CALL FOR PAPERS


‘The Globalization(s) of the conflict in Somalia’

24th-25th March 2010

Two decades ago, the collapse of the Somalian government of Siad Barre coincided with the rise of a new vision of global order: liberal, democratic, capitalist and under the leadership of the United States. US troops entered Mogadishu in the same year that Francis Fukuyama pronounced the ‘End of History’. Today, such visions seem gone forever. The liberal, free market system of the Washington Consensus is in ruins and the United Nations is once again paralysed by great power rivalries at the top table. And yet the transnational forces which lay behind the global visions of the 1990s are far from dead: if anything, they are stronger than ever. An, yet again, Somalia stands at a nexus of these global trends. In a place where dreams of the US as world policeman met with their first, ominous setback, continuing anarchy is providing a playground as well as a battlefield for competing forces of transnational scope. In 2009, Somalia is becoming the venure for a squabble of globalisations, the outcome of which may have much to tell us about the shape of things to come.

This conference will explore how the plurality of transnational forces is helping to shape the conflict in Somalia – and how Somalia, in turn, is bring its internal conflicts and contradictions to the world stage: from transnational organised crime to the transnational diaspora community; from international NGOs to international terrorist movement; from neo-fundamentalist Islam to neo-liberal economics.

Update (26/1/2010) - the provisional programme is now available for viewing