LUCA CIABARRI

Crisi dello Stato e riorganizzazioni socio-politiche in Somalia

N. 186

Summary — In the African political panorama, Somalia represents an extreme case. The fall of the dictatorship in 1991 occurred in a context of anarchy and sectarian conflict, against a background made more dramatic by drought and consequent famine. The equilibrium, already unstable in Somalia’s cultural and ecological conditions, had been completely upset by the excessive centralization of power in the years of Siad Barre, and the reaction of society by means of militarized parties, each with its own ethnic base in family groupings within an otherwise homogeneous Somalian population, brought about a fragmentation that has remaind unrepaired. Attempts from outside to " mediate ", after the failure of the United Nations operation, came up against the need to coordinate the rearrangement of a state too heavily identified with the capital Mogadiscio, and the exclusive control of the territory by those forces appealing, not wholly accurately, to tribal identity. For years now, Somalia has lived in this situation of a non-state, where certain sovereign prerogatives are delegated, at least for domestic purposes, to a multitude of subjects. Apparently, this represents a return to "tradition", but the " traditionalism " should not be exaggerated, because among the actors there are realities that are wholly alien to the traditional world, and to the same hierarchy that claims to represent it, being pure products of the political and socio-economic transformation that has taken place in the meantime, partly as an effect of the civil war.