Experimenting in Somalia: The new security empire

Abstract

The past several decades of US intervention in Somalia produced violent destabilization, dysfunction, and uncertainty, creating refugee outflows and terrorist networks against which the US is currently tightening its security cordons. This paper argues that Somalia’s recent history as a stateless region offers a cautionary and tragic case study of the long-term damages that ensue when wealthy states that intervene in poorer states in the name of their own security instead cause insecurity and inequities that enable violence, and then in response to that violence enact further securitization to protect themselves against the consequences of that damage. But rather than focusing on the state as a site of securitization, I focus on those whose lives are made insecure by the retreat of their state government and the imposition in its place of security regimes that are not created by their own state government. Such security regimes overlap and compete, are instituted by different state and nonstate actors for different purposes, and by their incoherence and multiplicity raise questions about the definition, location, and relevance of the state in such regions. The paper explores the emergence of new, interlinked security regimes that are partially or wholly constituted through the logics of a new security empire designed to respond to US security concerns. By turning attention to the situations faced by those who live within the insecurities of stateless regions, the paper asks, what happens to the concept of securitization when the national-territorial state is not the entity that operates as a ‘state’ in the lives of people, even though their lives are overlain with multiple and overlapping regimes of securitization?

Keywords

empire security militarized humanitarianism refugees Somalia terrorism violence

The past several decades of US intervention in Somalia produced violent destabilization, dysfunction, and uncertainty, creating refugee outflows and terrorist networks against which the US is currently tightening its security cordons. This paper argues that Somalia’s recent history as a stateless region offers a cautionary and tragic case study of the long-term damages that ensue when wealthy states that intervene in poorer states in the name of their own security instead cause insecurity and inequities that enable violence, and then in response to that violence enact further securitization to protect themselves against the consequences of that damage. But rather than focusing on the state as a site of securitization, I focus on what Glück and Low have called the ‘states of security’ that are lived everyday by people whose lives and places of dwelling are made insecure by the retreat of the state and the imposition in its place of security regimes that are not created by their own state government. Such security regimes overlap and compete, are produced by different state and nonstate actors for different purposes at multiple scales, and by their incoherence and multiplicity produce states and spaces of uncertainty, fear and violence, raising questions about the very definition, location, and relevance of the state in such regions. And yet, I argue, these security regimes are interlinked and are partially or wholly constituted through the logics of a new security empire designed to respond to US security concerns.¹

The security practices that are producing the new security empire take the form of drone strikes and missile attacks launched into Somalia on behalf of other states from foreign and international waters and lands, counterterrorist interventions by state-backed foreign militaries and non-state-backed foreign militias, the collapse of local policing, militias led by warlords and funded by foreigners, secret operations by foreign intelligence agencies who use local underground prisons as rendition sites, and the sealing of borders by neighboring states against the flight of refugees whose lives have been made utterly insecure by the combined effect of multiple and competing security regimes imposed from afar. By turning attention to the spaces, ‘states’ and situations faced by those who live within the insecurities of stateless regions, and within the Somali diaspora, the paper asks, what happens to the concept of securitization when the national-territorial state is not the entity that operates as the ‘state’ in the lives of people, even though their lives are overlain with multiple and overlapping regimes and spaces of securitization?

The contemporary story of Somalia is like a nihilistic-futuristic Hollywood dramatization, although of course, it is real. Over the past two decades since Somalia’s long-term dictator, Siad Barre, was deposed in 1991, Somalia has been called, repeatedly, ‘the worst humanitarian crisis in the world’ (Refugees International, 2009, Menkhaus, 2010; Garvelink and Tahir, 2011), ‘the most ignored tragedy in the world’ (BBC News, 2008; Minter and Volman, 2009), ‘the most failed state’ (Foreign Policy, 2008, 2009; Anderson, 2009), ‘the quintessential failed state’ (Horton, 2011), home to ‘the most effective pirates in the world’ (Harper, 2012: 145), ‘the most dangerous area for journalists’ (Kilman 2013), ‘the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian workers’ (Menkhaus, 2009: 228), and, simply, ‘the world’s most dangerous place’ (Fergusson, 2013; see also BBC, 2008).

Somalia’s undoing came at the end of a long series of foreign interventions and incursions: from the colonial era when British, Italians, Ethiopians and Somalis fought over the creation of borders and governance, to the geopolitics of the Cold War that poured millions of dollars of foreign funds into the coffers of Somalia’s dictator, from superpowers trying to buy influence and military access, to foreign-funded efforts in the neoliberalizing 1980s to privatize Somalia’s economy and redefine land and water as resources to be bought and sold. When foreign support for Somalia’s dictator ended after the Cold War in 1990 and his government collapsed, the militias that deposed him turned against each other to fight over who could lay claim to the state and its lucrative resources, including foreign aid. The ensuing devastation created new mobilities as refugees poured out of the country and foreign armies moved in; it created new forms of capitalist plunder on land and at sea as global players vied for control over Somalia’s resources; it created new spaces for terrorist and counterterrorist networks to flourish; and it created new extra-state spaces and forms of securitization and globalization as foreign NGOs, humanitarian agencies, armies, and multilateral institutions tried to re-institute governance structures in the standard form of the Westphalian nation-state.²

During the past 25 years since the collapse of Somalia’s government, most people in Somalia have been living entirely outside of state-controlled security structures, subjected instead to security regimes imposed by fundamentalist religious networks defined as terrorists by other states, multilateral institutions (who fund localized policing and run refugee camps and prisons), and proxy armies funded by foreign governments (in addition, of course, to local forms of political control). What concepts do anthropologists have for describing the spaces and institutions of governance and security in contemporary Somalia, where life is governed not by domestic state structures but by a range of local initiatives connected to, funded by, or orchestrated by extra-local networks, governments, and organizations? Al-Shabaab, the fundamentalist Islamiist militia that alternatively governs and terrorizes communities in the south as well as in nearby countries, is home-grown but supported by non-Somali fundamentalist networks elsewhere. Somali pirates in the north make a living ransoming their non-Somali captives from international shipping companies. Somali pirates convicted by courts in the Seychelles and in Kenya are held in prisons built by the United Nations in Somaliland and Puntland, ‘breakaway republics’ that the UN itself does not recognize as legitimate states even though it funds prisons and transfers prisoners there from other states (Glück, 2015; Tran, 2012; McGregor, 2011; The Nation, 2014). Somalia’s capital city, Mogadishu, is home to a CIA secret interrogation site for suspected terrorists who are captured through rendition in other locales (Scahill, 2014; Warah, 2014). Unmanned drones and Tomahawk missiles fly into Somali airspace from a US military base in Djibouti and from US ships in the Indian Ocean to kill suspected anti-US terrorists. Local security is provided, not by Somali police forces but rather, patchily and incompletely, by the African Union, paid for by American, European and UN funds.³ In all of this, Somalia has been fragmented into a patchwork of highly securitized and highly insecure spaces, zones of abandonment and intervention in what can only be described as a space of imperialist experimentation within the new global security empire.

Local journalists and humanitarian workers earn salaries from foreign media outfits and NGO offices. The various Somali governments emplaced by ‘the international community’⁴ over the past decade have been sustained entirely by foreign aid and have been primarily based outside the capital. Long-distance traders move the length and breadth of the country and across spatial scales and international borders to sell everything from weapons to milk through informal markets. Reportedly, all kinds of black market goods flow through Somalia’s ports, from guns to drugs to household supplies (Warah, 2014), making their way to small marketplaces and global business hubs throughout the East African region, such as Nairobi’s Eastleigh (Carrier, 2017; Rawlence, 2016).

Farmers in remote villages talk regularly by cell phone with their family members in the diaspora, from whom they receive remittances every month through a unique Somali global banking structure that moves $1–2 billion a year into Somalia – equal to approximately 40–50% of Somalia’s GDP.⁵ Somalia is probably the recipient of the most remittances per capita of any place on earth; local economies and survival are dependent on this informal indigenous banking structure that operates on a global scale.

What are the theoretical concepts that help define and make visible the structures, spaces and phenomenology of life in such a place? Somalia is not unique – people living in many parts of the world similarly experience, in place of a governmental presence, an active presence of NGOs, humanitarian workers, informal economic networks, resource extraction by foreign businesses, military interventions, fundamentalist religious organizations and terrorist, militia, criminal, and/or private security organizations of various kinds.⁶ The case of Somalia shows that so-called zones of abandonment (or statelessness) are actually spaces of imperialist intervention and that concepts like transnationalism and globalization do not adequately capture the inequalities inherent in the global processes that structure and connect states to non-state entities operating in stateless regions. Making sense of how power operates along these networks, and is negotiated and contested in local spaces as well as emergent political subjectivites linked to specific networks rather than political state structures or local ethnic associations, is a theoretical and terminological challenge.

Somalia’s present political entanglements suggest that an understanding of securitization in the post-postcolonial era in a place like Somalia should be approached by tracking social and spatial transformations wrought by Cold War alignments, post-Cold War civil wars, new mobilities of all kinds, and the rise of extra-state forms of securitization and globalization that connect people through NGOs, humanitarian operations, global religious movements, terrorist/militarist networks, criminal networks, and financial flows. Building on the theoretical framework offered by the editors of this special issue, in this paper I offer a historical and ethnographic account of what I view as the emergence of the new security empire governing Somalia and its diaspora – one which both produces spaces of exception and exclusion, as well as structures the everyday fears and experiences of those who live under its power. I offer some initial tools for apprehending and analyzing the spaces in which people supported by diasporic remittances navigate lives made insecure by imperialist military interventions and globally-funded fundamentalist terrorist networks that are jostling for control of their region. By extending and deepening the ‘sociospatial framework for an anthropology of security’ laid out by Glück and Low, I offer some initial thoughts on how the new security empire is being produced through intervention, across spatial scales, and in the lives of everyday people caught up in its meshwork.

Background: The colonial era and independence

In the scramble for Africa, Somali-speakers found themselves divided among five different countries ruled by others: French Djibouti, British-ruled Somaliland, Ethiopia, Italian-ruled Somalia, and British-ruled Kenya. Colonial rule was far from secure, of course. On the Somalia-Ethiopia border, the anticolonial fighter Mohamed Abdillah Hassan, whom the British colonists called the Mad Mullah, fought in a series of spectacular successes against Ethiopian and European control from 1899 until his death in 1920. In the south, the trans-Jubba territory initially claimed by Britain in the scramble was annexed by Italy as part of Italian Somaliland, which eventually, through a series of occupations and treaty negotiations, stretched from British Somaliland in the north to the Kenyan border in the south, until 1941, when a British military administration assumed control over Italian Somaliland as a protectorate. In 1950 the United Nations returned control over the Protectorate to Italy who governed it as a Trusteeship until 1960. During these decades of shifting colonial occupation Somalis persistently fought and protested against colonial occupation. At independence in 1960, the territory ruled as a trusteeship by Italy and the territory claimed as British Somaliland were united as the independent Republic of Somalia, although Somali-speakers in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti remained as minorities in independent states ruled by others.

Somalia’s postcolonial period of independent democratic politics ended with the assassination of its President in 1969, when Siad Barre claimed the presidency in a military coup. Forging alliances with the Soviet Union, Barre eventually created a one-party state based on the principles of ‘scientific socialism’. After Barre ordered an invasion of Ethiopia in 1977 to reclaim Somali-inhabited territory previously granted to Ethiopia by the British, the Soviets chose to back Ethiopia rather than Somalia, causing Barre to cut relations with the Soviet Union and turn to the US for patronage. After a decade of Soviet support in the form of weapons, economic assistance and advice, when Somalia switched sides in the Cold War it became the beneficiary of more US aid than any other African country except Egypt during the 1980s.

Cold War and neoliberal dreaming

Patronage of Somalia afforded the US military access to the longest coastline in Africa and proximity to the Middle East, the Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea in return for about a billion dollars worth of military and economic aid during the 1980s. Siad Barre received enough financial support, weapons and military hardware from the US and its allies to build the largest army in Africa, and Somalia became a destination for World Bank, European Union, German Technical Cooperation Agency, and US Agency for International Development officials and technocrats who were developing plans to transform the economy. Western governments poured money into Somalia, even as Barre’s rule transitioned from bureaucratic authoritarianism to personal rule, characterized by a concentration of power maintained through corruption and patronage in the 1980s, to outright ‘sultanism’, characterized by the flagrant abuse of power and violence (Compagnon, 1992). Through state patrimonialism, Compagnon writes, ‘the leading officials of the regime completely plundered the state budget and the banking system’ (1992: 9), the majority of which was provided by foreign aid. During the 1980s, in short, foreign aid from the US and its allies paid for the transformation of Somalia’s state government into a patrimonial kleptocracy.

The efforts by foreign investors, technocrats, and development officials to transform Somalia’s economy from socialism to capitalism followed a trajectory similar to that described by Janine Wedel (2001) for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where elites amassed newly privatized land and resources for themselves while shutting out peasants and workers from new economic opportunities. As in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Somalia offered a terrific experiment in neoliberal reform, where land reform programs and livestock projects planned by foreign experts attempted to turn collectively held subsistence farms into privatized land and to convert nomadic pastoralists into sedentary ranchers. Western economic advisors working across the postsocialist world in the neoliberalizing 1980s followed the predominant theoretical logic that capitalism would produce democracy and thus peace, and that ‘security’ would emerge from private property and a capitalist economy.⁷ But land reform in Somalia meant massive land alienation as political and business elites registered land throughout the country for themselves while dispossessing farmers and pastoralists (Besteman, 1994, 1996). Plans for a huge World Bank-funded dam on the upper Jubba River and other foreign-funded irrigation projects throughout the Jubba River Valley made the valley a particular target for land speculation and appropriation by urban elites. The land reform program was so corrupt that Western economic advisors intended to suspend support, a reform disrupted by the advent of civil war in 1990 (see Besteman, 1999).

In short, by 1989 US military interests and neoliberal interventions had intersected in Somalia in a way that supported an unpopular and destructive dictatorship, introduced massive amounts of weaponry into the country, and created a frenzied atmosphere of land speculation and betting on the promises of international development projects. Startlingly, while all this ‘development work’ was going on, Somalia’s dictator was dropping bombs on communities in the north that were beginning to protest against his leadership. The cumulative impact of foreign intervention in Somalia during the 1980s was to nurture a government that treated state resources as a source of private wealth accumulation by elites while abandoning the majority of citizens to kleptocratic and militarized invasions and dispossessions.

Militarized humanitarianism

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought US support for Somalia to an end when the US Congress redefined Siad Barre from US ally to simply another abusive dictator. The billion dollars spent in Somalia during the preceding decade slowed to a trickle and Barre’s government collapsed within a year, hastened by the pressure from rebel militias that had joined forces to oust him. Following his flight from Somalia, the militias began competing for state power and the resources (land, water, agricultural plantations) that had been defined as valuable by international development experts, terrorizing the civilian populations who held those resources. At least a third of a million Somalis died and hundreds of thousands fled the country as refugees.⁸

By 1992, the devastation across southern Somalia caused by warring militias and drought brought another form of international intervention as a UN coalition and then a US-led international military operation intervened in an attempt to reestablish security and deliver humanitarian aid.⁹ This mission marked the first time in its history that the UN Security Council approved an intervention involving military force in a sovereign state. It was also the first international effort to wed humanitarian and military intervention, an undertaking fraught with tensions and contradictions over priorities and control of operations (Menkhaus, 2010). By mid-1993, the intervention turned toward ‘nation-building’ and had become the largest UN operation in the world with 30,000 personnel and an annual cost of US$1.5 billion (Harper, 2012), making Somalia ‘a laboratory for new theories of U.N. peacekeeping’ (Crocker, 1995) through a ‘virtually unprecedented level of direct UN intervention in the core political and security functions of a failed state’ (Menkhaus, 2010: 7). One of Somalia’s most powerful militia leaders, General Aideed, finally managed to rout US involvement in the international intervention with the October 1993 Black Hawk Down incident. Two years later the UN forces also withdrew, leaving Somalia still stateless after three years and billions of dollars spent on state-building foreign interventions. Of this era, BBC Africa editor Mary Harper concludes:

The US/UN military intervention of the 1990s was probably the most dramatic example of ‘getting Somalia wrong’. It represented the archetypal wrong-headed exercise in building a state with foreign soldiers and good intentions; the more recent examples of Iraq and Afghanistan suggest lessons from this fiasco still have not been learned. (2012: 62)

Westphalian imaginaries and terrorism panics

Over the following decade, the UN, African Union, and European Union sponsored almost 20 peace conferences to reestablish a central government in Somalia, a process derided by Harper (2012) as a growth industry focused on peace talks to install a recognizable central government (which Harper called ‘virtual’ (2012: 65) because of the lack of public legitimacy) with no relationship to what was actually happening on the ground.

The US returned to Somalia when post-9/11 security panics identified Somalia’s ongoing statelessness as offering a potential opportunity for terrorists. By-passing the internationally funded and installed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) that had been established in 2004, the US began collaborating with local militias, including its former enemy, General Aideed, to capture suspected Al Qaeda members in Mogadishu, destabilizing the weak and incompetent TFG. The contestations between the TFG, US-supported militias, and the anti-TFG Islamic Courts Union (ICU) resulted in the ICU taking power and establishing control over most of south-central Somalia. But in response to the ICU’s hostility to Ethiopia and the Islamist rhetoric from some members, the US aided a 2006 Ethiopian invasion and occupation to overthrow the ICU and reestablish the TFG. Claiming self-protection against terrorism and in direct contravention of international refugee law, Kenya closed its border to fleeing civilians in January 2007. The ensuing ‘two-year period of 2007–8 was a calamity of enormous proportions for the country, arguably as bad as the disastrous civil war and famine of 1991–2’, writes political scientist Kenneth Menkhaus (2009: 224), as violence and famine once again engulfed the country amidst a violent reordering of national and local spaces in response to the intervention.

The surviving remnants of the ICU formed Al Shabaab to fight back against the Ethiopian occupation, producing massive conflict that displaced almost a million people. By 2009, Somalia was more insecure than ever before, as evidenced in the quotes that opened this paper. TFG forces (funded by the UN), Al Shabaab, and criminal gangs all preyed on residents throughout the country, and Al Shabaab responded to its designation as a terrorist group by the US with a pledge to target Western operations within and outside of Somalia and by joining Al Qaeda in 2010. Commentators like Menkhaus, Harper, and others argue that although US foreign policy toward Somalia after 9/11 was oriented toward quashing terrorism, it in fact enabled Al Shabaab to emerge as an effective anti-Western terrorist group. ‘In some ways’, Harper writes, ‘US-led policy towards the ICU created the very thing it aimed to destroy; its actions helped to radicalize the movement’ (2012: 66).

Privatized security: Drones and secrecy

In a shift from the boots-on-the-ground intervention that characterized US and UN intervention in the early 1990s, counterterrorist interventions in Somalia after 2009 depended on secretive operations, private security contractors, foreign mercenaries, and drone strikes, in addition to a small African Union force known as AMISOM. By 2014, the foreign-funded Somali government, protected by African Union troops, controlled ‘roughly thirty square miles of territory in Mogadishu’ (Scahill, 2014). US private security firms were contracted to pay former soldiers from France, South Africa, and Scandinavia to provide African troops with training in urban warfare, the CIA built a base for secret interrogations in Mogadishu of suspected terrorists rendered from Somalia and abroad, and US covert operations and drone attacks targeted suspected Al Shabaab members (Gettleman et al., 2011).¹⁰

Meanwhile, piracy in the north posed another set of international problems, with 50 vessels and 800 crew held by Somali pirates by 2011 (Harper, 2012). Uncertainties over who could prosecute and imprison them, given the complex reality of international shipping practices, meant that Somali pirates ended up in prisons all over the world – including pirates captured in the newly ‘securitized space’ of the Indian Ocean (Glück, 2015) who received life sentences in the US – while the European Union and Canada tried to set up a system of detention and trial for suspected Somali pirates in Kenya and the UN built pirate prisons in Somaliland and Puntland, two republics that broke away from Somalia following Barre’s departure but have yet to receive international recognition.

In short, after 2009, security in Somalia had become a privatized undertaking, with different states and multilateral institutions funding a mix of private contractors, mercenary labor, local militias, covert foreign operators, secret operations, drone attacks, militarized engagements outside of normal legal protocols, the abduction and incarceration abroad of Somalis, and troops from other states (especially Kenya) to make incursions into Somalia for reasons of their own. All of these entities responded to the security concerns of their funders and none answered to the Somali government. Al Shabaab claimed authority over regions of central-southern Somalia, reportedly relying on foreigners with experience fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as on Somalis in the diaspora for expertise and tactical assistance (Shinn, 2011). The remaining foreign NGOs arranged their own privatized security details. Somalis within Somalia had become subject to a varied, dynamic, opaque, and unpredictable array of security regimes and security spaces imposed by foreigners whose interventions in Somalia responded to security priorities in their respective states but not security priorities for most Somalis.

Foreign incursions into Somalia and across borders of all kinds in the name of security (through rendition, drone attacks, foreign invasions and the use of mercenaries) show the reach of the new security empire, which, as we have seen, is multilayered, spatially overlapping, transnational, translocal, extra-legal, extra-judicial, non-transparent, iterative, partially privatized, and productive of a host of new insecurities for local residents who have no state structures to appeal to.

The new security empire, where local life is subject to security interventions, priorities, and incursions of extrastate actors and foreign interests, has displaced and absorbed previous forms of empire based on territorial control or capitalist plunder. It produces new spaces of control, intervention, securitization and abandonment as the whims of new security threats wax and wane. It both responds to and, as we have seen in the case of Al Shabaab, even creates the security threats it is intended to manage. As a multi-sited and multi-scalar effort at coordinating state and non-state entities to fight a global war on terror in specific locations, the security empire reaches not only into the imagined Westphalian state space of Somalia but also into the communities and homes of Somalis living in the US and elsewhere who are drawn into the security empire as potential terrorists. The remainder of the paper turns to their experiences.

Refuge for the few

Following the collapse of Somalia’s government in 1991, Somalis fled in all directions to escape the militia violence. By the mid-1990s, Somali refugees were the third largest refugee group in the world, after Iraqis and Afghanis, and were living in refugee camps in Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, and elsewhere. A second refugee surge following the 2006 Ethiopian invasion sent hundreds of thousands of additional refugees across Somalia’s borders in a catastrophe that Refugees International called the worst in the world at that time. By 2010, Kenyan refugee camps housed over 600,000 Somali refugees with nowhere to go.

During 1991–2014, about 100,000 Somali refugees arrived in the US where they currently comprise the largest group of African refugees. While the offer of refuge to those fleeing persecution and violence is usually celebrated as an offer of humanitarian largesse, since 9/11 the US refugee resettlement program has been restructured to prioritize security. Refugee admissions fell sharply following 9/11, after which an extensive refugee screening protocol was enacted to weed out those suspected of terrorist associations (or duplicity). Thousands of refugee Somalis accepted for resettlement prior to 9/11 ended up waiting almost five years for their cases to clear because of new security procedures, through which many were then rejected from the resettlement process (see Besteman, 2016).

After arriving in the US, refugees are offered modest assistance for a few weeks, after which they are to become economically self-sufficient without resorting to government assistance programs. Like other refugees with high rates of illiteracy and low rates of English, education, and job skills relevant to the American economy, many have become low wage, part-time, unskilled, flexible laborers in the service economy. Part of their low wages must go to repay the cost of their airfare from Kenya to the US. Part is sent back to Kenya and Somalia in remittances.

Refugees in the diaspora engage with Somalia in a wide variety of ways: as remitters, as funders of development, religious, and military undertakings, as political actors, as possible recruits by Al Qaeda and Al Shabaab, and as objects of surveillance for possible terrorist associations by government authorities in their countries of refuge. Alongside the emerging security empire being constructed by the US and its allies in order to control security in Somalia is a parallel Somali diaspora world of financial flows, secrecy, mobility, and support structures. The US security empire and the Somali diaspora intersect when the former targets the latter for special surveillance regarding suspicions about remittances and fears about jihadist recruitment. Two stories illustrate how the US security empire developed to contain Somalia also targets Somalis in the US. This concluding section of the paper draws on the power of ethnography to bring forward the phenomenology of life for diasporic Somalis ensnared within the US security empire.

‘My son is in the target group’

‘My son is in the target group’, Zahara tells a roomful of mostly white, mostly non-Muslim people at a conference about Somali experiences of immigration in the US. Her comments focus on the persistent fear of living in a place where you are watched and questioned by authorities because of your religion and country of origin. Zahara is a medical assistant by profession, an active community member with a public profile and wide network of immigrant and non-immigrant associates, appointed by the mayor as the first Somali on an important city board, and widely recognized throughout the city as an unthreatening, kind person.

She describes persistent phone calls from the FBI asking her if the local mosque is engaged in fundraising and if any fundraising is being directed to Somalia. ‘What am I supposed to say?’ she queries her audience. ‘We need to support the mosque. We are trying to buy a building for our mosque. Our families back home are starving. Of course we’re fundraising!’ But she knows that the FBI and other federal agencies are concerned that fundraising efforts may somehow end up funding Islamiist terrorism. Local Somali-owned businesses have been raided without explanation by federal authorities, who cart away computers, business records and phones, leaving disarray and terror in their wake. And Zahara – along with every other Somali mother in the diaspora – knows that authorities are particularly concerned about the Islamic activities of the refugee community’s young men. ‘My son is 19; he is in the 19- to 25-year-old target group. I am so scared! I don’t know how to protect him.’

She means from the FBI, not from jihadists. She is desperately worried about all the little stupid things that young men in the ‘target group’ engage in, things that take on a totally different valence with authorities if you are black and Muslim in an age of terrorist panics. Other mothers talk regularly about the vast world of possible mistakes for young black Muslim men in the US. Crossing the street against the light, driving too fast, speaking improperly to a police officer, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, engaging in playful pranks that border on illegality, making jokes that raise alarm, visiting flagged websites, being a Muslim in public. Mothers, like Zahara, wonder about the wisdom of taking their sons to Kenya to get them through the target age category, thinking they might be better protected from the watchful eye of authorities there, but Kenya, as part of the US security empire focused on Somalia and where Somali residents are subject to intensive surveillance, policing, imprisonment, expulsion, and attack, offers its own threats to young Somali men in the target group (see, e.g., Glück’s (2017) article in this special issue). The mothers quite literally do not know what to do to keep their sons safe, and their worry eats at them every day.

Capturing jihadists at home

On 26 November 2010 the FBI arrested Mohamed Osman Mohamud in Portland, Oregon, and charged him with attempting to blow up a van full of explosives during Portland’s annual tree lighting ceremony. The FBI described the 19-year-old as a naturalized US citizen originally from Somalia who was committed to carrying out a terrorist attack on US soil. As the story unfolded, the FBI revealed that Mohamud had come under FBI surveillance after visiting jihadist websites and attempting to contact foreigners identified as extremists by the FBI, presumably for jihadist training abroad. Although he was unsuccessful in his alleged efforts to connect with terrorists, the FBI targeted him for a sting operation, just as they have targeted several other young men who visited jihadist websites but lacked any connection with actual terrorists. FBI undercover operatives gave Mohamud explosives training and cash and helped him plan the terrorist operation in Oregon. Then they arrested him just as he thought he was detonating the bomb he believed they had planted near the ceremony. Some might view this frightening and tragic incident as a terrorist plot averted – an example of how clever the US government can be in catching potential terrorists and ensuring domestic safety. But, instead, it may be an example of how far the US government will go to create terrorists in order to arrest them. Here, producing a ‘state of security’ involves helping to produce the actual terrorists who are the target of the security state.

Somali Americans stand at the intersection of two alarming historical trajectories, which mark them as potential terrorists and criminals. One is the exploding incarceration rate of African American men as a result of racism in the policing and judicial system. More than a decade ago, Angela Davis (1998) warned that since our judicial system was so stacked against African Americans, a logical outcome of the desire for greater security would be to identify all African Americans as potential criminals and incarcerate them en masse. The US is quickly moving in that direction (Alexander, 2012), a trajectory that some scholars see as part of the broader creation of a ‘carceral’ security state (Gilmore, 2007; Camp and Heatherton, 2016).¹¹

The second factor is the ruinous history of US involvement in Somalia, recounted above. From US support for Somalia’s abusive dictator during the 1980s to the disastrous deployment of US military forces to capture General Aideed in the 1990s, to the decision to assist Ethiopia in its 2006 invasion and occupation of Somalia to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union government, US intervention in Somalia has increased insecurity for Somalis in the name of protecting US security.

The African American experience with incarceration reveals a state overly comfortable with criminalizing minorities; Somalia’s experience with US foreign policy reveals the country’s willingness to see terrorists even when they aren’t there. A confused 19-year-old Somali American stands at the conjuncture of these two threads, illuminating the outlines of a new US security empire willing to expend vast resources to capture terrorists, even when they have to be created in order to be captured.¹²

Conclusion

The editors of this special issue ask, ‘How are “states of security” produced… what are they productive of… and how [are] security states as social formations produced and maintained?’ They suggest that the ‘way to answer such questions is to treat [the] micro- and macro-levels of security as subjective/affective states that are the outcome of larger social processes and power relations; and in turn, that large structures such as state formations are necessarily produced and reproduced through everyday practices, embodied social relations and affective dispositions’ (Glück and Low, introduction).

Building on this theoretical framework, I suggest that we must look at the effects of state securitization when powerful states intervene to impose security regimes on other regions, producing uneven geographies of securitized (and insecure) spaces, with effects that spill across borders, that produce contradictory alliances with non-state actors, and that create terrorists at home and abroad who can be rendered, incarcerated, and killed. The progressive efforts by the US to securitize Somalia resulted in its annihilation as a state and the production of spaces of profound insecurity for Somalis in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the US (enormous numbers of refugees with nowhere to go, murderous drone strikes, worries about rendition, terrorist attacks, xenophobia abroad against Somalis, and fear about jihadist efforts to recruit young American Somalis). The emerging dialectic – in which US securitization produces greater insecurity in Somalia, which in turn feeds greater efforts at securitization in the US – that has created terrible danger for Somalis is the effect of a newly emergent US security empire.

Journalist Mary Harper concludes her review of Somalia’s recent history by remarking on the dynamism and creativity of Somalis in the global economy as well as within Somalia: ‘It is as if the Somali community somehow floats above the world, having reached a postmodern stage of development, beyond the nation-state’ (Harper, 2012: 200). But they do not live beyond the grasp of the new security empire. The cynical yet lyrical British colonial officer Gerald Hanley reflected in his 2005 memoir about his years in the British colonial government in Somalia: ‘Empires were a hobby of a bored and energetic owning class, and empires made them rich, very rich, and the denizens of the empires poor, and it was good to have lived to see the end of that’ (2005: 201). But my account of Somalia’s recent history suggests the emergence of a new form and scale of empire, where the territorially-based political project of colonialism and the project of capital accumulation that David Harvey (2003) identified as producing ‘capitalist imperialism’ may be giving way to a new logic of security imperialism, where the exploitation of asymmetries that is the basis of imperialism has been extended to the co-option of non-state militant actors (mercenaries, warlords, militias), support from multilateral institutions (the UN, Africa Union, European Union), secrecy (rendition, CIA black ops sites abroad, FBI surveillance at home), and the creation of threats where none before existed.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Catherine Besteman teaches anthropology at Colby College. Her research focuses on mobility, militarism, sovereignty/citizenship, and racism, topics she has studied in South Africa, Somalia, and the US. Her books include Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (2016), Transforming Cape Town (2008), Unraveling Somalia (1999), and the edited volumes The Insecure American (2009), Why America's Top Pundits are Wrong (2005), and Violence: A Reader (2002). A 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, her work has also been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, Sigma Xi, and the School of Advanced Research.

References

Abdi

(2007) The new age of security: Implications for refugees and internally displaced persons in the Horn of Africa. Development 50(4): 75–81.

Adam

(1995) Somalia: A terrible beauty being born? In: Zartman

(ed.) Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority., Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, pp. 69–90.

Alexander M (2012) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. NY: The New Press.

Anderson JL (2009) The most failed state. New Yorker, 14 December. Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/the-most-failed-state.

BBC News (2008) Somalia is ‘most ignored tragedy’, 6 October. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7653928.stm (accessed 14 August 2017).

Besteman C (1994) Individualisation and the Assault on Customary Tenure in Africa: Land Registration Programmes and the Case of Somalia. Africa 64(4): 484–515.

Besteman C (1996) Local Land Use Strategies and Outsider Politics: Title Registration in the Middle Jubba. In: Besteman C and Cassanelli LV (eds) The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 29–45.

Besteman C (1999) Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Besteman C (2016) Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

10.

Camp JT and Heatherton C (eds) (2016) Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis led to Black Lives Matter. London: Verso.

11.

Carrier

(2017) Little Mogadishu: Eastleigh, Nairobi’s Global Somali Hub, London: Hurst Publishers.

12.

Compagnon

(1992) Political decay in Somalia: From personal rule to warlordism. Refuge 12(5): 8–13.

13.

Crocker C (1995) The lessons of Somalia: Not everything went wrong. Foreign Affairs 74(3). Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/somalia/1995-05-01/lessons-somalia-not-everything-went-wrong (accessed 14 August 2017).

14.

Davis

(1998) The Angela Y. Davis Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.

15.

Fergusson

(2013) The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia, Boston: Da Capo.

16.

Foreign Policy (2008) The 2008 Failed States Index.

17.

Foreign Policy (2009) The 2009 Failed States Index. Available at: http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/06/21/the-2009-failed-states-index/ (accessed 14 August 2017).

18.

Friedman

(1997) The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

19.

Garvelink W and Tahir F (2011) Somalia remains the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Center for Strategic and International Studies, 16 December. Available at: http://csis.org/publication/somalia-remains-worst-humanitarian-crisis-world (accessed 14 August 2017).

20.

Gettleman J (2015) Shabab militants learning to kill on a shoestring. New York Times, 6 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/world/africa/setbacks-press-shabab-fighters-to-kill-inexpensively.html (accessed 14 August 2017).

21.

Gettleman J, Mazzetti M and Schmitt E (2011) US relies on contractors in Somalia conflict. New York Times, 10 August. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/world/africa/11somalia.html (accessed 14 August 2017).

22.

Gilmore

(2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California, Berkeley: University of California Press.

23.

Glück

(2015) Piracy and the production of security space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33: 642–659.

24.

Glück Z (2017) Security Urbanism and the Counterterror State in Kenya. Anthropological Theory 17(3): 297–321.

25.

Glück Z and Low S (2017) A sociospatial framework for the anthropology of security. Anthropological Theory 17(3): 281–296.

26.

Goldstein

(2012) Outlawed: Between Security and Rights in a Bolivian City, Durham: Duke University Press.

27.

Hammond L, Awad M, Dagane AI, Hansen P, Horst C, Menkhaus K and Obare L (2011) Cash and compassion: The role of the Somali diaspora in relief, development and peace-building. United Nations Development Program. Available at: http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/4f61b12d2.pdf (accessed 14 August 2017).

28.

Hanley

(2005) Warriors: Life and Death Among the Somalis, London: Eland Books.

29.

Harper

(2012) Getting Somalia Wrong? Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State, London: Zed Books.

30.

Harvey D (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

31.

Horton S (2011) The CIA’s secret prison in Somalia. Harper’s Magazine blog, 14 July. Available at: http://harpers.org/blog/2011/07/the-cias-secret-prison-in-somalia/ (accessed 14 August 2017).

32.

Kapteijns

(2012) Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

33.

Kilman L (2013) Most dangerous countries for journalists: Syria and Somalia. WANIFRA: World Association of Newspapers and New Publishers, 31 January. Available at: http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2013/01/31/most-dangerous-countries-for-journalists-syria-and-somalia (accessed 14 August 2017).

34.

McGregor S (2011) United Nations opens prison in Somaliland capital for pirates. Bloomberg News, 20 March. Available at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-03-29/somaliland-prison-opened-for-convicted-pirates-with-united-nations-funding (accessed 15 December 2011).

35.

Menkhaus

(2004) Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism, London: Routledge.

36.

Menkhaus

(2009) Somalia: ‘They created a desert and called it peace (building)’. Review of African Political Economy 120: 223–233.

37.

Menkhaus

(2010) Stabilisation and humanitarian access in a collapsed state: The Somali case. Disasters 34(S3): 1–22.

38.

Menkaus K and Bouceck C (2010) Terrorism out of Somalia. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 23 September. Available at: http://carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/23/terrorism-out-of-somalia-pub-41612 (accessed 14 August 2017).

39.

Minter W and Volman A (2009) The Somalia crossroads: Piracy and an insurgency tempt Washington to get it wrong – again. These Times, 29 June. Available at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/4520/the_somalia_crossroads (accessed 14 August 2017).

40.

The Nation (2014) Nine convicted Somali pirates transferred to Puntland, 31 March. Available at: http://www.nation.sc/article.html?id=241181 (accessed 14 August 2017).

41.

Penglase

(2014) Living with Insecurity in a Brazilian Favela: Urban Violence and Daily Life, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

42.

Piot

(2010) Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa After the Cold War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

43.

Rawlence

(2016) City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp, New York: Picador.

44.

Redfield

(2012) Bioexpectations: Life technologies as humanitarian goods. Public Culture 24(1): 157–184.

45.

Refugees International (2009) Somalia: Political progress, humanitarian stalemate, 3 April. Available at: http://refugeesinternational.org/policy/field-report/somalia-political-progress-humanitarian-stalemate (accessed 14 August 2017).

46.

Reyna

(2016) Deadly Contradictions: The New American Empire and Global Warring, New York: Berghahn Books.

47.

Samatar

(1992) Destruction of state and society in Somalia: Beyond the tribal convention. The Journal of Modern African Studies 30(4): 625–641.

48.

Scahill J (2014) The CIA’s secret sites in Somalia. The Nation, 1–8 August.

49.

Serle J and Fielding-Smith A (2015) US drone war: 2014 in numbers. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 4 January. Available at https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/01/07/us-drone-war-2014-in-numbers/ (accessed 28 July 2015).

50.

Sheikh H and Healy S (2009) Somalia’s Missing Million: The Somali Diaspora and Its Role in Development. New York: United Nations Development Programme.

51.

Shinn

(2000) Al Shabaab’s foreign threat to Somalia. Orbis 55(2): 203–215.

52.

Tran M (2012) Inside Somaliland’s pirate prison, the jail that no country wants. The Guardian, 23 August.

53.

Warah R (2014) War Crimes: How Warlords, Politicians, Foreign Governments and Aid Agencies Conspired to Create a Failed State in Somalia. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.

54.

Wedel

(2001) Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

55.

Wilson

(2000) The Guguletu Seven, Rondebosch, SA: Lindy Wilson Productions.