This chapter examines post–Cold War debates in the United States over the US Army’s participation in peacekeeping operations. Peacekeeping missions may have been a central concern of the US Army in the 1990s, but they also exposed deeper fissures within the Army and broader American society about the organisation’s proper role and the sort of attributes that American soldiers would need in the twenty-first century. Army leaders and personnel deployed on peacekeeping operations struggled to articulate which martial values best applied to peacekeeping. Political commentators tended to be much less ambivalent about peacekeeping, with some neoconservative observers enthusiastic about using such operations to practice ‘soft’ skills that would be useful in later wars, while most conservatives displayed a deep antipathy for such interventions, arguing that they corroded valuable warfighting skills and were symptomatic of an Army that had lost its way. For the few liberal commentators engaged in debates over Army policy, peacekeeping operations represented an opportunity to showcase American values and even to promote a deeper connection between the US military and broader American society.

Whereas rents in conquest petrostates have been a source of relatively peaceful authoritarianism, this has not been the case in many Muslim countries that do not produce oil. Muslim non-oil producers – many of whom were also exposed to the institutional legacy of Muslim conquest – have tended to experience more frequent and violent political upheaval since the 1960s. This chapter leverages a quasi-natural experiment of oil price driven foreign aid disbursements to show that buoyant levels of foreign aid receipts strengthened dictatorship in Muslim non-oil producers, but their subsequent decline led to heightened political instability in the form of civil war. However, despite this greater political upheaval (during periods of lower aid inflows), Muslim recipients remained staunchly non-democratic

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This is the first of two chapters to take a closer look at Sub-Saharan Africa, which is both the world’s least-industrialized and ethnically most-diverse continent. I start here with an examination of Somalia and Uganda, which are both states which have seen low levels of industrialization and an increase in ethnic fractionalization in recent decades. In Somalia the lack of formal sector job creation in the 1970s and 1980s contributed both to the collapse of the state along clan lines and a shift by which Somalia has gone from being considered one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Africa to one of the most diverse, as the salience of clan identity has risen in order to allow citizens to gain access to land and livelihoods. In Uganda a failure to create structural transformation has led to increased competition for land, leading individuals to utilize their often newly formed ethnic identities to claim ownership and title over rural land. I provide evidence from a variety of local land conflicts that revolve around ethnicity, as well as ongoing debates around both the listing of ’indigenous communities’ in Uganda’s constitution and the creation of new districts.

Drought is a complex phenomenon with a long-lasting global impact on human society and natural ecosystems suggesting the need for greater attention to its underlaying causes. Here, we evaluated drought conditions in ESK (Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya) countries of East Africa during 1964–2015. We evaluate the severe droughts that occurred during 1973–1974, 1984–1985 and 2010–2011 in ESK, based on the drought severity levels. Results show that the drought characteristic parameters of drought duration and intensity increase over time, but drought frequency does not. Higher spatial drought trends were observed in large areas of the ESK countries with mean trend values of 0.0064, 0.0028, 0.00064 and -0.00095 yr–1 for SPEI-1, SPEI-3, SPEI-6 and SPEI-12, respectively. The total land area of the ESK under drought was 38–43, 46–80 and 25–46 per cent during 1973–1974, 1984–1985 and 2010–2011, respectively. Dire drought impacts have affected northeastern and southern Ethiopia, eastern Somalia and northeastern Kenya during the drought years. The spatial drought pattern analysis suggests an increase in drought in vulnerable areas which calls for better drought management strategies to reduce the risks on the natural and human systems.

This chapter explores why, in the wake of similar exposure to drought in the 2010s, Somalia experienced a famine but Ethiopia did not. I also use within-case analysis to explain why Ethiopia experienced a famine in the mid-1980s but not in the 2010s.

This chapter chronicles military incursions on behalf of humanity into Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans twice to feed the starving, restore democracy, and rescue populations from annihilation. These altruistic missions, known as “military operations other than war,” or MOOTW (pronounced as “moot-wah”) were viewed skeptically by the traditionally minded Pentagon brass. They regarded MOOTW as a diversion from real soldiering. But troops died in them. George H. W. Bush committed US forces, under United Nations auspices, to Somalia so as to distribute food to the starving Somalis in their volatile and violent land. This humanitarian mission led to a bloody skirmish in Mogadishu during William J. Clinton’s presidency that politically humiliated America. Also in 1993, a military junta in Haiti ousted the democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When desperate Haitians landed on American beaches, Clinton tried sanctions to restore Aristide. Then he militarily invaded the Caribbean nation to put defrocked Catholic priest back in power. Sobered by the “Mog” firefight, Clinton refused to help halt the bloodbath in Rwanda. He could not avoid the raging war in the Balkans to rescue Bosnian Muslims from Serbia in the worst conflict since World War II. In 1995, Washington corralled Britain, France, and other NATO members into bombing the Serbs and then occupying Bosnia to preserve the peace. Next, the tiny Muslim-dominated province of Kosovo erupted against its Serb overlords. A three-month sustained bombing campaign compelled Serbia to surrender.

States usually intervene in failed states for broader strategic or humanitarian motives. However, chapter 6 uses Somalia, the Democratic Repblic of Congo (DRC), and South Sudan to show that most African interveners lent their support to one side or the other in these lawless lands in the pursuit of their own interests. In the DRC, external interveners were primarily interested in looting rather than in Congo’s stability. In Somalia, Ethiopia switched from hostile to supportive military interventions in an attempt to dampen Islamist influence while also creating a weak transitional government it could easily manipulate. Kenya and Eritrea, in contrast, intervened in order to establish a strong Somali state capable of counterbalancing Ethiopia’s hegemonic aspirations in the horn of Africa. Unlike the first two cases, South Sudan did not experience multiple military interventions despite encountering similar conditions. This negative case is the result of Ethiopia’s restraint from taking any military action to support its kin, the Nuer, because it feared upsetting the ethnic balance in its eastern region. Results from qualitative comparative analysis show that most African interveners are motivated to dispatch their militaries to failed states by the presence of prominent roles, rebel sanctuaries, lootable resources, and domestic pressures.

In Majerteenia in the nineteenth century, violence – once the exception in inter-state relations in the region – evolved into a diplomatic strategy that could be instrumentalised for political and financial gain. Chapter 2 reconstructs a series of confrontations between British colonial officials and the rulers of north-eastern Somalia over Somali attacks on seaborne and wrecked ships. The Majerteen coastal elites engaged in a cycle of attacking shipwrecks and signing treaties with the British colonial rulers in Aden to increase regional recognition for their rights as coastal rulers. As the nineteenth century wore on, the British reneged on their promises, relied on duress in negotiations, and engaged in double-dealing with Sultan Uthman’s political rivals, especially a regional governor named Yusuf ‘Ali. Their treaty relations with the British echoed but modified existing agreements with other port-rulers in the region, including the Hadhramis, the Omanis and the Ottomans. By the end of the century, the Majerteen Sultanate would be split in two, carved into mutually antagonistic northern and southern spheres which continue to this day to be rivals, as can be witnessed in the tensions over the extent of Puntland and Galmudug federal states jurisdictions.

The first part of this chapter examines deep-rooted, diplomatic traditions of courtly exchange, international coexistence and commercial cooperation centred around the Majerteen Sultanate in north-eastern Somalia. A network of regional diplomacy first emerged for the purposes of managing shipwrecks and facilitating trade during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The Majerteen Sultanate emerged in the eighteenth century and played a critical role in the north-east Africa’s foreign affairs, presiding over a cooperative system of international relations which promoted domestic political stability and protected maritime commerce. Having reconstructed the contours of a regional culture of maritime law and international relations, the second part of the chapter tells the story of the first contacts between Majerteenia and British colonists, a few years after the East India Company’s settlement of the port of Aden in 1839. Early Anglo-Majerteen interactions mirrored the well-established regional model of diplomacy, in which regional rulers created alliances and offered one another mutual recognition as sovereigns. But as the century wore on, British officials became increasingly belligerent; the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the increase in steam traffic tested international relations and the regional maritime framework.

The colonial history of the southern Red Sea region is strewn with the bodies of victims of maritime violence. The chapter introduces the three case studies explored in this study: Majerteenia in north-eastern Somalia, the Zaraniq from Tihamat Yemen in the south-western Arabian Peninsula, and Henry de Monfreid in French Somaliland. The chapter further examines the backstory to a more competitive, adversarial approach to international relations and maritime law, observing that the European culture of international law and international relations prioritised private property rights over international cooperation. Strong ideas about private property rights and competition for influence set the stage for conflict with the southern Red Sea’s more cooperative approach to maritime space and international relations.

This chapter examines the nature of modern piracy and its impact on the human rights of seafarers taken hostage. By evaluating some of the key counter-piracy measures of the international community, this chapter shows that significant attention has been paid to the protection of the human rights of arrested pirates while the suffering of seafarers has been overlooked. This has been an inevitable outcome of the emphasis that states have been placing on criminal law enforcement measures. The use of force, arrest, detention and prosecution of pirate suspects entail risks of human rights violations, which the international community acknowledged and sought to prevent. This, however, has detracted attention from the need to protect the victims of piracy whose human rights continue to be marginalised.

In 2013, I traveled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to meet a senior government minister from Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG). He had recently left Mogadishu and I asked him to reflect on his years working to rebuild Somalia’s government, his successes and failures, the country’s legal development, and what the Islamic Courts Union and a series of failed international humanitarian interventions had left behind. He spoke about his country’s legacies of colonialism, violence, democracy, and authoritarian rule; his political strategies; and his struggle to survive attacks from militants who claimed shari‘a as their inspiration.

In postcolonial Muslim-majority contexts, particularly in areas struggling with political violence, achieving the ideal of the rule of law is straightforward neither in theory nor in practice. Plural and overlapping legal orders – derived from Islamic principles, from the traditions of indigenous communities, and from the laws and institutions imported by colonial administrators or foreign aid workers and managed by postcolonial state leaders – shape how citizens come to understand different values associated with legal order. In these states, common ideals and shared visions of what law is and how it should work are scarce. Litigants may shop around among different legal systems (each one derived from an amalgam of traditions) for a desired outcome of their disputes, as they are pulled in one direction or another by family members, religious and community leaders, and lawyers.