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Afyare Abdi Elmi. Understanding the Somalia Conflagration: Identity, Political Islam, andPeacebuilding. Oxford: Pluto Press, 2010. xvii +193 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00. Cloth. $35.00. Paper.
Markus Hoehne and Virginia Luling, eds. Milk and Peace, Drought and War: Somali Culture, Society and Politics: Essays in Honour of I. M. Lewis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. xi + 437 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00. Cloth.
The field of Somali studies has been shaped to a remarkable degree by I. M. Lewis's lineage-based structural paradigm and more recently by the "collapsed state" conceptual frame. Hoehne and Luling have edited an excellent set of essays that revisits Lewis's paradigm while simultaneously finding innovative ways to draw fresh ideas from standard texts. Elmi's monograph draws in part from the tradition of searching for the root causes and possible solutions to the problem of state collapse in Somalia. These two works suggest that while "clan-based politics" and "state collapse" are deeply problematic concepts, they have an enormous influence in contemporary scholarship on Somalia.
Elmi promises to take a fresh look at the story of Somalia's collapse, and the monograph does a good job in tracing the general story and specifically in incorporating the historical dynamics of political Islam. As is common to most accounts by regional specialists, he emphasizes endogenous dynamics behind state collapse. Counterterrorism policies advocated by Washington and Addis Ababa, Elmi argues, benefit the Islamists by allowing them...