Understanding Somalia’s multidimensional protracted war: an updated structural-processual analysis

Abstract

Political violence has uninterruptedly afflicted Somalia since its independence. That amounts to 60 years of uninterrupted conflict, quite a record in contemporary history. For that reason, Somalia has been considered as one of the epitomes of what is known as an intractable conflict and Intractable Conflict Theory (ICT) has used the country as a laboratory to test its frameworks. However, we contend that systemic and very overarching frameworks such as ICT are not very useful to understand the intractability of Somalia’s conflict. This paper proposes instead a historically grounded structural-processual analysis that explains the conflict as the result of the chronological accumulation and dysfunctional overlapping of several sets of structures an actors within Somalia’s society itself and the Horn of Africa leading to the creation of very deep fault lines that create a criss-crossed fabric of conflicting interests, separating and pitting social actors against each other.