Suchergebnisse

This article uses an ecological systems approach to detail community involvement in smuggling in Afghanistan and Somalia—two countries that have similar patterns of irregular outmigration to the West and geopolitical and human security dynamics. I emphasize community connections and family ties as the key points around which irregular migration takes place and smuggling persists. In both of these countries, smugglers are members of local communities. The social organization of smuggling is strongest at community-based points of origin, then weakens as migrants and smugglers get farther from their homes, owing to a growing diversity of actors, cultures, and languages. By analyzing the strength of ties in communities involved in smuggling, the dynamics of referrals and guarantees, and interactions across various distances, this analysis takes the focus away from the causal and economic logic of smuggling to delve instead into its relational dimensions.

Concentrating on the health sector, this article argues that the provision of collective goods through external actors depends on the level of state capacity and the complexity of the service that external actors intend to provide. It shows that external actors can contribute most effectively to collective good provision when the service is simple, and that simple services can even be provided under conditions of failed statehood. Effectively delivering complex services requires greater levels of state capacity. The article also indicates that legitimacy is a key factor to explain variance in health service delivery. To demonstrate this, the article assesses health projects in Somalia. It shows that simple services—malaria prevention and tuberculosis control—are provided effectively in all three Somali regions, including the war‐torn South‐Central region. In contrast, the HIV/AIDS project only achieved substantial results in Somaliland, the only region with a comparatively higher level of state capacity, and failed in the South‐Central region and Puntland.

One of the casualties of the gruesome nightmare that is gripping Somalia has been the capacity to think historically and systematically about the nature of the malady, and to find practical ways of controlling the present in order to build a more sustainable future. As explained by Ahmed Samatar: 'the fullness of understanding a given situation is [not] coterminous with the immediate and experiential.Rather, any visible elements of a particular reality are usually signals that other more discrete factors could be at work'. For far too long, those opposed to Siyad Barre's régime refused to go beyond the General and his constellation of clients to identify 'the enemy'. Their unwillingness to engage in any hard-headed analysis and their hostility to critical scholarship has undoubtedly helped to condemn the very people they 'wanted' to liberate.

This dissertation reconstructs the settlement of the Middle Jubba Valley of Somalia by ex-slaves , their descendents, and other Somalis from 1850 to the present. It is a historical study of the construction of a social identity of the Jubba Valley agriculturalist population (Gosha), and of the evolution of land tenure and land use patterns in the mid-valley. In examining the effects on valley farmers of new land tenure laws requiring registration of land, it shows how power dynamics are integral to the working of land tenure systems. (DÜI-Hff)

In the hot, dry, strangely beautiful land of Somalia, the first issue of the day is politics: politics of survival for the Barre regime, politics of food for the burgeoning refugee camps, politics of the East-West encounter here on the Horn of Africa. The other issue is the economy, particularly the invisible, irregular, illegal economy. Somalia's story is roughly comparable to the current "second economy" analysis of the Soviet Union which suggests a large sector of that system is extralegal, undercover, and in subversion of bureaucratic regulation-"the taxi driver can arrange it" system.