Reconstructing Global Security and Peacebuilding in Somalia’s Changing Context

Abstract

Understood from the backdrop of global security contradictions, the current analysis highlights the Somali decades-old political predicament as a consequence of Cold War global security frameworks and clan-based power struggles in the country. With extensive reliance on qualitative methods of data collection and analysis, explicitly document review, the chapter argues that the collapse of the Somalia state authority in 1991 was partly due to extreme global and Africa’s security shifts whose effects we still see today. Results suggest that the foundations of Somalia’s civil war define the profound transformations in the intricate sources of global security challenges in Africa shaped by a changing global order. As a contextually failed state, prudently undermining peacebuilding initiatives in Somalia were forces comprising interclan violence, global military deployments, maritime piracy, and terrorist viciousness, mostly featuring high levels of foreign engineered restructuring of Africa’s security landscape. Nonetheless, the fundamental dynamics that have driven global insecurity and undermined peacebuilding efforts in Somalia have largely been international, regional, and internal. The latter anchored in clan-based vicious struggles for political power. Thus, the A.U. initiatives for global security and peacebuilding are enormously substantial. The A.U.’s efforts through AMISOM constitute apposite interventions to design Africa’s security and peacebuilding networks on the African continent. The chapter recommends a multifaceted global security cooperation regime to reinforce A.U. institutions to contribute to the efforts to reconstruct Africa’s voice in its security policy framework and peacebuilding initiatives.