You know a geopolitical situation has gotten really out of hand when people start invoking Somalia.
Indeed, after six months of unprecedented bombardment at the hands – and AI machines – of the Israeli military, Gaza, where “civil order” has “eroded” and predatory power-brokers have emerged to fill the “vacuum”, is the latest theatre of battle that seasoned humanitarians have begun comparing to Mogadishu, Somalia’s war-torn capital, according to an article published in The Guardian on Monday. In warning of the Gaza Strip’s impending descent into a situation akin to a “Mogadishu on the Mediterranean”, observers are sounding a powerful alarm regarding the level of humanitarian breakdown faced by ordinary Palestinians, building on well-worn depictions of Somalia as a permanently “failed state”.
As an academic and practitioner who has spent over a decade exploring the diverse and often innovative ways that Somalis have responded to “statelessness”, it behooves me to begin by pointing out that such comparisons, while evocative and potentially useful in galvanising a political response, perpetuate unhelpful and even Orientalist tropes that present certain peoples and countries as inherent “basket cases”. Moreover, like all meme-ified forms of political narrative, such reductive analogies fail to do justice to either the archetype (in this case Mogadishu) or the object being illuminated (Gaza’s unfolding catastrophe), often glossing over important political differences necessary for understanding divergent contexts…..more
