternatives, August 2005). This behavior by the Kenyan government, due in part to the costs imposed by violent and lawless border areas (e.g., decline in tourism and rise in terrorist activities in those zones), is distinct from the more common state response to ungoverned border zones of low economic value, which is to ignore them. Jeffrey Herbst persuasively argues that modern states can engage in this form of state negligence because they enjoy juridical sovereignty over territory within their borders whether they govern them or not, in contrast to earlier periods, when states that failed to control border areas risked losing land to rival neighboring states and empires. See Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton. N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
40. Wolfgang Reinhard, "Introduction: Power Elites, State Servants, Ruling Classes, and the Growth of State Power," in Reinhard, ed., Power Elites and State Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 1.
41. Letitia Lawson and Donald Rothchild, "Sovereignty Reconsidered." Current History, May 2005, p. 228.