Africa: Somalia - a State Without Settlement

[African Arguments] In early June, a warm evening in Mogadishu was punctuated once again by the staccato of gunfire and mortar shells. Not the result of an ambush by Al-Shabaab or a quarrel over a checkpoint, but rather deadly clashes emanating from a federal government seeking to secure its political grip on the capital. The violence had been coming for several months. Though some have brushed it off as 'business as usual' and an expression of the violence that undergirds Somalia's political settlement, it might well be