Somalia: Economy without State

Abstract

Little (anthropology, Univ. of Kentucky) shows how since 1991, Somalia has adapted to a freewheeling, stateless capitalism. As in other collapsed African states, the borders between war and peace, official and unofficial, and legal and illegal are fuzzy, especially for pastoralists. Moreover, like Terrance Ranger (The Invention of Tribalism in Zimbabwe, 1985), Little sees ethnicity and clanism as created, manifested, combined, and reconstituted in struggles for political and economic benefits. In the 1990s, the UN and allied parties contributed to the proliferation of clan and subclan by elevating their significance in allocating resources. In some instances, to increase power disguised militia leaders or warlords became elders and their followers clans. Little's thorough, clearly written, and well-organized book is a treat for scholars. His study combines an economic anthropology of Somalian herding and trading communities; explanations of how people survive in failed states and who wins and who loses; how people organize their financial transactions without a central bank; the growth of telecommunications facilities and financial stability amid a collapsed state; how conflict contributes to the decline of major urban areas; and how all these have been affected by the US-led war on terror. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through professional collections.