Warlordism and terrorism: how to obscure an already confusing crisis? The case of Somalia
✍ Scribed by ROLAND MARCHAL
- Book ID
- 111080345
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 122 KB
- Volume
- 83
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0020-5850
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Civil wars are dirty wars, and as they progress their complexity increases. To make sense of these confl icts, considerable knowledge and understanding of the political background are needed. In addressing this challenge, donors, media commentators and academics continue to frame new concepts-or sometimes, more accurately, new buzzwords: among those that have become prominent over the past decade are 'complex emergencies', 'failed' (nowadays 'fragile') states, 'warlord' and 'terrorism'. To what extent have these catchphrases contributed to a deeper understanding of the situation and better policy responses? Do they tell us more about western perceptions of civil confl icts than about the complex set of problems those confl icts generate? 1 This article focuses on two such terms-'warlordism' and 'terrorism'-primarily within the context of events in Somalia, although some observations have wider relevance. In conceptualizing 'new' wars, as they have come to be known, 2 those notions became popular among academics as well as aid organizations and journalists. A fuller understanding of contemporary discourses on them would usefully draw on methodologies developed by Richard Jackson. 3 At the same time, the eff ects of these notions are, to an extent, context-specifi c, and the current discussion will limit itself to a more modest frame of analysis.The purpose here is not to ascertain whether alleged warlords and terrorists care about the academic defi nition of their activities (although the testimony of Charles Taylor, now under custody in The Hague, might provide new insights on this subject). It is to analyse how these expressions have contributed to building what Michel Foucault called a 'regime of truth': vocabulary, assumptions, labels and narratives that function to select and interpret events, emphasizing some and disregarding many others. They become part of a 'symbolic technology' that 1 Examples of such western perceptions might include an emphasis on the bureaucratic dimension of the state, a profound disgust for primary violence (a laser bomb looks less violent than a machete), a set of moral values that make war a crime, an apolitical vision of most confl icts as disconnected from ideological vision, and so on. 2 Mary Kaldor, Old and new wars: organized violence in a global era (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). For a critique, see Roland Marchal and Christine Messiant, 'Les guerres civiles à l'heure de la globalisation', Critique internationale 18, janvier 2003, http://www.ceri-sciences-po.org/cerifr/publica/critique/critique.php#1, accessed 28 August 2007. 3 Richard Jackson, Writing the war on terrorism: language, politics and counterterrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).