The Somalia of today and the extinction of the State: consolidating a historic failure

Abstract

This article tackles the reason why the Republic of Somalia, proclaimed in 1960, has dropped into its nowadays critical situation that has made it, since 1991, the worst of the failed states around the world. Broadly speaking, our goal is to raise the issue from a historic point of view. For that reason, we must take into account a number of significant factors that might contribute to shed light on the current stagnation. For instance, the effects of the colonial partition and the development of a damaging pansomalism through the first half of the twentieth century or the persistence of the foreign fixing and the ineffective international conferences which have established the neighbor states as the real masters of the domestic agenda. Besides that, it should be noted the malfunctions of the merge between the former Italian Somalia and the British one belong with the emergence of a selfish and venal elite and the resulting marginalizing state under Siad Barre. All these factors are essential to understand the current crisis as they provide, if analyzed properly, a number of keys to open the enormous obstacles we are to face in order to settle a sustainable and real effective solution.