15 October 2009

By George Grant

In the world's most comprehensively failed state, top-down, statist solutions are destined to fail, and this has been the main flaw with the approach to Somalia's problems to date. A president is installed, though he has virtually nothing over which to preside; state institutions are put in place, though there is not a state within which they can operate, and alliances are cobbled together in an attempt to heal wounds, neglectful of of the very real grievences that started the bleeding in the first place.

Yet there are bodies within Somalia, notably Somaliland and Puntland, that have succeeded in providing their citizens with a good measure of peace and normality. It is time the international community began to give these sub-state actors its full support, and abandon the outmoded notion that the central government in Mogadishu is "the only game in town".

4 November 2009

By George Grant

The news coincided with a visit to the United Kingdom by Somalia’s Prime Minister, Omar Sharmarke, who duly met with the couple’s relatives to assure them his administration “will not rest until we see the freedom of this couple”. At a meeting earlier that day he went further still, pledging to eradicate Somali piracy completely by 2011.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that Prime Minister Sharmarke is in no position to be making such bold and unrealistic promises. Likewise, the evidence to date suggests that the hugely costly international armada deployed to combat piracy has been largely ineffective relative to its size. Much the most sensible course, if meaningful progress is to be made on this issue, would be to the administration in Puntland, from where the vast majority of pirates operate, with the capacity to clamp down on the pirates on land at the same time as providing them with meaningful alternative livelihoods.