Menkhaus - Vicious Circles and The Security Development Nexus in Somalia
Menkhaus - Vicious Circles and The Security Development Nexus in Somalia
Menkhaus - Vicious Circles and The Security Development Nexus in Somalia
Analysis
Vicious circles and the
security development nexus
in Somalia
KEN MENKHAUS
The metaphor of the vicious circle is deeply in a collapsed state. These changes have
embedded in analysis of protracted conflicts. produced a dense network of informal and
Yet in at least some instances conflicts that formal systems of communication, cooper-
appear to be self-reinforcing in the short ation, and governance in Somalia, helping
term are in the longer run producing condi- local communities adapt to state collapse,
tions out of which new political orders can manage risk, and provide for themselves a
emerge. These protracted conflicts are thus somewhat more predictable environment in
dynamic, not static, crises and require post- which to pursue livelihoods. Crucial to this
conflict assistance strategies that are in- evolution of anarchy in Somalia has been
formed by accurate trend analysis. The case the shifting interests of an emerging business
of Somalia is used to illustrate the dramatic community, for whom street crime and
changes that occur over time in patterns of armed conflict are generally bad for busi-
armed conflict, criminality, and governance ness.
Introduction
The dominant, often implicit metaphor framing policy discussions about the security-
development nexus in post-conflict settings is the vicious circle.1 The logic behind this
metaphor is compelling. Endemic insecurity blocks progress in economic rehabilitation
Dr Ken Menkhaus is Professor of Political Science at Davidson College, NC, USA. During 1993–94, he served as Special
Political Advisor in the UN Operation in Somalia. He is author of Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism
(Adelphi Paper 364, 2004), and is currently completing a book on protracted conflict in the Horn of Africa, supported
by a grant from the US Institute of Peace.
and recovery. The lack of economic recovery and employment opportunities in turn
impedes demobilisation and reinforces criminality and armed conflict. In short, preda-
tion breeds poverty, poverty breeds predation. Likewise, underdevelopment contributes
to state failure by depriving governments of necessary tax revenues to be minimally
effective, which in turn stymies economic recovery. State failure produces economic
collapse; economic collapse perpetuates state failure.
Most of the discourse on contemporary post-conflict assistance reflects this view of
war-torn countries caught in a tangle of vicious circles, with failure reinforcing failure,
trapping countries in a downward, potentially perpetual spiral of crisis. The recent
World Bank study Breaking the Conflict Trap identifies several ‘negative feedback
mechanisms’ which help explain the high degree of conflict persistence. It concludes that
acknowledges that while nation-building is very difficult, a more strategic, informed, and
committed approach to post-conflict assistance can ‘cumulatively make a substantial
difference’ in breaking the vicious circles perpetuating civil wars.9 This requires a major
commitment of time and funding and in some cases an unprecedented level of
intervention into conflict-ridden countries.
For the moment, this debate has been resolved by the war on terror and the
now-dominant view that, left unaddressed, failed states are a potential safe haven for
terrorists.10 Once discussion of post-conflict assistance was effectively ‘securitised’ after
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the theoretical and empirical question of whether nation
building can work has been eclipsed by the political assertion that nation-building must
work.11
If any country qualifies as an illustration of the conflict trap, it would appear to be
Somalia. Somalia has been a zone of complete state collapse since 1991. There is at
present no functioning central government, no reconciliation, little security, endemic
armed conflict, high levels of criminality, high unemployment, extremely low levels of
human development, and an economy which stays afloat principally on the half-billion
or more dollars in remittances which annually flow back from the large Somali diaspora.
Moreover, the country proved impervious to the one of the most ambitious nation-
building efforts in the post-Cold War era—the massive, multi-billion dollar UN peace
operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) in 1993–95, which ended in failure.
Yet a close analysis of Somalia over the past fourteen years reveals something
unexpected from an allegedly textbook case of self-perpetuating crisis. Somalia’s triple
legacy of state collapse—endemic armed conflict, lawless criminality, and absence of
formal central government—has changed significantly since 1992. These changes hint at
the possibility that the very forces which seem to be perpetuating Somalia’s crisis are also
serving as midwife to emerging new political orders which are making the country
somewhat more predictable and less conflict-ridden than in the past. That violence
continues to feature prominently in these emerging new orders is indisputable, but it is
a more controlled violence, a far cry from the anarchy that plagued Somalia in 1991–92.
This article draws on the Somalia case to argue that in at least some instances
protracted conflicts are not self-perpetuating crises but rather evolving, ‘emerging
political complexes’12 within which political and social changes are driven by the
evolving interests of key local actors ranging from political elites to local militiamen.
Understanding how and why the interests of local actors can shift over time is thus a
Security development in Somalia 153
mosaic of local polities and informal social pacts that have evolved in post-state Somalia
does provide Somali citizens with variable levels of ‘governance,’ if not ‘government’.
The most visible manifestations of sub-national governance in Somalia are the formal,
self-declared administrations existing at trans-regional, regional, district, and municipal
levels. One such polity, the secessionist state of Somaliland in the north-western corner
of the country, has by some measures performed better than a number of recognised
sovereign states in Africa. Since 1996, it has provided modest levels of administration,
maintained a level of peace and rule of law that few neighbouring states can match,
survived a constitutional succession upon the sudden death of the President, and most
recently held local and national elections.
Although none can come close to matching Somaliland’s achievements, a number of
other regional and trans-regional authorities have come into existence in the past seven
years. Puntland, a non-secessionist, autonomous state in the arid northeast corner of the
country, has assumed very modest governmental functions. In Kismayo, the Jubba
Valley Authority (JVA) has kept the peace and facilitated an increase in import-export
activities in that troubled port city. Elsewhere, the Rahanweyn Resistance Army’s (RRA)
administration of Bay and Bakool regions in 1998–2002 and the Benadir Regional
Authority in 1996 showed some initial promise before collapsing. Most though not all
of these regional and trans-regional polities are or were essentially clan homelands,
reflecting an impulse to pursue a ‘Balkan solution’ or, more appropriate to the Somali
context, ‘clanustans’.
The interests that helped bring these regional states into existence vary from case to
case. In the case of Somaliland, powerful commercial interests in maintaining a secure
environment for trade out of the all-weather seaport at Berbera were a vital source of
financial support for the nascent Somaliland state. In addition, the strong desire of most
of the Isaaq clan to secede from Somalia following years of repression and wartime
atrocities galvanised public support for a state of their own. In Kismayo, the Jubba
Valley Alliance has maintained a modicum of order strictly in order to profit from a
monopoly on trade through the city’s all-weather seaport. The JVA is composed of
outside clan militias that are essentially an occupying force in Kismayo, and hence do
not represent any kind of local initiative to return rule of law to the area. Most other
regional states were created more by political rather than economic motives. Specifically,
a number of regional states were established by political leaders hoping to use their
position as ‘president’ or ‘governor’ of that polity as a springboard for a position in a
Security development in Somalia 155
future national government, and to secure greater recognition and resources from
external actors inclined to favour regional authorities over self-declared factions.
The most dramatic change in governance in Somalia since 1992 has come at the
neighbourhood or municipal level. Although these local polities have attracted the least
amount of external support, they have produced the most actual day-to-day governance
in Somalia, and they are a reflection of local communities’ attempts to provide core
functions of governance in a context of state collapse.16 In the immediate post-UNO-
SOM period, this ‘radical localisation’ of politics tended to manifest itself mainly in
informal, overlapping polities loosely held by clan elders and others.17 Over the course
of the second half of the 1990s, these local polities often became more structured and
institutionalised.18 The most common manifestation has been a coalition of clan elders,
intellectuals, businessmen, and Muslim clergy to oversee, finance, and administer a
sharia court. These coalitions are themselves shaky, laced with tensions over power and
resources, but when conditions are right, these groups are able to work together in
common cause to cobble together a modest judicial and law enforcement structure. The
sharia courts appear to come and go in cycles, and are currently in what appears to be
a renewed phase of ascendance following a decline during 1999–2001, a re-emergence
linked to the failure of the TNG and the related rise of insecurity.
In some locations, local polities do more than simply keep the peace via a sharia
court. They also have managed to provide some basic services, operate piped water
systems, regulate marketplaces, and collect modest levels of taxes and user fees that cover
salaries. Typically, these successful municipalities have been led by dedicated, pro-
fessional mayors working closely with local non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
clan elders, and businesspeople. As with the sharia courts, effective municipalities have
enjoyed enormous popularity in the local community, but have also proven to be
vulnerable to the machinations of warlords and jealous politicians and to the vagaries of
clan tensions.
What has emerged in Somalia by way of governance in the past decade has not so
much resembled the ‘jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and
anarchic regionalisms’ depicted in Robert Kaplan’s famous 1994 portrait of failed
states,19 but rather a loose constellation of commercial city-states and villages separated
by long stretches of pastoral statelessness. In the towns, the sharia courts and municipal
authorities do what they can to impose basic rule of law. Across the towns, business
partnerships weave extensive commercial ties, which transcend clan and conflict across
156 Ken Menkhaus
the countryside. This imbues Somali society with a dense network of communication
and cooperative relations that are often critical in managing conflict and taking the edge
off of what appears to be anarchy. The pastoral zones have never come under the
effective control of a state, so the collapse of the state has not been as traumatic for
nomadic populations as outsiders often presume. There, protection and access to
resources in a political world which loosely approximates the ‘anarchy’ of the inter-
national system have long been secured through a combination of blood payment
groups (diya), customary law (xeer), negotiation (shir), and the threat of force.
These extensive and intensive mechanisms for managing conflict and providing a very
modest level of security in a context of state collapse are virtually invisible to external
observers, whose sole preoccupation is usually with the one structure that historically
provided the least amount of rule of law and the most amount of predation—the central
state.
ties that criminals cannot commit crimes with complete impunity. Neighbourhoods and
towns (often of mixed clan composition) in some places have organised the equivalent
of ‘neighbourhood watch’ systems, sometimes absorbing former young gunmen into
paid protection forces.
Lawless behaviour in contemporary Somalia remains a serious problem, especially in
the more troubled south, where kidnapping for ransom has developed into a dangerous
industry. Ironically, the most egregious crimes (if measured in value stolen or lives lost)
are committed by many of the top political and business leaders whom the international
community convenes for peace conferences. This includes incitement of deadly commu-
nal violence for narrow political purposes, embezzlement of foreign aid funds, introduc-
tion of counterfeit currency into circulation (which, by creating hyperinflation, robs
average Somalis of most of their savings), huge land grabs by force of arms, export of
charcoal (illegal under the past government and highly destructive environmentally), and
involvement in piracy, among others. This criminal behaviour tends to get less attention
than street crimes such as carjackings, murders, and kidnappings which are usually
perpetrated by gangs or individuals and which are at epidemic proportions in some
places, but which pale in comparison to the cost of the ‘white collar crimes’ committed
by political and business leadership.
The key to these changes has been the gradual evolution in the political and economic
interests of key actors inside Somalia, including many whose interests in the early 1990s
were linked to a war economy and predation. The most important instance of shifting
interests is the business community concentrated in Mogadishu. Most leading business-
men today were to some degree complicit in the war economy of the early 1990s,
profiteering from the sale of arms, export of scrap metal, and diversion of food relief.
Thanks to a confluence of factors, the nature of economic opportunity shifted in
Somalia, leading many of these entrepreneurs to shift into legitimate (or at least
quasi-legitimate) commerce and services. UNOSOM’s massive economic presence pro-
duced lucrative opportunities in procurement, construction contracts, property rental,
private security, and currency exchange, which drew war merchants and militiamen alike
into livelihoods that are more respectable. The one million migrants and refugees who
formed the Somali diaspora began sending money back to family members, fuelling
demand that was met by the establishment of sophisticated, transnational remittance
companies. The revolution in telecommunication technology in the mid-1990s provided
an opening for the rise of Somali satellite phone companies. New economic opportuni-
Security development in Somalia 159
ties for transit trade into Kenya helped to spark a booming import-export business
involving thousands of small traders as well as major merchants, and sustained growth
in the transportation sector. These and other economic opportunities required a degree
of stability, security, and predictability, not warfare and criminality. Merchants who in
1992 oversaw the dismantling of the country’s entire infrastructure for scrap metal and
who profiteered from looted food relief now began sinking considerable sums of money
into fixed assets—warehouses, telecommunication towers, plantations, hotels, and
trucks. As they did, they became a constituency with vested interests in open roads,
control over street crime, and peace. Thus, they have a greater interest in peace and
paying customers, not armed clashes and famine victims. Some still indulge in question-
able or illegal business activities, but these do not require, and they are not well served
by armed conflict. War is now, for the most part, bad for business. The decision by
leading Mogadishu businessmen in 1999 to refuse to pay taxes to warlords in their clans,
to buy out the militiamen from beneath the warlords, and to support local sharia courts
in a bid to clean up street crime, was a watershed moment in southern Somalia. It was
the point at which the economic interests of the business elite helped to reshape the
political landscape.
Demobilisation in Somalia
The trend analysis presented above makes the case that Somalia’s long-running crisis is
clearly a dynamic situation, not merely a country caught in a vicious circle of perpetual
conflict and underdevelopment. How does this more nuanced political assessment help
shed light on the security-development nexus in Somalia? A brief survey of successful
demobilisation in the country—an issue considered vital to almost all post-conflict
settings, and a major preoccupation of the security-development nexus literature—is
instructive.
Though hard figures on the number of Somali militiamen are elusive, there is
universal consensus that far fewer young men are active members of militias or are in
armed criminal gangs in 2004 than in the first half of the 1990s. The vast majority of
gunmen have been effectively demobilised. Estimates that Mogadishu’s population of
one million includes some 60,000 gunmen are deceptive, since the vast majority of those
armed men are employed as private security guards. Remarkably, this demobilisation has
occurred in what most would consider the least conducive environment imaginable—in
160 Ken Menkhaus
UNOSOM demobilisation.
During 1993–94, UNOSOM’s formal demobilisation projects—housed in its Demobili-
sation, Disarmament, and Demining (or ‘3D’) Department—was badly under-funded
and had almost no impact in demobilising Somali militia. The demobilisation projects
the department did undertake were often misused by militia leaders, who used the
projects to house and feed gunmen who had no intention of demobilising. Inadvertently,
however, UNOSOM became the source of a major spontaneous demobilisation in
Mogadishu. For over two years, the enormous peacekeeping mission injected hundreds
of millions of dollars into the local economy, via employment of thousands of Somalis,
procurement and construction contracts, and property rental. This infusion of cash
transformed the Mogadishu economy, serving as an unintentional but quite effective job
creation scheme. Gunmen seeking an alternative livelihood found opportunities in
sectors such as transportation and commerce, or more commonly as private security
guards for businesses and private residences benefiting from the economic boom.
taken up new occupations. More often, militia gangs have morphed into protection
rackets, finding it both safer and more sustainable to exact a portion of villagers’ harvests
for protection instead of looting them of all their harvests. In the parlance of biology,
these gunmen have shifted from being poorly adapted to well-adapted parasites, by
learning not to kill their hosts. In some cases, these arrangements constitute a grey area
between extortion and taxation, between protection racket and nascent security force.
Survival instincts are not the only driver of this behaviour. Over the course of the 1990s,
the status of young gunmen in local communities went from prestigious to disdainful.
In much of Somalia, it has become ‘bad form’ for men to walk openly with weapons on
the streets.
Conclusion
The Somalia case reinforces several seemingly obvious and yet often overlooked claims
about complex political emergencies. First, in zones of war, criminal violence, and state
collapse, the individuals and communities caught in these crises actively seek to reduce
and manage risk, and are quick to fashion informal systems providing a modicum of
security and predictability in their lives. Too often, external interventions into conflict
and post-conflict settings make the false presumption that communities beset by
predatory banditry or war are passive victims, when in reality they are expert at the art
of survival and adaptation. At a societal level, this translates into a tendency for
‘systems’— uncodified but often complex arrangements governing predictable move-
ment, transactions, and expectations—to emerge even in the most seemingly chaotic
environments. That those systems are all but invisible to most external actors does not
make them any less real.
Second, even the local actors who profiteer from the collapse of rule of law tend to
gravitate toward risk management and ‘rule-bound’ behaviour, which places great value
on predictability. This is partially a survival impulse in a terrifying environment, but is
also due to the fact that the interests of predators in these crises change over time,
especially among those who, after having accrued considerable fortunes in war econom-
ies, come belatedly to appreciate the many virtues of law and order.24
Third, the Somali case underscores the fact that these changing interests on
the part of a wide cast of characters in collapsed states and war zones can drive broader
changes in the nature and scope of the conflict itself. Crises that at first glance appear
to be a manifestation of a ‘conflict trap’ may in fact be in a state of evolution, with the
potential to produce new social orders out of chaos. These social orders are almost
invariably violent, exploitative, and illiberal, and they may not be at all interested in
culminating in a revived central government. However, they are orders, not anarchy, and
their evolution may in some instances constitute the best chance a country or com-
munity has to emerge from the ruin of war into something worthy of the expression
‘post-conflict.’
Documenting the nascent local and regional political systems arising out of the
Somalia crisis is in no way intended to obscure the reality that zones of state collapse
like Somalia remain extremely dangerous, insecure places. For international aid agencies
engaged in post-conflict assistance, it does raise several issues. First, it serves as a
164 Ken Menkhaus
reminder that external actors should at a minimum work to ensure that their aid
interventions work with, not against, prevailing political trends toward political organis-
ation and consolidation in post-conflict settings. In more than one case, aid agencies
working in Somalia have inadvertently undermined promising local initiatives out of a
strict adherence to an agency template and a lack of knowledge about local politics. The
corollary to this claim is that external actors must be equipped with a strong under-
standing of local conflict dynamics and an accurate inventory of local political interests.
Second, external actors must be sensitive to the fact that promising community-based
developments in matters such as demobilisation can actually be sabotaged if outside
funders inject themselves at inopportune moments.25 One of the most surprising aspects
of successful demobilisation in Somalia is the virtual absence of external actors. These
were locally owned and locally driven processes of demobilisation which almost certainly
would have collapsed had external funding been offered. That they occurred in the
absence of a functional central government and national reconciliation is an additional
challenge to conventional thinking about the security-development nexus.
Endnotes
1 The vicious circle metaphor is usually dressed up in 7 Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars:
more impressive academic prose; one study refers to the Merging of Security and Development (London: Zed
‘pathological interaction dynamics’ to make the same Books, 2001).
point. See Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, ‘The Nature 8 Peter Uvin, ‘The Development/Peacebuilding Nexus: A
of the Intractable Conflict Problem’ [http:// Typology and History of Changing Paradigms’, Journal
www.beyondintractability.org/iweb/challenge-3-es- of Peacebuilding and Development Vol. 1, no. 1 (2002),
say.htm] (accessed 21 May 2004). p. 12.
2 Paul Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War 9 Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap, p. 174.
and Development Policy (Washington DC: The World 10 John J. Hamre and Gordon R. Sullivan, ‘Toward Post-
Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 1. conflict Reconstruction’, Washington Quarterly 25(4),
3 The World Bank study cited above notes that civil wars 2002, 85–96.
today are on average twice as long in duration than in 11 As the situation in Iraq soured in early 2004, however,
the past, and attributes this to a war economy dynamic. pessimistic voices challenging the new consensus on
See Collier, et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap, p. 82. nation-building have quickly resurfaced, suggesting the
4 The concept of the ‘hurting stalemate’ as precondition possibility that, in American circles in particular, the
for negotiated settlement of civil wars was developed by pendulum may again swing back to a more fatalistic
I. William Zartman in Ripe for Resolution: Conflict and view on prospects for post-conflict reconstruction, just
Intervention in Africa (New York: Oxford University as occurred in the aftermath of the ill-fated interven-
Press, 1989). tion in Somalia in 1994. See for instance George Will,
5 See for instance Mats Berdal and David Malone, eds, ‘Time for Bush to See the Realities of Iraq’, Washington
Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars Post (4 May 2004), p. A25; and John Tierney, ‘The
(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Press, 2000); and David Keen, Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts’, The
The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars Adel- New York Times, Week in Review (16 May 2004).
phi Paper no. 320 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for 12 This apt term was first coined by Mark Dillon in a 1997
the IISS, 1998) presentation, and has since been used by analysts such
6 Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap, p. 79. as Mark Duffield in Global Governance.
Security development in Somalia 165
13 The line of reasoning which understands the ‘new wars’ Emergency Response’ (Nairobi: UNDOS report, 11
as dynamic crises producing new social orders has been December 1998).
explored by a number of researchers, including 19 Robert Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy’, The Atlantic
Duffield, Global Governance; Martin van Creveld, The Monthly 273(2), 1994, 44–76.
Transformation of War (New York: Free Press, 1991); 20 One close observer to the fighting in Mogadishu re-
and William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States ports that the average cost of a full-scale armed clash
(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000). lasting six hours costs about $100,000 in ammunition,
14 This section of the article is derived from chapter 1 of a steep price that few warlords are capable of sustain-
the author’s publication Somalia: State Collapse and the ing; hence, it is unusual for armed clashes to last more
Threat of Terrorism, Adelphi Paper no. 364 (Oxford: than a few hours.
Oxford University Press for the IISS, 2004). 21 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Hu-
15 TNG President Abdiqassim Hassan Salad declared an manitarian Affairs, Somalia Humanitarian Situation Re-
extension to the TNG’s mandate, and so continues to port, Nairobi (30 July 2003), pp. 5–6.
represent Somalia in international fora, but the TNG is 22 By 2004, security and defence expenditures constituted
for all practical purposes merely another faction today. only about 50% of the total budget.
16 International Crisis Group, ‘Somalia: Combating Ter- 23 ‘Coke and al Qaeda’, The Economist (3–9April 2004),
rorism in a Failed State’, ICG Africa Report No. 45, p. 50, and William Maclean, ‘Defying Mayhem, Somali
(Brussels/Washington: ICG, May 2002) [http:// Plans Coca-Cola Venture’, Reuters (20 February 2004).
www.crisisweb.org]. 24 The seminal historical research advancing this observa-
17 Ken Menkhaus and John Prendergast, ‘Governance and tion is Charles Tilly’s ‘War Making and State Making as
Economic Survival in Post-Intervention Somalia’, CSIS Organized Crime’, in Bringing the State Back In, edited
Africa Notes no. 172, May 1995. by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda
18 The author conducted research on local governance for Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press,
the UN Development Office for Somalia in 1998 in five 1985).
regions of southern Somalia – a summary report of 25 This mirrors the findings of a major study on demobil-
trends in Somali local governance based on that re- isation, Mats Berdal, Disarmament and Demobilisation
search is available in Menkhaus, ‘Political and Security after Civil Wars Adelphi Paper No. 303 (Oxford: Ox-
Assessment of Southern Somalia: Implications for ford University Press for the IISS, 1996), pp. 74–76.