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When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland

Online ISBN:
9781501747168
Print ISBN:
9781501747151
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland

Sarah G. Phillips
Sarah G. Phillips
University of Sydney
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Published online:
17 September 2020
Published in print:
15 March 2020
Online ISBN:
9781501747168
Print ISBN:
9781501747151
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. This book offers us one such example. Using evidence from Somaliland’s experience of peace-building, the book challenges two of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South. First, that intervention by actors in the global North is self-evidently useful in ending them, and second that the quality of a country’s governance institutions (whether formal or informal) necessarily determines the level of peace and civil order that the country experiences. The book explores how popular discourses about war, peace, and international intervention structure the conditions of possibility to such a degree that even the inability of institutions to provide reliable security can stabilize a prolonged period of peace. It argues that Somaliland’s post-conflict peace is grounded less in the constraining power of its institutions than in a powerful discourse about the country’s structural, temporal, and physical proximity to war. Through its sensitivity to the ease with which peace gives way to war, the book argues, this discourse has indirectly harnessed an apparent propensity to war as a source of order.

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