Thanks very much. And hello, everyone, and welcome to The Talk.
Thank you very much for having me here. And. This is a project that I'm working with, the King's College London.
I'm trying to reconceptualize the conflict, the contemporary conflict in Somalia.
And. Thank.
Yeah. This presentation is pretty the more historical.
And it starts with the 1980s, in the 1990 and 1990, in the early 1990s,
during the peak of the conflict in Somalia, when the conflict become more and more.
But I would be able, during the discussion of question and answer, to answer the questions about al-Shabab contemporary conflict in Somalia.
And let me start the armed conflict with your own clan.
Tribal or ethnic bases have been a kind of fugitive on the African continent over the years.
Reclamation with one aspect of violence has resulted in an incomplete picture, since it obscures the other forms of violence.
In a famous study in 2001, Nicholas Burns curiously enquired What ethnic and ethnic civil wars have the same causes?
Unquote. Without engaging directly with Somalis.
Two years later, in 2003, Stathis Calvert thought he had left with proper answers to the phenomena and came to the
conclusion that political violence is not the same as personal violence or any other violence,
for that matter. So exploring the case of the military regime of General Mohammed Siad Barre in Somalia from 1969 to 1991
reveals that both cleavages and in some balance theories made potential analysis for the Somali case.
Political violence, carried out in the name of clan but investigated by state authorities,
was part of the everyday politics in Somalia during the military regime.
But how to? The two different dynamics I negotiated with in everyday realities has been a
challenge to Scotland in sustaining the conflict in Somalia for many years.
This phenomenon has perplexed, even if not baffling, political scientist,
armed bandits and and those who are trying to establish Somali society and state, both theoretician and practitioner.
This mainly because and this is not the violence unleashed by the shadow regime of civilian rule.
It is reign and the clan convulsions that followed it after 1991 is all within
the same intersecting lines of what I call group to call it bloated boundaries.
Violence, whether orchestrated by the state or initiated by a nanny state or extended state actors, is conceived as singular in Somalia.
Such are the two cases. Related observers on the Somali case insist the affirmative.
But however, violence is not as simple as it seems on the surface.
But rather a more complicated case. A closer examination, one that draws from the context on the fieldwork show,
is that the political of the political violence in Somalia lies in the clear underlining dichotomy of both and cases.
It is often difficult to dissect the difference between violence carried out by the state authorities and one conducted by a client or even a subclan.
Failing to distinguish between the two.
Many scholars conceptualise in the state violence as a clan war or clone wars, which promoted the critical conflicts and conundrums in Somalia,
would be both two conceptual challenges one distinguishing the violence from societal violence.
Second, recognising the former from the other, overlooking the structural and institutional approach to the violence.
The scholars who are looking at the Somali conflict debate scant attention to how the
Seattle regime shaped and transformed the traditional warrior tendency of Somali clans.
Historically, clan violence is only possible when the state fails to be a neutral actor, becomes part of the violence or completely collapses.
Doesn't happen. In 1991, Somalia. On one related to the reality on the ground.
That is when animosity between clan is ignited. It leads to an unending, everyday violence.
As a result, the fissures violences might have been averted had the military regime employed different
meanings other than violence to deal with the descent in clans from the first place.
New ways of conceptualising African armed conflicts are indeed necessary to capture the
nuances of what's going on or what has gone wrong in Africa since the post-colonial period.
James Ferguson called for the need to advance the new conceptual categories and employ new methodological tools in African studies,
famously appealing in their classic African works to the urgent need of rethinking African politics.
But to balance the lost found the two types of armed conflict in contemporary Africa.
That is the political and the criminal. The former is portrayed as a straightforward struggle for power without consent.
There are legitimate by a significant proportion of the.
While the latter has been termed not political legitimate out of the outcome of the private greed of the war makers.
The limitation is of the academic exercise of African works outside the Somali
context demonstrates that this premise was not always the case in Africa.
If one is to take seriously about Antony, Gideon is a case study on how street violence and violence intersected.
Then the example of Somalia is both useful and instructive. How one come apart.
The popular binary violences remain is about the moronic,
despite the fact that clan conflicts have never morphed into massive crime compulsions until the fall of the state in 1981.
In Somalia, these important aspects raised two set of questions.
That's street violence have a distinctive character more or less infeasible than for fatal violence in this case, clan complex.
If so, what is what it should be? What are the characteristics?
Character is the causes and the consequence of this in beauty wars.
Let us try to look at these answers.
In the Somali conflict, Somali society, especially for those adhering to the pastoral lifestyle, have had a history of incremental wars.
Throughout the early colonial ethnographers both British and Italian German reported
with much its way in ways of a culture of violence in the pre-colonial family society.
However, the contemporary ongoing conflict began on 21st October 1969,
when the military regime came to power with the platform of a bloodless coup d'etat.
Open the Somali politics.
Become violence same as violence had become politics before the post-colonial in the 1960s,
Somalia was born as a democratic state from the UN trusteeship in 1960.
But after the military regime, this was and the politics all the politics become violence.
It was intensified as as the military regime fought the mysterious 1977 war with Mengistu Hailemariam as the regime in neighbouring Ethiopia.
And this war is now an internationally Ogaden war and was part of the Cold War dynamics in the 1970s.
From Durban there emerged a series of political determinants and dynamics played through a state
structure and violence because the military regime was not as powerful as it was in the 1970 civil war.
And Democrats have just begun to conceal their weaknesses with brutality against any individual
or client who commits or moves a challenge to the illegitimacy of the military regime.
State violence has been sanctioned ever since as a way to subdue the dissent in groups trying to topple the regime,
using the traditional clan system to anchor themselves within the sociopolitical framework of the rule.
The military authorities began to rule with the similar methods through which colonial rule had ruled.
That is, ruling by subjugation.
The bullet cessation, not to mention economic ization as well as the institutionalisation of clan of violence, become a reality.
The place to begin exploring this violence is the political given and granted claim
notions that normalised the state violence they state or just treated colonised waters.
We're in the military regime.
One of the boys on 19 and one would vote along clean lines rather than exposing ideological lines renders the conflict very complex and complicated.
Claret bills were useful and served as easy meat tools in political contestation of about so much thought that violence was justified.
And at any level it reached the strong cleansing bond of protection and societal security
ensured that both the victim and the perpetrator should possess the same right.
The Constellation United, the rebels and the loyalists of the regime from both sides of the fence.
One is the military regime collapse in the first realities.
Two, the position of the defender. Would the atrocities and action is committed by the regime.
Destroying. Whole communities and colonies did not exist and are not accurate outside the state parameters,
a factor noted by the participants in armed conflicts and observers alike.
So explaining the political trajectory of violence has proved challenging, even for ethnographers.
Who saw the colonised waters firsthand in the 1990? This does not mean that the conflict was neutral Somali tourism, but it was a factual reality.
Well, before the coming of colonialism in both the Somali colonies began to return to a bitter colonial mode of violent, violent revenge.
Water violence are not always as political as they appear. Armed conflicts become political when political were involved in the process of war.
Violence has lost the connotation of political. In March 1991, as opposed to most of the other leaders, Ali Madi Mohammed and Mohamed Farrah Aidid.
And lost the war over who should have ruled Somalia after the military regime.
She then insisted, making this always what we can. I still have conceptualised long ago in Somalia war making becoming state making from 1991 onwards.
The state making wars shifted from political violence to economic violence.
A bullet out and travel.
A lot has begun to come beat for capturing airport seaport, but not what the presidential palace, as I quoted from the outset.
Comparing and contrasting 1313 cases across the continent may come across its
own ways in which natural resources may impact on civil war and civil wars.
In the Somali case, the natural results were more an incentive to sustain rather than on park on war.
This was mainly because Somali buffers possessed no oil, copper or diamonds, as were evident in Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
In Somalia only, this did become the major resource asset in the result of the state, whoever capturing power would have control of its capital.
As one American diplomat, one is famously declared in 1990.
Quote, The attitude towards the estate itself, it's one of the London soil remain a great treasure just in which you can grow up and everything.
That is the way. And the military regime has run the country through their clans.
Uncle, who is ruling the estate rather than what type of rule is, is still the most important question in contemporary political conflict in Somalia.
Even when the military regime was ousted, the institutions and structures they put in place have to be sold from time to time.
This explains why the notorious state intelligence agency, now known as the NSF,
the National Security Service, was reinstated in contemporary Mogadishu at the moment.
The concept of the state in the minds of the family has always been predated, as it's commonly contemplated with capital.
They stayed is the magic as it must, and behave in a blatant manner in the past.
The observation by the rugby and tribal societies that the state is not a political actor, but a political field is irrelevant in Somalia.
The Somali state and the clan are part of the same story, part of the same political dynamics.
Thrown upon his assent,
the military's strong rule of Siad Barre began with separating the colonists who would support from those who would resist this regime.
Those clients who had beneficiaries of the ousted post-colonial civilian administration in the 1960s were put into the enemy category,
while the colonists, such as his, who felt marginalised under the 1960s political configuration, were coming on board.
So some clans were kept out and others were kept in.
Soon after, the 1969 coup was suggested, driven to the reconfiguration of state power,
Siad Barre promoted his claim not just to clan but subsub clan forum and clan family to a political family.
And those of the family before the government. For the family. By the family.
After that, the sentences to silence the dissenting views they state become.
And. A tissue with me and all it would distribute to send it to some clients and it might even and it's moulded to others.
Apart from the imposition of it all revolving around client groups loading down immediate client.
She had better form and are only circle a small group of stealing from sitting around sharing the national cake as part of
the politics of the building and using the javelin throw up by concept with approval and budget and extraversion evidence.
They did that as long as the international aid was secured. The regime could sustain the backbone,
and the base of the regime were founded upon the formation and establishment of autocratic institutions controlled by his immediate family members.
And in. This meant that where he got the big fish for himself, he reserved the middle seat for his family and the rest for his subclan.
Now that small fish were allocated to the allied elite from certain subclans or subclans.
As a consequence, it's because of the presence of one single dominant clan that encouraged the political groups to push their clients to revolt.
The military regime benefited from absolute impunity and the men needed to become a gatekeeper between the West and the East.
The Soviets and the United States aligned the first eight years with the Soviets, the rest with the United States and the other Western states.
It should be noted that the years the military regime allied with the US was the worst.
The years of state violence. Some Somali political officers confirm to the American authorities in Mogadishu that U.S. military equipment was used by
their forces to suppress civilian uprisings throughout the 1980s in order to oppress the insurgents against this regime.
And the theatre lounge in. A state terror campaign against the revolt that collapsed.
Assistance can be spearheaded by different political groups who would frame it as kind of struggles.
Internal transition distinct from another consultant. What is all about was also framed and candlestick mastectomies.
Even when the violence was transformed into a societal violence.
But any attempt to shift from the seats of the state to the seats of the society was staved off.
To be Hasan the devastating Avenger,
the state sponsored colonised waters that engulfing the country in early 1991 was something that had long had been imagined on one way or the other.
When the military regime more friendly overthrown in 1991,
the predictable consequence of the enduring dictatorship culminated in a clan on a account of violence.
In other words, the violence delegated the violence to clan for the clan violence and an the strategy before 1990 to suppress the dissenting.
And. This the transformative part of the societal violence was carried out on Clan B throughout the 1990s,
something that was not dissimilar from pre-colonial Somalia. To be sure, this was indicative of the devastation in Africa from Sudan.
Nearly each African country had been affected by a wildfire of water.
Somalis headed to other African than war ridden African states with the experience of going through one conflict after conflict.
In fact, the confusion of the 1990, as opposed to dictatorships and Cold War conflicts.
Though the Somali case was less violent than other conflicts.
Even though the military regime acted as an all inclusive state, it was in reality not a national state.
This created a lot. Enough by bulletins and hit by bulletins as special categories were formulated.
To rephrase differently. The client is on the centre and the colonies of the periphery.
Simkin in his book Faces of the Enemy argues that the enemy has often no one single face to be confronted with the absence of such a recognisable,
the military ready made civilians belonging to the armed groups as its enemy throughout the 1970s, up to early 1990.
It was a government policy that in order to survive in a pool of dissent in armed movements, the regime had to beat the veritable colonist.
Those who are aligning with the regime against the enemy, those who are hostile to the regime, to counter the armed groups,
the regime army, the favourable climate against the disfavour, which in turn set out to arm themselves,
to defend themselves from the hostile regime and its supporters by way of clear political delineation between both and claims
that the regime military officers would have given orders to summarily executed members of those who were opposed to the regime.
This was a complete transformation of violence and dissent as described by the
human rights organisations after sanctioned collapse toward the Somali state,
similar to the relatively understate ceased to be an important element about but remained a significant bone of contention.
The intersection between the estate and clan came to be based on one off dialectical relationship.
The political exclusion asserted to represent Bush and the political opponents to set the
stage for the current convulsions of 1991 after the military regime's fall and flight.
As long as exclusion was institutionalised during the reign,
the elites from and allied with the military regime would take whatever the military ruler had allocated them,
which meant zoom in political opposition without completely let alone abortion.
Those who proved to be dissenting or tried to challenge the status quo had to endure the wrath of the regime.
When one clan group denied the other the right to share with the state resorts, as well as the right to exist under a rule of exclusion and exclusion.
The result as illogical for using cleavers and the societal violence as a strategy to resist state violence.
The alternative with that as guaranteed political beliefs tended to display their muscle was to go
warfront and attack the regime from outside as one by the first elements of the Somali Salvation Front,
as if let the Somali Salvation Democratic Front is there.
Soon afterwards, many other armed opposition groups more powerful than the SDF.
Elements were later drawn in. The Seattle regime came to the fore.
The most powerful of these armed groups was the Somali Salvation National Movement in the North, which held from another powerful front in the south.
The United Somali Congress to topple the military regime. The formation of this military movement was later used as a means for political ends.
Rather than liberating those group which were felt oppressed and excluded from the power.
The political and economic marginalisation spawned serious grievances that came to clash with greediness.
The class of grievance with greed led Somalia to the uncivil war in the first place.
However, two choices were open to allies in Somalia,
whether to accept the status quo or to resist the military regime that was oppressing them longer before making it one.
According to the Niccolo Machiavelli armies,
which two types of war to attain goals and engaged what is larger primarily because of the expansionist
ideals and other hidden ambitions of the ruler to expand and maintain his dominance over the revolution.
The second one the most detrimental, arguably far reaching, is when an entire population fights against another.
The typology of reason for all against all both types of war were what accurate during and bossed the military period.
The June period. This means that from the perspective of conflict that is,
the contemporary Somalia armed conflicts have intersected both Trinitarian and interior minutes and measures in multiple ways.
In the post military regime, no clan commanded the most substantial forms of military machine,
such as fighter jets, as was the case during the military regime and the mosque.
And because of the military regime instructed on legacies, localised wars were not conventional.
Masaka is on the basis of economic constructs by the military regime.
Degenerated into the race which is debated.
Therefore, the expulsion of Mogadishu, the capital. Indeed the driving forces behind it, the explosive clan cataclysm, is when an abuse of power,
autocratic, exploitation of state resource as well as a drive in in region particularly.
The distinction of this sponsored violence as a wholesale terror and the current
violence as a retail terror developed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hellman,
was to add to the Somali conflict. On 26th September 1975,
the French intelligence newsletter Africa Confidential published a classified document signed by the military regime in August of that year,
ordering the punishment of certain groups in the central regions in Somalia.
The document itself was not clear and the purpose of such undertaking, but it revealed that people in the capital were conscious.
Of what would follow after the convene of central regions, what is what Africa Confidential wrote in 1975?
There are now rumours in Mogadishu that the plan of other regions would follow opposition to the regime in Hargeisa district,
forming which Somaliland in the north would put next in line.
But Hargeisa would be a much tougher nut to crack with many supporters of the military regime itself.
A decade later, in 1984, another intelligence report made this gloomy picture of what Somalia is now
bitterly divided into line with each clan armed to the teeth fending for itself.
This clearly indicates and indicates that what happened in 1998 was not the cause of violence, but the continuation of state violence.
But put it differently. It was not a cause, but a consequence.
It state supported clan was encouraged to defend the regime from a societal subordinate clan.
This explains why some refugees were targeted as played the crucial role and participated in the state funded convenience of an invasion against.
Civic groups in Mogadishu, in the capital, another.
These refugees were from Ethiopia after the 1977 war and the regime tried to and implicate them in the war against those who resisted the regime.
The reason why the violence moved from the capital city to the southern Somalia was in a lot of the because and not the military regime had moved.
They stayed power to their clan bases after the fall.
Indeed, the role of the state sponsor of violence should not be equated with crime motivated reprisal.
It's accurate in both militarily in Somalia, the political culture of the military regime and the various ways of violence.
Canada was quoted dividend that there is a link between a cause such as a cold winter and a consequence such as increasingly,
as one Somali elder puts it, quote, If a car had a collision with another car, for whom is going to be responsible, unquote.
The reply to the crucial question that the driver must be held accountable because these policies are made and re made by the driver.
It's a matter of determining factor considered in how the driver with the state of the will.
There's no doubt that over two decades the driver of that estate was the military leaders who drove somebody to the wrong direction.
Victims of state violence are often challenged with violent competitions.
Not only is it important,
but imperative to underline the distinction between systematically structural and symbolic violence carried out as a campaign of state terror.
Which one is more detrimental and leave lasting consequence?
The state violence and the violence they the is always more advanced and more determined to win a war that the United Colonies,
who could hardly combine all the resources needed to which any nation can be.
As one interviewee observed, no clown had the capacity to conduct organised terror after 19 and one,
destruction on a massive scale could hardly be undertaken without the resources drawn from the state coffers.
Only the state was capable of fulfilling such a colossal, arduous activity.
In other words, only the state has the means and the mechanism to unleash massive destruction on a proportional,
as evidenced in Rwanda, Burundi and even Yugoslavia and Germany.
In this respect,
the state sponsored violence law and the military regime in Somalia could not be managed with clan convulsions between rival calamities in 1991.
The result of the state violence proved that those colonies, oppressed under the military regime,
could not be convinced today to share power with those or president.
Violence in Somalia has taken performance and conclusion one to carry it out on a state level and another on clan with the state
violence and the clan or communal violence are not clearly differentiated and eliminated in the existing academic literature.
Differentiation between the two cases has not been tried.
Even the finest thoroughbreds used most recently by Lincoln,
really would utilise the geographic information system, the tools and its statistical methods.
From empirical observation, this kid violence and the violence are different in scope and in extent.
It's important to use electronic and synchronic evidence to negotiate the distinction between the two.
Which one is more enduring? Either one can be real, as both could draw upon outside intervention and phenomena that warrants further research.
In every way they state terror is distinct from clown violence.
During the military regime, the historicity of the political conflicts and political rivalries created by
state were made more complicated than the way they have often been simplified.
The military regime in Somalia was, in a way a replica of what William Brennan call it, the shadowy state with regard to Leone and Liberia.
Whereas the state violence. Can be termed as one sided violence.
The societal violence falls into the category of what can be called the other violence, which is to say it has not term like state violence.
The other less obvious quote is the state violence characterised here as political
violence and violence conceptualised as public violence for peace or societal violence.
For it is substate myth or statism has always been shorter and less lethal.
And the public violence, I'll quote it, as a consequence of the brutal policies pursued by the state.
As we can see in Somalia. As a result, any violence should be best defined as should best be conceptualised to the extent of the outcome,
not the form of the conflict as collective violence and convulsions, or if not simply clan war.
So even though it's distinctive both in made for methods and objectives,
what separates the state violence from the associated violence is not merely the political ambiguities about on the part of the state,
but also the organisation and the resources to conduct a more detrimental destruction than anything else but in another way.
Whereas the territories of the state violence is shaped by a rigid determination to ensure the monopoly of violence.
The perpetrators of public violence are conscious of the fact that one day they would hand over their weapons of the state.
The street violence and the societal violence that has always been interwoven as one single variable.
I like the state is born from one. The convulsions in the most military regime in Somalia were not based on one single variable,
but many conflicts with many actors, each having its own variations.
This resonates with what can be described as a war within a war.
By the war we ended the war and conflicts are open ended episodes.
But when they that exercise but it later become part of the conflict,
fighting with the favourable kind of gains that is before the war have to turn itself into colonised war.
So colonised outside of the state's purview, the military regime introduced the state violence into the regional Somali clan warrior system.
In a comparative study looking at the global level, argued that political violence, in other words,
dictator, resulted in casualties four times more than the interstate and uncivil war.
Aside from the political aspect,
the conflict of resources previously based on water but contemporary over the state border in Somalia and economic result component.
Would that have long been and still is, a central feature of the continued armed conflicts in Somalia?
In retrospect, the Somali pastoral claims have long before with each other.
But when the state apparatus that was supposed to be in battle become part of the colonised wars, the consequence culminated in the 1991 convulsions.
Acted on the constraints imposed on them by the state. Some clan militias fought against the others on behalf of the regime.
Others defending the regime.
This evidence contradicts that the armed conflicts in Africa are not the retreat from modernity, as Ali so forcefully argued.
The Somali state under the grip of the military regime.
Was not the security guaranteed for a populated territory, rather, is guarantee the security of certain communities to the detriment of others.
Between. But later and parasitic, while remaining oppressive unexploited, it triggered clients to set difficult scores on each other.
After the downfall of the 1991 highlight of the regime oppressing pastoralist colonists who were culturally more
violent than agricultural colonies in the South was like locking a cat in a small room and then beating it.
Most certainly the cattle would fight back fiercely and ferociously.
In the introduction to violence and belonging like this,
do someone is a very legitimate question on why the complicity of the state is absent in popular accounts of political violence,
underscoring the responsibility of the ruling political authorities.
She presents her case by augmenting empirical evidence gathered from Turkana in Kenya.
Heritage sites are useful for the Somali case. Similarly, the military regime in Somalia was characterised by unleashing terror,
using violence to inflict can guilty and fit as a method of political intimidation and regulation to sustain power.
No one can accurately estimate the toll of this, but we do it and in the name of the state.
From 1969 up to 1991, during the during the reign of the military regime.
But it is nonetheless estimated that nearly 150,000 people were killed on the orders and supervision of the state authorities during that period.
At least 100 people were either or killed every year from 1972 up to 1977, after which the war weakened.
The number of people lost their lives after 1969 up to now is terrible.
300,000 died in the aftermath of the siege, Mohammad Abdullah's rebellion in the 1920s.
During the war, like a group, an armed group like al-Shabab in the 1920s, fought against the British colonial rule.
But as hundreds killed in the campaign against them.
The good contemporary news is that violence in Somalia comes to secondary and global data on security issues over the last two years,
thanks in part to the decline of al-Shabab and Mujahideen, although they have been recently the tiny back to the fold.
And thanks also to the renewed water fronts in other parts of the world, though it remained on top for many years.
Somalia was not replaced by Syria. South Sudan. Honduras.
Venezuela. Swaziland. El Salvador. Afghanistan. And the iPhone application has most violent countries in the world.
What is obvious in those countries is still the state violence, something that created a left.
An unprecedented level of violence in Somalia and.