Brains Like a Shoe » development

Two new pieces on Darfur

Sean Brooks — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:13:51 +0000

Since I returned from Sudan, I have been busy writing. Here is a piece I posted today at Foreign Policy’s new Middle East Channel.

What the Islamic Conference got wrong on Darfur

Members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) pledged $850 million dollars for future development in Darfur on Sunday in Cairo. Egypt and Turkey co-chaired the donor’s conference–which aimed to jumpstart international commitment to long-term reconstruction and development in Darfur after seven years of conflict, mass displacement, and humanitarian crisis. Some countries making generous pledges willfully ignored the ongoing security challenges and unresolved conflict between the Darfuri rebels and the Sudanese government. In this way, the OIC–like the League of Arab States in its response to the Darfur crisis–sought to help the people of Darfur without addressing those most responsible for their deplorable conditions.

Read the rest at Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel

And here is a piece on the Darfur peace process that I posted at Huffington Post.

Darfuri Civil Society: Still Missing from the Table

“This step constitutes a strong and vital addition to efforts to bring peace in Darfur,” declared Sudan’s Second Vice President Ali Osman Taha in Doha yesterday, after signing a framework agreement with the Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM). That may be true, but as I wrote last week, peace in Darfur remains a long way off.

Read the rest at Huffington Post

Somalia’s dismemberment and possible patchwork rebuilding

Sean Brooks — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:53:35 +0000

Yesterday, I highlighted the recommendations of Somali experts – notably Bronwyn E. Bruton and Ken Menkhaus – for how the United States should contribute to counter-terrorism, conflict resolution, humanitarian relief, economic development and state-building in Somalia. Their pragmatic and cautious approaches argue against knee-jerk American responses to the real or perceived threats posed by al-Qaeda, the al-Shabab, and piracy.

Last spring at SAIS, I put together an extensive backgrounder on Somalia. The paper traces the history of state formation in Somalia from the colonial period to the collapse of the state and its current crises. At the end, I provide a brief analysis of the current challenges to peace-making and state-building placed in their historical context – something missing from much of the current writings on Somalia. I must confess that much of my understanding of Somalia has been influenced by Menkhaus, my former advisor. In reading Bruton great piece in Foreign Affairs, I also found that her recommendations closely match the findings that I developed. So if you are interested, enjoy…

Introduction

The five points on the star of the light-blue Somali flag proclaim a nation’s dream deferred. The predominantly nomadic Somalis met the era of nationalism and independence with high hopes. They and observers of the time saw a “well-defined geographic and ethnic unit…as a natural base for a sovereign state.” Ethiopia and the colonial powers, however, had different visions for the boundaries of a Somali state. Three points of the star – Djibouti, the Ogaden (in Ethiopia), and the Northern Frontier District in Kenya – were stripped from the Somalis before the official birth of the Somali nation. The subsequent experiments with democracy and ‘scientific socialism’ attempted to develop a modern state and in some ways rebuild a forcibly contracted national consciousness. These processes ultimately failed and led to the collapse of the state in 1991. What emerged in replace of the state were still uncongealed fragments of a dismembered nation. For external and internal reasons, Somali leaders until this day have not found a means to unite these disparate and usually warring pieces.

Final Analysis

Emerging from a dismembering birth at independence, Somali elites have constantly attempted to breed irredentist nationalism to legitimize their control of the state. The early politics of democracy challenged each government to push a hard line on securing the stripped Somali lands of French Somaliland, the Ethiopian Ogaden, and the Northern Frontier in Kenya; former dictator Siad Barre could not concede the right of self-determination for the Ogaden Somalis in the late 1970s; and most recently the Islamic Court Union (ICU) could not muzzle threats against Ethiopia long enough to consolidate and defend their military and political successes in 2006.

Why do the elites retreat to this expansionist Somali nationalism each time in the face of clearly stronger neighbors? The answer may be that little else has thus far shown a capacity to forge a national consciousness across the real economic and social cleavages of Somali society. In addition to clan divisions, the rural/urban divide has shaped Somali politics for centuries as seen in the ebb and flow of power between the coastland to the hinterland. In the beginning of his regime, Barre recognized the importance of improving the agricultural sector, but the implementation of ‘scientific socialism,’ a product mostly of cold war convenience, could not begin to address the growing gaps between urban and rural populations. Then in the 1980s, the regime used state resources to inflame cleavages between various Somali communities. As such, there were no defenders of the state when it collapsed and, likewise, no foreign agents to blame as a means of rallying Somali nationalism to revive the state.

Islam presents a more indigenously suited alternative, as it can be easily conflated with Somali nationalism and has shown the ability to bridge both rural/urban and clan divisions. The slow rise of Islamic activism and the ascendancy of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) demonstrate its cross-cutting mobilizing utility in Somali politics. Nevertheless, the ICU eventually encountered the common problem of clan division, with certain groups effectively characterizing it as Hawiye-dominated. The success of Islamic activism in Mogadishu, however, pales in comparison to the regional solutions that have endured in Somaliland and to a lesser extent in Puntland.

What the success of the ICU and Somaliland have in common, however, is that they are at their base Somali-derived solutions that depart in some key way from current Western models of governance. Yet, these accomplishments have been virtually unacceptable from the point of view of regional and international powers. Ethiopia views both an Islamist-oriented government in Somalia and greater autonomy or independence in Somaliland as threats to its national security.International actors also obviously fear the rise of an Islamist government in Somalia and want to avoid the division of Somalia into smaller units for fear of the encouragement that such a development would give minority groups in other countries, especially Africa. Despite these internationally imposed constraints on state-building in Somalia, the international community paradoxically continues to demand a state from the warring parties.

If such is still the objective, the process of national reconciliation and state formation must derive from Somali-driven processes. As theorized by as diverse an array of scholars as Ibn Khaldun and Francis Fukuyuma, social cohesiveness (or capital) and trust are key components in the formation of society and the building of a state. By all measures, these bonds have broken down in Somalia today. As such, Somalis have relied almost exclusively on their familial connections. This outcome is a result of a state that intentionally destroyed cross-cutting societal linkages in the 1980s – a process that began during the period of colonial partition. International intervention has only inflamed differences more and done nothing to rebuild trust among Somali political actors. Still both Ken Menkhaus and Peter Little have written about the “malleability of interests” even within the clan system in Somali society. They point to the way that the clan system has adapted to “the changing demands of the international community as well as to the challenges of statelessness and pastoralism.” Little provocatively asks, “Is it surprising then that Somali clans began to fracture and/or consolidate along sub-clan and lineage lines when external agencies worked within a clan idiom themselves?”

In order then to identify the true interests of each constituency and search for a workable compromise, it is necessary to remove the foreign influences as much as possible. The involvement of the United States, Ethiopia, Egypt, Eritrea, and even the United Nations are inherently distorting to Somali politics. As such, Menkhaus encourages the new Obama administration to seek “[p]olicies which privilege Somali-driven processes, rely mainly on Somali interests and actors to drive outcomes, and respect Somali preferences.” Were Somalis able to take control of the process in this way, perhaps finally as Samatar advised in 1988 “moral and intellectual commitments from leading classes” could emerge to take charge of the state and the economy. Western countries though must realize that in the current Somali political climate some solutions – such as regionalism or elements of Islamist governance – may emerge. It must accept, therefore, these outcomes and then support the new-born Somali state in making the central government and its governing mechanisms mean more to the Somali people than a threatening source of predation.

Disengagement from Somalia?

Sean Brooks — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:02:29 +0000

Heavily armed men in Somalia

The United States Institute of Peace held a talk yesterday focusing on “International Engagement with Somalia.” Bronwyn E. Bruton of the Council on Foreign Relations and Abukar Arman, an independent policy analyst originally from Somalia, addressed the immensely complicated topic of how the United States and its international partners should approach the interlocking and enduring political, security, and humanitarian crises in Somalia.

In his remarks, Arman emphasized the need for a “paradigm shift” in policymaking by highlighting the colossal mistakes of recent American policies toward Somalia. While he gave general recommendations for a new blueprint, he failed to outline in a systematic way any real contours for this new approach.

On the other hand, Bruton repeated her call for a policy of “constructive disengagement” from Somalia that she controversially put forward in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (non-subscription, bootleg, link). In this essay, she states that the American policy of attempting to prop up the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) against the al-Shabaab militia and other threats is a useless and counterproductive effort:

With no side capable of keeping the peace if it wins the war, the U.S. government, as well as the rest of the international community, should not focus its efforts on backing any one group. It should also forget about grand political projects to create a central government authority, which are likely to be futile.

Instead, she writes:

At some later point, when the anti-U.S. sentiment has subsided, it will indeed be desirable for Washington to try to address the deeper causes of anarchy in Somalia. But it will have to be extremely mindful not to revive past prescriptions, including the idea of finding and supporting national political figures in Somalia…

Given the shortage of viable national leaders, bottom-up governance strategies might appear to be a solution to Somalia’s messy, perpetually shifting decentralized politics. For instance, the experience of the ICU, which brought unparalleled stability to an unruly Mogadishu almost overnight in 2006, is instructive…Such arrangements,although admittedly fragile, have emerged in the northern regions of Somaliland and Puntland. The best of them depend on local, rather than international, resources to deliver economic growth and other concrete benefits to the public and respect relations among clan and religious leaders, business groups, and civil society

This proposal if undertaken would represent a true paradigm shift on how the U.S. approaches the conflicts in Somalia. Rather than treating Somalia as a battleground of moderates and extremists in the Global War on Terror, Bruton would prioritize humanitarian relief, local reconciliation initiatives, and sustainable economic development. These efforts would in time, Bruton states, help marginalize most combatants:

Somali actors are generally responsive to economic incentives. Most combatants are freelancers who have been forced to join militias out of economic need; in fact, they are often stigmatized as bandits for making such a move. In order to give them options other than employment with militias, the United States should promote targeted local development initiatives, such as a decentralized microcredit scheme that would engage both the Somali diaspora worldwide and existing local authorities. So long as these projects steer clear of governance reform, they might encourage the public to pressure local Islamists into distancing themselves from radical anti-Western actors.

This concept of how warlords make decisions in Somalia is not new. Ken Menkhaus (my former advisor at Davidson College) has written extensively on the subject. For years, he has argued that, “State-building and peace-building are…two separate and in some respects mutually antagonistic enterprises. This is because the revival of a state structure is viewed in Somali quarters as a zero-sum game.”

With that in mind, his key contribution to the understanding of why Somali leaders resist a political settlement to establish a state derives from the theory of ‘bounded rationality’ – a willingness to seek sub-optimal but acceptable outcomes rather than face the risks a revived state would entail.” In Somalia’s case, he submits:

“Powerful constituencies… profit from, and seek to promote, certain levels of conflict and certain types of lawlessness…[Thus,] relatively small numbers of these spoilers form the equivalent of a ‘veto coalition’ over initiatives to control criminality and prevent armed clashes.”

But doesn’t the presence of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban-like al-Shabaab militia change the scenario? Menkhaus does not think so. Instead, in a recent piece in Foreign Policy, he argues that, “The fall of Mogadishu would not appreciably worsen the threat that al-Shabab and al-Qaeda already pose.” The defeat of the TFG by al-Shabaab would not be the Obama administration’s fault but due completely to the TFG’s inability to build a workable coalition. It is for this reason that, like Bruton, he advises the White House to act with absolute caution and even to ignore snipes by Republicans that Obama is “losing” Somalia:

Today, the Obama foreign-policy team must resist the temptation to treat Somalia as a political problem if equally dire consequences are to be avoided. Anything less will yield paper solutions and empty gestures designed to preempt Republican attacks. Somalia has had many such “solutions” before. After two decades of war, what it needs now is long-term management of a messy crisis that, for the moment at least, presents options that range only from bad to worse.

Bruton’s “constructive disengagement” plan, therefore, is quite similar to Menkhaus’ cautious engagement strategy. Furthermore, in the face of dire warnings about al-Qaeda, local jihadis and pirates, they both put forward pragmatic recommendations for dealing with problems in Somalia that if not handled carefully could actually become worse and even more intractable.

I reached the same conclusions in an extensive background paper on Somalia that I wrote last spring. Tomorrow, I will post a portion of the paper that argues how Somalia’s history of dismemberment has led it to this moment where perhaps only half-solutions are possible.

Sunday Morning Reading

Sean Brooks — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:08:32 +0000

Egypt is now suffering the consequences of irrationally killing all its pigs last spring. The whole episode points to other major flaws in the system:

What started out as an impulsive response to the swine flu threat has turned into a social, environmental and political problem for the Arab world’s most populous nation.

It has exposed the failings of a government where the power is concentrated at the top, where decisions are often carried out with little consideration for their consequences and where follow-up is often nonexistent, according to social commentators and government officials….

“The state is troubled; as a result the system of decision making is disintegrating,” said Galal Amin, an economist, writer and social critic. “They are ill-considered decisions taken in a bit of a hurry, either because you’re trying to please the president or because you are a weak government that is anxious to please somebody.”

Meanwhile, my friend Nate tells a short story about the long suffering of of a Kurdish family from Halabja.

Finally, Sec. of State Clinton raised some (lofty) expectations for this administration’s foreign assistance and development approaches at Brookings on Friday. Until now, President Obama has been pillioried by the development community for his failure to appoint a USAID administrator:

HRC – No Sudan

Now, many of you have heard me describe our plans to integrate diplomacy and development as two of the three pillars in our foreign policy, along with defense. I’ve talked in different venues about the Obama Administration’s commitment to leading with diplomacy and engaging other nations. Next week, I will outline how we will approach development in tandem with our diplomacy – to be effective and efficient and enable the State Department, USAID, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation to pursue and execute 21st century foreign policy goals.

The foundation for our approach will be principles that will move us away from top-down assistance that too often fails to meet the needs of those we are attempting to help, or has only short-term effects. To solve the complex problems of poverty, hunger, health, climate change, where they intersect, we want to focus on those root causes, and look for approaches that really change, transform the environment in which people are making these decisions and in which governments are held accountable to a higher degree of performance and transparency. We will be looking for ways to not only explain our approach, but to highlight issues. I will be, for example, participating in an event with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, hosted by the UN and the United States Government, on food security.

Now, many of you have heard me describe our plans to integrate diplomacy and development as two of the three pillars in our foreign policy, along with defense. I’ve talked in different venues about the Obama Administration’s commitment to leading with diplomacy and engaging other nations. Next week, I will outline how we will approach development in tandem with our diplomacy – to be effective and efficient and enable the State Department, USAID, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation to pursue and execute 21st century foreign policy goals.

The foundation for our approach will be principles that will move us away from top-down assistance that too often fails to meet the needs of those we are attempting to help, or has only short-term effects. To solve the complex problems of poverty, hunger, health, climate change, where they intersect, we want to focus on those root causes, and look for approaches that really change, transform the environment in which people are making these decisions and in which governments are held accountable to a higher degree of performance and transparency. We will be looking for ways to not only explain our approach, but to highlight issues. I will be, for example, participating in an event with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, hosted by the UN and the United States Government, on food security.