Special Guest Writer for the Somaliland Times, Prof. William Reno, Northwestern University
[Continued from the previous issue]
With the world economy. It is unlikely that this political project will generate nation-state identities of the sort seen among dominant states, as indeed independent Somalia failed to become. Instead, the organization of identity and political community adapts to manage connections with the rest of the world within constraints and adaptations to marginality.
Divergent outcomes are explained in this work in an institutional framework shaping the calculus of opportunities, much like those who attribute conflict and networks leading to state collapse to rational calculations of vulnerability and fear. Institutions are not limited to clan, ethnic groups, or remnants of the collapsing state. They include novel business and legal arrangements within networks in the world economy, diasporas, and new alliances with non-state international agencies. They may or may not be rooted in custom and tradition, but are central to regulating who is prestigious, who gets resources, who is considered legitimate, and most important, who exercises coercion. Douglass North identified them in his classic broad definition of institutions as ‘the rules of the game in a society, or more formally, the humanely devised constraints that shape human interaction’. In the cases here these institutions include unofficial and clandestine linkages, which often play an integral role in how local leaders construct their authority. Somali overseas traders, for example, have long relied upon inter-clan networks of trust and accommodation for economic survival. The persisting lack of international recognition of Somaliland’s sovereignty encourages authorities in Hargeisa, the country’s capital, to continue to place a premium on these accommodations. But it also forces authorities to contract out state services to local communal enterprises in lieu of the economic regulatory opportunities and access to global commercial practices that outsiders’ formal recognition of Somaliland’s sovereignty would permit.
Four tentative hypotheses incorporate this modified institutional approach to explaining divergent experiences with conflict and identity formation in the wake of state collapse in the cases examined below:
One: Unofficial, non-state institutions, including those that respond to global economic shifts and increased marginality, in some instances reduce risks of fragmentation that come with state collapse. The pursuit of a state-building project and the consolidation of identity around new syncretic adaptations to global conditions can be explained with reference to informal, mediating institutions that defuse inter-clan (and inter-ethnic) security dilemmas.
Two: When formal and informal institutional frameworks favour old informal patronage networks and clandestine economic channels over the interests of new or outsider elites, the successful intervention of clan (or ethnic) entrepreneurs is less likely, reducing the risks of violence.
Three: When elites adapt old informal institutions to maintain an old state or build a new one, the risk of fragmentation is lower. New institutions and channels of resources such as roundtables, national conferences, NGO aid, and outside military intervention can increase security dilemmas, offer new niches for political entrepreneurs, and thus increase risk of political fragmentation.
Four: If internal conditions noted above are met, local actors are able to exploit opportunities in the international economy to pursue self-determination. These strategies counterbalance and manipulate otherwise strong pressures implicit in international norms and laws that otherwise undermine self-determination efforts outside the framework of existing boundaries of globally recognized states.
Taken together, these hypotheses acknowledge that marginal status in global economic and political networks can become political tools in the hands entrepreneurs. This can take the form of exploiting inter-clan or inter-ethnic conflicts. It is also compatible with strategies that do a better job of containing violence, and are capable of sustaining more diverse political communities, though not in the mold of old fashioned nation-states.
Some scholars cite an immutable ‘call of kinship’ and durable ‘ethnocratic state’ predating colonial rule to explain the failure to sustain a centralized state in Somalia after 1990. In this work I recognize that clan and lineage play important roles in Somali politics and are crucial units of analysis. A Somali scholar, for example, identifies six major clans and at least 67 sub-clans that have become defensive networks against predation in the 1990s. Clans are taken as basic determinants of social order elsewhere such as in Chechnya: ‘in peacetime, they recognize no sovereign authority and may fragment into a hundred rival clans’. Yet if social structure, the subject of the next section, plays an important role in shaping the organization of conflict, assumptions of immutability do not explain why some clan groups are able to contain entrepreneurs of violence in their midst while others cooperate with them or become their targets. If, as propositions above propose, people in these social units can tailor their own organization, procedures and solutions to concrete circumstances, then it is more useful to look at clan and lineage structures through the lens of political and economic institutions, both formal and informal in this light. In that case, colonial rule emerges as an important influence on social organization and social control of resources used in warfare in the 1990s. Differences in colonial rule and local responses also help explain contemporary variations in politics.
State Collapse and Violent Fragmentation in the South
Italian administrators imported into Southern Somalia their own experiences with state economic planning and heavy state support for large-scale enterprises. This tight connection between state policy in the capital and commerce appeared when the Duke of Abruzzi (famous for Alaskan and Himalayan adventures) in 1919 established the Societa Agricola Italo Somala (SAIS) in the fertile river valleys of southern Somalia. He and other concession holders discovered that they could not attract workers from among the Gosha people of the area that had migrated to these river valleys from the Zanzibar coast in the pre-colonial era. Small holders were reluctant to leave their farms and trade social obligations and protections of family and lineage based production for wages. European concessionaires identified the problem as following from the tendency of local elders to discourage young men from accepting paid labor that would undermine elders’ control over bride price. Oral histories from the Jubba River Valley cite worries over the potential for local disruption that loss of elder control over matrimony would cause. If young men could afford to marry whomever they pleased, this would favour some families over others, perhaps permanently. This risked giving young men means to ignore local sensibilities concerning what constituted appropriate marital matches, which involved concerns about family alliances and redress for past wrongs or disadvantage, all social constraints that are important later if one is interested in controlling fighters or freeing them to prey on communities.
The launch of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia from Somalia in 1935 helped to ‘solve’ this labour problem. The conscription of 40,000 Somali troops gave Italian officials the means to forcibly remove local farmers from their land and give it to Italian enterprises. Removing young men from among settled populations in southern river valleys, disrupted local food production in the late 1930s. Food shortages and higher prices ensured that more local people sought wage labour contracts, some of which provided food as in-kind compensation. Some young men discovered what elders feared, that employment on plantations growing bananas for the Italian market freed them from local customary constraints. Employers also recruited young women to provide workers with wives from outside the area to convince their workers to settle on plantations. This change increased matrimonial options for young men but undermined the role of married women in elders’ constructions of flexible, cross cutting ties between local lineages.
Heavy state subsidies for commercial farms also initiated a pattern that outlived the Somali state in the 1990s of drawing powerful actors from the capital into southern economic and political affairs. It was the intention of colonial administrators from the start that large-scale commercial agriculture be distributed according to political criteria, not simply efficiency. Specifically, investment was designed to uproot local producers’ control over land and force them to engage fully with a national economy. By the mid 1930s SAIS became Italy’s main banana supplier and Somalia’s largest commercial agricultural enterprise behind the shield of import tariffs and state subsidies. The export quota survived the collapse of the Somali state through terms of the Lomé Conventions that protected Somali banana exports to the European Union up to 1999. This colonial policy resembles later policies of ‘national self-sufficiency’ that masked capital-based elites’ manipulation of state economic policies to divert assets for themselves and weaken regional power bases of rival politicians. This patronage-based allocation of economic opportunities drew outsiders into the region to control land and monopolize access to economic opportunities with help from the coercive force of the state to back up their claims. When violence increased in the 1980s, this elite was able to replace state militias with young men of their own kin from outside the area. These young men were refugees from conflict in other regions, freed from customary limits that their home communities would have exercised over their use of violence.
Thus economic expansion and government revenue in Italian Somalia and the independent Somali state did not develop on the basis of global competitiveness. Instead it relied on violent accumulation and privileged connections to political authority in the capital. Colonial officials used this strategy to bolster a formal economy export market that could provide revenues to the state. Despite the eventual diminishment of formal state control over transactions, colonial policy resembled later practice in that beneficiaries relied upon the support of key officials-later, patronage bosses-who used coercion and public asserts to ensure commercial success. For example, 1955 banana exports to Italy provided $7.6 million of the colony’s total exports of $10.8 million only because SAIS still enjoyed prewar tariff exemptions and state-regulated pricing in Italy. A World Bank team estimated that Somali bananas cost 40 percent more to produce and ship to Italy than did West African and Canary Island bananas. Likewise, SAIS also produced textiles, soap, and sugar for local consumption at 40 percent above world prices, again with the benefit of tariff protection and easy access to state credits, policies that continued after colonial rule. Thus the World Bank report accurately predicted that Somalia would require heavy financial support long after achieving independence in 1960, a responsibility that expanded with large-scale aid projects that boosted commercial farming to include about 20 percent of all farming land in southern Somalia’s river valleys.
Despite state support for agriculture-or rather because of it-Italian Somalia entered the 1950s heavily reliant upon direct subsidies from Rome to pay for administration. From 1951 to 1957, the colony generated average annual revenues of only $5.4 million, requiring an additional Italian government subsidy averaging $9 million. ‘The hard facts’, wrote investigators, ‘are that the traditional sectors of the economy offer little prospect for rapid expansion, while European agriculture has grown up on a largely artificial basis’. This did not deter multilateral creditors and foreign donors from taking the burden of financing projects after independence in 1960. During the 1960s and 1970s foreign donors and creditors supported a large expansion of plantation agriculture. From Independence to 1981, 18 percent of remaining small holders in the Jubba River Valley had their communal and private holdings forcibly expropriated to state farms, not including land lost to reservoirs. This was usually done without compensation. The impact on local communities was more dramatic than figures suggest, since water diversions to large irrigation schemes left additional land unfertile.
To be continued...
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