Contemporary state dissidences. War, internationalization and informal development in Somaliland

Abstract

The expression “somalization” seems to have, at the turn of the century, completely replaced the old term “balkanization”, commonly used in the XIX and XX century, to describe a situation of instability, disorder, anarchy, sectarian in-fights, towards which many international crises (Syria, Libya, Mali, Afghanistan… the list is quite long) are apparently leaning. The article analyses from an ethnographic perspective the social landscape of one of these new stateless areas, namely a region within Somalia, and tries to highlight, rather than the disconnection and the exception of these zones, the various ways in which they are connected to the surrounding State system. The cross-border informal trade and the overlapping between the flow of people, money and goods, are in this case-study taken into account in order to show the profound ambiguities and contradictions of these forms of relationships. Regional dynamics that interweave goods’ and people’s trajectories, that nourish real and ideological borders, that put into contact or separate local social actors in forms that are irreconcilable with the macro-discourses founded on the risk of religious or sectarian radicalization are here proposed as determinant factors in understanding the pathways towards conflict or towards peace emerging in the grey zones of the international system.