Catherine that's really phoned me up. I'm an old development practitioner.
I'm not an academic. I'm actually a practitioner researcher for the last ten years.
And it was only last week that I met her that and it was only two days after meeting that she sent an invite saying, We've got a space.
Could you come and talk? What I accepted I could offer to be.
That's not so difficult. I've probably already sort of got something that I can share with you,
but actually I didn't finish this presentation until about 2 minutes ago because I realised as I was preparing that what you
were interested in is changing character of conflict with something that I really needed to adjust my thinking around for you.
So I'm, it's it's an experiment. Let's see how we go.
I'm, I'm going to be sharing findings from three studies that I've done.
And what I'm hoping will come from today,
from this session is a sort of maybe a greater understanding or a deeper excitement
around how comprehending sort of male and female gender relations identities,
gender ideologies can really shed light on what you're trying to to learn about and look at and examine.
I believe it can I hope that you see that, too, at the end of this, if you don't already.
Oh, it's going back to this. When I put this picture up here, I've used quite a few photos in this presentation.
I don't know if that's allowed in an academic setting. This is a picture from Somalia in the late 1970s, and these women are all policewomen.
So I put it there because not many people, it seems, sort of know very much about the the pre 1991 history of Somalia.
And I am going to be talking a bit about that today because I am an old person and I was actually there before the war.
So woman use of it. So just to introduce you briefly to the studies of there are qualitative studies and Katrina
and I had this conversation over breakfast about quantitative qualitative research.
My work is always pretty much on the qualitative side, particularly using life stories and semi-structured interviews.
If I can get in sometimes focus groups and I work with Somali researchers or whoever are local researchers,
so it's not me going out there doing all the interviews.
I might do some if I can do them in English, but usually I'm working with a local a team of local researchers.
So there are three studies. The first one you can find these or I'll give you the links, which is called The Impacts of War on Men, on Somali men.
And that was undertaken with the Rift Valley Institute. Actually, I'm not part of the Rift Valley Institute.
I'm associated with them, but I'm an independent research and I do do a lot of work with them and they have been keen for me to come to this.
The second study is it's called Women in Conflict and Peace Learning from Kismayo.
Do you mind just show me if you sort of very familiar with Somalia.
I mean, does anyone here sort of specialise on Somalia?
Yeah, you're the only one that's mission proof.
Yeah, I think I can give you my best job with that, Michel.
Okay, so I might just give you a little bit of background about that one.
This study was undertaken with the Life and Peace Institute primarily and their local partner,
Somali Women's Solidarity organisation Peace Direct funded it.
We wanted in this study to really find out if it is a case study in one context, one small place, because it's not so from one place.
And we wanted to learn about what do women do in conflict, what are their roles in conflict?
Because lots of these are Peacebuilding Organisation and they wanted to really find
new avenues for bringing women on board and then the peacebuilding it through,
through many, many of the findings as well. And then lastly and I,
I've it's not highlighted in the same way because this is a study that isn't published and I'm really not supposed to be even talking about it,
but I actually feel very sure that it's relevant to what you're interested in and I'm just came for it to be published.
It's a study of women girls in al-Shabab experiences, and it was research that we did in Somalia, in Somaliland, which is in the north east Kenya.
Publication pending, and I can't say more about it, but we will have Chatham House rules when I do talk about that part.
Okay. So those are the three studies. There is a fourth one which I haven't put up there, but I suppose it informs everything that I do these days.
And it's an earlier piece of work that I did with Judy Upshaw, who the late Judy of which I didn't, in part from Michelle.
How many of you do? But it was a study of the impact of war on Somali women.
And this was done with with Somali women. It's a collaborative thing.
And it's written up in a book which is still available.
It's called Somalia The Untold Story The War Through the Eyes of Somali Women.
I mention that because all of the rest of these things have come from that initial study.
We worked with a group of women who were sharing their experiences and impacts during the 1990s about the war.
And one of the things that they said to us was Our lives as women will never recover until the men are the lives of our menfolk recover.
And that sort of lodged in my mind. We didn't at the time really explore it, but it lodged in my mind and Judy's mind.
And it wasn't until really more than 15 years later we were able to get funding to do this
follow on study to actually try to find out what it was that women were talking about.
And I mention that because throughout this presentation, in fact, throughout all my work,
when I talk about gender, I'm not talking about women and girls.
I'm talking about the relationship between women, between men and men, between women and men.
This gender is a relational concept.
And I think that I mean, maybe that's how you also think about it.
But we do have to pretend to operate in the world, in the developing world.
But gender means women and girls. And so there's always a struggle to sort of establish it's actually me.
Now I want to share three observations that for me frame this presentation because
I framing it for you and for this idea around the changing character of war.
And I'm taking this from a work that Judy did.
I don't know if any of you have seen it. Why does armed conflict recur and what has gender got to do with it?
It's a brilliant paper. It's not very long. It was an LSC, Women Peace and Security Paper came out last year.
And so she makes many observations in the paper and I just picked out three.
So the first one I really mentioned,
gender is a relational sense and that gender is really deeply implicated in conflict and in violence and the knock on effects and beyond.
And, and that's why it's valuable to essential.
We might like to, to look at what's happening on the ground in terms of gender relations.
Then she makes another observation, which our findings really bear out, which is that transformation of gender relations can go either way.
There's no guarantee. And when we look at Somalia, it's a brilliant example of this.
You can think that you're changing gender relations in a positive way or that they are changing and therefore they can be pushed back.
And this so it's very difficult to make a cause and effect fact.
You can't really establish or generalise about cause and effect.
And then she also says that history shows that the roots of repairing conflict may
be sort in the behaviour of past generations as well as in current structures.
And I really do more and more and more I feel history is so important in my work and the people
that I'm working with and I think my presentation will take some steps back into the street.
She goes on to say, Underlying tensions and grievances often often recur cyclically over decades, if not over centuries.
The knowledge of violence can be transferred from one generation to another.
And we see that in the Somali context, particularly through women.
Women are a sort of vehicle for carrying this the knowledge of the past grievances,
and it informs not only the fact of war, but also the intensity of the violence.
And again, that really resonates with what we found.
I would say that I hadn't read this before we did the studies, so it's just a nice validation of what Jean is saying.
I just wanted after talking with Katarina, I just wanted to add one more thing that Judy goes on to say,
because I thought it was relevant to our earlier conversation.
She says these insights undermine the presumption of orthodox conflict analysis that conflict is.
Be measured in terms of battle deaths and to be explained exclusively by the machinations
of warlords and financiers whose elimination will herald a sustainable peace.
I mean, that's certainly the reality in Somalia.
That's kind of what drives a lot of the international policymaking.
That's why the focus so much on the elites, on the people that they identify as the rulers who always male,
who gets to be at the table every single time.
But of course, if we start to look down and I hope this is what I'll show you today, what we see underneath all that is going on.
And it's not going to be affected by the deaths of the warlords or whoever else moving them on.
It's still there. It's residual in the social fabric.
And unless that's addressed, then it's unfinished business.
Now, I just made a little timeline for you. I tried to sort of things so say so much.
You could say whether it would be interesting or not that in it.
But I've tried to sort of divide up a sort of Somalia's history into these four stages.
I've got some pictures to go with this just to share with you some sort of thinking precolonial colonial pastoral past.
So up to about independence 1960. And there's a picture of pastoral women dancing.
I would say a huge loss about that.
But you'll find that when I refer to the North excuse me, the norms and expectations of men that coming from this colonial past.
Okay. That's what we found when we talk to men and women today about what's expected of being a man that is the modern Somalia,
the cabaret era, sort of up to from 69 to to 90 state collapse.
And I think you'll probably find that I do really emphasise state collapse almost over and
above the wars that have affected Somalia because state collapse has been so catastrophic.
And the aftermath. And then and this is my sort of artificial dividing up here,
but I think others would agree that you could see very significant changes post-9-11 post war on terrorism.
Post that after the announcement up to today,
I don't know if you like the sort of the embodiment of that change through the changing of control really over women's bodies.
Going into that, you can do lots of things with photographs I to be I don't want to go on dodgy ground.
Okay.
So first of all then when I was thinking about this presentation, something came to my mind, think I've got to begin by looking at the Somali context.
I didn't know how much you'd know about it, and I don't want to overdo it because I'm not a geographer or a historian.
But it seems to me that you're interested in changing character of war.
But maybe in the Somalia case we can see changing character of the Somali context even more sharply.
So I started with three maps, and this is the first one, and this one comes from the sort of preclear that pre independence time.
And it shows it's not a very great map to finish.
This big area here shows the extent of the Somali nation of people, Somalis speaking or the Somali ethnic peoples.
And that was before the borders really have a boundary, but it was sort of the precolonial makeup of Somalia.
And I was thinking about, well, what were the stakes? And we didn't hear about big wars.
Then we know that the clan was put into clan wars or into wars between neighbouring groups, perhaps to be more precise.
For all life, my understanding is mostly around securing enlarged herds or securing grazing water.
It's very much sort of ecological and environmental based about an equilibrium.
So often when you talk to Somalis about that sort of pastoral past,
it's it's more about rather than making conflicts is about avoiding conflicts or about mediating conflict.
So I'm going with that. I might be wrong, but I've not got any evidence to prove that it is wrong.
But it's certainly that seemed to be the stage at hand at that time.
And there are mechanisms of sort of gendered mechanisms, such as the importance of exhaustion with marriage,
the fact the system of kinship organisation, which I'll talk a bit more about in a little while.
To manage resources, to manage the environment as well as the social structure.
Then the second map, this isn't a perfect map because there are things missing, but this is what that looked like after colonials had arrived.
And you have the division between British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland,
and it should also show you Djibouti being French Somaliland, which belonged to Ethiopia then and here, northeastern Kenya.
Somalia is divided up into five pieces by the the British, the French and the Italians then are secure.
What were the stakes then? You know, what was kind of going on at that point?
And like I said, I'm not the historian. Sorry, but what's interesting about this, this time, if you know about Somalia today,
is the roots of the irredentism claims that have really driven the there in a way it spoils Somalia that
party was creating because you have the Vietnam War which ended up being quite a disaster for Somalia.
It was all happily out of the Cold War, but this was rooted in this time and the Somalis were divided up.
And then the last map that I found, which I thought was helpful and that of today, Somalia today, and it shows how fragmented it is.
It's divided now into five main federal states, plus the Somaliland state, which is a claiming secession.
And this Red Stars represent where this live conflict or where al-Shabab is remaining in control.
And in fact, al-Shabab retains a lot of this southern area.
And there it seems to me that the stakes or what it sort of shows the stakes here seem to be more around state control of state resources.
And that's definitely what we'll see happening in terms of how the the the battle, if you like, for wealth,
for opportunities is through managing to capture and control what what would be resources of the state.
Now. I don't know if I've lost you on that, but then you're I think it's it's an important reminder that there are roots right from
the very beginning that are still resonating today in the Somali context on many,
many levels. So I just want to now go to see Barry's era, because from a gender perspective, the CFR a period.
So Zebari had a bloodless coup more or less 1969, and he held Somalia under a dictatorship until 1990.
December, well, actually January 91. He operated in the Cold War period.
He was he introduced scientific socialism to Somalia.
And major changes were imposed through a sort of state organised, state driven system, and particular to the interest I have in gender.
He banned kinship, he banned the whole idea of the clan tribalism and everything had to come through the state,
and he did it in a very sophisticated sort of way.
So, for example, whereas before, you would be dependent on your kinship group for welfare, for protection.
Now the state would provide you with insurance if you needed.
If you got sick, who needed a funeral or remarriage, it would all happen through through the state.
When it became illegal to talk about clans and I mean, I remember it, you know,
when I lived in Mogadishu, people didn't refer to clan identity at all.
I'm using talking about clans, assuming everybody knows what I'm talking about, but I will go into it in a bit more depth in a minute.
So he really succeeded in a way.
Up to a point in erasing or burying, actually more than erasing, because it re-emerges in burying the most fundamental part about being Somali,
which was your dependence on your kinship group in terms of dealing with boys.
And the reason I've used this photo is because under the CFR as scientific socialism,
fewer bald male, you have many more opportunities than if you were born into a pastoral system.
So he is a building. The state opened up many opportunities for men and boys and to an extent for girls too.
And women, but particularly for men. You couldn't get employment.
You didn't have to herd camels anymore. You could go live in the urban area.
You could become a driver, an artist, a soldier and mechanical engineer and architect.
There's a huge gamut and that the state employed thousands and thousands of people,
I think something like 60,000 civil servants or public public servants and.
This slide I've just put up here because I think it's very little understood or it's not often looked
at what's the average did for women or he tried to do for women under the scientific socialism.
Somalia became the foremost African country in terms of women's rights and women's equality.
So he introduced family laws in 1974 and 78, which made women have equal rights in marriage, inheritance, divorce,
etc. Why that's important for today's story is because it was so controversial at the time he imposed it,
and because there was protests by religious sheiks, religious leaders, he had them executed and their execution shocked to the to the core Somalis.
They couldn't believe that he would do that. And still today, when you talk to men of that generation.
So they're in the sixties, seventies, some of them were still telling you that.
That's why al-Shabab is able to do what it's doing because of what it did in the name of women's equality.
And they'll say, you know, we're never going to allow women to have those rights again because of what happened to those to those men.
So it's a critical point in history. It's one of those sort of recurrent things also.
And people still I mean, Sapa has a very bad reputation among most people.
But one of the things that most agree on is he introduced mass literacy and education, and that had a huge impact at the time.
There were mass literacy campaigns during the early seventies.
He did understand through his sort of science, scientific socialism, the value and importance of having an educated population.
Nevertheless, when I was there in 89, somebody was still at the very bottom of the world's literacy stakes.
And today, female literacy is about 17%, even less 6% in the rural areas.
And male literacy is is not much better. So he introduced these things, but they didn't stick.
Okay. Are you okay? Yeah, I'm sure.
I might get you on this. All right. So now moving on to state clocks.
It's a 1991, January 1991.
All of the architecture of the state.
This fit overnight. Completely overnight.
There was nothing left of a new banks, the new ministries, new law courts, no police, no health centres, no schools, nothing.
Everything just collapsed in the space of three weeks.
And as a consequence of that, I think what we found in the impact of our men study is that the state collapse in itself has and it's still look,
it's still not been reformed. I mean, we have a Somali government, but it's got no credibility.
It doesn't actually control anything. It's it's a construction from the international community and those that it collaborates with.
It doesn't can't operate outside Mogadishu, but it's there in name only.
So the actual state has never really ever been reconstructed,
with the exception of Somaliland and Puntland, which are and I think I've missed saying that,
but it's terribly important that there is a lot of difference depending on where you are in the
Somali context as to how things are for the majority in the south and in southern Somalia,
it remains without a functioning state. So the state collapse has had this massive impact and it's still being felt.
This is over 27 years later, I think.
So for women and this is a desperate photograph and I don't think it's untypical of the time this is in the very end, 91, 92 for women.
They lost overnight. They lost everything in terms of legal support, protection, all their rights.
Anything that had been given to them by the state was gone completely.
The the men, too, lost it.
But for women,
it was a way bigger impact in terms of legislative rights and what re-emerged and what everybody had to fall back on because there was nothing else.
Was the kinship system as the central organising force.
Kinship or as we call it, clan. And that had in some ways, it had differing impacts depending on whether you were female or male.
Now I'll talk about female. This is a picture of some Elvis actually in Galmudug, I think taken quite a few years.
I hope they look suitably dejected. That's going to chase it because the study that we did to 20 men and we talk to women as
well to to sort of verify it showed that state collapse has been catastrophic for for many,
many men. And one of the reasons was because they lost their livelihoods overnight.
They lost assets overnight. They no longer had any status.
Whereas somebody might have been they might have been an accountant for the government.
They might have been in an office or a driver for the government. Anything but everything went well if their jobs and employment.
And we took about urbanised men here. The rural men having life more or less probably stayed stayed the same.
But we interviewed 440 men and every one of them, if they were over 40, talked about their lives being irreparably damaged by state collapse.
They weren't. Most of them haven't been able to regain what they feel they lost.
And they've sort of you're probably familiar with the sort of stories of men being cut, addicts or mentally ill, and the rest of it.
A lot of the men we spoke to referred to this huge blow that they incurred.
And it was all the greater, because if you're born male in Somali society,
you have this expectation put on you that you are responsible, that you will provide for your family, that you will protect your family.
And all these men couldn't do that. They lived on very zero where the state provided and protected.
And they had absolutely no resources, resilience to to do that.
But more perhaps more enduring maybe with the re-emergence of kingship as the
central organising force all men and I always ask men if it's someone new to me.
I always want to check this with everyone. All men have their lives totally circumscribed by clan loyalty, clan membership.
So even I'm like, I am making a generalisation there because not everybody in the Somali context belongs to Clan.
There are minority groups as well which have very different or modified systems,
but said the majority have a patrilineal clan identity and I am hesitating to even talk about clan identity.
Katrina and I talked about this, and if there were Somalis in this room, should they be waving the house music?
They could speak with such an Orientalist viewpoint and the rest of it.
So I'm using it tentatively. And I think for me what helps think about Clan is it's somebody somebody like to think about.
That's how they think in terms of clan identity.
But it's not something that people will talk about openly, and I don't want to express it,
and they definitely don't want to talk about it with foreigners unless they know you quite well.
So, you know, this is in parenthesis kind of thing.
But what we were hearing and it was from young men, older men, middle men from Richmond for everybody, I mean, since state collapse,
your only source of opportunity protection wealth is through your kinship group, through your your clansmen, basically, or your kinsmen.
And you can't step outside that. You can't live in an area where they're not living because you're not safe and you can't oppose them either.
You have to comply. Compliance is a very important part of that.
Being male, there are leaders and there are followers and you need to be one of those.
Otherwise, you're not you're not fitting in.
So for a young man, I don't know how those guys sort of 1516 Wednesday collapse happened, how they must feel.
But since 91, if you're a youth, your adulthood may not kick in until you're 30 or even in some parts of Somalia, 35.
All that time, you're you're kept as a subordinate within the sort of community of men that you're part of.
And this is so different. On the contrary, by the time you were 18, you could, you know, you were considered adult.
So male adulthood is.
Delayed and men have tried to stay if they had a job, if they managed to get into some kind of new governance system that was being set up.
They've held on to it. They haven't wanted to sort of retire and pass it on.
So there's a there's a really big issue around civil service, retirement packages and things that don't exist but should exist.
We also found the inequality between men, I mean, between men and women.
We expected and found that between men themselves. We saw that it has expanded with state collapse and with the wars.
And this goes beyond the sort of traditional marginalised groups that live in Somalia who are traditionally customarily excluded,
marginalised, unable to access the same opportunities as the men from majority clans except on Safari, which is interesting.
Now this inequality around wealth in particular,
and your access to any kind of resources and if you don't have if you're from a small plan, for example,
which doesn't have very many men in it, because clan size is all dependent on the number of men that it has,
then you've got less opportunity, less access to opportunities.
Powerful men can exploit these divisions and they are exploiting them and they perpetuate male vulnerabilities.
And I can talk about that. I'm conscious about the time.
I think importantly, what we were hearing was that it's a new form of male hegemony and it's one that's based on wealth and control of resources.
Whereas in the past, under the sort of pastoral system, you were just an esteemed male.
You're part of the sort of the men in need. If you could demonstrate wisdom, you had a great knowledge of choose prudence.
If you have good to if you are a good prime mediator, if you are generous, all these highly esteemed qualities, they're out.
They don't matter anything anymore if they do inside people's heads.
But what matters in terms of being able to gain power and control is is to have access to wealth that you may have got because you're a pirate.
It may be that you've become a warlord. It may be that you've been a diaspora member who's gone back.
And a lot of diaspora are young and they're in the government and they're able
to exert a lot of influence because they can get other men to support them,
because they can pay for them or they can give them access to jobs.
So there's been a huge shift in terms of that sort of male power.
Okay. Just I'm going to take time and really get the issue to.
Okay. Right. Are we through this? I don't know if you want to know about this, but I think this is quite critical, really.
And I've told you my reservations about you can talk about the current system,
but I think you need to know if we're talking about gender in the clan system, how it's gendered.
So it's different if you're born female, if if you're born male in some very fundamental ways, if you're born male, clan identity is patrilineal.
So it's through your father. Sorry, this isn't clear, but this is male relatives through your mother.
If you're born, then you're only really strong relationships that you can trust and depend on with your father's clans for your kinsmen.
Yeah, that's the only group who you belong to, who you can trust,
who you can build things with, etc. You have connections with your mother's relatives,
but they're very weak and it's really mainly your mother and her brothers that you could sort of sometimes get protection from,
but it's not guaranteed. On the other hand, if you're female, you have multiple networks, multiple points of relationships that you can benefit from.
So you have the Senate, you have your paternal clan. You're very that's your very strongest.
That's who you identify the most with. But at the same time, you are linked to your maternal clan.
You can go to them. You're link to your husband's clan because your children who belong to your husband's clan.
So there are also people that you can reach out to that you have a bond with.
You can even become connected to your son in Laws Clan.
The main ones are paternal, the husbands and the maternal clans.
But compared to a man, you have many more opportunities in terms of relationships and protection.
Although your main protection will always be with your paternal count.
You can still live in your husband's clan area during the conflict or before in your mother's.
Now, the reason I've put this up here is because, believe it or not,
this really helps to understand so much about the state of into an intra clan conflict.
In summer, in Somali society, how it comes about, the agonies that it produces,
the the terrible, appalling suffering that it creates, that family level.
Because if you imagine this marriage is the preferred marriage.
So girls are brought up in the expectation that they will marry the enemy.
That's how it's described.
Girls, girls and their values, that they're loved and they're important, but they're not as important as boys because girls would be the enemy.
Whereas the boys will stay in the American importance in your plan and they go to the enemy,
because that's the way to expand your your group's grazing is sort of the historical reasons for it.
So they're a very important political tool, if you like.
The wars that we've seen or the very violent conflicts that we've seen in,
particularly throughout southern Somalia, but also in Somaliland and Puntland,
have have been made worse because a woman's husband will be fighting her brothers, her father,
her son will be possibly being killed by her brothers, by her father's relatives.
It's it's been at that level into family conflicts.
It also means that why women are excluded from political settlements,
from politics so fiercely by men is because men say, well, you can't trust the women because politics is clan based.
Since 1991, everything is decided according to numbers, quotas, 4.5 system.
If you're a man, you know exactly who you're going to side with, who you'll vote with.
It's always going to be you that you can be trusted. If you're a woman who you tend to side with, who will you be loyal to?
Will you be your father's clan? Husband's clan? Maybe your mother's clan.
So men don't want to know about women coming into politics because they can't count on their votes.
And it's all about numbers. So this is actually very important to understand.
Even if we don't sort of want to think too deeply, we get too attached to to to clan as a kind of defining term.
I'm almost at the end of, what, two more slides?
I think you're okay. Yeah, very patient.
So that the last step, the last two steps, so you could see a very steep collapse in the aftermath.
State building huge project to the international community since that really since 91.
I mean I think anyone that's followed the history as well knows that it's been very intermittent.
It really kicked in after 911 and everybody was sort of panicked by the thought that Somalia was going to be a haven for terrorists.
So huge amounts of investment. I happen to be part of the Somalia Stability Fund on the agenda.
So conclusion advisor but I'm wary of this. You know, the whole concept that you can rebuild this state.
I'm not sure myself how that will happen and I don't see it yet.
As to keep raising the stakes. And I think that refers back to those three maps.
You know what's at stake because of the way that state building has been pinned
on to the idea of clan and clan composition and clan numbers and 4.5 system.
If you can win it, you win. Everything is like the winner takes all approach, which is so different to how it was in the pastoral past.
So these ideas that people are operating with today come from a completely different context, from the sort of idea that 60 years ago and beyond,
when you're talking about sort of conflicts over camels and over a bit of grass,
now it's everything's different port and you'll be aware of all the transnational dimensions.
Now to the Somali conflict with Dubai and UAE and Qatar really sort of been playing around a lot and Ethiopia and Kenya.
Yeah. I mean, there's so much international interest at stake, the terrible photo.
But this is an amazing photo. This is taken at the inauguration of the parliamentarians.
I think it was the I think it was this last election.
I think it was Hassan Schiff's selection.
But it's amazing pictures taken by Axum and it's on the front cover of a paper that I'll give you the link to which I wrote,
which is called Somalia A State of Male Power, Male Inequality and male insecurity doesn't fit male.
That's the end function. And I've put it here because one of the I think one of the real gaps in understanding
or thinking in terms of the international policymakers and community in all of this,
they're really not looking on the ground what's happening, what the realities are for men or for women.
And I'll talk about that. You know, men are the elite and they are holding the power in so many ways.
But there are also such inequalities between men. Only this time, 14,000 men got to vote.
There's no universal suffrage yet in Somalia. Previous times, it's been about 1000 men who got to choose the parliamentarians.
This time it's 14,000, 25 or something. So there's a huge inequality, but there's also massive insecurity.
And I think that insecurity goes right back to the state collapse.
So if you're male, you've been living in what I've described.
When I talk to the Met, I think it's correct to call it existential insecurity.
I think that's the right term, the same for women, but they have different forms of insecurity.
So if you're a man, you've not only been a potential target in a sex selective massacre and there's massacres have continued throughout.
We've put testimony from mothers who talked about hiding their children, dressing their voices, girls wasted, losing their menfolk.
You've been proxies potentially, and you still are potentially subject to being forcibly recruited into armed groups, including al-Shabab.
It could be your clan militia. It could be another militia.
And perhaps most pernicious of all is the re-emergence of revenge killing, which has not been researched.
I have to say, I mean, nobody's really looking at it.
And yet it's a very strong determinant of medal opportunities or a constraint on male opportunities.
And when we did our research, we didn't expect it. We haven't kind of thought about it, I have to be honest.
But it was coming through from many of the areas that we did a field work.
In fact, one place that we visited the fund was when the research was turned out, there were no men.
No young men visible in the whole town because they were under a revenge killing feud and they'd all been sent out to the rural areas to hide.
The consequences of that for men, but also for women who have to step in and enter the public domain in order to fulfil the livelihood needs, etc.
But tremendous men can't move between one space and another space freely.
They can't look for work in a different part of Somalia.
They are trapped in the areas where they feel safest.
I think the the way that state building is being undertaken doesn't really is not cognisant of these kind of details.
And it's kind of focusing so much on the elites that suggests to get rid of the elite seriously, the other good of elites.
And this is all still happening on the ground. It's not going to go away.
And it's something quite different, the different approach. I don't have it before anybody else.
I mean, I don't know what bridge. I do want to just say.
Yes. I wanted to bring in. Okay.
At this point, talking about insecurity. So to mention the male insecurity, the revenge killing, of course, is the female forms of insecurity.
And insecurity we've seen is so gendered, so different.
And you will all be aware of the international attention on sexual, gender based violence, rape, etc. That has been through the Somali context.
And many Somalis are very sensitive about that.
They feel it's overblown.
But, you know, there's no doubt that sexual, gender based violence is a is a it was it was a taboo before, but it's definitely out there in a big way.
I wanted to show you what we've learned in terms of if you're male.
What's expected of you. Again.
Because I'm trying to understand how you create that into clan or intra clan conflict,
which our research has shown is it's not easy to get men to go fight each other.
It's not easy to get man's good his uncle or Cliff's his nephew or whatever, because it seems.
Manhood isn't predicated on violence in the Somali context.
You're not esteemed. If you're violent, you know, you're certainly disrespected if your your found to be violent or oppressive to women or girls.
Doesn't mean it doesn't happen. But this is the sort of the normative the social norms.
Manhood is is defined by people as a responsibility.
In fact, a lot of people said you're responsible after all, love and all is the ultimate,
and then it's mine and your responsibility to for your family and for your clan and for those two entities,
you must do anything you can, which is where the violence comes in.
Now, if you're female, what we've learned from the life and peace study is that women have a very important role,
a critical role in the construction of intrusion into clan warfare.
And it seems and we're still validating this and doing extra study, but it seems partly it's a response to vulnerability to violence.
So women are seeking and trying to make men seek revenge, get dominance, claim clan supremacy,
because that's the only way a woman can be protected in this state, this society, if her clan is is holding all the reins.
So women are instrumental in instrumentalize and have multiple roles in violence.
And we've documented this. And I would urge you, if you're interested, to take a look, I've got a listed I mean,
they canvas for war, they promote it, they fundraise for it, they'll sell the house.
They go all women. But these are the the the the majority in the places that we've studied,
they'll provide logistical support in the form of food and milk, water, even air time, things like that.
Most, perhaps most importantly, they mobilise men, and so they push them into fight.
They push their boys and their husbands to to get out there.
And we have some very graphic descriptions of how they do that using humiliation, taking off their clothes.
These are not exclusive to the summary content.
You find this in other similar contexts.
They ferment to a feather. They'll use poetry, then use songs of love for his custodians or they seem to be.
Now, this is something that I'm suggesting and I am not sure about it, but it seems that they are.
They play a role of holding on to grievances, remembering grievances,
and bringing them up when they feel most vulnerable so they can be agents of cleanliness and custodians.
And it seems to be the talisman is playing a very,
very important part in the sort of concept of getting mobilisation is being used by warlords, whatever.
But it certainly seems hugely important. We haven't done the research on it.
So that's kind of tentative and definitely they seem essential in producing the violent masculinities because it's not there without them.
And we heard men say, you, we need women, we need them on the battlefield to sing to us.
We're too afraid. You know, we can't stay that and this that the singing is so and I've just found this.
This is a chilling 100 shilling note currency from 1989 from Mogadishu.
And I don't know if you can see it very well, but this kind of image of a woman, a pastoral woman,
because she's dressed in traditional pastoral dress, she's brandishing a rifle in one hand and a spade in the.
Women are so split between clans. Can you just finish the presentation and then go to the end?
You can know other women of a. I think I think we have time to get this about.
Yeah, I am very late. You can ask me. Is it yet?
We don't know. But we are told that with it depends on where the fight is.
So if it's with their family,
I think you have Christian was the women's side with their father's clan or with their mother's clan or encouraging them either?
Yeah. It seems counterintuitive. Yeah, I totally agree with you.
I mean, we haven't got the full picture yet,
but it definitely seems that whereas the father's clan against the husbands, they side with their fathers.
Yeah. Even that may mean giving up their sons.
And that happens. And we've got life stories collected from women who say, I divorced him, I left my children because it because it's so huge.
It's so massive to to do that.
If it's in a situation where it's a third plan, then they would probably be with their husbands and their sons, I imagine.
But yeah, so just I tweeted this just to show it goes back into sort of the history that women have a very important symbolic role.
And we now know it's more than symbolic in terms of being agitators and supporters and stuff.
I'm sorry. No, no, no. That's good. Thank you.