Somalia, A Hobbsean Jungle‎‎‎

By Ahmed Sh. Farah

Somali warlords, creatures of myth and legend whose pent up anger against the civil society in Somalia has turned them into barbaric beasts bent on widespread destruction and looting of the country are hear to stay for the foreseeable future. As the Somali state crumbled under its own weight only the strongest, the most ruthless and powerful survived to pillage the country’s infra-structure, carving Somalia into sub-national territories for their own personal aggrandizement.

These primitive warlords rooted in Somalia ’s ancient tribal hatreds immediately embarked on a campaign of thuggery, knocking heads to settle century’s old scores. In a land where might makes right, the greedy warlords’ writ extends in all directions reaching into the most far-flung areas of Somalia . The destructive powers of the demented Somali warlords are unsurpassed in its brutality in modern times. Vested interests of Somalia ’s neighbors exacerbated the ongoing Somali civil war, turning it into an orgy of never ending lawlessness, senseless violence and subterfuge.

Freed from their consciences Somali warlord’s insatiable hunger for power and prestige led them to use every imaginable atrocity to devastate, conquer and subdue the indomitable sprit of the Somali nation. Warlordism is a state characterized by the absence of the rule of law; a warlord is someone who “exercises power through a combination of military, political, and economic power outside a constitutional or legal framework”. Furthermore warlords are particularly more destructive when they exercise power over distinct geographical regions”. In Somalia the ethnic dynamics of the Somali society has played a large role in fostering a political climate that is conducive to lawless anarchy.

History shows, that evil triumph when good people either out of necessity or on narrow parochial interest choose to stay on the sidelines as atrocities happen in front of their eyes. Somali warlords don’t operate in a vacuum, there is a whole perverse moral infra-structure that produces and supports their actions. It will take a generational struggle to defeat the highly entrenched warlords and rebuild Somalia again.

The collapse of moral authority in Somalia brought a new paradigm where the lure of economic and political power infected even the most benign leaders with a perverse deranged thinking of us against them, diminishing genuine expressions of good character. Repeated negotiations between the warlords, civil society and traditional leaders have not produced any lasting agreement that can pull out the Somali nation from the moral quicksand it has hopelessly languished for the past fifteen years. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbs (1588-1679), best know for his wit and articulation of the “philosophy of political and natural science” which stipulates a mechanist view of the universe reducing all observable phenomena to matter and motion. Hobbs masterwork, the Leviathan is a treatise on the absolute necessity for the sovereign power of the king. His contribution lays down some of the fundament work on “aspects of human nature, society, and proper government” in philosophy. Hobbs argued for the existence of a natural condition for mankind which he referred to it as a “state of nature”. Before governments were created there was a “state of nature” with no rules on who owned what. In this state of nature Hobbs maintains there is a “war of every man against every man” and life in this Hobbsean state can be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, this description fits the bill of exacting what is happening in Somalia today.

According to Hobbs , it is the unbearable nature of life under the “state of nature” that forced mankind to break this logjam and submit to the absolute authority of the sovereign. Thomas Hobbs’ observations later formed the basis on which political theorists like Locke, Spinoza and Rousseau expand their work. The three main ethical philosophies in the western canon (Emanuel Kant’s categorical imperatives, Aristotelian Ethics and Utilitarianism) together provide a common understanding of “morality, goodness or righteousness of any action undertaken by individuals”. Two distinct behaviors separate human beings from the animal world and led to human domination of; these are the ability to cooperate with one another and the human tendency to be less hierarchical than other primates. Somali Warlords whether they realize it or not are truly modern day heirs to Thomas Hobbs kingdom of the Hobbsean jungle.

After Hobbs came the proponents of the social contract theorists who further refined Hobbs controversial take on what ticks the human sprit. Men like John Locke, Hume and jean Jacques Rousseau came up with the philosophical underpinning of today widely accepted notions that the legitimacy of the state is derived from the consent of the governed. By giving up their natural rights citizens of any state expects certain protections from the state.

This mutual agreement between states and individuals is what forms the core of the social contract theory. There are two strains of the social contract theory. The first holds that “persons are self-interested” which would naturally lead them to cooperate fully with each other while the other relies on the rationality of individuals which makes them subject to reasoning. Either way individual peoples have a say as to how they are supposed to be governed.

The collapse of the Somalia state implicitly broke the implied contract between Somali citizens and the Somali state per se. once the so called Genie is out of the proverbial bottle it is hard to put it back. Warlordism in Somalia is a bold challenge to the cohesion of Somali society and by extensions its ability to rejoin the civilized world. Together Somali warlords pose an existential threat to the Somali people’s desire to reconstitute a functioning civil order in their homeland.

Still large sections of the Somali polity seem to be enthralled with the ever sexier mystique and power of the warlords; recently some of them like (Abdillahi Yusuf) have been conferred to a new status as respected leaders of Somalia giving them unearned dignity that engenders more cynicism from ordinary Somalis.

ahmedsheikh@verizon.net

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