Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1462554
A. Hills
Insecurity is Mogadishu’s great leveller. On Saturday 26 November 2016, at least eleven people were killed and many more injured in a car bomb attack on a police checkpoint by a busy vegetable market in Waberi district. Noone claimed responsibility, but most people thought that Al-Shabaab was behind the attack, which took place when the president was visiting a nearby university. Two weeks later, on Sunday 11 December 2016, a bomber drove a minibus packed with explosives into a tax office at the entrance to Mogadishu’s Turkish-run seaport. The blast went off among stalls in a lay-by crowded with day-shift workers buying breakfast. On this occasion Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for killing 30 police officers, but most people agree that the majority of those killed and wounded were civilians and port employees. The blast could be heard across the city and pictures of the scene soon circulated on social media. The weeks between December’s attack and February’s presidential elections saw multiple assaults involving vehicle bombs, IEDs, grenades and targeted assassinations, which destroyed buildings and killed or injured government representatives and citizens. The elections were held in the safety of Aden Adde International Airport, but those without international protection were targeted by gunmen, including senior Somali security officers, government representatives such as tax collectors, and authority figures including elders, businessmen and NGO activists.
{"title":"III. Managing Neighbourhood Security","authors":"A. Hills","doi":"10.1080/02681307.2017.1462554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02681307.2017.1462554","url":null,"abstract":"Insecurity is Mogadishu’s great leveller. On Saturday 26 November 2016, at least eleven people were killed and many more injured in a car bomb attack on a police checkpoint by a busy vegetable market in Waberi district. Noone claimed responsibility, but most people thought that Al-Shabaab was behind the attack, which took place when the president was visiting a nearby university. Two weeks later, on Sunday 11 December 2016, a bomber drove a minibus packed with explosives into a tax office at the entrance to Mogadishu’s Turkish-run seaport. The blast went off among stalls in a lay-by crowded with day-shift workers buying breakfast. On this occasion Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for killing 30 police officers, but most people agree that the majority of those killed and wounded were civilians and port employees. The blast could be heard across the city and pictures of the scene soon circulated on social media. The weeks between December’s attack and February’s presidential elections saw multiple assaults involving vehicle bombs, IEDs, grenades and targeted assassinations, which destroyed buildings and killed or injured government representatives and citizens. The elections were held in the safety of Aden Adde International Airport, but those without international protection were targeted by gunmen, including senior Somali security officers, government representatives such as tax collectors, and authority figures including elders, businessmen and NGO activists.","PeriodicalId":37791,"journal":{"name":"Whitehall Papers","volume":"91 1","pages":"49 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02681307.2017.1462554","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44113506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1462555
A. Hills
Neighbourhood watch has yet to be implemented throughout Mogadishu’s districts, but Waberi’s experience shows how successful such schemes can be at mobilising communities and collecting the information and intelligence needed to make the district safer. Nevertheless, police– community relations remain marred by distrust, and the collecting of information, let alone of intelligence, remains a long-standing challenge in a clan-based culture in which family and clan come before crime reporting, and memories of Barre’s formidable policing system continue to influence attitudes. Waberi’s police station may be a place where residents can engage with officers, but most crime is not reported to the police, and even if it were, few expect the police to respond. Most victims turn first to elders or religious leaders. Little is known about the police force’s attempts to collect information and intelligence, although what exists is probably driven by the need for actionable intelligence on Al-Shabaab, rather than as an aspect of crime prevention or resource allocation. AMISOM and UNSOM provide relevant courses, while donors such as the UK and the US deliver training for criminal intelligence and forensic purposes, which officers say they value because it is proper policing in a way that community policing is not. But such training has limited application because Somali officers do not follow chains of evidence in the way that a European officer might. Indeed, anecdotal and circumstantial reports suggest that many have no understanding of why evidence should be collected. Also, the most valued forms of investigative training are reputedly aligned to the physical coercion style employed by NISA. And this has been true for some years. For example, 2012 saw the introduction of a cash-for-tips scheme that provided a reward of $500 dollars for information relating to the capture of Al-Shabaab leaders and $100 dollars for information on the
{"title":"IV. ICT for Community Security","authors":"A. Hills","doi":"10.1080/02681307.2017.1462555","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02681307.2017.1462555","url":null,"abstract":"Neighbourhood watch has yet to be implemented throughout Mogadishu’s districts, but Waberi’s experience shows how successful such schemes can be at mobilising communities and collecting the information and intelligence needed to make the district safer. Nevertheless, police– community relations remain marred by distrust, and the collecting of information, let alone of intelligence, remains a long-standing challenge in a clan-based culture in which family and clan come before crime reporting, and memories of Barre’s formidable policing system continue to influence attitudes. Waberi’s police station may be a place where residents can engage with officers, but most crime is not reported to the police, and even if it were, few expect the police to respond. Most victims turn first to elders or religious leaders. Little is known about the police force’s attempts to collect information and intelligence, although what exists is probably driven by the need for actionable intelligence on Al-Shabaab, rather than as an aspect of crime prevention or resource allocation. AMISOM and UNSOM provide relevant courses, while donors such as the UK and the US deliver training for criminal intelligence and forensic purposes, which officers say they value because it is proper policing in a way that community policing is not. But such training has limited application because Somali officers do not follow chains of evidence in the way that a European officer might. Indeed, anecdotal and circumstantial reports suggest that many have no understanding of why evidence should be collected. Also, the most valued forms of investigative training are reputedly aligned to the physical coercion style employed by NISA. And this has been true for some years. For example, 2012 saw the introduction of a cash-for-tips scheme that provided a reward of $500 dollars for information relating to the capture of Al-Shabaab leaders and $100 dollars for information on the","PeriodicalId":37791,"journal":{"name":"Whitehall Papers","volume":"91 1","pages":"70 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/02681307.2017.1462555","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46591705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1462551
A. Hills
Identifying the best way to manage everyday security in fragile post-conflict cities is as challenging today as it has ever been, and Mogadishu is one of the most challenging in the world, as the capital of the notoriously failed state of Somalia. This Whitehall Paper explores the ways in which Mogadishu’s inhabitants try to stay out of harm’s way, from security officials in the presidential compound of Villa Somalia to the city’s powerful district commissioners, from patrolling policemen to the women road-sweepers in the rubbish-filled alleyways of the Waberi district. Its central proposition is that security is best understood as a coherent relationship or activity based on the need for physical safety today, rather than in the future. It uses the neighbourhood-watch schemes developed in certain districts of Mogadishu−most notably Waberi− to understand the ways in which the city’s inhabitants respond to the security models promoted by international advisers, who in fact are based in the safety of the city’s Aden Adde International Airport. The most immediate security challenges confronting the city are terrorism-related, with the Islamic militant group Al-Shabaab the main concern, but the legacy of 25 years of conflict and violence means that the security threats faced by Mogadishu overlap with current terrorism and indeed are mutually reinforcing and indicative of broader political and social tensions. Special attention is paid in this paper to the city’s security plan and the points at which the local and the international meet. The level of insecurity in Mogadishu− and the length of time this insecurity has persisted− is extreme: at the time of writing, a truck bomb at a busy junction near key ministry buildings had killed at least 350 people, the country’s deadliest attack. Yet all sectors of society are exposed to a range of physical threats on a daily basis, arising from interclan conflicts, Al-Shabaab attacks, revenge killings, trigger-happy guards, or as a result of conflicts about land, property and livestock. Internally displaced persons (IDPs), members of minority clans and women are the
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Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1462558
Alice Hillswas professor of conflict studies at DurhamUniversity, 2013–2017. She is currently a visiting professor at the universities of Durham and Leeds, where her research is funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Before joining Durham she was professor of conflict and security at the University of Leeds. Prior to that she taught defence studies at the UK’s Joint Services Command and Staff College where she specialised in urban operations and police–military relations.
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Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1462557
A. Hills
Unlike most analyses of Mogadishu’s security governance, which concentrate on high-level developments involving the international community’s plans for Somalia’s stabilisation and political progress, this Whitehall Paper explores the ways in which the city’s Somali inhabitants assess street-level threats and try to mitigate insecurity. It uses Mogadishu’s city security plan and its constituent parts – most notably, the Waberi district neighbourhood-watch scheme – as an entrance into the city’s security dynamics. This enables a consideration of issues such as the connections between counterterrorism and community safety, the contribution of community cohesion and mobilisation to sustainable civilian policing, and the potential of ICT to improve the police– community engagement on which stateand capacity-building is thought to depend. In other words, the city security plan and neighbourhoodwatch scheme allow for a concrete conceptualisation of problems and problem-solving that help to generate insights into the nature of (in)security in an otherwise inaccessible environment. They also allow an exploration of the interface between three issues usually kept separate: hard and soft security; formal and informal policing provision; and international and local perspectives on security. The result is a more balanced picture of the city’s security provision. Mogadishu’s security environment is shaped by terrorist, insurgent, criminal and militia networks entrenched in clan identity politics, all of which are exacerbated by chronic violence, poverty, deprivation, inequality and alienation. Although security is formally the responsibility of the FGS, the Benadir Regional Administration, the SPF and NISA, most people rely on informal providers, such as local clanand district-based militia. However, sharply distinguishing between formal and informal provision is misleading because the borders between the two are porous and shift according to need. Thus, the city security plan draws on information collected by illiterate women who rely on clan-based protection, but choose to visit police stations to discuss their concerns,
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Pub Date : 2017-09-02DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1462552
A. Hills
The form of policing that the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) is expected to develop has various ingredients. It is founded on the slippery terms ‘security’, ‘state-building’ and ‘capacity-buil...
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{"title":"List of Acronyms and Abbreviations","authors":"Derek W. Vaillant","doi":"10.5406/J.CTT1WS7W0B.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5406/J.CTT1WS7W0B.4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37791,"journal":{"name":"Whitehall Papers","volume":"90 1","pages":"vi - vi"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45150082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1427921
Luis Simón, Paul H. Nitze
Luis Simón is a Research Professor of International Security at the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Director of the Brussels Office of the Elcano Royal Institute. He is also an associate fellow at RUSI and the Baltic Defence College, and a member of the editorial board of Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly. Professor Simón has been a visiting research and fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University (2012–13), RUSI (2009–10), the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University (2008), and the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (2008). In 2008–09, he was a fellow of the European Foreign and Security Policy Studies Programme of the VolkswagenStiftung, Germany, the Compagnia di San Paolo, Turin, and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Stockholm. He holds degrees from Royal Holloway College (University of London) and the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). He is the author of Geopolitical Change, Grand Strategy and European Security: The EU-NATO Conundrum in Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). His articles have appeared in leading journals such as Security Studies, International Affairs, Journal of Strategic Studies, Survival, Geopolitics, Orbis, Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly, RUSI Journal, Comparative Strategy, and International Spectator.
Luis Simón是布鲁塞尔Vrije大学欧洲研究所的国际安全研究教授，也是埃尔卡诺皇家研究所布鲁塞尔办事处主任。他还是RUSI和波罗的海国防学院的副研究员，也是《参数：美国陆军战争学院季刊》编委会成员。西蒙教授曾是哥伦比亚大学萨尔茨曼战争与和平研究所（2012-2013）、俄罗斯科学院（2009-2010）、约翰霍普金斯大学保罗·H·尼茨高级国际研究学院跨大西洋关系中心（2008）和战略研究基金会（2008）的访问研究员。2008–09年，他是德国大众基金会、都灵圣保罗公司和斯德哥尔摩Jubilemsfond银行的欧洲外交与安全政策研究项目的研究员。他拥有皇家霍洛威学院（伦敦大学）和巴黎政治研究所（巴黎科学院）的学位。他著有《地缘政治变革、大战略和欧洲安全：透视欧盟-北约的困境》（Palgrave Macmillan，2014）。他的文章发表在主要期刊上，如《安全研究》、《国际事务》、《战略研究杂志》、《生存》、《地缘政治》、《奥比斯》、《参数：美国陆军战争学院季刊》、《RUSI期刊》、《比较战略》和《国际观察家》。
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Pub Date : 2017-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1427919
Luis Simón
This paper has endeavoured to outline and understand the present European geopolitical order and how it will likely evolve in the coming years. The analysis has revolved around the question of how the postSecond World War order is changing. In the immediate aftermath of the war, US military and economic power rescued many European states from collapse and the temptation to turn to communism. Not only did Washington’s presence in Europe assist European states economically, but politically the US was able to help socialise Germany within the West, and ensure that the then-Soviet Union was kept at bay. To institutionalise the gains that the US had made in European security, it forged a military alliance and encouraged the Europeans to move ahead with greater economic integration and interdependence. Both NATO and the EU in no small way stand as monuments to Washington’s commitment to European security, but there is a danger that these monuments may eventually transmogrify into relics. If the European order post-1945 was secured by US political support, military power and money, then US retrenchment, Russia’s resurgence across Eastern Europe, and Germany’s newfound centrality in European politics raise many important, if uncomfortable, questions. A central tenet of this analysis has been that Europe’s evolving order is defined by a seemingly inexorable tension between power and weakness. Even if the US remains the strongest ‘European’ power, a hands-off approach calls into question its ability to undergird regional order. Germany is becoming stronger, but it seems neither powerful enough to underwrite a new order, nor interested in doing so. Russia lacks the legitimacy to lead and is besieged by structural economic and demographic woes, as well as important geostrategic liabilities. Bedevilled by chronic economic crisis and politico-military conflagrations along its borders, Europe’s post-Second World War order is being tested. Geopolitical cohesion is arguably Europe’s greatest asset, but the range of crises it faces invariably calls this cohesion into question; all at a time when Russia is seeking to exploit and profit from fissures in the European order. It is true that NATO has reconfigured itself to the
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Pub Date : 2017-05-04DOI: 10.1080/02681307.2017.1427918
Luis Simón
This chapter outlines potential ways of redressing Europe’s impending balance of power crisis, and restoring an order that continues to command the loyalty and trust of EU and NATO member states. Three main, interrelated lines of action are identified: fixing the transatlantic ‘superstructure’; rebooting the European ‘infrastructure’; and checking Russia’s assault on Eastern and Central Europe. Key to this is a new grand bargain between the US and Germany – the two main referents in the transatlantic and European systems, respectively. However, special attention is also paid to the importance of the UK and France, and to their potential role as bridges between the US and the transatlantic superstructure on the one hand, and Germany and the European infrastructure on the other.
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