Conflict in Somalia and International Intervention Impact

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In this study we try to explore brief historical review of conflict and state infrastructure in the region of sub Saharan Africa that is, Somalia. The main focus of the research is on the impacts of international intervention and the intrastate wars. The study surveys civil conflict patterns in Somalia for a period of just over three and a half decades (1975-2006), evenly spanning the point of full state collapse in January 1991. We carefully distinguish between the periods before and after state collapse in 1991 and present evidence to support our argument that violence involving the national government may exhibit different patterns than violence that occurred in the absence of a functioning state. Our logic for making this distinction is that Somalia's former leader, President Siad Barre, ostensibly commanded the means to export violence more efficiently than other actors. “Coercion is privately provided” in stateless societies (Bates, Greif, and Singn, 2005), and while private organizations that challenge state authority can be quite powerful, historical record shows that in Somalia no internal group commanded the most substantial forms of military machinery, such as fighter jets. The utility of distinguishing between types of violence within the study of civil war has precedent in the conflict studies literature (Sambanis 2001; Reynal-Querol 2002). Furthermore, Buhaug and Gates (2002) show that battles for government control, on the one hand, and territorial/secessionist war, on the other hand, exhibit distinct spatial patterns (what they call “scope”). Our driving proposition is that violent events that occur within a civil war cluster in space. Spatial clusters are influenced by socio-economic and structural factors, including demographic composition and previous population shifts, income levels, repressive local-level governance, and the location of valuable resources. Our study adopts an innovative methodological approach to studying civil conflict, and focuses on a case where numerous international reconciliation efforts have failed to achieve lasting peace. Thematically, Somalia has gained recent attention for three main reasons that warrant study. First, the entire Horn of Africa has become an important stage in the global war on terrorism in addition to having been an area of great-power interest for over a century (Kraxberger, 2005; Jones, 2008). The Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes against suspected terrorist networks and their leaders has been invoked to legitimate United States attacks within Somali territory several times since 2006 (Gettleman and Schmitt 2009). Second, structurally, Somalia represents a case ...