ABSTRACT

Political violence has uninterruptedly afflicted Somalia since its independence. That amounts to 60 years of uninterrupted conflict, quite a record in contemporary history. For that reason, Somalia has been considered as one of the epitomes of what is known as an intractable conflict and Intractable Conflict Theory (ICT) has used the country as a laboratory to test its frameworks. However, we contend that systemic and very overarching frameworks such as ICT are not very useful to understand the intractability of Somalia’s conflict. This paper proposes instead a historically grounded structural-processual analysis that explains the conflict as the result of the chronological accumulation and dysfunctional overlapping of several sets of structures an actors within Somalia’s society itself and the Horn of Africa leading to the creation of very deep fault lines that create a criss-crossed fabric of conflicting interests, separating and pitting social actors against each other.

摘要

自索马里独立以来，政治暴力就不间断地困扰着索马里。这相当于60年的不间断冲突，在当代历史上是相当可观的记录。因此，索马里被认为是所谓的顽固冲突的缩影之一，而顽固冲突理论（ICT）则以该国为实验室对其框架进行测试。但是，我们认为，诸如信息和通信技术之类的系统性，非常全面的框架对于理解索马里冲突的顽固性不是很有用。