The Failed State and the State of Failure

In a remarkable study, Somalia: Economy without a State, Peter D. Little has attempted to show how Somalis have survived under statelessness.[18] With no functioning government, no central bank, and no accountable security system, Somalis have continued to trade (officially, via contracts with transnational corporations [who neglected to include this data for Thomson Dialog], and unofficially, via a large and intricate black market), to move about the country (this is particularly important for roving pastoralists who maintain Somalia’s large livestock industry), and to maintain a semblance of social order (although, as Little affirms, this has not been the case in the main urban areas [at least until the recent emergence of the Islamic Courts — a mitigating factor that receded with the invasion of Ethiopian troops in December 2006 and U.S. air raids in their support]). Little’s research on Somalia of the 1990s underlines that the sur-vivre of Somalis has a longer history than the UN Charter. With no governmental administration, Somalis continued to use traditional local institutions to maintain communal and regional viability. These include the principle of the diya, a “blood payment” established through an extended family matrix that mitigates need in times of crisis; the xeer that functions as a form of social contract; and the aqil (renamed the nabadoon after the revolution of 1969), who acts as a local mediator among clan elders to resolve disputes. Little does not reject the advantages of the modern state apparatus; his argument is about how a postcolonial population survives when it basically gives the regime of state a vote of no confidence. Western and specifically UN aid remains crucial and is not discounted, but the example of Somalia shows that it is held with such deep suspicion that local communities survive by fending for themselves. This does not mean foreign intervention cannot assert itself: it has in the past and now, with the perception that failed states are breeding grounds for transnational terrorism (unlike autocratic strong states, of course), Somalia has become once again a topic of “strategic interest.” The failed state narrative, however, masks the importance of the geolocal and substitutes instead a compromised calculus that overlooks the substance of what I would term postcolonial duration.