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Since 2008, Book Fairs held across the Somali Horn of Africa have been a remarkable feature of civil society activism in a region usually associated with conflict and crisis. At the forefront of these efforts to promote Somali-language print culture is a digitally connected and social media-savvy generation of young people. This article explores the work done by books (as symbolic objects) and Book Fairs (as multimedia cultural festivals) to provide spaces for debate about Somali identities. Attention to local histories of media development is necessary for understanding the relationships that exist between print and digital culture, and the destabilisation of clear temporal distinctions between 'old' and 'new' media technologies. This participant-observation based study shows how the contemporary social media environment affects the ways in which print culture is promoted – facilitating cross-border civil society networks, and intensifying the political salience of literary activism for actors articulating different visions of Somali statehood.

This article examines the extent to which different forms and technologies of media production facilitate popular participation in a 'digital public' across the politically fragmented Somali territories. Based on textual analysis of local media and comparative examination of news production and consumption, the article emphasises the dual character of the public sphere in the Somali context. Here, local media production centred in individual capitals of various political administrations coexists and overlaps with a transnational arena of Somali-language broadcasting and debate from various externally-based media networks. In this distinctive Somali media ecology, multiple forms of 'old' media intersect with digital technologies that have emerged throughout the post-1991 period of statelessness, conflict and political reconfiguration. Local public spheres of media production and public engagement help create state-like identities and political imaginaries. Nonetheless, these are articulated in the wider transnational Somali-language digital public that such administrations have limited ability to control. In this context certain notions of a transnational 'Somali' ethnolinguistic or religio-cultural community are maintained not in spite of conflict and fragmentation, but rather as a result of a media ecology and digital public that itself exists as an outcome of political instability and flux.

Since 2008, Book Fairs held across the Somali Horn of Africa have been a remarkable feature of civil society activism in a region usually associated with conflict and crisis. At the forefront of these efforts to promote Somali-language print culture is a digitally-connected and social media-savvy generation of young people. This article explores the work done by books (as symbolic objects) and Book Fairs (as multimedia cultural festivals) to provide spaces for debate about Somali identities. Attention to local histories of media development is necessary for understanding the relationships that exist between print and digital culture, and the destabilisation of clear temporal distinctions between 'old' and 'new' media technologies. This ethnographic study shows how the contemporary social media environment affects the ways in which print culture is promoted - facilitating cross-border civil society networks, and intensifying the political salience of literary activism for actors articulating different visions of Somali statehood.

Since 2012, Mogadishu has been the site of both unprecedented optimism around the re-emergence of the Somali state, as well as persistent violence perpetrated by the Islamist militants of Harakat Al Shabaab Al Mujahidiin (Al Shabaab). In attacking hotels and restaurants, as well as other sites broadly associated with the state, Al Shabaab has prosecuted a strategy intended to foment the ungovernability of the city, undermine the nascent Federal Government of Somalia"s claims to authority, and denounce the alleged "foreign" capture of the re-emerging state. Based on discursive analysis of local political commentary, and fieldwork in Mogadishu, this article examines media contestation between a re-emerging state and an armed opposition in a context of prolonged political fragmentation. The article argues that not only does the highly decentralized and transnational modern media environment facilitate a dynamic and dialogic exchange of propaganda between the state and an armed opposition but, furthermore, the technological context of this discursive contestation has practical implications for the ways in which counter-terrorism and state reconstruction are undertaken by political and military actors on the ground.

Amin Amir is the most popular and prolific political cartoonist in modern Somalia. His work is disseminated digitally and in print across the Somali territories on a daily basis. His appeal to such broad audiences is remarkable given the extreme political fragmentation of the media environment and that his renderings of broad themes of Somali political discourse (as well as highly localised developments) are all transmitted digitally into the region from the diaspora. This article explores certain recurring discourses in these 'texts', including corruption, political violence, 'clanism', and endemic external interference in Somalia. Building on theories of popular geopolitics and diasporic civic agency, it argues that analyses of such material must be attentive to the particular political, linguistic and socio-cultural features of the cartoon form within distinctive media settings. Considering the technological context of these texts' dissemination into dynamic public spheres of Somali political debate, it argues that the artist collapses conventional distinctions between diasporic production and local consumption. The cartoons – being both ubiquitous in and spatially detached from on-the-ground realities of political change – epitomise the wider transnational character of the global Somali public sphere. This facilitates the reproduction of particular tropes of shared cultural, ethno-nationalist or religious identity of the 'Ummadda Soomaaliyeed' (the Somali Ummah) across multiple political boundaries.

Since 2013, media affiliates of Harakat Al Shabaab Al Mujaahidiin (HSM) have been producing and disseminating online documentary-style videos presenting daily life in areas of south-central Somalia under the militant group's control. In the context of their wider 'jihad' waged against foreign occupiers and an 'apostate' Federal Government, these videos feature narratives of nationalist economic self-determination as alternatives to aid dependence and the allegedly nefarious interference of external powers in Somalia. This paper analyses the iconography of these videos in the context of the 'narrative politics' of a fragmented modern Somalia. If HSM has, at times, been characterised by a broad ideological divide between factions with an 'internationalist' jihadi outlook and those with a more pragmatic 'nationalist' worldview, then the discourses of this latter faction require detailed analysis not only for a clearer understanding of the internal dynamics of the HSM insurgency but also in regards to the wider role of narratives of Somali ethno-nationalism in ongoing processes of state reconfiguration. The paper argues that although HSM no longer benefits from the popular nationalist kudos it previously enjoyed in its resistance to the Ethiopian invasion of 2006, it nonetheless operates in a discursive battlefield where narratives around malign foreign intervention – based on exploitation of socio-political divisions of society and the dependence brought by external humanitarian aid – transcend the movement itself and find expression in the wider public spheres of news media and popular commentary.

This thesis examines the 'public sphere' of state reconstruction and political conflict across the Somali territories through comparative discursive and contextual analysis of media production and consumption on the ground in Somalia. Using Somali-language media sources - including political cartoons, editorials, radio broadcasts and audio-visual propaganda - the chapters cumulatively present a dual conceptualisation of the public sphere in the Somali context. Here, local media production centred in individual capitals of various political projects (The Somali Federal Government, Somaliland and Puntland) coexists and overlaps with a transnational arena of Somali-language broadcasting and debate from various externally-based media producers. These range from the British Broadcasting Corporation"s Somali Service and popular diaspora-based satellite television stations, to sophisticated 'jihadi' propagandists, or individual geographically-detached cartoonists. Internationalised dynamics of economic and political change across the territories render distinctions between 'diasporic' and 'local' media production analytically unhelpful. At the same, ongoing popular rhetorical contestation over 'foreign' influence ensures an ostensibly paradoxical (and politically salient) discursive resilience of a culturally and religiously-defined 'Somali Ummah' across and beyond political boundaries. Although significant academic attention has been directed towards the role of decentralized 'new' or 'social' media and possibilities for civic agency vis-á-vis coherent, authoritarian state structures, the thesis argues that the Somali case highlights the significance of such public sphere technologies in altering discursive, political and security conditions for state (re)construction in socially fragmented and conflict scarred environments.

This book explores relationships between war, displacement and city-making. Focusing on people seeking refuge in Somali cities after being forced to migrate by violence, environmental shocks or economic pressures, it highlights how these populations are actively transforming urban space. Using first-hand testimonies and participatory photography by urban in-migrants, the book documents and analyses the micropolitics of urban camp management, evictions and gentrification, and the networked labour of displaced populations that underpins growing urban economies. Central throughout is a critical analysis of how the discursive figure of the 'internally displaced person' is co-produced by various actors. The book argues that this label exerts significant power in structuring socio-economic inequalities and the politics of group belonging within different Somali cities connected through protracted histories of conflict-related migration

This book explores relationships between war, displacement and city-making. Focusing on people seeking refuge in Somali cities after being forced to migrate by violence, environmental shocks or economic pressures, it highlights how these populations are actively transforming urban space.

AbstractThis article explores the articulation—in different forms, at different periods, and by different actors—of 'national self‐determination' in Somalia and across the Somali‐speaking regions of the Horn of Africa. It explores how this concept can be understood in the context of protracted political fragmentation in Somalia—considering unresolved debates over the ideological foundations of state reconstruction, disagreements about the suitability of federalism, aspirations for the recognition of an independent Republic of Somaliland, and the distinctive trajectory of the Somali Regional State in Ethiopia. Taking a comparative, cross‐border and wide‐angled historical approach, the article argues that ideas of an ethno‐linguistically, culturally and religiously defined Somali 'nation' continue to coexist (and be reproduced, updated and used) within an environment of extreme political fragmentation and across multiple 'state' boundaries. This argument is made through comparative analysis of contemporary examples of the performance of Somali state and nationalist identities within and beyond the region and the distinctive transnational Somali‐language media environment within which these ideas circulate and compete.