Introduction
According to the ‘Failed State Index’, Somalia was, in 2013, for the sixth year in a row, the ‘No. 1 Failed State’. This position suggests, according to the organisers of the Index, a chronic condition of failure.1 Although South Sudan replaced Somalia as the most fragile state in the world in 2014, it does not mean, according to Fund for Peace, that we should no longer be concerned, since the country ‘continues to endure widespread lawlessness, ineffective government, terrorism, insurgency, crime, and abysmal development’.2
The concerns related to this condition, announced at the first international intervention in Somalia in 1992, were undoubtedly aggravated by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. In this new context, the theme of the so-called failed states has assumed a central position on the US agenda, as these states have come to be seen as breeding grounds of and safe havens for terrorists, and as such, capable of causing considerable damage to the security of the USA. Thus, the focus on Somalia has been increasingly reoriented from a charitable stance towards a country inflicted by a humanitarian disaster to a frightened gaze at a country taken over by terrorists and pirates.
The article suggests that the failed state rubric that has so comprehensively permeated the thinking of policy makers and the approach of international agencies to Somalia (Walls 2009, 3) does not allow us to capture the alternative peace-building experience of Somaliland, in the northeast of Somalia.
The article will proceed as follows. First, it will set out how Somalia and the Somalis have been represented by the international community in the period between 1992 and 1995, that is, during the three UN peace operations in the country (UNOSOM I, UNITAF and UNOSOM II3). Second, it will argue that the logocentric discourse4 about Somalia and the Somalis explains much of the failure of the international initiatives to ‘save’ Somalia. Third, it will show how the neglected hybrid Somaliland experiment challenges the dominant discourse of peace building.
The article aims to challenge peace-building practices through a postcolonial perspective that draws attention to the hybrid condition of postcolonial societies. Reflecting on the Somali case, it argues that the systematic failures experimented by the international community in the country derived in great extent from the modern and logocentric orientation underlying UN peace operations practices. According to such an orientation, Somalis are conceived as traditional and, as such, incapable of emancipating themselves without the help provided by external ‘benevolent’ actors. Furthermore, the dominant discourse assumes that the single solution for the Somali problem rests in the construction of a centralised authority.
Avoiding romanticising the Somaliland experiment, the article argues that this sui generis attempt to construct a democracy combining Western and local forms of governance is generating a hybrid construction that cannot be captured by a logocentric grammar.
Somalia and the Somalis: anarchy in the ‘New World Order’
I knew that policy was made by the written word, that texts made things happen in the realm of high diplomacy and statecraft. Writing forces concepts into life. (Boutros-Ghali 1999, 26)
The aim here is to show how Somalia and the Somalis have been produced by the main external actors engaged with the peace operations deployed in Somalia from 1992 to 1995.
First, it is important to emphasise that the United Nations discourse on Somalia after the demise of Barre’s government continued to represent the country, as had been the case since colonial times, as lacking something. Underlying this discourse, there is a definition of what a successful state is, in which the elements not found in Somalia would supposedly be abundantly present.
In July 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali (S/24343; para. 24 in Boutros-Ghali 1996, 174, emphasis added), then Secretary-General of the UN, represented the situation in Somalia as follows:
Somalia is today a country without central, regional or local administration, and without services: no electricity, no communications, no transport, no schools and no health services. Throughout the country, there are incredible scenes of hunger, disease and dying children. … The absence of food is both the cause and the result of lack of security.
According to the UN discourse, as shown above, the collapse of the Somali state and the subsequent civil war led to a widespread failure of all the country’s institutions, services and infrastructure, which meant that reconstruction efforts would have to begin from the ‘ruins’ of a country.
Indeed, Lauderdale and Toggia (1999) show us that the main reference used to analyse the extent of the Somali crisis was its condition of ‘statelessness’, characterised by the lack of a central political authority. Deprived of such authority, Somalia began to be seen as an area of chaos and danger, as shown in the following passage from the article published by the journalist Keith Richburg in The Washington Post (September 1992):
Just over 30 years after it officially became an independent nation, Somalia essentially has ceased to exist. The land mass on world maps that defines the horn of Africa is now a dangerous and chaotic place of clan-based warfare … . (Richburg 1992a)
As a result of the Somali condition of ‘statelessness’, two images have been widely used to represent Somalia after Barre: the idea of an anarchical Somalia and the idea of a Somalia immersed in a ‘Hobbesian state of nature’. For example, in his address from the Oval Office of the White House on 4 December 1992, President George H. W. Bush said: ‘There is no government in Somalia. Law and order have broken down. Anarchy prevails’ (Bush 1992). Thus, according to Bush, the collapse of the Somali state resulted in a situation of anarchy, seen not merely as the absence of government, but as a situation of chaos and of disorder.
The Hobbesian metaphor of the ‘state of nature’ became also common in the post-Barre scenario. In October 1992, in an article published in The Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer said:
Somalia has no government. It is in a Hobbesian state of nature. It desperately needs to be taken over and run by some outside power so that its suffering people can be afforded the minimal human decencies of food, medicine and personal safety. (Krauthammer 1992a)
William Durch also uses this metaphor to describe the situation in Somalia after Barre: ‘When its narrowly based government was finally toppled in early 1991, no single group had legitimate claim to power and the country collapsed into Hobbesian anarchy’ (Durch 1996, 311).
The image of a ‘Hobbesian state of nature’ suggests the idea of a natural, untamed, violent and backward (temporally prior to the modern state) condition. To Walker (2006), the narrative of the Hobbesian social contract gives legitimacy to the modern state by projecting the problems of man to another time and place (the state of nature), conceived as the negation of the prototype of the modern liberal man. According to Walker, the Hobbesian narrative shows us how individuals can mature. To such an end, it is necessary that they submit themselves to modern structures of authority. Where these structures do not exist, what remains is a natural and non-domesticated environment. Since Somalia has been represented as a ‘state of nature’, the Somalis were displaced from history and, as a result, deprived of the possibility of political life, given that in modernity, as shown by Walker (1993), effective progressive political practice is unthinkable outside the borders of the sovereign state. From this perspective, the present, the modern state, becomes the norm, while the past becomes the exception (Walker 2006).
Both the notions of the ‘anarchy’ and of the ‘state of nature’ suggest the lack of a sovereign modern state which, according to the UN discourse, was the solution to the destruction, famine and war of Somalia post-Barre.
Indeed, according to the mainstream literature on the collapse of African states in the post-cold war era, the main feature of state collapse, common to all different experiences of the phenomenon, is the loss of the monopoly of the legitimate means of violence. Deprived of this legitimate monopoly, such entities can no longer be conceived as ‘states’ in terms of the classical definition of Max Weber (see Ignatieff 2003). The loss of control over the means of coercion is conceived as the main reason behind the violence and the instability of these societies. According to the dominant discourse, individuals rely on centralised states to feel secure. This assertion was explicitly expressed by Rotberg (2002, 87), who said: ‘Citizens depend on states and central governments to secure their persons and free them from fear’. The centralised state, holder of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, becomes, according to the dominant literature, a mandatory condition for the provision of that asset regarded as central to any state, namely security.5
Under conditions of ‘anarchy’ and ‘state of nature’, there is no state and, therefore, there is no security. This discourse, however, prevents us from imagining any serious political organisation alternative to the centralised state as it conditions us to think that without the Weberian state we will always have a lawless violent condition. As pointed out by Beier (2002), the faith in a Hobbesian state of nature forecloses the possibility of political life in the absence of state authority. Within the framework of the United Nations discourse, following the collapse of the Somali state, the coercive power of the formerly centralised state was scattered among different actors, which began to impose terror and prevent the delivery of international humanitarian aid across the country. These violent actors often appear in the discourse as the only agents populating an ‘empty’, ‘destroyed’ and ‘hungry’ Somalia. As Crawford (1996) reminds us, in caricatured accounts of Africa, ‘there are no social movements, unions, student activists, political parties, intellectuals, writers, or artists worth mentioning’ (33). This disparaging reading of difference conditions us to focus exclusively on the seemingly traditional, chaotic and violent nature of postcolonial societies, which come to be seen as mere obstacles to the UN’s efforts at the reconstruction and modernisation of their states. This condition, in turn, inhibits the targeted societies to be included as co-participants of the reconstruction process. As Hagmann and Hoehne (2007) warn us, contrary to the idea of chaos and anomy, non-state actors are often capable of providing basic governance and security at the local level, such as in the case of Somaliland.
Some passages of Boutros-Ghali’s (1996) discourses illustrate his concern about the proliferation of means of coercion in a devastated Somalia. Two of these passages, which date from early 1992, appear below:
(I) I have earlier drawn attention to the absence of any civil society and the breakdown of law and order in Mogadiscio, which has been compounded by the proliferation of arms among civilians. Banditry, looting and reckless firing have complicated all efforts to bring humanitarian assistance to the people of Somalia … (S/23693, para. 77, in Boutros-Ghali 1996, 130)
(II) Somalia today is a divided country, fragmented on clan and family lines, without any recognized channels for political action. The quantity of arms in the hands of individuals, factions and groups is enormous. The defeat of the Somali Army which, as a result of the cold war, became under the President Siad Barre one of the best-equipped military machines in Africa, resulted in a vast number of arms falling into the hands of individuals, factions and groups, thus feeding the conflict as well as the banditry and looting which are taking place all over Somalia. (S/24343, para. 54, in Boutros-Ghali 1996, 177)
The passages above suggest the idea of a ruined Somalia where there is no civil society and no governmental structure that one could rely on. Somalia was, according to this discourse, completely vulnerable in the face of armed groups that proliferated in the country in the wake of the collapse of the central political authority.
According to the UN discourse, the civil war in Somalia has generated not only the physical and institutional destruction of the country, but also the serious threat of mass starvation (see S/23693, paras 11 and 12, in Boutros-Ghali 1996, 123). In July 1992, Boutros-Ghali remarked about this threat:
The food situation is critical. Civil conflict has prevented agricultural activity in the normally productive areas of the south … . The threat of widespread famine in rural areas has become a reality. Food prices are rising sharply everywhere, but most of the population have no money to buy food on the market since virtually all economic activity has been disrupted by war. (S/24343, para. 25, in Boutros-Ghali 1996, 174)
According to the above passage, the lack of security in Somalia would cause food shortages which, in turn, would sharpen the insecurity problem, resulting in a vicious cycle difficult to break.
Given this spectrum of interconnected threats (famine and conflict), the peace operations of the United Nations/United States in Somalia were represented as operations aimed at bringing a future of hope to Somalis, saving them from their own compatriots. According to the United Nations discourse, the need to save the Somalis from their domestic rivals became even more pressing when international humanitarian aid also became a target of armed gangs (Boutros-Ghali 1996).
The United States and the temporalisation of difference
After Boutros-Ghali declared that the UN contingent was unable to undermine the power of the Somali factions and that the deteriorating situation in the country meant that peacekeeping was not enough, the UN authorised the second stage of the operation, UNITAF (United Task Force), also known as ‘Operation Restore Hope’ (see Boutros-Ghali 1996). The aim of this operation, established by UN Security Council Resolution 794 of December 1992 and conducted under United States command, was to ensure access to humanitarian aid for vulnerable Somalis.
The perception that the United States should take a more active role in Somalia was expressed by President Bush after the US Ambassador to Kenya, Smith Hempstone, submitted in May 1992 a dramatic account of the conditions of devastation and famine of a Somali refugee camp he visited on the border between Kenya and Somalia (see Kansteiner 1996; Tripodi 1999). Nevertheless, it was not until the end of June 1992 that the plight of Somali people began to gain prominence in the United States media coverage. In that moment, several articles published in The New York Times by Jane Perlez began to call attention to the starvation in the southern and central areas of Somalia (Kansteiner 1996; Petterson 2000; Sahnoun 2005). Since then, images of Somalis immersed in bloodshed and starvation began to cause discomfort among Western audiences.
The discourses of President Bush on the Somali conflict simplified the complexities of Somali society by dividing it between perpetrators and victims. The origins of the Somali conflict were not mentioned by President Bush, who instead focused on the reasons for its reproduction, locating such reasons in armed gangs who prevented humanitarian aid from reaching its intended recipients. While the ex-UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali emphasised the need to disarm such gangs, Bush’s speeches did not make any reference to such need. This silence in President Bush’s discourses was congruent with the idea widely propagated by the American media that the Somali problem did not reside in the weapons per se – mainly acquired from the superpowers during the cold war – but rather in the encounter of such modern weapons with ancient clan hatreds (see Besteman 1996). Thus, we can see a shift in the dominant discourse regarding the sources of Somalia’s problems in the United States: no longer the absence of a central authority and the decentralisation of the coercive means but now the violent nature of Somali clan culture, unchanged since pre-modern times.
The famine in Somalia was seen as a result of the civil war that emerged in the country after the fall of Barre. This war was read by the US media as a mere repetition, perhaps of great proportions, of clan rivalries stemming from ancient times. By reading the famine as a consequence of a conflict interpreted mostly in cultural racist terms (derived from a backward social organisation), the famine in Somalia was depoliticised and eternalised in the same way that the conflict was. This representation of the Somali famine appears clearly in following passage of the article by Keith Richburg published in The Washington Post on 9 December 1992: ‘[I]n Somalia, clan warfare seems doubly senseless since it has turned what was once a nation into a land of mass starvation where the economy has collapsed and chaotic streets are ruled by marauding gunmen’. Further, the journalist added: ‘[T]he clan feuds help to explain why there is a famine here in the first place, and why it will prove difficult to put the puzzle of Somalia back together again’ (Richburg 1992b).
The same Ambassador Hempstone who had informed Bush about the plight of Somalis when he visited a border refugee camp in Kenya warned the State Department on 6 December 1992, through a telegram, not to ‘embrace the Somali tarbaby’. To him, the United States should refrain from sending troops and suffering casualties to deal with ‘natural-born guerrillas’. In the words of the Ambassador (1992):
Somalis, as the Italians and British discovered to their discomfiture, are natural-born guerrillas. They will mine the roads. They will lay ambushes. They will launch hit and run attacks. They will not be able to stop the convoys from getting through. But they will inflict – and take – casualties. (Hempstone 1992, 30)
The idea that Somalis were natural warriors was reproduced by John Drysdale, a human rights activist, when he said: ‘Somalis know all about tactics and are natural fighters. It is second nature to surround and ambush effectively’ (in Petterson 2000, 77).
Locating the cause of the Somali chaos in the innate behaviour of the Somalis, Hempstone stated:
Finally, what will we leave behind when we depart? The Somali is treacherous. The Somali is a killer. The Somali is as tough as his country, and just as unforgiving. The one ‘beneficial’ effect a major American intrusion into Somalia is likely to have may be to reunite the Somali nation: against us, the invaders, the outsiders, the kaffirs (unbelievers) who may have fed their children but also have killed their young men. … In the old days, the Somalis raided for camels, women and slaves. Today they raid for camels, women, slaves and food. (Hempstone 1992, 30)
In the passage above, the Ambassador employed, as in colonial times, pejorative adjectives (treacherous and killers) to characterise the nature of the Somalis. Adopting such a deterministic view of the conflict, Hempstone did not predict any short-term solution, but rather an undetermined involvement of the United States in the country. Noting that the problem of Somalia would require a lasting and very costly operation by the United States, Hempstone stands in favour of inaction: ‘Leave them alone, in short, to work out their own destiny, brutal as it may be’ (Hempstone 1992, 30).
UNITAF: an emergency operation
US involvement in the Somali case came about within the context of a proclaimed ‘New World Order’, which was said to have been bolstered by the UN/US victory in the Gulf War. It was George Bush who gave the tone of this project of a ‘New World Order’ in the context of the war against Iraq. On 11 September 1990, he stated that: ‘We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation’ (Bush 1990). What appears almost as a prescription in 1990, namely a world marked by peace, harmony, cooperation and justice, gains more factual contours, according to Bush, in March 1991, shortly after the Gulf War victory when it goes through its first test: ‘The Gulf War put this new world to its first test. And my fellow Americans, we passed the test’ (Bush 1991, emphasis added).
According to President Bush’s rhetoric, this ‘New World Order’ was not yet realised, but at a stage of testing. In this sense, this ‘new order’ had to be practised and tested in order to gain strength and durability. It is possible to consider its second great test opportunity arising precisely in Somalia. The Somali case thus served as a laboratory for this ‘New World Order’ in waiting. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations made it clear that the USA was to lead within this ‘New World Order’.
This ‘new order’ had to be continually reaffirmed by logocentric discursive practices, which designated certain areas as outside the ‘New World Order’, as if they remained locked in a pre-modern time, as was declared in the case of Somalia. The discursive practices of temporalising difference, as utilised by the United States in dealing with Somalia and Somalis, had significant effects on the constitution of its own identity as leader of the ‘New World Order’. The Somali population was accordingly conceived as distant from the West in both physical and imaginary terms (see Debrix 1999), given the difficulty of conceiving the possibility of a genocidal war driven by clan hatred in so-called civilised countries (see Besteman 1996). Through this discursively produced temporal frontier, the United States pushed difference out of its national boundaries, ensuring the uniformity of its own domestic space, traversed by uncertainties and ambiguities accentuated by the end of the cold war (see Campbell 1996).
Besteman (1996) also argues that the process of ‘othering’ visible in US rhetoric toward Somalia resulted in a gross oversimplification of Somali society, marked by stratifications of race and class in addition to the clan stratifications. Any signs of greater complexity, such as those of race and class mentioned by Besteman, also present in the American society, tended to be silenced. Thus, the demarcation of rigid boundaries between the two countries helped the United States to preserve the integrity of its own country, also marked by complex racial, ethnic and class stratifications. In this sense, the act of ‘saving’ the Somali ‘Other’, the United States was, in fact, saving itself, that is, trying to protect its identity and role in an international order in transformation.
President Bush did not follow the advice of Hempstone to leave Somalia to its own fate; he opted for a limited engagement in the country. Through this engagement, the United States was said to be guided by a minimum humanitarian purpose: feeding the Somalis. The proclaimed US objective was to ensure a safe environment for the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the central and southern areas of Somalia in order to defeat the famine (Tripodi 1999). According to a speech by Bush on 4 December 1992:
Our mission has a limited objective: to open the supply routes, to get the food moving, and to prepare the way for a U.N. peacekeeping force to keep it moving. The operation is not open-ended. We will not stay one day longer than is absolutely necessary. (Bush 1992)
The discourse about the immutability of the Somali conflict created the conditions of possibility for this limited involvement by the United States, whose sole focus was to ensure access to food for the hungry Somalis and hence to ensure their mere survival. Thus, the United States adopted an emergency approach, aiming to deal with the effects of the conflict but not with its supposed causes. This approach resulted from the discursive construction of the conflict as if it was rooted in the nature of Somali culture or in the very nature of Somalis and hence requiring many generations to be solved. Indeed, Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in an article in the New York Times on 10 August 1993: ‘[P]eace cannot be made overnight. It will take time for people who have been shooting at each other to start trusting each other’ (Albright 1993). As Wright (1993) wrote in the Los Angeles Times, ‘most analysts agree that there is virtually no chance that mediators can end the clan rivalries that date back to the nomadic origins of the clans themselves’. According to the scholar Paul Diehl, the popular understanding among international diplomats in Somalia was that the Somali conflict was not yet ripe for solution or that: ‘[T]he Somalis … just hadn’t grown adequately weary of war yet and perhaps needed a decade or two … before they were ready to sit at the negotiating table in good faith’ (Diehl 1994, 57). So, regardless of the policy prescriptions, whether interventionist or in favour of disengagement, both of these narratives within the dominant discourse are based on racist categorisations. The challenge of rebuilding the Somali state was left to UNOSOM II through Resolution 814 of March 1993. As reported by Tripodi (1999), from the beginning, the position of Boutros-Ghali diverged from that of Bush, as the ex-Secretary-General stressed the need for an international force dealing with the task of disarming Somali factions and of promoting ‘nation-building’. However, such demands were not accepted by the US Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, who considered that the active disarmament of the Somali gangs should not be part of UNITAF (Tripodi 1999). These divergences between the United States and the UN explain why, against conventional wisdom, some American analysts regarded the operation in Somalia as a success, since the UNITAF mandate was said to have been accomplished by the defeat of the Somali famine.
Thus, disarmament was not pursued by the United States in Somalia precisely because the militarisation of the country during the cold war was not conceived as a problem in itself. Instead, what explained the Somali conflict was the fact that modern weapons were being used by Somalis guided by ancient animosities. According to the anthropologist Besteman (1999, 4), the dominant discourse represented the Somali conflict as continuing the ‘Stone Age ancestral clan rivalries, but with Star Wars military technology’. Scott Petterson, a journalist at London’s Daily Telegraph, argued that it was the ‘dangerous cocktail’ made from the mixture of medieval demands for vengeance with modern and efficient weapons that caused the so-called Somali ‘disease’. Later, Petterson (2000, 7) expressed the same logic when he said: ‘It was the efficient modern methods of taking life – in such hard-worn and pitiless hands – that complicated the equation. Because Somalis are … as hard as their country’. In December 1992, Charles Krauthammer also expressed this idea when he stated in an article in The Washington Post: ‘The United States and the Soviet Union shipped M-16s and AK-47s to every corner of the Earth. Yet only in Somalia have the guns been used for cruelty beyond barbarism: stealing food from the mouths of starving children’ (Krauthammer 1992b).
By either emphasising the violent nature of the Somalis or highlighting the violent nature of Somali clan culture, the dominant discourse in the United States attributed a purely endogenous dimension to the conflict, neglecting any connection with both colonialism and the postcolonial state. In doing so, the conflict appeared related exclusively to a pre-modern past. Hence, the violence was seen as a mere product of the backwardness of Somali society.
Besteman (1996) argues that, in the dominant discourse, Somalia seems to have only pretended to be a modern state when, in fact, it remained tribal. Hence, according to Besteman, most analysts imagined Somalia returning from a pseudo-state to a social organisation based on kinship ties. Such a view was clearly exposed, for instance, in an article published in The Washington Post in September 1992: ‘As rebels opposing Barre closed in on the capital, the artificial Somali state unravelled, and Somalis were left in essentially their pre-colonial condition – a collection of regionally based clans, newly laden with modern arms’ (Richburg 1992a). The news about the Somali conflict emphasised the idea that after the fall of Barre what actually happened was the reappearance of old clan rivalries frozen since immemorial times. In the wake of the fall of Barre, Petterson (2000, 15), for instance, noted: ‘The power vacuum was readily filled by the ferocious ghosts of Somali warriors past’. In December 1992, in the Chicago Tribune, Liz Sly used a European time reference for representing the condition of Somalia in the late 1992 when she said:
Within days, Siad Barre fell and Somalia began its long and bloody decline into a state of anarchy unprecedented in recent history. Over the next two years, vicious clan fighting reduced downtown Mogadishu to rubble and plunged the city back into the Middle Ages. (Sly 1992, emphasis added)
The representation of the Somali conflict as a pre-modern conflict created the conditions for its understanding as intractable and, consequently, for the distant attitude of the United States towards it as well as for its premature withdrawal from Somalia after the incident in which American soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The blame for the Somali conflict was mostly assigned to endogenous factors related to the backward way of life of the Somalis and, more specifically, to hostile leaders and factions steeped in this culture of violence and thus resistant to the multiple peace efforts undertaken by the external actors.6
The dominant reading of the Somali conflict portrays it as nonsensical and suicidal and, as such, depoliticised. The attribution of irrationality to the ‘Other’, in turn, helped to construct the rationality of the external actors represented as saviours and as the conductors of order and organisation to a dysfunctional and uncontrolled society.
Who fails?
After reviewing above a series of discourses, both of the United Nations as well as of the American media and the political world, we can conclude that Somalis continued to be represented, as in colonial times, as non-modern and violent. We called attention, however, to the coexistence of two main conflicting narratives of representation of difference.
On one hand, we saw the use of a narrative that suggested signs of immobility and freezing of Somali society by the media and by certain American leaders. This rigid representation of difference created the conditions for the very limited mandate of UNITAF, self-represented as an operation whose only objective was to save Somalis from death. The fight against starvation was seen as the only possible course of action for the United States since Somali starvation was constructed as a by-product of a senseless conflict that dated back to ancient times.
The minimum goal established by UNITAF, however, was put into question by Boutros-Ghali, whose discourses suggested the possibility of transforming traditional Somalia into a modern state holding the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. The centralisation of violence was presented by him as the solution to the Somali problem of order, which explains the importance he attached to the disarmament of Somali gangs. Thus, we can observe, from the discourses analysed, the operation of two main discursive constructions in dispute. Both the UN and the US discourses were based on the binary opposition, temporarily informed: ‘tradition’ versus ‘modernity’. Nevertheless, while the UN discourses expressed the possibility of modernisation of Somali society, the US discourses expressed doubts about it.
Therefore, the conflict in Somalia has been interpreted by the dominant discourse as derived from the Somali tradition centred on a clan organisation of society. The historical determinism that informs views about the post-cold war African conflicts in general is ethnographically questionable, since this reading neglects the impact of major events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as colonialism and the cold war.
To authors such as Besteman (1996), Luling (1997, 2006) and Samatar (1992), the problem that Somalia faced in the post-cold war period was not linked to the pre-colonial Somali lifestyle, but predominantly linked to the introduction of the modern state to Somalia and the changes this introduction produced in Somali practices. Thus, the problem faced by Somalia was in part due to the introduction of elements associated with modernity within Somali society and not, as commonly alleged, derived exclusively from pre-modern factors. Indeed, both authors emphasise the flexibility of the clan system, showing that pre-modern or traditional identities do not remain intact through time.
Samatar argues that the nature of competition between clans changed with the introduction of the colonial state. According to Samatar (1992, 634), ‘the leadership in the old tradition had no public resources that they could compete for and loot, and as such the nature of the allocations made under that regime was qualitatively at variance with the modern order’. Luling (1997, 290) agrees with Samatar, stating that:
Clans always had to compete for resources such as land, grazing and water, but now that control of all these resources and much more was vested in the state, competition between clans, which before had been only one aspect of their existence, became its permanent condition.
To Luling (2006), for example, the prohibition to refer to the clans during the postcolonial government, especially in schools, had an impact on Somali identities, meaning that they did not remain unchanged as assumed by the dominant discourse. The author shows that the increasing mobility and mixing of people of different backgrounds in Mogadishu as well as in other cities contributed to the emergence of a generation of urban youth committed in large part to the rejection of the clan system.
As reported by Besteman (1996), the characterisation of Somali society as clannish by the dominant discourse is based on evolutionary family types. That is, the representation of Somalia as a society based solely on a clan system reinforced the traditional anthropological understanding of state formation and clearly indicated the direction this society should go: from kinship relations to the social contract. These relations (kinship and the social contract), in turn, were presented as distinct and irreconcilable and thus as temporally dissociated. Consequently, the evolutionary typologies underlying the dominant discourses locate such categories (clan and state) as distinct steps of an evolutionary trajectory of society (see Besteman 1996). Reflecting this evolutionary view, Abdalla O. Mansur, for example, argues:
The most serious problem in Somalia today is that our cultural traditions are not compatible with the constructs of a modern state. We Somalis are prisoners of a culture that we created in the past and which we refuse to re-examine. What is needed is to educate our people and exhort them to free themselves from the dependency of clanism, charity, and family parasitism. Only after creating this new culture will it be possible for us to reinvent ourselves and in the process to launch the construction of a new, viable state. (Mansur 1995, 115–116)
The above passage clearly shows the mythical attempt of Mansur to separate, after centuries of colonialism and postcolonialism, the elements called traditional from those called modern of Somali society, presented by the author as normatively hierarchical and irreconcilable.
Besteman (1996) argues that when the evolutionary language is used, the image that comes up is that of a backward and rigid society devoid of any other competitive hierarchies, which, if taken into account, could give greater complexity to Somali society than is usually suggested by the dominant discourse. We might add that the clans, through this narrative, are represented as ‘mini-states’, insofar as they are understood to be similar to the state, that is, as unitary entities, without fissures, to which the Somalis supposedly devote their primary and unequivocal obedience.
Besteman offers us an understanding of Somali society that brings out its flexibility and complexity, both neglected by the dominant discourse which treats the clan system not only as the essence of Somali society but also as its totality. According to her, the cleavages of race, lineage and status provide the Somali identity with a greater complexity than is usually assumed by the mainstream reading of Somali society. This alternative portrait of Somali society reveals the presence of a variety of social identities there that cross, undermine, change and replace the clannish identities.
Insofar as the UN conceived the centralised state as the only politically feasible alternative to reorganise the lives of the traditional Somalis, the UN’s efforts were concentrated in the capital, Mogadishu (Sahnoun 2005, 37), to the detriment of the countryside where the main episodes of violence and starvation occurred. As reported by Samatar (2002), the agricultural people of the south were those who paid the highest material and human costs of the war in Somalia. At the height of famine and destruction, the people within the farming communities of this region died in their thousands and the city of Baidoa, the epicentre of deaths, became known as ‘the city of the walking death’ (Mukhtar 1996; Samatar 2002).
Two factors explain why the UN neglected the ongoing destruction in the agricultural south of Somalia and focused instead on the battles in the capital. The first is related to the fact that the UN operations in Somalia were guided by the norm of a politically centralised state which would be built from the capital, Mogadishu. The second one concerned the reading of the Somali conflict as a clan conflict. This reading did not take on account the discrimination of race, lineage and status that crossed the Somali clan structure and which culminated, according to Mukhtar (1996), in a genocide directed at the farmers in the course of the conflict. As Besteman shows us (1999, 7),
The Juba valley in the mid-1990s has been the site of massacres, of famine, of years of militia wars, and of a disproportionate outpouring of the surviving local farmers into refugee camps: many of the faces shown on television screens depicting Somalia’s tragedy belong to people from the valley.
To the extent that the Somali conflict was read primarily under the failed state rubric, the central state became the ideal pursued by the UN in the country. Thus, clan leaders, heavily armed, became the most privileged interlocutors in detriment of other local and more decentralised authorities.
Somaliland: challenging the dominant discourse
The case of Somaliland helps us to destabilise the dominant discourse which presupposes that state failure automatically empowers predatory forces (see Fieldman and Slattery 2003). Based on this assumption, we are unable to conceive that such ‘failed’ states may develop alternative governance mechanisms more effectively than those provided by international actors through peace-building operations.
This article does not intend to discuss the complex and specific genealogies of Somalia and Somaliland that could help us to understand why the current situations of these regions are so different. While the southern areas of Somalia were colonised by Italians, Somaliland was a British protectorate from 1887 until 1960 when it joined the new independent territory of the former Italian colony of Somalia (see Walls 2009). The Somaliland case serves to illustrate how state failure does not always result in a ‘Hobbesian state of nature’ needing to be redeemed by international agents.
Since 1991, when dictator Barre was overthrown, Somalia lacked an effective government, which, according to Menkhaus, turned Somalia into ‘the longest-running instance of complete state collapse in postcolonial history’ (Menkhaus 2006/7, 74). Although numerous peace conferences have been carried out in order to rebuild the Somali state, all failed. For Menkhaus (74), ‘This track record has earned Somalia the dubious distinction of being the world’s foremost graveyard of externally sponsored state-building initiatives’. As shown by Walls (2009), Somaliland has maintained a policy of non-involvement in most of these conferences, pursuing, instead, a parallel process of negotiation and debate. This process, as highlighted by Walls, was not uniformly successful given the persistence of many complex conflicts and disagreements. Nevertheless, such process led to a remarkable stability in the region (see Walls 2009).
The discourses informing international attempts to rebuild a centralised state in Somalia contributed to the failure mentioned above. These discourses were based on binary oppositions (i.e. modern/non-modern) and thus offered an essentialist and endogenous explanation for the Somali conflict, which was often read as a national suicide. This reading of the conflict does not acknowledge either the historical influence of international actors on the conflict or the systematic failures of the ‘international community’ in trying to remedy it through elitist initiatives aimed at reconstructing a centralised Western state in Somalia. According to Hagmann and Hoehne (2007), it is generally assumed that the driving forces of state collapse are internal to a given state. Thus, exogenous factors such as international interventions and international political economy are usually neglected by authors and external observers.
To Menkhaus (2006/7), Somaliland, a former British colony located in the northwest of Somalia, serves as a reminder that external efforts of nation-building cannot be a sine qua non condition for the reconstruction of successful governance mechanisms, as, in general, international organisations presume. A few years after declaring independence unilaterally in 1991, Somaliland has been regarded as an ‘island of tranquillity within the Horn of Africa as a whole’ (Doornbos 2002, 96) in such a way that Somaliland has attracted migrants from all the Horn of Africa (Kaplan 2009).
Nevertheless, in Somaliland, the main agents of state building were not external, but, as noted by Hagmann and Hoehne (2007, 23):
This state-building process occurred through cooperation between traditional authorities such as elders and sheikhs, politicians, former guerrillas, intellectuals and ordinary people who decided to put their guns aside and solve problems peacefully, and with only marginal external support from international organisations.
According to Boege et al. (2009), Somaliland is an example of an emerging state based on a hybrid political order, with significant social legitimacy, in which the elders play a critical role in governance. Walls (2009) shows that many of the processes employed through the territory of Somaliland were based on the traditional institutions of conflict resolution, hybridised throughout history. These processes can neither be rejected owing to their innate conservatism, as proclaimed by the mainstream discourse, nor romanticised (Walls 2009). As pointed out by Renders and Terlinden (2010, 726), hybrid political orders are always in the making through non-linear and ongoing processes of negotiation that involve formal and informal actors, at national and local levels. In fact, as shown by Hoehne (2013), the case of Somaliland was partly mystified during the 1990s, when the traditional authorities were the driving force behind the bottom-up hybrid peace. Nowadays, however, Somaliland is defined, by Hoehne, as a ‘crippled’ hybrid order, where traditional leaders have became vulnerable to corruption and distant from the needs of ‘their’ people. As such, Hoehne concludes, Somaliland advances neither as a strong traditional government, nor as a Western-oriented democratic state.
If, on one hand, Somaliland has not up till now been recognised as a state by the international community, being thus deprived of what Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg (1982) call ‘legal sovereignty’, on the other hand, Somaliland is seen by the region as having reached a high degree of public security, economic recovery and domestic legitimacy (Menkhaus 2006/7). These achievements, however, have occurred in the absence of one of the criteria considered critical to the provision of security, namely the public monopoly of the legitimate use of force. As shown by Hagmann and Hoehne (2007), the government of Somaliland has no monopoly of public violence in that most of its inhabitants guarantee their security through their private access to guns. To these authors, ‘[s]ecurity in Somaliland is dealt with in a decentralised manner and is largely guaranteed by local politicians and elders’ (24). Within the framework of this innovative scheme, the central government intervenes directly only in exceptional cases when the integrity of the region is at stake (Hagmann and Hoehne 2007).
This relatively stable environment allowed, in turn, for a high investment in the country by the Somali diaspora, which has contributed to the survival and the economic recovery of the region since 1991 in the absence of other resources that could exist if Somaliland was recognised internationally as a sovereign state (see Menkhaus 2006/7; Hagmann and Hoehne 2007; Englebert 2009). Thus, even deprived of the traditional sources of economic and coercive state power, Somaliland is not understood in the region as a chaotic space governed by the laws of nature as anticipated by the mainstream discourses.
The dominant discourses, however, remain: (i) persisting in efforts to forge a Sisyphean centralised Somali state (see Kaplan 2009); (ii) silence about the alternative political experience of Somaliland; and (iii) denying the possibility that the Somali clan structure could be accommodated within the framework of the new state. As stressed by Walls (2009, 3):
[T]he rubric of the failed state has so comprehensively permeated the thinking of foreign governments, and therefore the approach of the multilateral and bilateral agencies who set a significant portion of the agenda throughout the Somali territories, that engagement with Somaliland has been limited to support for discredited transitional governments. It seems perverse that Somaliland’s failure to win international recognition should limit examination of what has been a largely successful, if uneven, process of conflict resolution, peace building, and state building.
Thus, Walls draws attention to the depreciation of the transitional government established in Somaliland by the international actors, who insist at looking at the Somali territory as a whole from the rubric of the failed state. To overcome this limitation underlying the dominant discourse, Boege et al. (2010) propose a reconceptualisation of the so-called failed states by including concepts such as hybrid political orders. For them, such a move
allows for a more neutral and nuanced understanding of the complex domains of power and authority in these societies, by widening the frame of reference from the functions and capacities of state institutions to also include the operation of customary and other non-state institutions in providing sources of social peace, justice, political representation, and participation. (101)
The effects of these homogenising narratives evoked by the international community are that if Somaliland wants to actually integrate into this ‘community’, it has, at least rhetorically, to exhibit some degree of similarity vis-à-vis its other members. One of the ways that Somaliland tried to produce such similarity was through the production of its differentiation from the ‘failed state’ of Somali. That is, Somaliland has been narrating its collective identity through the production of its distance vis-à-vis the Somalis. To this end, the leaders of Somaliland have omitted the long period in which, from 1960 until 1991, Somaliland had been united to the former Italian Somalia, and the nature of its political order. Thus, we can see the Somaliland leaders reverting to the same comparative logic used by Western leaders when they compare their own new state to an ‘Other’ denominated as a failed state. As a result, they reproduce the logocentric grammar, here criticised, in order to acquire a place in the ‘international community of nations’. Aimed at strengthening the uniqueness of its history in relation to the ‘failed Somalia’, former Italian colony, Somaliland began to build its identity as if it is a direct successor of British imperialism (see, for example, Hoehne 2006).
However, Somaliland’s leaders have appealed to their former coloniser not in the sense that the British government should regain control over the region but rather demanding international recognition and protection (Hoehne 2006). To that end, the recent history of Somaliland, united with Southern Somalia within the framework of a common state for 30 years, was silenced. According to Hoehne, ‘The logic behind this huge historical gap is that any relationship with Southern Somalia except economic cooperation is an obstacle to Somaliland’s claim to be an independent country deserving international recognition’ (404).
This narrative that omits the postcolonial state, however, contrasts with another put forward by some in Somaliland who are in favour of the union of Somaliland with Southern Somalia, claiming that such a union would strengthen the region economically as well as contribute to its defence against potential enemies, such as Ethiopia. This last narrative, however, conceals the fact, emphasised by Hoehne, that Ethiopia has established very close ties with Somaliland.
Thus, there are various representations of identity in dispute in Somaliland, which are constructed from different readings and interpretations of Somali history. Such interpretations draw attention to the contingent, even contradictory, character of these various expressions of identity, which have nothing natural, since they are produced by the discourses of different actors through omissions as well as through re-readings of their past.
Final considerations
The recognition of the hybrid character of postcolonial societies, together with a more nuanced and historicised understanding of Somali culture, allows us to destabilise the dominant discourse informing ‘new’ peace-building operations, which continue to reproduce colonial binaries and essentialisms, and, in turn, identify the ‘Other’ as violent, backward, primitive and failed. As shown by Richmond (2010), the majority of approaches to peace building assume that international agency is good, and that the problem is always with local agencies.
If, on the one hand, we have criticised here contemporary trends in the literature on ‘new’ peace operations which associate the local with tradition and, by extension, with backwardness, disorder and ethnic violence, on the other hand, we are conscious about the opposite risk, namely romanticising and glorifying the ‘local’ (see Kaplan 2009; Lidén 2009; Mac Ginty 2010; Richmond 2010).
Thus, we have discarded the usual associations between the global and domination and between the local and resistance, since, as shown by Darby (1996), the global lives in the local. To Darby, while conveniently neglected by selective histories, the presence of the global within the local is a result of colonial involvement in reconfigurations of local identities, which has often been responsible for the intensification of communal and ethnic identifications.
By recognising the global in the local, it becomes impossible to keep drawing a clear frontier between the domestic arena (what is happening within the borders of Somalia, for example) and global processes. Such global processes become complicit in recent outbreaks of violence in postcolonial societies, which cannot be then understood as solely an endogenous problem.
This postcolonial denunciation of the current logocentric tendency underlying the discourse of Western actors involved in the UN peace operations contributes to destabilise their alleged new, progressive, humane and inclusive nature. These operations are still guided by an old ethnocentric grammar that, as happened in the colonial period, divides human beings into stages defined by the West and creates the conditions for increasingly intrusive interventions.