Somali Ventures in China: Trade and Mobility in a Transnational Economy

peer reviewedResearch on Somali mobility and migration has predominantly focused on forced migration from Somalia and diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America, neglecting other experiences and destinations. This article traces the journeys of Somali traders from East Africa to China, mapping the growth of a transnational trading economy that has offered a stable career path to a few but a chance to scrape by for many others. Understandings of migration and mobility must encompass these precarious terrains, allowing for a richer examination of how individuals have navigated war, displacement, and political and economic change by investing in transnational livelihoods, not just via ties to the West, but through the myriad connections linking African economies to the Gulf and Asia.Border Crossing, Trade and Trus

Rendering difference visible: The Kenyan state and its somali citizens

peer reviewedThis article examines the history of Somalis in Kenya. It argues that the precarious citizenship status of Kenyan Somalis is rooted in the institutionalization of state power in Kenya and the ways in which social relations have mediated that power. It focuses on a screening exercise organized by the Kenyan government in 1989 to differentiate citizens from non-citizens. Somalis deemed non-citizens were detained and deported while those declared citizens were granted pink 'certificates of verification'. The exercise was framed as a response to disorder and insecurity in northern Kenya - problems blamed on the increased presence of 'aliens' from Somalia. The 1989 screening is a useful lens for understanding how the institutions of the Kenyan state have negotiated and produced citizenship. First, the screening shows how citizenship is an arena for both inter- and intra-ethnic competition; the way specific social relations are embedded within the structures of the state affects the distribution of rights and resources among different groups of citizens. Second, the organization of the screening reveals that public debates about citizenship in Kenya have not just been about drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, but about which insiders belong to which territorial spaces. © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved

Generating power: electricity provision and state formation in Somaliland

The dissertation uses the lens of electricity provision to examine processes of state formation in Somaliland, an unrecognized, self-declared independent state in the northwest of the former Somali Republic. The dissertation focuses on Hargeisa, the capital city at the heart of Somaliland's state-building project. After the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, private companies arose from the ruins of Hargeisa and turned the lights back on, navigating a fragmented post-war landscape by mobilizing local connections and transnational ties. However, being dependent on the political settlement that engendered the peace necessary for business, emerging private power providers were tied into a state-building project. The dissertation analyses the resulting tensions at the heart of this project, by examining the struggle to define the role, extents and limits of an emerging state in an interconnected world. Based on interviews in Somaliland and a survey of news media and grey literature, the dissertation has three aims. First, it provides a view into how social order and service provision persist after the collapse of the state. Secondly, it investigates how patterns of provision emerging in the absence of the state shape subsequent processes of state formation. Finally, it discusses how patterns of provision affect the interaction of state-building and market-making. In order to fulfil these aims, the dissertation examines how people invest in the project of building a state, both materially and discursively. The chapters present a narrative history of the electricity sector, explaining the attempts of both private companies and the government to claim sovereignty over the market and shape statehood in their own interests. The struggles shaping Somaliland's economic order reveal the contemporary significance of transnational connections, interconnected systems of capital flows, and the rise of corporate business actors. At the same time, they underline the abiding power of social structure, local identities, and historical memory.</p

Situating extraction in capitalism: Blueprints, frontier projects, and life-making

editorial reviewed“Mining (in) Capitalism” considers struggles over large-scale mining projects amid the multi-scalar politics of capitalism, bringing together articles analysing the articulation of national sovereignty over resources, protests over land, jobs and development projects, and individual and collective projects of life-making. This introductory article provides conceptual context, situating the collection within a discussion of what Nancy Fraser (2014) terms an “expanded conception” of capitalism, one that pays attention to multiple hidden abodes of “non-economic” processes and recognizes long-lasting legacies of variegated histories of extraction. The article begins by reviewing shifts in transnationally promoted blueprints for governing mineral extraction. It traces how, while mining projects power capitalism, they undermine its conditions of possibility, provoking struggles and requiring work to maintain extraction. Secondly, it calls for a contextualization of extractivist geographies of frontiers and enclaves that pays attention to older and intersecting projects of confiscation, domination, exploitation and neglect. Thirdly, it argues that such contextualization opens avenues for understanding diverse life projects and lived contradictions in the shadow of extraction. Contextualizing extraction within an expanded conception of capitalism helps illuminate the planetary politics that drive extraction while emphasizing place-specific trajectories of corporate power, distributive projects, protest and accommodation

Human Resource Managers: Mediating Capital and Labour

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Labour Regimes: A Comparative History

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Violence and exodus in Kenya's Rift Valley, 2008: predictable and preventable?

This article offers a preliminary analysis of the outbreak of violence in the Rift Valley Province of Kenya, over January and February 2008, following the national elections of December 2007. Maps of the earliest phase of the violence are reproduced to illustrate the sequencing and location of conflict. The causes of the violence are explored through discussion of historical patterns of land settlement in the Rift Valley, the impact of political violence in key constituencies since the early 1990s, and more recent political contingencies around the question of constitutional reform and regionalism (majimboism). The violence of 2008 bore strong similarities to earlier episodes of conflict in the Rift Valley, and in that sense was predictable and might have been prevented. Though the December 2007 poll was the catalyst for this violence, its causes are to be found in deeper-rooted historical and political conflicts