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- Ioan Lewis
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4 - Somalia
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- By Ioan Lewis, Emeritus Professor, London, School of Economics, James Mayall, Emeritus Professor, University of Cambridge
- Edited by Mats Berdal, King's College London
- Spyros Economides, London School of Economics and Political Science
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- United Nations Interventionism, 1991–2004
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 15 February 2007, pp 108-138
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The involvement of the United Nations (UN) in Somalia was a product of the new international climate created by the end of the Cold War and by the dramatic success of Operation Desert Storm, and its aftermath in 1991. For the UN, the Somali operation, which at its height employed a force of 28,000 at an estimated cost of US $1.5 billion, broke new ground in two ways. Under Resolution 794 of 3 December 1992, the Security Council invoked Chapter VII of the Charter to authorise the establishment of an Unified Task Force (UNITAF), under US command and control, ‘in order to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia’. This was the first time that an unambiguously internal and humanitarian crisis had been designated as a threat to international peace and security, thus justifying peace-enforcement measures.
Second, with this and subsequent resolutions, the UN dropped the pretence that its involvement in Somalia arose out of an invitation from the government – although the Council continued to refer to ‘urgent calls from Somalia … to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance’ – since no government existed with the authority to issue such an invitation. For the first time, statelessness was acknowledged to be a threat to an international society composed of sovereign states.
The UN did not extend its prerogatives in these ways either willingly or as the result of a deliberate and carefully worked out international strategy.
Visible and Invisible Differences: The Somali Paradox
- Ioan Lewis
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In exploring the difficulties experienced by the traditionally politically uncentralised Somalis in establishing a stable and effective state, based on their ethnicity, this article compares ethnicity, nationalism and lineage identity. In this case, ethnicity and nationalism are local products, influenced but not created by the colonial experience. They have had to contend with the intractable force of segmentary lineage identity, which has proved extremely difficult to adapt and accommodate to the requirements of modern statehood. In its cultural context, agnation is all the more pervasive and powerful in constituting an ‘invisible’ bond, conceived by Somalis as a biologically based distinction like ‘race’. Unlike race, it is almost infinitely elastic and divisible. Ethnic identity, which rests on external distinctions such as language, culture and religion, cannot be broken down into a series of formally equivalent segments, but is less binding as a social force. Today, after the collapse of the state of Somalia in 1991, following protracted grass‐roots peace‐making between clans, two parts of the nation—the former British Somaliland, and the north‐eastern region of Somalia (‘Puntland’, based on the Majerteyn clan, and other closely related clans)—have developed separate local states. Although Somaliland claims complete independence, which Puntland does not, both polities incorporate parliamentary institutions that accommodate traditional, and modern political leaders and processes. The ex‐Italian residue, Southern Somalia, still without any form of government, is in what appears to be the final throes of its long‐running, fourteenth grandiose international ‘peace’ conference in Kenya. Thousands of delegates, in various configurations, have already spent over eighteen months in these talks. Although its embryonic constitution now recognises ‘clans’ as constituent political units, this attempt to re‐establish Somalia is based on the usual ‘top‐down’ approach, rather than on spontaneous local negotiations amongst ‘stakeholders’ on the ground, such as those on which Somaliland and Puntland are founded. With contingents of foreign ‘experts’, the whole process seeks to reinstate a familiar Eurocentric state model, unadapted to Somali conditions.
Preface to the fourth edition
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- By Ioan Lewis, London
- I. M. Lewis
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- Book:
- A Modern History of the Somali
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 11 August 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2002, pp vii-xiii
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As a social anthropologist (and amateur historian), I have had the unusual experience of studying an African people whose traditional cultural nationalism has fathered more than one contemporary ‘nation-state’. In the turbulent context of northeast Africa, however, since formal independence from European rule in 1960, Somali political fortunes have experienced many vicissitudes. The passionate nationalism which brought Somaliland and Somalia together in 1960, and fuelled ambitions to extend the resulting Somali Republic to include the entire nation, unexpectedly burned itself out in the 1980s and 1990s. Then, with a reversal of external and internal pressures, the segmentary divisions within the nation reasserted themselves with an explosive vengeance.
This impressive demonstration of the continuing power of more immediate clan and kinship loyalties revealed the enduring tension, in a traditionally politically uncentralized culture, between these lower-level identities and cultural nationalism. The many attempts at different levels in society and at different times to devalue and even extirpate these internal divisions, which always threatened national solidarity, assumed many forms, ranging from denial to political suppression. The most colourful, perhaps, were the public burials (and other measures) instituted by the dictator General Siyad at the height of his powers and in his ‘Scientific Socialist’ phase. Earlier politicians had resorted to the linguistic sophistry of pretending that they had surpassed clan and tribe by substituting in spoken Somali the English (or Italian) term ‘ex’ (understood as meaning ‘ex-clan’) when identifying people. Since Siyad had banned all reference to clans, this even included this circumlocutory usage of ‘ex’. On visits to Mogadishu in this period, I thus could not resist wickedly asking my apparatchik Somali friends if one could now safely enquire about a person's ‘ex-ex’. They were not amused.
So all embracing and insistent were these disclaimers of persisting clan realities, that even foreign academics, who should have known better (although they were usually handicapped by an inadequate understanding of Somali language), were taken in. Consequently, their writings helped to sustain this illusion, which played a significant role in mystifying Somali political realities, and encouraged their misrepresentation in the eurocentrie jargon of‘class’ and ‘class conflict’. Behind this, of course, lay the ethnocentric (Marxist) assumption that clan organization was an early, ‘primitive’ political form of organization, incompatible with modernity.
4 - Somalia
- Edited by James Mayall, London School of Economics and Political Science
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- Book:
- The New Interventionism, 1991–1994
- Published online:
- 15 January 2010
- Print publication:
- 02 May 1996, pp 94-124
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The involvement of the United Nations in Somalia was a product of the new international climate created by the end of the Cold War and by the dramatic success of Operation Desert Storm, and its aftermath in 1991. For the UN, the Somali operation, which at its height employed a force of 28,000 at an estimated cost of US $1.5 billion, broke new ground in two ways. Under Resolution 794 of 3 December 1992, the Security Council invoked Chapter VII of the Charter to authorise the establishment of an Unified Task Force (UNITAF), under United States command and control, ‘in order to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia'. This was the first time that an unambiguously internal and humanitarian crisis had been designated as a threat to international peace and security, thus justifying peace-enforcement measures.
Secondly, with this and subsequent resolutions, the UN dropped the pretence that its involvement in Somalia arose out of an invitation from the government – although the Council continued to refer to ‘urgent calls from Somalia … to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance’ – since no government existed with the authority to issue such an invitation. For the first time, statelessness was acknowledged to be a threat to an international society composed of sovereign states.
The United Nations did not extend its prerogatives in these ways either willingly or as the result of a deliberate and carefully worked out international strategy.