WILL RENO
▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: MOGADISHU, SOMALIA
Three scholars and I teamed up to travel to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, for several weeks in 2015 to conduct research into various aspects of the intriguing politics in that country. We four foreigners were there to interview political, military, and community leaders and to observe what we could. This was my third trip to Mogadishu, having previously conducted fieldwork there in 2012. All members of our team had been in Somalia before. One had visited Mogadishu previously, and another had lived in the city for over a year.
Many foreign diplomats claimed that this city was becoming more secure and prosperous, but we knew that their statements were aspirational at best. Their statements validated their support for the African Union’s peacekeeping force that drove al-Shabaab fighters from Somalia’s capital city in 2011, as well as the intense international effort to build a new Somali government. The reality was that the security situation in the city had deteriorated, a fact that I could plainly see in comparisons with previous visits. Car bombs, drive-by assassinations, and coordinated attacks were a regular feature of Mogadishu life, and they had intensified alongside new construction, government reform plans, and sunny official statements. These facts also contributed to the intriguing political puzzle that had drawn me to this place: What kind of politics of contemporary warfare in this collapsed state allows for an armed government presence with such intense insurgent infiltration, and even apparent collaborations between those who fought one another?
I believed I had a good understanding of how personal security works in this environment. In previous visits, we met a few Western foreigners in Somalia in scattered and otherwise very unlikely places who seemed to have worked out their local security. We also had studied the local political scene to learn what lessons we could. Ultimately, these observations and experiences taught us that security definitely is about much more than firepower or other forms of physical protection. Security is deeply socially contextualized here, as it is in most environments. Who we knew and how we were perceived was critically important for managing our security environment. All of this requires a good network of people, such as local hosts, journalists, NGO workers, and other informed people.
The first step to figuring out the security puzzle is to answer two questions: Why would a Somali host protect a foreign researcher if a foreigner has considerable value as a kidnap victim? How can the researcher know whether the immediate environment is safe? As for most things political in Somalia, the key to a realistic assessment lay in an accurate understanding of the intricate relationships and logic behind the facade of organizational charts, official pronouncements, and policy reports. One has to have enough knowledge of these connections to understand why a particular host would value the guest’s well-being over selling the guest to a criminal gang or jihadists for several tens of thousands of dollars. This knowledge is also necessary to determine whether the host’s armed retinue really is strong enough to protect guests from those who may wish them ill. (In our case, this assessment was not made more cheerful by the decision of one research team member to fill his laptop video library with films such as Captain Phillips and other chronicles of piracy and kidnapping, accompanied by uplifting documentaries such as The Act of Killing.) The key to figuring out what would deter a host from selling the guest to criminals or terrorists is to understand who supports the host and who might get angry if guests went missing. This involves identifying the real local and foreign sources of military assistance to the host (who also must have his own private army) and his past and present political connections.
The second step is to figure out who might see reputational benefits from successfully hosting foreigners. Successful hosting can convince observers that the host is strong and is a desirable associate for others who need to risk it in Mogadishu’s unstable and dangerous environment. Conversely, the loss of a guest is seen as a sign of weakness, the kind of signal that no one who is important in a rough place such as Mogadishu would want to send.
For this trip and others, the ideal host is a businessman, preferably one with a small army that is used for commercial and political purposes. The presence of this security serves as a deterrent to those who may harbor ill-intent toward visitors. A strong host shares information widely and has many sources of information—an important element of the politics I had come to study—and is able to explain to insurgents what the foreigners are doing, while also deterring insurgent action. It is a truism that one does not pay a host for protection, as monetizing that relationship sends a signal of weakness and brings with it the suggestion that the guest is far more valuable as a hostage.
Assessing the neighborhood is the third step. Is the neighborhood destroyed from periodic bouts of fighting since the collapse of Somalia’s central government in 1991? A wrecked neighborhood is inhabited by people whose often heavily intertwined kinship and political and business networks can’t protect them from predators if they eventually rebuild their houses. The businessmen in nicer neighborhoods have protection—from insurgents as much as from other armed businessmen and politicians.
This protection, as well as excellent fresh produce from the Somali coast, proved essential for our work. We were able to spend considerable hours with Somali government officials, experts and notables in the local security scene, knowledgeable observers, journalists, and others. Venturing outside the gates required help from members of the small private army and care to avoid venturing off the recently paved and well-swept streets, which carried a low but present risk of IEDs. These hours, along with the task of figuring out our own security arrangements, produced a wealth of information and critical insights into the interconnected logics of violence and information in Somalia’s complex political environment, which defied in important ways much conventional wisdom about violence and information in other conflicts.
Eventually it was time to return to Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport. This was a task of some import because this was a flight we could not miss! Experience from past visits heightened the sense of anxiety. For example, one trip to the airport involved running out of fuel near Villa Somalia. As the car rolled to a stop and the driver said “no benzin, no benzin,” the clock started ticking. The crowd started to form, and cell phones came out. This level of interest in foreigners was concerning. Fortunately, that host had a small detachment two minutes away. Armed protection (in addition to those we already had) appeared on the scene, and we made our flight.
This time the ride was more relaxed, so why not stop at Jazeera Hotel to have lunch with an international reporter on the way to the airport? Lunch was delightful, and the journalist was informative. I checked out the hotel as a potential base. After all, it was only two hundred meters from the airport gate into the secure Green Zone with its AMISOM peacekeepers. The hotel’s roof provides one of the most panoramic views of Mogadishu. We stepped into the elevator, the only working one we know of in the whole city, and it promptly became stuck between floors! After about twenty minutes, the elevator began to move, and we got our view and our photos, arriving at the airport and the flight not to be missed with little time to spare.
The value of this field research lay in the stark contrast between reality on the ground in Mogadishu and reports by international organizations and government agencies. We met foreign and Somali agents involved in assistance to Somali security forces and government whose stories were very different from the official versions. We came to understand how armed groups can collude and collaborate at the same time that they fight each other, and how the politics of state collapse had created an environment of interlocking, yet competing, networks in which leaders of most armed groups hedged their bets by inserting their agents in as many networks as possible—foreign NGOs, the government, al-Shabaab, private security firms, local militias, and security forces. These insights helped me to frame the logic governing uses of violence, how violence is seen by observers in this context, and how information flows and is shared. This work was important for understanding how the processes of state collapse are connected to this distinct logic of violence. Being there also helped me map the actual outcomes of foreign intervention to assist Somalia’s government and to fight al-Shabaab, much of which stands in contrast to official plans and reports.
The value of this research outweighed the risks, at least from my perspective in 2015. I have not returned to Mogadishu. Shortly after our visit to the rooftop of Jazeera Hotel, the hotel was targeted in a car bomb attack. The host of that 2015 visit and about forty other people were killed two months after the Jazeera bombing in a coordinated suicide car bomb and follow-on attack that raged for several hours. Mogadishu has become less secure each year, with more bombings and drive-by shootings. The nighttime gunfights in 2015 were a clear signal. Then, in October 2017, the city experienced one of the most deadly terrorist attacks since 9/11 when a massive truck bomb blast killed almost six hundred people. Our precautions, protocols, and institutional review board and Office of Risk Management guidelines could not (and should not) cope with this degree of risk. A risk worth taking in 2015 has become a far greater risk today; even the precautions outlined here would not be sufficient for research today in Mogadishu.
My approach to risk is that it cannot be eliminated but must be managed; even a researcher encased in bubble wrap might get jarred in transit. This means taking concrete steps to reduce risk, such as not traveling at night on Kenyan highways renowned for gruesome crashes, actually taking the malaria pills, and not riding (helmetless) on convenient motorcycle taxis even when Kampala traffic is gridlocked. Mogadishu, however, is a war zone, despite the denials of an international community desperate to make its intervention succeed. Violence is not random, and it is possible to reduce the risk of harm. But a field researcher really should not be explaining to loved ones a strategy for avoiding truck bombs and IEDs, or why some people who were killed were somehow in very different situations.
The benefits of research—mine at any rate—are currently clearly not worth the risks of that worsening situation, which is one very good way to know when it is time to stay away. If one cannot go to the original site, there are alternatives. For those who want to study conflict in the field, conflict is recent history in plenty of places, and many methods are available to get at the information you need. Then you can worry about the traffic and leave the IEDs to others.
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Will Reno is professor of political science at Northwestern University.
PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Reno, Will, and Jahara Matisek. “A New Era of Insurgent Recruitment: Have ‘New’ Civil Wars Changed the Dynamic?” Civil Wars 20, no. 2 (2018): 1–21.
• Reno, Will. “The Politics of Security Assistance in the Horn of Africa,” Defence Studies 18, no. 3 (2018): 1–16.
• ——. “The Importance of Context When Comparing Civil Wars,” Civil Wars (forthcoming).