Sarah G Phillips - When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland

I am enormously grateful to the many Somalilanders who so kindly offered me their time and wisdom in coming to grips with the political contours of their fascinating country. Somaliland is a small place, and the level of interest that it generates from foreign researchers is relatively high, meaning that Somalilanders (particularly those fluent in English and based in Hargeisa) spend a lot of time and energy helping to familiarize each of us. This level of generosity is widely remarked upon and extremely appreciated. Special thanks are due (in alphabetical order) to Adan Abokor, Mustafa Awad, Hassan Bulbul, Ahmed Dualeh, Mohamed Dualeh, Weli Egal, Mohamed Fadal, Khadra Omer Hassan, Abdirahman Hussein, Jama Musse Jama, Abdulkadir Omar, Khadar Omar, and Abdifattah Ahmed Yusuf. I hope that I have faithfully applied the many lessons I learned from each of you and, if I havent, the responsibility is entirely my own.

Mark Bradbury at the Rift Valley Institute was very helpful in putting me in touch with people in Hargeisa as I began my research there. Jama Musse Jama organized a public talk for me at the Hargeisa Cultural Centre in 2015 where the insightful comments from the audience gave me much to reflect upon. Particular thanks are due to Mohamed Ahmed Ali (Amin), who made the fieldwork as fun as it was informative. I will never look at passport application procedures, personal security protocols, or mobile phone use in the same way. As always, I must single out two giants in my intellectual life, Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani and Adrian Leftwich, who helped me not only to think better but also (hopefully) to be kinder.

I have had some wonderful research assistants throughout the life of this project, and I would like to thank Mohamed Ahmed Ali, Aishwarrya Balaji, Ahmed Dualeh, Chrisanthi Giotis, Eda Gunaydin, Barkhad Kaariye, and Melinda Rankin for their great work and friendship. Thanks also to my colleagues in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney for making the office a happy and supportive place to be. Roger Haydon at Cornell University Press is an incredible editor and I am very grateful to him, the rest of the editorial team at Cornell, and to the anonymous peer reviewers for their incisive comments on previous drafts of this book.

The Developmental Leadership Program generously funded the first phase of this research, and the Australian Research Council (DE130101468; DP130103966) funded its subsequent phases. Without their support, this work could not have been conducted.

Parts of chapters 2, 3, and 4 have been adapted from a working paper that I published with the Developmental Leadership Program in late 2013. Some of the material throughout this book (particularly in the introduction and chapter 5) has been adapted from Sarah G. Phillips, 2019, Proximities of Violence: Civil Order beyond Governance Institutions, International Studies Quarterly 63, no. 3: 68091. (Republished by permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.) Parts of chapter 1 and the conclusion have been adapted from Sarah G. Phillips, 2020 (forthcoming), The Localisation of Harm: Why Local-Context Based Approaches to Poverty and Insecurity Still Tinker in the Margins, Australian Journal of International Affairs. Some passages about the influence of Sheekh School have been adapted from Sarah G. Phillips, 2016, When Less Was More: External Assistance and the Political Settlement in Somaliland, International Affairs 92, no. 3: 62945. Some of the primary interviews and analysis about piracy in Somaliland are adapted from Justin V. Hastings and Sarah G. Phillips, 2018, Order beyond the State: Explaining Somalilands Avoidance of Maritime Piracy, Journal of Modern African Studies 56, no. 1: 530, and are reproduced with permission.

Finally, I am so lucky to have had Hamish with me throughout this project. His happy acceptance of honeymoon travel to Somaliland and Yemen confirmed what I already knew. Torben and Maxwell came along a bit later and also helped in their own wonderful (if not always immediately obvious) ways.

Somalilands postcolonial, pre-independence period (19601991)

Somalilands key formative period (19912001)