The Political Marketplace and Mass Displacement: Somalia in the Red Sea Arena

Lecture by Dr. Nisar Majid (London School of Economics).

The Horn of Africa (and Somalia) has a long history of famine and humanitarian crisis. These catastrophic outcomes reflect structural poverty and endemic political volatility and conflict, as well as the influence of more proximate factors, such as extreme climatic variability. These factors are also associated with high-levels of rural-urban migration and forced displacement (locally, regionally and globally) in an often traditionally highly mobile population. Migration, forced or not, has historically occurred within the Red Sea region as an inter-connected arena.  Recent years have seen renewed engagement of Gulf States in the Horn, including in food security (investments in land) and maritime security (investments in ports). These investments (by Gulf states) are part of a wider regional political marketplace, in which state competition in the Gulf is playing out in the Horn. This paper focuses on Somalia and examines how a political marketplace analysis can help to explain the persistence of structural poverty, and long-term displacement.  

Nisar Majid began working in Somalia in the late 1990s and since then has worked across the Somali territories of the Horn of Africa as well as within the Somalia diaspora. His early working life was focused on early warning, food security and livelihood analysis, whereas for his PhD he explored aspects of Somali transnationalism. In 2017 he co-authored the book Somalia Famine: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures, 2011/12, and has published a wide range of policy reports and research studies over the last ten years. He joined the LSE Conflict Research Programme, managing the Somalia programme, in mid-2018.

This event will be held online, please register in advance: https://tinyurl.com/5xswd368