Sarah G Phillips

This article explores how counterterrorism knowledge practices affect the groups they study. We argue that these practices typically construct terrorist groups as ontologically stable and organizationally rational, which makes them appear familiar to, and so governable by, counterterrorism organizations. We show that by excluding prevalent local knowledge, Western counterterror- ism policy discourses assign the power to construct the category of “terrorist” to those without daily lived experience of the “terrorists” in question. This undermines different ways of knowing what sustains these groups, what might eradicate them and, more importantly, what might make their ability to pose a serious threat seem unlikely, or even absurd, to those whose sup- port they purportedly need to survive as terrorists. Using evidence from Yemen, we show that groups labelled as “terrorists” do not fit into the stable categories that counterterrorism organizations require to produce actionable targets. We argue that while imposing such categories helps counterterrorists find targets that reflect their assumptions, it also generates pathways for violent actors to evolve and reproduce.

How integrated are agricultural markets in conflict-affected states? We answer this question by examining the dynamics of monthly price series of rice, maize and sorghum across eleven cities (markets) of Somalia. Using conflict as a source of transaction costs between spatially connected markets, we examine its role in price transmission between the markets in a panel smooth transition regression framework. We find that in the case of rice—an imported cereal grain—conflict tends to reduce the speed of price transmission between markets. By contrast, we find no evidence of conflict-related transaction costs in the case of maize and sorghum—commodities that are locally produced, particularly in the central and southern parts of Somalia. In all instances, we find that there is some degree of spatial integration among cereal markets around the country, perhaps partly due to informal institutions that can bridge the divides created by conflict, distance and internal political fragmentati...

This chapter examines the backgrounds of several elite networks and coalitions that were instrumental to establishing independence and, subsequently, peace in the 1990s, focusing on the relationships, configurations of power, and ideas that they drew on and further embedded. Being denied access to significant external funding or support, these networks were largely dependent upon one another for either their survival as elites or for their prosperity. Their mutual dependence reverberates throughout the independence discourse, building layers of meaning around the idea that Somaliland was forged through the self-reliance of its people, which followed on from the self-reliance demonstrated by earlier civil society movements and the Somali National Movement (SNM) guerilla fighters. This framing of history is not only used to illustrate the authenticity of Somaliland’s independence but also the degree to which its experience upends hegemonic assumptions about state fragility and the use...

Only a fundamental restructuring of the political system that includes more Yemenis will lead to stability. © 2010 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Carnegie Endowment. Please direct inquiries to:

There are few norms in International Relations so pervasive as the Weberian notion of the state as the set of institutions that legitimately monopolise the use of violence (Weber 1919/1946). The assumption that the monopolisation of armed force is a universally held ideal – even among states unable to exercise it fully – is so widespread that it rarely occasions comment within the literature on the emergence and resilience of norms in the international system (Krahmann 2013, 57). When it does, generally in the literature that deals specifically with the rise of private military contractors or mercenaries in international conflicts, it is powerful Western states that are seen to be challenging the norm (Krahmann 2013; Wulf 2011; Percy 2016). This piece argues that this is only so because the focus of inquiry has implicitly excluded post-colonial experiences of statehood, and that amending this would reveal that other states have long challenged this norm. Nor has the challenge occurred through the processes of active contestation or norm ‘entrepreneurship’ that dominates the literature (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Nadelman 1990; Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999) but rather simply through the fact that this purportedly universal norm was never universal to begin with. Using Yemen as a primary case, this piece examines the assumptions that underpin the norm of state-monopolised violence, and how they break down when unhinged from their Western origins. It proposes first that a monopoly on violence is not necessarily something that all states strive for all of the time as a function of universally rational self-interest. Second, it suggests that the logic of state-monopolised violence implicitly establishes a clear separation between state and non-state actors, which has been unquestioningly taken up in many scholarly analyses of the norms bound up with statehood (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp and Sikkink 1999; Boli and Thomas 1999). This dichotomy is most pronounced when states contend with violent non-state actors (Jo and Bryant 2013, 239). This piece analyses Yemeni discourses about al-Qa’ida to unsettle an assumption that is implicit to Western discourses about what constitutes a state and to the norms constructivism literature: the apparent logical inevitability of the binary distinction between state and violent non-state actors. It suggests instead that state actors may facilitate violent non-state actors that challenge their authority or, at least, that citizens widely interpret them as doing so. Using this ‘situated’ perspective (Epstein 2014), this chapter then deconstructs the dominant discourse, which takes strengthening the state’s monopoly on legitimate force as the only long-term solution to instability and political violence, and yields specific counter-productive counter-terrorism practices and policies. It argues that in conceptualising the links between the coercive capacity of the state and political stability so rigidly, the norm of state-monopolised violence can help to produce the threats to stability it is believed to contain.

This chapter spotlights the powerful discourse about independence that re/produced shared meanings about each of these elements, demonstrating their contingent nature. It argues that the maintenance of peace is less a function of institutional strength than of a discourse that structures the conditions of possibility such that political violence seems illogical or dangerous. The discourse articulates engrained popular ideas about the proximity—and dangerous unpredictability—of violence. The visible consequences of failing to negotiate a peace settlement in Somalia undoubtedly reinforced Somalilanders’ motivations to succeed in doing so. For Somalilanders, the war in and around Mogadishu provided a tangible worst-case scenario that graphically illustrated the potential for violence to spiral out of control in structural circumstances that closely resembled Somaliland’s. It suggests that the maintenance of peace rests, to a significant degree, on the reproduction of a belief that viol...

This chapter explores how Somaliland’s independence discourse assigns meaning to the region’s relative isolation within the international system. To that end, the chapter first provides some background about the kinds of intervention that Somalia has experienced. It then considers the effects of the independence discourse and international isolation on Somaliland’s economy, even as it delves into Somaliland’s pre-independence economic insulation. Here, the unusual nature of Somaliland’s relative exclusion from international economic and political structures is reified as a pillar of its ability to establish peace. The absence of intervention during Somaliland’s early years energizes a powerful discourse about Somalilanders’ exceptionalism, the self-reliance of its people, and the ownership of its institutions.

This chapter shows how Somaliland’s institutions have helped to facilitate both war and peace, which is reflected in the way that the independence discourse emphasizes that peace is never guaranteed and so must be actively nurtured. It charts the evolution of the governance institutions that structured key aspects of Somaliland’s recovery between 1991 and 1997, contextualizing their role in ending the violence and in the subsequent maintenance of peace. It emphasizes the contested nature of their emergence and the degree to which their contingency diminishes the notion that there is a “basic set of tools emerging from experience” that can be applied to post-conflict situations. After illustrating the complexity of the rules of the game that were iteratively established over several years and across dozens of the clan-based conferences, the chapter zooms in to examine the government’s institutional capacity to enforce rules that are not directly related to either to violence or civil...

This chapter sets the scene for Somaliland’s place within debates about the utility of northern intervention against violence and poverty in various southern contexts. It explores the way that the dominant discourse about state fragility frames the quality of domestic governance institutions in the Global South as both cause of, and solution to, the prevalence of conflict and poverty. In so doing, it brackets out alternative—nondomestic and noninstitutional—ways of understanding peace and development in the Global South. These exclusions also frame international intervention as self-evidently useful in making the world more peaceful and prosperous. The chapter argues that this dramatically overstates the impact that development or state-building interventions have because they constitute a small part of the means by which power and resources move between north and south.

ABSTRACT The dominant international discourse about ‘fragile states’ calls for external actors to build the capacity of domestic institutions as a means of overcoming poverty and insecurity in the global South. It frames the pathway to greater peace and prosperity as primarily, if not entirely, domestically constituted, thereby confining the causes of poverty and insecurity to the domestic arena as well. This article argues that by focusing so intently on the domestic capacity of these states, international peace/state-building and development interventions discount, and thereby reinforce, non-domestic factors that impede security and development. These include: external support for repressive regimes; the sale of weapons to local actors; and the preservation of international trade arrangements implicated in sustaining global inequalities. This article argues that while each of these issues have greater levers for change in the North than in the South, they are generally excluded from discourses about overcoming poverty and insecurity. Therefore, if international actors are serious about attending to these issues, there are more pressing areas for reform than the internal institutional configurations of Southern states. Intervening in domestic institutions is, however, what development and state-building agencies are structured to do, meaning that to overhaul this mandate would directly challenge their existence.

This article is concerned with the relationship between the quality of a country's governance institutions and the degree of civil order it experiences. Using evidence from Somaliland, it argues that order and peaceful cohabitation can be sustained not only when, but even partly because, governance institutions are incapable of reliably controlling violence. It suggests that Somaliland's postconflict peace is less grounded in the constraining power of its governance institutions than in a powerful discourse about the country's structural, temporal, and physical proximity to war. Through its sensitivity to the ease with which peace gives way to war, this discourse indirectly harnesses an apparent propensity to disorder as a source of order. This case challenges the “common sense” causal relationship between institutions and order. If either the strength or the weakness of institutions can offer foundations for order, then neither quality can be assigned as its cause witho...

How do some places with weak institutional capacity avoid being caught in the cycles of violence and criminality so often associated with African institutions in the ‘failed states’ literature? This paper exploits in-country variation in piracy incidence across different regions of Somalia to investigate how some territories with low state capacity can nonetheless deter piracy and provide relative order. We find that the usual explanation – state ‘failure’ in Somalia, compared with a reasonably functional government in Somaliland – does not withstand scrutiny. Somaliland's lack of piracy was not due to ‘strong’ state institutions, but can be attributed to the strength of a discourse that emphasises Somaliland's ‘inherent’ capacity for order against the disorder supposedly endemic to the rest of Somalia. The exploration of the discursive underpinnings of Somaliland's supposed ‘piratelessness’ has implications for understanding the relationship between state institutions, ...

Why did America’s counter-terrorism strategy in Yemen fail to contain al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula in the years prior to the Yemeni government’s collapse in 2015? Moreover, why did the US administration think that its strategy was successful? This article draws from field research in Yemen and a diverse array of other Yemeni sources to argue that the answer lies in the fact that there are two broad, but ultimately irreconcilable, ontologies of what al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula ‘really is’: one legible, organisationally rational and thus governable; and one not entirely so. I argue that by targeting tangible elements of al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula (such as its leaders, sources of revenue and bases) in partnership with the Yemeni state security apparatus, the strategy strengthened the group’s less coherent aspects. As a result, Western counter-terrorism practices target a stripped-down, synoptic version of the group while missing, even empowering, the shadowy append...

There are few norms in International Relations so pervasive as the Weberian notion of the state as the set of institutions that legitimately monopolise the use of violence (Weber 1919/1946). The assumption that the monopolisation of armed force is a universally held ideal – even among states unable to exercise it fully – is so widespread that it rarely occasions comment within the literature on the emergence and resilience of norms in the international system (Krahmann 2013, 57). When it does, generally in the literature that deals specifically with the rise of private military contractors or mercenaries in international conflicts, it is powerful Western states that are seen to be challenging the norm (Krahmann 2013; Wulf 2011; Percy 2016). This piece argues that this is only so because the focus of inquiry has implicitly excluded post-colonial experiences of statehood, and that amending this would reveal that other states have long challenged this norm. Nor has the challenge occurr...

Western scholarship often frames a narrative of state ‘failure’ and state ‘weakness’ that is then used by policymakers to construct specific policy objectives, many of which are informed by security issues and military concerns. This has been especially the case since 9/11 and more recently since the Arab uprisings of 2011, with much of the academic and policy concerns about weak and failing states revolving around the security threats emanating from them. The role of external actors is often obscured in these narratives, which tend to focus more narrowly on the internal security problems of ‘weak’ states. This chapter seeks to counter this analytical inclination by examining the impact that Western conceptions of stability and state failure – particularly those of the United States Government – have had in Yemen, and the way that these may have fed the insecurity they intend to eliminate. Narratives of state weakness and failure can thus do more than simply describe political conditions but can also shape political outcomes. The chapter begins by questioning the usefulness of the orthodox failed states narrative from which international policy to “stabilise” Yemen has largely drawn its intellectual justification. It will then analyse the implications of this for understanding processes of rapid political change and responding to them more effectively. To make this case the chapter places USAID’s (United States Agency for International Development) Yemen Country Strategy 2010-2012: Stabilization Through Development within the context of Yemen’s contemporary political and security dynamics. This strategic document is particularly relevant to the issue of ‘weak’ statehood in the Middle East because it articulates the perceived causes of, and solutions to, this condition as understood by the US Government’s development agency. The chapter will first examine some underlying assumptions of American stabilisation strategies before analysing the unintended consequences of framing rapid political change as an external security threat. It will conclude by suggesting that while Yemen desperately needs development, assistance that is given in the explicit expectation of receiving political or security benefits is likely not to be targeted at the areas of greatest need and thus being perceived as self-serving. From the outset, therefore, this risks undermining the intention of winning “hearts and minds” and encouraging pro-Western​ sentiment. The chapter will also suggest, however, that there is a performative objective to Western stabilisation strategies: to establish for a domestic audience that complexity can be domesticated, and that power can outmaneuver uncertainty. As the anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom writes, “power rests in part on the very illusion that power exists”, and stabilisation strategies are, in part, about protecting that illusion by being seen to take the risk out of political change.

This paper (published in early 2011) looks behind the scenes at the Yemeni regime’s opaque internal politics and at the nature of the neo-patrimonial system that it has entrenched over the past 32 years. Yemen is at a critical juncture, and the calculations and strategies of the country’s key actors may shift rapidly and on the basis of unpredict- able factors, but it is important to keep in mind that deeply patrimonial systems are not transformed overnight.

... Establishment', not the Yemen Economic Corporation). Abdul-Aziz Oudah, 'Parliament Cracks Down on Government Scandals', Yemen Observer, 22 March 2008, http://www.yobserver.com/front-page/10013940.html. View all notes. ...

Diverging dramatically from the path taken by the Federal Republic of Somalia over the past two decades, the case of the unrecognized ‘Republic of Somaliland’ provides a powerful natural experiment for exploring political violence and institution-building within the contemporary global context. Having emerged from six years of intermittent violent conflict (between 1991 and 1996), Somaliland constitutes an example of peace and relative order in the absence of a government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Throughout its formative period (considered here to be roughly its first decade, 1991–2001), foreign support of any kind was negligible, and the lack of any external power attempting to end (or prolong) its civil wars dramatically limited belligerents’ access to external revenue. Somaliland, therefore, presents a case in which the domestic drivers of peace and development may be examined in the absence of aid and other forms of international intervention as significant variables.

The two regions with the greatest incidence of maritime piracy in Africa, the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, are also known for the low quality of the institutions underlying their political economies. This article investigates how institutions in these areas shape and constrain the sophisticated maritime piracy syndicates and their behaviour. Engaging with the literature on state failure and maritime piracy, we argue that norms and institutions constrain even criminal organizations like piracy groups, which often mimic and are embedded in the licit economy. In the Horn of Africa, pirates take structural and ideational cues from the licit economy and are constrained by the informal regulations that govern clan groups, rent-based economic activities, and collective security arrangements in Somalia. In West Africa, sophisticated piracy both preys upon and arises from the formal economy, specifically the international oil industry. As a result, piracy networks often mirror and draw from both the formal institutions in Nigeria used to regulate and protect oil production, and those engaged in oil production, processing, distribution, and transportation. THE PERSISTENCE AND HIGH INCIDENCE of maritime piracy in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea are widely attributed to the weakness or even failure of state institutions in both regions. We suggest that the prevalence of the failed states narrative in explaining the drivers of piracy has diverted attention from more important factors that shape pirate behaviour across time and place, namely the configuration of local norms and institutions that pirates interact with on a daily basis. The failed states narrative casts the weakness of formal state institutions as creating the incentives and opportunity for criminal behaviour but fails to account for the often wide variations in pirate behaviour, either within the same state or between states

Oman's developmental trajectory is a 'positive outlier' to most post-colonial states, particularly those with significant natural resource reserves. Its trajectory confounds many of the usual expectations surrounding the impact of rentier incomes on conflict and inclusive development. This piece attempts to disentangle the threads of Oman's apparent good fortune to reveal characteristics of its political settlement that may (and may not) have salience elsewhere. This paper spotlights the influence of narrative and the non-domestic factors that played pivotal roles in the formation and evolution of the political settlement, suggesting that both have generally been understated within the literature to date.