Destabilising Interventions in Somalia

Sovereignty Transformations and Subversions

Debora Valentina Malito

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351122498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a critical reading of contemporary interventionism, exploring how interventions shape the course of conflicts and reconciliation processes in Somalia.

In a critical departure from the state-capacity consensus that has dominated the debate on terrorism and state failure, this book argues that conflict and sovereignty transformations in Somalia cannot be understood as the result of a gap in state-capacity, as multiple interventions have compromised the autonomy of the target state and society to act as sovereign.

Destabilising Interventions in Somalia focuses on the humanitarian intervention of the mid-1990s, the Ethiopia–Eritrean regional proxy war in the late 1990s and the Global War on Terror in the 2000s. Examining the politics and mechanisms of multiple interventions, this book shows how interveners complicate and amplify existing conflicts, how they reiterate the international dimension of the conflict itself, and how they orient the target state towards the outsourcing of sovereignty functions. Key to this process has been the violent and exclusionary nature of interventions grounded in the aspiration of transforming existing political orders.

Destabilising Interventions in Somalia will be of interest to students of African peace and conflict studies, international intervention and International Relations.

Part I

How we think about sovereignty and intervention

1 Introduction

‘I don’t like the way we are going to vote’, lamented Hawa Mahamoud, a Somali businesswoman to a Washington Times journalist in Mogadishu during the 2016 presidential and legislative elections (Onyulo, 2016). ‘We should be given the opportunity to elect the president of our choice rather [than] using parliamentarians to impose leaders on us.’ When first announced, the Somali 2016 elections were celebrated as the first democratic poll of the country. Yet, because of security concerns, the elections took place with limited suffrage: 14,025 representatives distributed among 275 electoral colleges were responsible for choosing the members of the lower house. Already in 1999, Hussein Mohamed Adam noted that ‘the pervasive and explosive crisis confronting several African states goes beyond the need to adapt cosmetic democratic reforms’ (1999, p. 261). The ‘make-up’ of the 2016 Somali elections was based on the basic argument that, because Somalia does not have the capacity to hold free and fair elections, the universal suffrage component had to be sacrificed: ‘This is not an election, it’s a selection,’ pointed out Abdi Ismail Samatar (Craig, 2016).

Reading government and international actors’ justifications for such an indirect exercise of democracy, I realised that the 2016 elections were undermined by exactly the same dilemma that existed between the capacity of the state ‘to be or not to be’ that had attracted my research interest in the political implications of international interventionism in Somalia. The country’s poor security situation and continuing violence meant it was unprepared for elections. The lack of budget allocations for election-related processes meant that Somalia was economically unprepared to manage the process; hence the transitional government asked the International Community to fund the entire electoral process. In a 2015 interview with Voice of America, the Somali president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, clarified why no popular elections might be organised by 2016: ‘It’s the pinnacle of democracy that everyone who is eligible votes to elect, but there is a big gap between there and where we stand’ (Maruf, 2015).

Arguments that categorise but do not explain

The concept of gap, more than anything else, has been used to explain and justify almost everything in recent Somali political history. Discourses about ‘state failure’ in the early 2000s have made capacity gaps more visible, as the concepts of state ‘failure’ or ‘collapse’ presuppose the existence of a certain benchmark of sovereignty, against which any difference can be measured. This benchmark has been anchored to an institutionalist and legal–rational framework, that emphasises the role of ‘inclusive institutions’ (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2013) in implementing official goals (Sikkink, 1991): state capacity traditionally refers to developmental abilities in terms of legal, bureaucratic and administrative functions (Skocpol, 1985). The distance between this benchmark and the performances of a ‘failed state’ constitutes indeed a capacity gap. As institutionalist and neo-Weberian understandings of sovereignty connect state capacity to coercion (holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence) and extraction (producing and providing public goods), a gap in state capacity refers to the inability to mobilise and control the resources necessary to coerce and produce welfare. The state fragility discourse elaborates hence on state capacity and presents sovereignty as static, dependent on a given set of attributes. Yet crises and changes to existing polities cannot be conceptualised as the mere violation of organic coherence between domestic powers, institutional apparatus and authorities. The fundamental problem with the institutionalist approach is that it assumes the concept of sovereignty as fixed; it overemphasises the principle of functional equivalency among sovereign states, ignoring how inequalities of power between members of the international state system affects the capacity of the state to act or not to act, as sovereign. The state-capacity argument lying behind the state fragility discourse does not engage with the historical context in which statehood is crafted, manipulated or destroyed. It looks at the capacity of the state ‘to be or not to be’, without questioning the ability ‘to act or not to act’. It focuses on the ‘gap’, while at the same time it obfuscates the relations and interdependencies that made state capacity strong in one country and weak in another one. In this narrative, no inferences exist between the strengths of the strong and weakness of the weak. What is even more problematic is that it ignores how ‘accomplished’ states perform better, as the extractive and coercive capacity of European states was based on colonial and class exploitations, as well on multiple forms of intolerance and exclusion (Marx, 2005). By ignoring the role the international state system plays in fostering conditions of inequality and instability, state-capacity arguments elaborate on ontological erasures about how colonialism (Bhambra, 2007; Rodney, 1973), imperialism (Louis, 1984; Magdoff, 1970; Moore, 2011) and liberalism (Mehta, 1999) enhanced the extractive and coercive capacity of ‘strong states’ to the detriment of ‘weak states’.

Many of the conventional explanations about the Somali conflict align with such an institutionalist view, elaborating on Migdal’s understanding of the world as made of ‘strong’ and ‘soft’ states (Migdal, 1988). In this literature, the role of clan kinship and dividedness (Lewis, 1994, 2010) hold central position. As a result, in the last three decades the study of Somalia has been permeated by a number of negative categories representing the hyperbolic decline of the Somali sovereignty – defined as the reign of chaos, ‘coming anarchy’ (Kaplan, 1994, p. 44), ‘new barbary’ (Murphy, 2011, p. 157), ‘between devils and deep sea’ (Omar, 2004) – which have rather simplified, and to some extent depoliticised, our understanding of state–society relationships in post-1991 Somalia.¹ Since Barre’s government collapsed in January 1991, Somalia has been defined as ‘the quintessential collapsed state’ (Nenova & Harford, 2005, p. 1). Government and centralised sovereignty surely collapsed in 1991, but far from epitomising the absence of governance, a multiplicity of political and military agencies and authorities have emerged. In 1991 political and clan leaders in the north-western regions of Somalia declared the independence of the Republic of Somaliland; in 1998 the Puntland State of Somalia announced the formation of an autonomous regional administration. Between 2000 and 2016 three interim governments have been created by a series of internationally led initiatives: the Transitional National Government (2000), the Transitional Federal Government (2004) and the Federal Government of Somalia (2012). Several regional administration states have emerged (Jubaland, Galmudug, Azania, Kathumo), consolidated (Republic of Somaliland, Puntland State of Somalia) or suddenly disappeared (Southwestern Somalia, Maakir). The territory of the former Republic of Somalia is now officially fragmented across the Republic of Somaliland, the Federal Government of Somalia and its regional states. Since the 2006 Federal Charter introduced and encouraged the formation of ‘State governments, Regional and District Administrations’, a plethora of ‘mini-states’ has emerged (Roble & Askar, 2012). Since 2012 the formation of regional states and administrations has intensified, and in 2016 the Somali Federal Government recognised five regional states – Puntland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle, Jubaland and South West State. Galmudug is an autonomous region established in 2006 and formed by the two provinces of Mudug and Galgaduug. It enjoys formal recognition even if it is not exerting effective (and exclusive) control on the ground, as parts of its territory have been under the control of pirates, al-Shabaab and Puntland forces. Hirshabelle is an autonomous region established in 2015, composed by the Hiran and Middle Shabelle regions, while Jubaland was established in 2013 to unite the Middle Juba, Lower Juba and Gedo regions, establishing a shift in the Somali state-building process from the 4.5 formula to a form of decentralised governance, where representatives are nominated on a district base. The South West State was formed in 2002, and in 2009 was officially recognised as a federal state within the Federal Republic of Somalia.

Not all these initiatives produced authorities sustainable in the long term,² as many states emerged but did not consolidate. While leaderships claiming authority over them often did not exercise exclusive control over the territory, the demarcation of new areas of regional governance ignited old and new conflicts. For instance, in the disputed buffer zone between Puntland and Somaliland in the territories of Sool, Sanaag and Aayn, different regional authorities have alternatively emerged and disappeared. In 2008, the formation of the Maakhir state was announced in the northern part of this contested territory, in Sanaag, but in 2009 it was again incorporated inside Puntland. During the same year, the leaders of the clan Dulbahante announced the formation of an autonomous state, the Northland State of Somalia; but during a dispute with Puntland, Somaliland extended control on the presumed capital, Loos Anod, and the Northland state ceased to exist. In January 2012, the Khatumo state of Somalia was announced within the same contested territories of Loos Anod. Diaspora groups have been important actors in these processes of state formation,³ but even though they are involved in international state-building efforts, they have been excluded from decision-making at the political level (Fagioli, 2017). How can the concept of ‘collapse’ account for such a proliferation of authorities and parcelisation of the state?

A large body of literature has approached post-Cold War instances of state disintegration as the result of ethnic violence, clanism, tribalism or pathological conditions consistent with developmental, peripheral, or post-colonial states (Lake & Rothchild, 1998; Shultz, 1995; Wimmer, 1997). The literature emphasising the role of clans, warlords, terrorists and pirates remains entangled in a state-capacity imaginary which reiterates a picturesque understanding of the Somali conflict as a sort of uroboros, eating its own tail and reproducing itself. Against the tendency to look ‘within the gap’, an interdisciplinary debate has contested anthropological determinism (Hussein Mohamed Adam, 1992) and traditionalist readings of the Somali crisis, as well the contraposition between primordialist and instrumentalist understanding of a clan society (Gaas, 2018). Abdi Ismail Samatar lamented how the role of clan dynamics in both conflict proliferation and mitigation has been largely overemphasised, and ‘the logic of the traditionalist discourse leads to the conclusion that the trouble with Somalia is the nature of its culture, grounded in the clan system, with cruel individuals proving divisive for projects of modern nation-building’ (1992, p. 629). Kapteijns contested and contextualised how the segmentary lineage model – codified in the work of the anthropologist Ioan Lewis, A Pastoral Democracy – has often been used as a ‘natural, self-evident and self-explanatory category’, without deploying the nuances indispensable to reflect historical and contextual changes in the structure of social relations (Kapteijns, 2004, p. 3). Not only does clanship acquire its meaning as it ‘is performed’ in specific contexts (Kapteijns, 2004, p. 3), but also Catherine Besteman claimed that the fracturing of Somali state and society could not be understood without a critical interaction of class, race and geopolitical cleavages (Besteman, 1996b).

Hermetic Somalia

Somali political space was not so hermetic and immune to dynamism as these prevailing primordialist and instrumentalist interpretations of Somali society might suggest. My interest in the study of international and external interventions started in 2006, when the Ethiopians entering the Somali town of Baidoa attracted my attention. This project started from the astonishing observation that across time a series of arguments centring on the Somali incapacity to exercise sovereignty have been mobilised to justify a further erosion of sovereignty through different forms of interventions. The Ethiopian occupation and US drone warfare fought during the Global War on Terror (GWoT), the 1998 Ethiopia–Eritrea proxy war, the UN–US led ‘humanitarian’ intervention of the mid-1990s, the Cold War’s proxy war, the Italian Trusteeship Administration, the Italian colonial experience: all these events seemed to belong to separate chapters of the country’s history, and the continuity of interventions in limiting and violating Somali sovereignty has rarely been questioned in the study of contemporary interventions. By looking at what happened in Somalia after the collapse of Barre’s government in 1991, and contrary to the ‘abandonment’ syndrome evoked by humanitarian agencies after the withdrawal of the UN and USA in 1995, international forces and actors actually never deserted Somalia. The UN–US-led multilateral missions were initiated in 1992 and terminated in 1995 under a series of constraints and operational complications. Other forms of regional and global intervention shaped Somali politics and conflict in the late 1990s: the Ethiopia and Eritrea proxy war, between 1998 and 2000; the GWoT launched by Ethiopia and the United States in 2001; the 2006 Ethiopian occupation; the 2007 African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM); the 2011 Kenyan invasion (Operation Linda Nchi). None of these, declared or not as ‘liberalising’ interventions, had a positive impact on reconciling belligerents or ‘rebuilding’ the state. Yet, although almost three decades of incessant interventions in Somalia had raised numerous questions, the consequences of these interventions on the politics of the target state remained only incidentally investigated.

In parallel, the emphasis on clan politics and later on terrorism, piracy and state failure has tended to retain the ‘unseen’ of the politics of contemporary intervention – that is, the roles and responsibilities of various actors in managing conflicts, security or stabilisation, and their impact on Somali politics. Reflections on the continuity of unequal relationships of power between intervener and intervened that are pivotal in such exercises of limiting sovereignty have been strategically missing from conventional readings of the conflict. The idea that interventions belong to the sphere of peace operations, and as such they benefit the target state and society, has been resilient i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• PART I: How we think about sovereignty and intervention
• PART II: Interventions in Somalia
• Index