Somalia is one of the best examples to illustrate the problems of external intervention. Especial... more Somalia is one of the best examples to illustrate the problems of external intervention. Especially since the overthrow of the Siyaad Barre regime in 1991, an array of external forces tried to use the lack of formal central state institutions to pursue their own interests. When the US-led United Nations' missions failed in the beginning of the 1990s, the West withdrew and left the space to regional actors. What first seemed an opportunity for ‘African solutions to African problemsʼ and indeed initially led to stabilisation, enabled Kenya and Ethiopia to interfere in their own interest, which destabilised Somalia. With the rising fear of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism after 2001 and in the wake of the stabilisation of Mogadishu under the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) in the mid-2000s, the West, particularly the US, became again aware of the until then sidelined country. Regional and international interests have been clashing and continue to clash not only with each other but also with those of the Somali elites', overlooking the needs of the population. This scenario is even more complicated by the fact that the international actors do not tackle the roots of the Somali conflict. Instead, peace in form of a central government is enforced from above, not legitimated by neither parts of the elites nor parts of the population and therefore continuously contested. The underlying problem is not only that external interventions are rooted in political interests, but also that the narrow concept of the modern nation-state undermines local solutions to local problems. This leads to the assumption that on the basis of British, French and Italian colonial legacy and subsequent foreign interventions, there can be no effective role for external actors in the Somali peace and justice process. However, I argue that this cannot be generalised. The basic principle for an external intervention to work is its sensitivity to the processes on the ground, i.e. contextualisation, and, related to this, its legitimacy in the eyes of the diverse elites as well as ordinary people.
Somalia is one of the best examples to illustrate the problems of external intervention. Especial... more Somalia is one of the best examples to illustrate the problems of external intervention. Especially since the overthrow of the Siyaad Barre regime in 1991, an array of external forces tried to use the lack of formal central state institutions to pursue their own interests. When the US-led United Nations' missions failed in the beginning of the 1990s, the West withdrew and left the space to regional actors. What first seemed an opportunity for ‘African solutions to African problemsʼ and indeed initially led to stabilisation, enabled Kenya and Ethiopia to interfere in their own interest, which destabilised Somalia. With the rising fear of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism after 2001 and in the wake of the stabilisation of Mogadishu under the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) in the mid-2000s, the West, particularly the US, became again aware of the until then sidelined country. Regional and international interests have been clashing and continue to clash not only with each other but also with those of the Somali elites', overlooking the needs of the population. This scenario is even more complicated by the fact that the international actors do not tackle the roots of the Somali conflict. Instead, peace in form of a central government is enforced from above, not legitimated by neither parts of the elites nor parts of the population and therefore continuously contested. The underlying problem is not only that external interventions are rooted in political interests, but also that the narrow concept of the modern nation-state undermines local solutions to local problems. This leads to the assumption that on the basis of British, French and Italian colonial legacy and subsequent foreign interventions, there can be no effective role for external actors in the Somali peace and justice process. However, I argue that this cannot be generalised. The basic principle for an external intervention to work is its sensitivity to the processes on the ground, i.e. contextualisation, and, related to this, its legitimacy in the eyes of the diverse elites as well as ordinary people.
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