Daily Archives: January 16, 2014

Somalia: Police Development as State Building?

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International and local power brokers see police as indicators of legitimacy and international recognition, but the international community’s vision of police development as state building is undermined by Somali politicians, officers, and businessmen sharing a political and entrepreneurial under- standing of the police role. The picture is further nuanced by influential Somalis who regard many of the structures and skills associated with Western policing as desirable, even as they manipulate the values and procedures promoted in its name.

The propensity of donors to see police development as a tool for not only state building, but also social engineering is marked. But so is the pragmatic response of Somalis. Officers in Somaliland and Puntland take what they value, manipulate what they can use, and subvert approaches that offend the sensibilities of their conservative society. Meanwhile, the SPF’s primary concern is to acquire the heavy weapons, vehicles, fuel, and communications equipment it needs to survive today.

Somalia’s experience shows that formality is not required for the governance associated with state building, but relative security and stability are, and there are limits to the role police can play in facilitating this: Somalia remains dangerously insecure. That the three forces are subject to the un- predictability that dependence on local power brokers and international funding introduces suggests that success depends on balancing local security levels and politics against international imperatives in a way that goes beyond current conceptions of state-based governance.

That is Alice Hills in a paper on policing in Somalia in the current issue of African Affairs.

On the state of African Studies at Yale

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Despite a recent uptick in the recruitment of students from Africa (my class had 5 students from Kenya alone), Yale has lost a string of Africanist faculty (like this awesome guy) without replacement. The loss of faculty and the associated decline in the volume of research focused on Africa have raised questions about the university’s commitment to the study of the Continent.

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Scott Ross explores these questions in a nice piece in the YDN. Check it out here:

The more I learn about African languages at Yale, the more I hear about budgets. That’s because language acquisition is central to how Yale funds   African Studies (and how colleges fund area studies in general). Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965 was drafted to strengthen “uncommonly taught languages” by funding universities that taught them. The federal government deemed these universities “National Resource Centers” for language instruction (NRCs) and provided Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships to students. More than half of Yale’s current M.A. students, including myself, are receiving money from FLAS.

The current Title VI grant ends soon. But Udry’s not sure whether Yale will win another award next year, or if the Council will even apply. He explains that Yale’s small Africanist faculty, along with its lack of teacher training and community outreach services, may hurt the University’s chances for funding. If Yale loses FLAS fellowships for African Studies students, the Council will have to find new ways to attract applicants who may be turned away by Yale’s high costs.

My own thoughts on this are that African Studies at Yale is probably just going through a reorganization following the shift from a traditional area studies focus (with emphasis on the humanities and languages) to a more social science-y approach. It says a lot that Prof. Chris Udry, an economist, is the Chair of the Council on African Studies. For the sake of all involved (including those going on the market later this year), I hope the transition will not take forever.

(Incidentally, I once worked for the YDN as an advert salesman my freshman year. I quit because I wasn’t patient enough to rise through the ranks before I became a staff writer.)