Somaliaworks: Police development as state building

African Affairs

Volumn 113, Issue 450, 2014, Pages 88-107

  Hills, Alice ^a  

^a DURHAM UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GOVERNANCE APPROACH; POLICE FORCE; STATE BUILDING; STATE ROLE;

SOMALIA;

EID: 84892507338     PISSN: 00019909     EISSN: 14682621     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adt068     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. The Economist, 'The world's most utterly failed state', 2 October 2008, (17 December 2009).
2. Fund for Peace, The Failed States Index 2013, (26 June 2013).
3. Morton Bøas and Kathleen Jennings, 'Insecurity and development: the rhetoric of the "failed state"', European Journal of Development Research 17, 3 (2005), pp. 385-95, p. 385.
4. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as political instrument (James Currey, Oxford, 1999).
5. Martin Murphy, Somalia: The new barbary? Piracy and Islam in the Horn of Africa (Hurst, London, 2011), p. 156.
6. Peter Manning, Democratic Policing in a ChangingWorld (Paradigm, Boulder, CO, 2011).
7. Somalia has been a member of INTERPOL since 1975, and was connected to INTERPOL's I-24/7 global police communications system in 2007.
8. Beatrice Pouligny, Peace Operations Seen From Below: UN missions and local people (Hurst, London, 2006), p. 22.
9. It was not possible to visit Mogadishu, but interviews were held in Nairobi with the Transitional Federal Government (TFG)'s police commissioner and director general of the Ministry of the Interior, as well as with past and current members of Mogadishu's Police Advisory Committee (PAC), either in person or by telephone.
10. Ken Menkhaus, 'Governance without government in Somalia: spoilers, state building, and the politics of coping', International Security 31, 3 (2006/7), pp. 74-106
11. Christian Lund, 'Twilight institutions: public authority and local politics in Africa', Development and Change 37, 4 (2006), pp. 685-705
12. Tobias Hagmann and Markus Höehne, 'Failures of the state failure debate: evidence from the Somali territories', Journal of International Development 21, 1 (2009), pp. 42-57
13. Merilee Grindle, 'Governance reform: the new analytics of next steps', Governance 24, 3 (2011), pp. 415-18.
14. Puntland's deputy commissioner in late 2011 was an army officer.
15. The government in Mogadishu was known as the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), 2004-2012. It was replaced by the FGS in August 2012.
16. CIA support is provided from Djibouti's Camp Lemonier and Bosasso.
17. Somalia Report, 'Puntland's anti-piracy program shut down', 22 June 2012, (22 June 2012)
18. The Jamestown Foundation,Militant Leadership Monitor 1, 9 (2010), p. 15, (1 October 2013).
19. Personal observation, Garowe, September 2011.
20. Al Jazeera, 'Al-Shabab "join ranks" with al-Qaeda', 10 February 2012, available at (10 February 2012).
21. Menkhaus, 'Governance without government', p. 74.
22. Hagmann and Höehne, 'Failures'.
23. The US formally recognized the FGS as the national government of Somalia in January 2013, the IMF did the same in April, and the UK opened an embassy inMay.
24. Somalia Report, 'A war in waiting', 20 June 2012, (20 June 2012).
25. Marleen Renders, Consider Somaliland (Brill, Leiden, 2012), p. 57.
26. Markus Höehne, 'Political identity, emerging state structures and conflict in northern Somalia', Journal of Modern African Studies 44, 3 (2006), pp. 397-414.
27. Virginia Luling, 'Genealogy as theory, genealogy as tool: aspects of Somali "clanship"', Social Identities 12, 4 (2006), pp. 471-85
28. Joakim Gundel, 'Clans in Somalia' (Austrian Red Cross, Vienna, 2009), (20 October 2012).
29. Markus Höehne and Virginia Luling (eds), Milk and Peace, Drought andWar: Somali culture, society and politics (Hurst, London, 2010).
30. Uzi Rabi, The Emergence of States in a Tribal Society: Oman under Sa'id bin Taymur, 1932- 1970 (Sussex Academic Press, Brighton, 2006), p. 3.
31. UNSAS, 'Overview of the United Nations Somali assistance strategy', undated (2010?), (12 October 2013).
32. Martin Ganzglass, 'Restoration of the Somali justice system', International Peacekeeping 3, 1 (1996), pp. 113-38
33. Lynn Thomas and Steve Spataro, 'Peacekeeping and policing in Somalia' in Robert Oakley, Michael Dziedzic, and Eliot Goldberg (eds), Policing the New World Disorder: Peace operations and public security (National Defense University Press, Washington, DC, 1998), pp. 175-214
34. Robert Perito, The American Experience with Police in Peace Operations (Canadian Peacekeeping Press, Clementsport, 2002), pp. 27-35.
35. Renders, Somaliland, who refers to police in passing, rather than in detail.
36. Matt Bryden (ed.), Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and possibilities (Red Sea Press, Lawrenceville, NJ, 2005)
37. Mark Bradbury, Becoming Somaliland (James Currey, Oxford, 2009)
38. Renders, Somaliland.
39. Interview, Director General, Hargeisa, 7 September 2011.
40. Al Jazeera, 'Puntland shuns Somali government', 18 January 2011, (18 January 2011).
41. Financial Times, 'Security experts reap rewards in fight against Somali sea pirates', 9 February 2012
42. Anja Shortland, 'Treasure mapped: using satellite imagery to track the developmental effects of Somali piracy' (Chatham House, London, 2012).
43. By mid-2013 this had expanded to an estimated 17,700 troops and police.
44. Christian Lund, 'Twilight institutions: public authority and local politics in Africa', Development and Change 37, 4 (2006), pp. 685-705, p. 685.
45. Adrian Leftwich, 'Beyond institutions: rethinking the role of leaders, elites and coalitions in the institutional formation of developmental states and strategies', Forum for Development Studies 37, 1 (2010), pp. 93-112
46. Thomas Risse (ed.), Governance without a State? Policies and politics in areas of limited statehood (Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2012).
47. Peter Evans, 'The eclipse of the state? Reflections on stateness in an era of globalization', World Politics 50, 1 (1997), pp. 62-87.
48. Renders, Consider Somaliland, p. 30.
49. Comments based on personal observations and conversations with advisers in London, Nairobi, New York, and Somalia, August-September 2011. Barre was the SPF's commissioner in the decade before independence.
50. Personal conversations, Hargeisa, 7 September 2011. Puntland's penal code is based on Anglo-Indian models.
51. Officers in Hargeisa handle an average of 2.4 reported crimes a year while those in Sahil Region (several hours drive to the north of Hargeisa) deal with 5.6. 'Somaliland Police: Strategic Needs Assessment 2011-2015' (2011), p. 3.
52. Interview, female officers, Hargeisa, 6 September 2011.
53. Daniel Harris with Marta Foresti, 'Somaliland's progress on governance: A case of blending the old and the new' (ODI, London, 2011).
54. Somalia Report, 'Mogadishu feels less safe under TFG', 24 November 2011, (24 November 2011).
55. Police Advisory Committee (PAC), 'Report on the Somali Police Force, July 2011' (PAC, Mogadishu, 2011).
56. Somaliland Police, 'Strategic needs', p. 1.
57. Private communication, UN official, Garowe, 20 July 2012.
58. Peter Pham, 'Peripheral vision', RUSI Journal 154, 5 (2009), pp. 84-90
59. Jane's DefenceWeekly (JDW), 'Somalia is moving from "failed" to "fragile" status, says UN envoy', 20 January 2010
60. Menkhaus, 'Governance without government'
61. Mary Harper, Getting Somalia Wrong: Faith, war and hope in a shattered state (Zed Books, London, 2010)
62. John Norris and Bronwyn Bruton, Twenty Years of Collapse and Counting: The cost of failure in Somalia (Center for American Progress and One Earth Future Foundation,Washington, DC, 2011).
63. Crimes recorded in Puntland's main towns in 2010 included murder, rape, robbery, piracy, cheating, insults, property damage, affray, and terrorism. Personal observations at Gardo (9 September 2011) and Garowe police stations (10 September 2011), and Garowe's Legal Aid Centre, PLAC (10 September 2011).
64. Interview, police adviser, Nairobi, 15 September 2011.
65. Megan O'Neill, Monique Marks, and Anne-Marie Singh (eds), Police Occupational Culture: New debates and directions (Elsevier, Oxford, 2009), pp. 3-7.
66. Compare the experience of Eritrea and South Sudan. In 1996, Eritrean officers dismissed the utility of rank on the basis that there had been none during the revolution, though they admitted that war records influenced informal rankings and status (interview, senior officer, Bramshill, 19 April 1996). Uniform was regarded with similarly disfavour, though by then senior officers wore blue shirts and epaulettes. Ten years later, many of South Sudan's new police were ex-rebels. Some had a policing background but most did not, and few had any idea of standard organizational or rank structures. Even those who did identified themselves as former rebels, rather than policemen. Personal communication, senior officer, Pretoria, April 2007; UN adviser, Berlin, October 2012.
67. Against this, half of the respondents to assessments conducted in Somaliland's Burao and Las Anod declared 'relatively high' to 'very high' trust in the police. Observatory of Conflict and Violence Prevention (OCVP), 'Safety and security district baseline report: Galkayo, August 201'; 'Burao, August 2011'; 'Las Anod, August 2011' (2011); personal communication, Burao, 20 September 2011.
68. Masamichi Sasaki and Robert Marsh (eds), Trust: Comparative perspectives (Brill, Leiden, 2011).
69. Somalia Report, 'The police of Somalia, Somaliland, Puntland', 31 May 2012, (31 May 2012).
70. Peter Little, Somalia: Economy without state (James Currey, Oxford, 2003), p. 3.
71. Somalia Report, 'Who's who in Somalia's new cabinet?', 17 August 2011, (17 August 2011).
72. Markus Höehne, 'Mimesis and mimicry in dynamics of state and identity formation in northern Somalia', Africa 79, 2 (2009), pp. 252-81, p. 253.
73. In July 2012, Farole told women leaders to shout their demands for equal parliamentary representation into the ears of elders. Private communication, UN official, Garowe, 20 July 2012.
74. Police Advisory Committee, 'Report on the Somali Police Force: April' (PAC, Mogadishu, 2011).
75. Private communications from international advisers suggest that a cycle exists whereby Somalis request (and receive) specialist training, only to make the same request several years later. Documented examples relate to requests by Somaliland for command training in 2004, 2007, and 2011.
76. Interview, SPF Commissioner, Nairobi, 19 September 2011.