Union of Islamic Courts

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This chapter explains the challenges and possibilities in Somalia’s attempts to redesign its “ungovernable” spaces. It is therefore a story about the journey of Somalia that explores its ethno-political and religious spaces, as well as a story about the resilience that has come to characterise political governance and the struggles for the consolidation of democracy. That said, this chapter begins with a discussion of the colonial and postcolonial struggles to adopt democratic governance and the ongoing search for stability (as a requisite condition for democratic governance) in Somalia. The discussion then turns to an examination of the various “Somali-style” and other governance models that were attempted in each regime’s search for political legitimacy. I identify the histories as well as patterns of political adaptation and resistance to the neoliberal peace project prescribed by the international community for each of these regimes. Thereafter, I examine the country’s use of indirect political representation as a tool for the promotion of democratic electoral participation in the aftermath of the political transitions. It concludes with a discussion of the roles that Somali civil society has played in the expansion of the governable political space in Somalia.

In this article, we assess the ongoing conflict between al-Shabaab on the one hand, and the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), on the other. Though al-Shabab has been around since the mid 2000s, the current round of the conflict began in 2010 when AMISOM was deployed to Somalia to bolster the fledgling Somali government. The main thrust of the paper, therefore, is to reexamine what effect, if any, this African force has had on the conflict. Data were collected from 2009-2021 through monitoring and analysis was done using software. Data gathered included recording specific instances of violence between the two groups, including who orchestrated the violence, the location of the violence and the fatalities in each act of violence. While TFG/AMISOM made substantial gains initially against al-Shabab, the result did not specifically conclude which of the two groups is poised to win the war. However, it demonstrates that al-Shabab is able to stay in play by resorting to a host of other strategies which neither the TFG nor AMISOM can deploy.