Academic Event

Galkaio town represents a boundary on the ground and in the imagination within Somali society. The 1993 Peace Accord held a fragile peace for many years as political and developmental trajectories differed markedly on either side of this border town. This talk, hosted by the Conflict Research Programme, explores the 2016/17 peace agreement, in its local and national dimensions, and which occurred as part of the state-building project that is still ongoing in Somalia and offers insights on the quality of international intervention.

The twenty-first century is marked by the rise of new forms of authoritarianism, many of which are characterized by the ‘paradox of restraint’, in which reforms compliant with the rule of law are used to unshackle the ruler's arbitrary power. Despite a proliferation of scholarly studies on this topic, we still have limited understanding of how national-level authoritarian power reaches ordinary citizens in these contexts. This article identifies the performance of militarized masculinities as an understudied mechanism that does so.