Catherine Besteman

Unraveling Somalia : race, violence, and the legacy of slavery

In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees. During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalias disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare among various clans and subclans. In Unraveling Somalia, Catherine Besteman challenges this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence -- inflicted disproportionately on rural southerners -- contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition. She contends that the dissolution of the Somali nation-state can be understood only by recognizing that over the past century and a half there emerged in Somalia a social order based on principles other than simple clan organization -- a social order deeply stratified on the basis of race, status, class, region, and language. Unraveling Somalia makes this argument by focusing on those particularly targeted in the recent violence: the people of the Jubba valley Gosha area. The people of the Gosha, whose ancestors were brought to Somalia as slaves, have always confronted discrimination in Somalia on the basis of their Bantu heritage and their history of enslavement. In tracing their struggles to legitimize their Somali identity, Unraveling Somalia reveals the critical significance of racial and class divisions in contemporary Somalia. In addition to offering a new explanation of the collapse of the Somali state, Unraveling Somalia contributes to our understanding of how constructions of raceand class in Africa are related to supposedly tribal warfare on the continent. In drawing connections among race, class, and violence, this book also contributes to the building of a comparative theoretical analysis of the global disintegration of nation-states and the politics of terror.

Translating Race across Time and Space: The Creation of Somali Bantu Ethnicity

This article reviews the creation of Somali Bantu ethnicity as an object of humanitarian intervention during Somalias civil war. A variety of local, regional and international actors combined to create the ethnonym Somali Bantu for a group of refugees identified as a persecuted minority by the UNHCR and the US government and selected for resettlement in the United States. I track the emergence of the name and its affective dimensions for those who embrace Somali Bantu identity and assess criticisms of its authenticity and legitimacy. The creation of Somali Bantu identity reveals critical dimensions of how race is translated across time and space. Since a fundamental dimension of Somali Bantu identity is based on presumptions of racial difference, the article traces the salience of constructed difference for social hierarchies within Somalia, colonial projects in Somalia, refugee camp life in Kenya, US resettlement policy and diaspora politics in the United States.

Experimenting in Somalia: The new security empire

The past several decades of US intervention in Somalia produced violent destabilization, dysfunction, and uncertainty, creating refugee outflows and terrorist networks against which the US is currently tightening its security cordons. This paper argues that Somalia’s recent history as a stateless region offers a cautionary and tragic case study of the long-term damages that ensue when wealthy states that intervene in poorer states in the name of their own security instead cause insecurity and inequities that enable violence, and then in response to that violence enact further securitization to protect themselves against the consequences of that damage. But rather than focusing on the state as a site of securitization, I focus on those whose lives are made insecure by the retreat of their state government and the imposition in its place of security regimes that are not created by their own state government. Such security regimes overlap and compete, are instituted by different state and nonstate actors for different purposes, and by their incoherence and multiplicity raise questions about the definition, location, and relevance of the state in such regions. The paper explores the emergence of new, interlinked security regimes that are partially or wholly constituted through the logics of a new security empire designed to respond to US security concerns. By turning attention to the situations faced by those who live within the insecurities of stateless regions, the paper asks, what happens to the concept of securitization when the national-territorial state is not the entity that operates as a ‘state’ in the lives of people, even though their lives are overlain with multiple and overlapping regimes of securitization?

Refuge fragments, fragmentary refuge

This experimental essay shows the ways that Somali Bantu refugees’ experiences of resettlement, especially their encounters with the bureaucracy of immigration and resettlement, fragment what for the refugees are meaningful wholes (such as families), as well as the sometimes creative, though often frustrated, ways they work to re-create wholeness and meaning in their new context. Revealing cognition and feeling in the moment, these fragments challenge the conception of refuge as relief or resolution, the end of the journey. Instead they expose just how fragmentary refuge is, where the fragments, like the experience of refuge, take the form of a puzzle that shows the precarity and uncertainty of refuge. But the stories told in these fragments also push back at their fragmentation by revealing how refugees puzzle through and attempt to control fragmentation, demonstrating the strength of refugee agency and the beautiful potency of their resistances.

Militarized Global Apartheid

New regimes of labor and mobility control are taking shape across the global north in a militarized form that mimics South Africa’s history of apartheid. Apartheid was a South African system of influx and labor control that attempted to manage the “threat” posed by black people by incarcerating them in zones of containment while also enabling the control and policed exploitation of black people as workers, on which the country was dependent. The paper argues, first, that the rise of a system of global apartheid has created a racialized world order and a hierarchical labor market dependent on differential access to mobility; second, that the expansion of systems of resource plunder primarily by agents of the global north into the global south renders localities in the global south unsustainable for ordinary life; and, third, that in response, the global north is massively investing in militarized border regimes to manage the northern movement of people from the global south. The paper argues that “global apartheid” might replace terms such as “transnationalism,” “multiculturalism,” and “cosmopolitanism” in order to name the structures of control that securitize the north and foster violence in the south, that gate the north and imprison the south, and that create a new militarized form of apartheid on a global level.

Promised Land (review)

171 Wales to how industrialized nations must fight poverty in developing countries and indeed whether it is the responsibility of outsider donors and organizations to help fight poverty in the Third World. This refocusing raises important questions about how Western NGOs often determine the alternatives and activities to fight poverty in developing countries through shortlived and palliative programs rather than sustainable, long-term solutions developed in collaboration with governments and aid recipients, such as resource allocation to local industries and economies. The struggle with how to manage the overpowering impact of the outside world–be it in the form of aid and donations, legal systems, cultural influence, or other–from the perspective of cases in developing countries is at the core of the series Life 6. At this level, portraying the effects of globalization in various regions, the series’ episodes are comprehensively effective as the case studies are well contextualized in a concise and easily watchable manner that captures the realities of everyday life challenges. Each of the episodes brings to the fore the difficulties of achieving justice, durable peace, social mobility, and economic stability, and protecting individual and group rights. But in terms of addressing the Millennium Development Goals, the series defaults due to the difficulty of presenting well-contextualized individual case studies in the midst of globalization, and connecting all the issues they face in light of the MDGs. In spite of its shortcomings, the series is an excellent educational resource and discussion material for many academic levels. Aniuska M. Luna Nova Southeastern University