Who sent those arms to southern Sudan?

A few months ago, when a Ukrainian freighter carrying tanks and arms was hijacked off the coast of Somalia, I discussed the destination of the weapons (likely rebels in southern Sudan) and proposed that the Russians might have been the source of the weapons:

Which brings us to last question: where did the weapons come from? According to the VOA article, southern Sudan receives weapons from both the US and Russia, though given that the US isn't going along with the Kenyan story about the destination of the weapons, it seems likely that the Russian weapons aboard the Ukrainian ship came instead from Russia. Given that they were destined for an oil-filled region brimming with instability, it seems likely that this is part of the Kremlin's broader plan to destabilize oil- and gas-producing regions in order to raise the price of energy and feed the Russian petrostate's need for high oil prices.

Though this isn't new, I've found some corroborating information, also suggesting the arms came from Russia:

In response to the seizure of the Faina, Admiral Viktor Mardusin, commander of Russia's Baltic fleet, ordered a Russian missile frigate to Somali waters for more than two months "in order to guarantee the safety of Russian ships". That suggests the tanks and weapons aboard the Ukrainian vessel are of Russian origin.

The MV Faina is still held by Somali pirates awaiting a ransom, though the West's worst fear – that the pirates would offload the weapons and sell them in the Somali arms markets – doesn't appear to have panned out.

The economics of khat prohibition in the West

Khat is a plant that is widely used in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Yemen, where it is chewed for its mild stimulant qualities, and recently it's been confounding anti-drug warriors in the West. The East African and Yemeni diaspora has brought the drug to immigrant communities through the US, the UK, and Northern Europe. While technically illegal in most of these places (the UK being the notable exception), its use is limited to immigrant communities and hasn't appeared on the streets alongside heroin and cocaine, and so it's been a relatively low law enforcement priority. As always, though, the US is the most eager to stamp out the drug, with DEA agents arresting Somali immigrants in places like Seattle and San Diego for conspiracy to import the drug from East Africa.

Diaspora communities in the US themselves are apparently divided on the issue, with many supporting the use of the drug as an integral part of their culture, and others (often women, who are by custom less likely to chew khat) wishing their adopted homelands would crack down on the use of khat. Many of the criticisms coming from within and outside of the community are the standard anti-drug arguments – it destroys your mind, turns you into an idle drug user, etc. But one bizarrely paradoxical argument is that it costs too much:

In fact, within the East African community in the U.S., there are many who welcome the khat restrictions.

"I have seen what it does," Mohamud said. "Families who are trying to make ends meet on a daily basis cannot afford it. It just creates so many problems between a husband and wife to the point where a broken family is going to be the result."

But why does it cost so much? In East Africa, the plant is cheap – only $1 per kilogram according to the Seattle PI. But across the Atlantic, in the United States where the plant is illegal, the price shoots up to as much as $700 per kilo. Some of this difference can be attributed to the cost of shipping the plant from East Africa to the United States, as it needs to be consumed soon after harvest or it will lose its potency (in contrast to most illegal drugs, which can be stored for long periods of time). But that's only part of the story – the lion's share of the price differential is eaten up by the black market, as shippers and sellers take larger profits to compensate for the risk of trafficking in this illegal substance.

Compare this to the UK, where the plant is legal, and prices are low in comparison – less than £20 per kilo retail (pdf). And it's not just the law that makes the price shoot up, but rather the degree of enforcement. For example, in Sweden, where the plant is technically illegal but enforcement is minimal, retail prices range from about $100 to $250 per kilo – high, but not as high as in the US. (Some other reasons for Sweden's high khat prices could be its relatively small East African/Yemeni population as compared to that of the UK, as well as its lack of direct air connections to the regions where khat is produced.)

Those who don't like the drug because of its cost to poor immigrant families would be smarter to simply legalize the drug and watch prices plummet, rather than adding another substance to the quixotic and dangerous war on drugs.

Somalia: the forgotten front of the War on Terror

I've written an original article for antiwar.com about the situation in Somali, reflecting on the history of American intervention in Somali and its utter failure. In it, I argue that the only way to bring about peace and stability to Somalia is for the international community to stop trying to impose a state on a people who are not accustomed to involuntary government. You can help publicize it by voting it up on either Digg or Reddit.

Somalia update

So, it's official (almost): the Ethiopians are leaving Somalia and the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab is likely to take over the parts of Somalia that haven't already seceded. Al-Shabaab is far more radical and strict in its interpretation of Islam than the Islamic Courts Union that reigned in Somalia before the 2006 US-backed Ethiopian invasion. So, by expelling what we now know were comparatively moderate Islamists (the ICU), the US and Ethiopia sewed the seeds for the current al-Shabaab takeover.

And with the conflict between first the ICU and the Ethiopian-backed TFG, and now the TFG and al-Shabaab comes death and destruction. I reported last month that the war in Somalia has been deadlier than the one in Iraq by some measures, but since then, the estimates of the death toll have only gotten worse – from about 10,000 civilians to more than 16,000 killed directly because of the conflict.

In addition to the deaths, life for the living is becoming increasingly difficult as they flee the war-torn urban areas that offer respite from the barren Somali hinterlands, where a humanitarian disaster is now brewing. As the Washington Post reports:

Out of a population of about 9 million, more than 1 million people have fled their homes, preferring drought-stricken regions of the country to the crossfire of militias battling for control of Mogadishu and other areas. Attacks on aid workers – most likely carried out by the Shabab, who equate them with foreign interference – have made humanitarian assistance almost impossible to deliver.

Also, something I didn't mention in previous posts about Somalia is that even before the 2006 invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia (backed by American money and diplomatic efforts), the US was supporting the warlords that the ICU would make its call to war.

At pretty much every step of the way since the fall of the Barre dictatorship throughout the 1980s, the United States has intervened in Somali affairs and it's backfired every single time – from its support of the warlords in the early '90s that resulted in the infamous Black Hawk Down episode, to the pre-2006-ish support for the warlords that enraged the moderate Islamists, to the current support of the Ethiopian proxy government that's enraging the extremist Islamists. Luckily, this time around there's little popular support for either a UN- or American-backed mission/invasion of the country, but that might change if American Democrats change their tune about "nation-building" and missions abroad now that the right guy is in power.

Government restrictions are the reason that Somali pirates thrive

Two weeks ago I asked why shippers don't hire private security to deal with Somali pirates off the coast of East Africa, and instead spend hundreds of thousands of dollars avoiding the area by taking a different route. I postulated that the reason they didn't was because they were worried they'd lose their subsidies in the form of states' navies securing the high seas if they showed themselves capable of doing the job themselves, but since then I've heard of another, better reason: they're not allowed to properly defend themselves.

Channeling the investigative powers of the internets, Wired finds that shippers don't forgo effective private defense of their cargo for financial reasons, but rather because they're flat-out not allowed to. The Times of London found that it's "almost impossible to carry firearms through Customs and on to vessels in most countries," and so shippers are left defending themselves with increasingly ineffective non-lethal weapons. It also noted that there are security risks to carrying firearms on board a flammable oil tanker, however the founder of a private security company in his blog doesn't buy this excuse, noting that real militaries mix weapons and ammunition and oil all the time. An analyst with another private security firm echoed this sentiment, noting that "the downstream legal implications of hiring private security are really pretty substantial."

And just for a comparison against the quarter- to half-million dollar hit that shipping companies have been taking by avoiding the Somali coast that I mentioned two weeks ago, the half-baked private security solutions involving non-lethal weapons cost at most £12,000 per journey.

Free market solution vs. state solution: Somali piracy

In an article on Somali piracy, the Washington Post has this to say about the recent move that shippers have made from using the Suez Canal (which involves passing the pirate-infested Somali waters) to sending their ships southwards down to the Cape of Good Hope:

Experts say the much longer journey adds 12 to 15 days to a tanker's trip, at a cost of between $20,000-$30,000 a day.

So essentially, the shipping companies are taking a hit of $240,000–$450,000 in order to avoid Somali pirates. The question almost asks itself: they can't hire someone for the few days (surely shorter than 12 days) to protect the oil tankers while they pass by the parts of East Africa where pirates prey?

One possible answer is that shippers have traditionally depended on governments' militaries to subsidize them in the form of providing protection on the high seas, and assuming responsibility for protecting themselves in Somalia might open the Pandora's box of having to defend themselves elsewhere. Another explanation is that the subsidized protection has meant that the companies simply have never had to do it before, and they're not likely to have to do it much in the future – as the article notes, governments around the world are already getting together to protect the area at no cost to the shippers.

Somali pirates in the news again

Yet again, Somali pirates deliver a valuable lesson in political economy. The price of oil spiked this morning after the news broke that Somali pirates off the coast of Kenya had taken an oil supertanker ferrying 2 million barrels of oil through the treacherous waters. This is an excellent illustration of what a free market in oil (and, more importantly, sea transport) would look like: securing ships traveling across the globe is expensive. As it stands now, the US government (and governments around the world) effectively subsidizes the industry with their navies, ensuring safety for ships on the high seas. But this protection isn't free, and should be rightly counted as a subsidy for goods shipping internationally (such as crude oil).

For more on Somali piracy and what it can teach us about the world, see here. And for all my posts on Somalia (there's more than you'd think), click here.

A war deadlier than the war in Iraq is about to end

Just two days ago I wrote about the imminent demise of the US- and Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government of Somalia at the hands of Islamist rebel forces, but the post sort of rambled and didn't explain very well the significance of the event. The Somali Mogadishu politicians are squabbling over cabinet positions while rebels are "within a few kilometers of the city," playing Nero while Rome burns, and a little-known, but very bloody chapter in the war on terror is about to come to a close.

While no American troops were involved, money and training were provided by the US to Ethiopia in order to fight the recently-established Islamists in Somalia, and the public blessing of Ethiopia's mission by the State Department probably didn't hurt. The Bush administration viewed it as another front on the global war on terror, and took advantage of Ethiopia's presence in Somalia during the war to attack al-Qaeda leaders by air and ground.

The American financial obligation of $20 million might have paled in comparison to the trillions spent in Iraq, the rate of civilian deaths has been much higher. In total, about 10,000 civilians have been killed since Ethiopia invaded a little over two years ago and 1.9 million displaced, among a population of less than 4 million (60% of Somalia's 10 million official inhabitants live in breakaway unrecognized states that weren't threatened by the Ethiopian invasion). This compares to 100,000 civilians dead in Iraq since early 2003 and 4.7 million displaced among a population of 23 million (I excluded the 7 million Iraqis who live in Kurdistan, which the war has barely touched in terms of civilian deaths). In Afghanistan, there have been about 7,000 direct civilian deaths in seven years among a population of 32 million. That means that the per capita civilian death rate of the war in Somalia is higher than that of the Iraq war by about a third, and it beats out the Afghan war by at least an order of magnitude. And if what will be the sixth battle for Mogadishu is drawn out and deadly, this ratio could rise.

Like what is bound to happen in Afghanistan and Iraq, the proxy invasion of Somalia will have been an abject failure. The same Islamists that the Ethiopians chased out two years ago will be returning to power, but this time bringing along with them another possible civil war among the different Islamic factions to be fought before one of them emerges on top.

Update: The death toll appears to have surpassed 16,000 according to another report.

US/Ethiopian coalition in Somalia fails, Islamists advance

Somalia, yet again, is in turmoil. This time, the Islamists are advancing against Somalia's weak central government, the Transition Federal Government. And far from being a complicated and inexplicable basket case, the story of Somalia actually holds some pretty simple and important lessons: foreign governments cause problems and terrible regimes, while the international community's neglect allows capitalism to bring Somalis' living standards up.

The TFG was created in the mid-2000s as a response to Ethiopia's fear of any coherent state at all in Somalia, and the West's fear of radical Islam. At the time, the Islamic Courts Union was sweeping through the southern half of the country, and damn near took over the parts that hadn't already seceded. (Somaliland and Putland are de facto independent governments, and aren't at risk of collapse from the ICU, though they aren't the most stable regimes.) Ethiopia was understandably worried about Somali revanchism, as it won the Ogaden region from Somalia in a war of that same name in the late '70s, along with the four million Somalis on it that didn't flee into Somalia proper. The West had its own well-being in mind: it was afraid of Somalia becoming a hub for al-Qaeda and Islamic terrorism.

So as a result, the corrupt and ineffective TFG came into being. From what I understand, by now it doesn't have power at all outside of Mogadishu, and the Islamists are currently preparing for a battle there. The general objection to the Islamists is their strictness: the NYT cites the example of a teenager being stoned to death for adultery for reporting a rape. But this rigid interpretation of sharia is alien to most Somalis, especially the vast population of pastoralists who have very tight family and clan-based governance structures. Given the Somalis' distaste for non-autochthonous government (Michael van Notten wrote a fascinating book about the indigenous Somali law system), and the foreignness of Wahhabi Islam, it's unlikely that the Islamists could stay in power long without adapting. But anyway, we'll see now how long the Islamists last, as it looks like the Ethiopian- and American-backed TFG is about to crumble. It just would have been nicer if this were allowed to happen years ago, so that we could have avoided the intervening war.

This pattern of foreign intervention trying to create a state begetting horrific results in Somalia is not limited to the last decade. As early as the colonial period, the imperialists had a very difficult time getting Somalis to register and interact with the state, as their isolated pastoral culture kept them out of coastal towns for the most part. The brief democratic post-colonial period was a failure, because even though it was Somali in its conception, it was the conception of the Westernized Somali diaspora and elite, not of the prevailing Somali culture. The descent into dictatorship and the horrific experiment with Siad Barre's "scientific socialism" again can be seen as a result of foreign powers interfering, with Somalia being a pawn in the proxy war between America and the Soviet Union. First by the USSR, and then to some extent by the US (though not really), Siad Barre was allowed to go on with his destructive domestic policy. Luckily, détente eroded his power and the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the nightmare, as the government collapsed for good. A brutal civil war broke out, and when Barre was finally deposed, a power vacuum led to a nasty competition over who would be heir to the Somali state. The US and international community got involved in 1992 but failed miserably, and only prolonged the civil war. This conflict was rooted in Barre's discriminatory policy towards other clans – it was a war that was destined to be fought.

From then up until the early 2000s, vast expanses of Somalia were more or less stateless. And yet, in many ways its people fared better than those in neighboring African states that had governments, as well as doing better than during the Barre state. The best thing for the West to do right now would be to vow not to interfere anymore in Somalia, and promise to stand by idly if the country is broken up into even smaller factions. Dictators and would-be governments are only egged on by the prevailing nation state norm, and know that if they can establish themselves in power, the international community will help them stay there. But the West should make sure to get out of the mindset that a stable central government is necessary for peace and economic development in Somalia.

Criminal heroes

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for criminals who expose government malfeasance. In recent news we have two good cases of this: the first are the Somali pirates who unknowingly tried to ransom (and seem to be succeeding) off a ship transporting weaponry from the Ukrainian government to probably rebels from South Sudan, in contravention of an agreement that ended (but apparently not for long) the decades long Sudanese civil war.

The second example of the noble criminal (I guess the pirates weren't actually that noble – they didn't realize they'd be exposing such a scandal) is the kid who hacked into Sarah Palin's e-mail account. Unfortunately, he's been arrested and is in the process of being indicted by a grand jury, but without his adept hacking (well, more like Google fu), the world would never know that Sarah Palin kept a secret e-mail account, which she used to communicate with people about government matters in contravention of laws that require that all written communication about government matters be archived (and released at some point). Since Palin never told anybody about the account, obviously she wasn't planning on turning over the e-mail contents at any point. Or at least so thought an Alaska judge when he ordered Palin to recover and save all of the e-mails kept in these previously-secret accounts.

Pirates shed some light on energy geopolitics

The ongoing stand-off between Somali pirates who hijacked a Ukrainian freighter loaded with weaponry and US warships likely isn't going to end in a $20 million ransom like the pirates want. However, what's more interesting is what's on the ship, where it's going, and who it came from. What's on the ship, we know: "tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition." Where it's going, though, gets a bit more interesting:

Kenyan officials continued to maintain that the weapons aboard were part of a legitimate arms deal for the Kenyan military, even though several Western diplomats, Somali officials and the pirates themselves said the arms were part of a secret deal to funnel the weapons to southern Sudan.

The Kenyan government's insistence that the weapons are for its own use doesn't hold water: the Kenyan military is trained by Western forces, and has not received the training necessary to use Russian tanks (which the equipment onboard was), according to Voice of America. The southern region of Sudan, however, holds two distinctions that make it likely that that's where the weapons were heading: it was the site of the most deadly war since World War II, and has vast oil resources. The Second Sudanese Civil War raged for over twenty years, and though it officially ended in 2005, the fighting persists and the conflict could reignite at any time. The uneasy treaty stipulated that the South is to be autonomous until 2011, when a referendum on independence will take place.

Which brings us to last question: where did the weapons come from? According to the VOA article, southern Sudan receives weapons from both the US and Russia, though given that the US isn't going along with the Kenyan story about the destination of the weapons, it seems likely that the Russian weapons aboard the Ukrainian ship came instead from Russia. Given that they were destined for an oil-filled region brimming with instability, it seems likely that this is part of the Kremlin's broader plan to destabilize oil- and gas-producing regions in order to raise the price of energy and feed the Russian petrostate's need for high oil prices.

Possible false flag operations in Somalia

The NYT today has a story about Somalia and the recent spate of violence against aid workers, both foreign and domestic. At least twenty have been killed this year alone, something that is apparently unprecedented in the two decades since the collapse of the Siad Barre regime. But the funny thing about the killings is that no one can quite figure out who's behind them. Though the attacks are apparently committed by radical Islamists, the groups claiming responsibility are little known. The government maintains that the Islamists are behind it, though they have a good reason to present that picture: the current federal government was put into place on the back of an American-backed, Ethiopian-led invasion of the country that drove the Islamic Courts Union out of power in 2006. But not everyone buys it:

Some Western security analysts theorize that in the violent murkiness that has overtaken the country, unsavory elements within the Somali government may be killing aid workers to discredit Islamist opposition groups and draw in United Nations peacekeepers, who may be the government’s last hope for survival.

The government admits that it desperately needs peacekeepers. But it denies that it is attacking aid workers to get them.

“It’s obvious who’s doing this,” said Abdi Awaleh Jama, a Somali ambassador at large. “It’s hard-liner Islamists who hate the West. They are forces of darkness, not forces of light.”

Considering that foreign intervention in Somalia is always a not-too-distant possibility, and that the current regime was installed by fiat, this theory isn't as crazy as it seems. The scepter of al-Qaeda led the Americans and Ethiopians to invade and expel the ICU two years ago, so hey, maybe it will work again.

Here's the archive of my posts about Somalia, everyone's favorite failed state, which includes a pretty long post I wrote taking the media to task for their uncritical look at how Somalia's fared since it descended into statelessness twenty years ago.

America's irrational energy incentives

CleanTechnica, a blog about...clean tech...has a post up about the perverse incentives that American energy producers face thanks to government regulation. The thesis of the article – a guest post by Sean Casten, CEO of a green energy company – is that electricity generation hasn't improved in efficiency since 1957 because the government has been removing the incentives to generate energy cheaply and efficiently. It's a pretty bold claim, and he only backs it up with two examples: regulation that forces companies to take profits only on capital costs, and the Clean Air Act (which one, it's unclear) which mandates specific technologies that may not actually be that effective at reducing overall air pollution. It's an interesting read, though I feel entirely unqualified to judge the veracity of some of its claims (though they jibe with what I'd expect). However, the part about regulation forcing companies to make money only on capital costs is pretty easy to understand:

Our century-old electric regulatory model pays utilities a return on their capital investment, but compels them to pass along all operating costs to consumers at zero mark-up. This creates a great incentive to build capital-intensive boondoggles. It completely isolates electric utilities from the economic principles that drive “normal” businesses, wherein capital and operating cost reductions are a route to greater profits. This has conspired to make our electric sector openly hostile to efficient power generation. It explains why their efficiency hasn’t moved since 1957, and why that sector now accounts for 42% of US CO₂ emissions.

Some questions I have: Is the US the only country to do this, or are there others? Are there any countries that adopt a more laissez-faire approach to energy generation (leaving aside Somalia), and who achieve better efficiency in energy production because of it? And what are the interests that keep this system in place, or has it kept going on sheer inertia?

Living on $4/day and owning a cell phone

There's an excellent article in this coming weekend's NY Times Magazine in which a reporter follows around a "human-behavior researcher" or "user anthropologist" at Nokia. Basically, he travels around the world to discover how people use their phones and what Nokia could do to make them sell better. His work mainly is focused on the Third World, it being the place with the largest untapped market for cell phones. It's full of fascinating anecdotes, and reminds you of the power of something that seems as benign as a cell phone. There's a lot that's fascinating about this article, but this is what I found the most intriguing:

One of the most remarkable findings was that even very poor families invested a significant amount of money in the I.C.T. category — information-communication technology, which, according to Al Hammond, the study’s principal author, can include money spent on computers or land-line phones, but in this segment of the population that’s almost never the case. What they’re buying, he says, are cellphones and airtime, usually in the form of prepaid cards. Even more telling is the finding that as a family’s income grows — from $1 per day to $4, for example — their spending on I.C.T. increases faster than spending in any other category, including health, education and housing. “It’s really quite striking,” Hammond says. “What people are voting for with their pocketbooks, as soon as they have more money and even before their basic needs are met, is telecommunications.”

The fact that one would be surprised at the spending habit's of another seems obvious: human desire and exchange is complex, so complex that we cannot hope to possibly be able to understand it all. This is precisely the reason that communism could never work even under the most helpful conditions: no one can possibly allocate goods as well as the market. And yet, in development, people are so often focused on introducing certain things into people's lives, be it safe drinking water of access to healthcare. And yet, when people make decisions with their own money, they spend it on cell phone minutes!

Also, this makes me feel more optimistic about Somalia, because despite its so-often derided status as a stateless wasteland, it has some of the cheapest calling rates and competitive telecom markets in Africa.

Whither, Somalia?

In continuing with my favorite topic, Somalia, I noticed a story on the nytimes.com about Somalia. Normally stories about Somalia are about some failed initiative or outbreak of violence between government/non-government troops, but they don't really do justice to the smallness of the the power of the "government." This story does – it says that the government lives on $19 million per annum (the rest siphoned away from corruption). And it alludes to the fact that the Transitional Federal Government doesn't control much land, but doesn't do justice to the situation by stating that "in many ways, Somalia is not a state at all, but more a lawless space between its neighbors and the sea." That's a gross simplification – much of the land (especially the produce urban areas) are under the control of governments, just not the federal government. Nomadic Somalis follow the xeer, the same code they've followed since before the Europeans. Northern Somalia is divided among the governments of Somaliland and Puntland, with weak albeit present reach. They are much less violent than the south, and for the most part have been since the start of anarchy around 1990. And anyway, the conflict is not among the traditional nomads of Somalia, but rather between invading forces and their reactions, the Islamists.

Correctly, the Times points out the failed policies of American intervention, UN intervention, and American-backed Ethiopian intervention (the current demon). However, it's reflecting only its own ignorance when it declares that "[t]he looming failure is making many people here and abroad question the strategy of installing the transitional government by force." The implication is that there was some doubt in Somalis' minds as to what any form of government, imposed by locals or foreigners, would be like for them. Somali businessmen don't have ideological commitments and consistently side with whoever will protect their business, and would be impossible to capture in the form of a permanent tax base. Somalis haven't supported the colonial powers, diaspora-backed political democracy, American-backed dictatorship, Soviet-backed dictatorship, UN-backed political democracy, or American/Ethiopian-backed political democracy. At the moment the Islamists have sway, but that seems to be a reaction to the Ethiopian invasion. Given the history and the relative mildness of Somali Islam, the Somalis would likely chafe under the Islamists if the Ethiopians withdrew.

Finally, the Times makes the eternal Somali gaffe, when it implies that anarchy in Somalia has been brutally worse than under Siad Barre and scientific socialism in the decades before: "Sometimes it seems that if anything binds this country together, it is scar tissue." This is nonsense – the Somalis have an incredibly rich culture and civilization, with a functioning and unique justice system and generally growing wealth. According to a paper called "Better off Stateless" by Peter Leeson published in 2006, key indicators of welfare in Somali have largely risen in the period since the collapse of Siad Barre's state. Infant mortality is down, underweight births per capita declined 80%, extreme poverty is down more than 15 percentage points, and access to sanitation and healthcare is up significantly. Somalia has cheap, accessible, and competitive internet and mobile phone markets as well as competitive private low-cost air carriers. Education is relatively well-provisioned by the private market, and Somalia now has a higher university enrollment than under the Barre regime.

The Times and the media in general must emerge from their paradigmatic shell of always looking to governments for indicators of society. While this might work okay in Western countries where much of the civil and social discourse is in some way filtered through government, the model breaks down for countries like Somalia where foreign and non-governmental entities and institutions are much more important to ordinary Somalis than the supposed central government.

Anarchy in Somalia on Wikipedia

Last semester I wrote a paper about anarchy in Somalia, and I remember reading the Anarchy in Somalia article – there were a few citations, but it wasn't really that helpful. But I went back today, and it really has gotten a lot better. There are a lot more quotes, and some more indications of what's going on today. So, hats off to you, (not so) anonymous Wikipedians!