ANTONIO  MORONE

La crisi dello stato in Somalia: una riconsiderazione storico-giuridica

N. 200

Summary -  Nowadays, Somalia is a deeply lacerated country, shacked by a civil war, which has been keeping on for ten years and has been causing the breakup of social web and dissolution of public frameworks. The causes have to be founded especially in the Somali decolonisation and in its influence upon Somalia's recent history. The colonial and post-colonial subdivision of Somali territory brought about a difficult relationship between State and Nation, since the borders of the former were more restricted than the virtual space of the Nation. This was the context where the "pansomalism" rose and its failure, after the Ogaden war, carried out an effect opposite to the wanted one. Instead of joining, it divided and reopened the colonial fracture between northern and southern Somalia: the prove is a secessionist movement, which, for some years, has been operating in the north of Somalia, in the same territory which was the former British Somaliland. This fragmentation influenced the political and judicial pattern as well, used to realize the construction of the new State, in particularly opposing Italian and British models. Between these two components of Somali decolonisation, the role of local pattern, i.e. the rules and relationship of tribal and traditional Somali society, has to be considered. It represented a strong hindrance to the import process of foreign patterns into Somalia and promoted an increasing tribalisation of its political system. Therefore the consideration of a cultural difference, between local and imported elements, is unavoidable in order to explain the weakness of Somali decolonisation and the return to the precolonial institutional form of society.