in Somalia have deep historical roots. Their causes are complex, including both internal and external factors. Justifications for intervention have been equally complicated: they have varied from actor to actor and changed over time. Spurred initially by regional instability and the responsibility to protect, foreign powers were increasingly galvanized by the war on terror. The results were mixed. Although the immediate humanitarian crisis—widespread starvation—was to some extent averted, the long-term effects were largely negative. Foreign intervention provoked a terrorist insurgency that consumed civilian lives and increased regional instability. Externally brokered peace initiatives failed to end the conflict. Large segments of Somali civil society were not invited to the bargaining table, grassroots peace-building and nation-building efforts were ignored, and the interests of outsiders and Somali elites prevailed over those of ordinary Somali citizens. As a result, the ensuing agreements garnered little internal support, and a succession of weak Somali governments failed to provide services and security to citizens. Similar practices marked the course of foreign intervention in Sudan and South Sudan, to the west of Somalia, which is the subject of chapter 5.
Suggested Reading
For overviews of Somali history and society, three surveys are especially recommended. Lee V. Cassanelli’s pathbreaking work, The Shaping of Somali Society: Reconstructing the History of a Pastoral People, 1600–1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), explores the precolonial foundations of modern Somali society. I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa, 4th ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), is regarded as a seminal study of Somali politics and society from ancient times through the early 1990s. However, Lewis’s characterization of Somali political identity as one largely based on clans and their segments—rather than one that embraces a fluid assortment of genealogical, language, religious, cultural, and economic factors—has been challenged by more recent scholarship. See, for instance, Abdi I. Samatar, “Debating Somali Identity in a British Tribunal: The Case of the BBC Somali Service,” Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies 10 (2010), article 8. Finally, David D. Laitin and Said S. Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), considers the precolonial and colonial periods and focuses especially on events since independence.
The early independence period is examined in two significant studies. Abdi I. Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats: Somalia’s Aden A. Osman and Abdirazak H. Hussen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), focuses on the democratic political organizations that led the struggle for independence, the leaders who shaped the first democratically elected governments, and their opponents who were engaged in sectarian and patronage networks. Hannah Whittaker, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Kenya: A Social History of the Shifta Conflict, c. 1963–1968 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), explores the dynamics of a secessionist war in northern Kenya, a region heavily populated by ethnic Somalis, where government counterinsurgency tactics alienated the Somali minority and exacerbated tensions between the Kenyan and Somali states.
Other historical studies explore the emergence of social and economic hierarchies in Somali society. Abdi I. Samatar, The State and Rural Transformation in Northern Somalia, 1884–1986 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), investigates class formation and economic history in modern Somalia. Catherine Lowe Besteman, Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), examines the historical development of hierarchies based on race, class, status, region, language, and occupation and the implications of these hierarchies after the breakdown of Somalia’s central government. Three recommended works provide insight into the origins of the Somali Bantu as an ethnic group and the violence perpetrated against its members after the central government failed: Mohamed Eno, The Bantu-Jareer Somalis: Unearthing Apartheid in the Horn of Africa (London: Adonis and Abbey, 2008); Catherine Besteman, Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and Ken Menkhaus, “The Question of Ethnicity in Somali Studies: The Case of Somali Bantu Identity,” in Milk and Peace, Drought and War: Somali Culture, Society and Politics, ed. Markus V. Hoehne and Virginia Luling (London: Hurst, 2010), 87–104.
A number of studies focus on Somalia during the Cold War. Laitin and Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State (mentioned previously), and Ahmed I. Samatar, Socialist Somalia: Rhetoric and Reality (London: Zed Books, 1988), examine Somalia under the Siad Barre regime. Jeffrey A. Lefebvre, Arms for the Horn: U.S. Security Policy in Ethiopia and Somalia, 1953–1991 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), uses declassified government documents and interviews to examine US relations with Somalia and Ethiopia over four decades, focusing especially on the massive influx of weaponry and its societal impact. Marina Ottaway, Soviet and American Influence in the Horn of Africa (New York: Praeger, 1982), focuses on the role of the Soviet Union and the United States in both countries. Louise Woodroofe, “Buried in the Sands of the Ogaden”: The United States, the Horn of Africa, and the Demise of Détente (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013), and Nancy Mitchell, Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), provide important new insights into Cold War dynamics in the Horn and US and Soviet involvement in the Ogaden war. For a brief overview of foreign intervention in the Horn during the Cold War, see Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 6.
Several works that examine Somalia since the dissolution of the Siad Barre regime focus on the origins of conflict and difference in Somali society. Grounded in sources that reveal grassroots perspectives, Lidwien Kapteijns, Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), shows how Siad Barre promoted conflict and competition among clans in order to establish and protect his neopatrimonial state, and how the political elites, warlords, and rebels who succeeded him used similar strategies of clan mobilization and clan cleansing to obtain and maintain power. Afyare Abdi Elmi, Understanding the Somalia Conflagration: Identity, Islam and Peacebuilding (London: Pluto Press, 2010), takes a different view, arguing that clan identity is deeply rooted, rather than a tool manipulated by elites, and that it must be considered if a political settlement is to endure. Contributors to Catherine Besteman and Lee V. Cassanelli, eds., The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia: The War Behind the War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), investigate contests over land and resources as stimuli for violent conflict. Besteman, Unraveling Somalia (mentioned previously), examines the ways in which war and violence have disproportionately affected rural southerners. M. J. Fox, The Roots of Somali Political Culture (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2015), analyzes the source of divergent political cultures in Somalia, Somaliland, and Puntland. Mark Bradbury, Becoming Somaliland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), explores political developments in the autonomous northern region that declared itself an independent state in 1991.
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