Thank you very much.
Thank you to both of you for being here today.
I want to get back to something that has been raised already, but only in a very basic way. I think for most Canadians, perhaps even for most Canadian politicians, we think of the world in the way we think of Canada, with a central government, a cohesive social framework, established identities, and established conceptions of citizenship. Can you leave us with some thoughts on how you would hope the Canadian population and Canadian political representatives ought to understand Somalia?
Professor Menkhaus, you've written at length about the fragmented nature of authority in Somalia and other societies like it. I wonder if you could go into that again. We've heard about the clan-based structure of the society.
And Professor Spears, you talked about the Christmas tree analogy, which I think is very apt.
Can you talk about how that fragmentation actually impacts upon authority, how authority is divided as a result, and what that has meant for Somalia? Somalia is divided in this way, but so are other societies. I think through Somalia we can understand a little bit more about some of the key human rights catastrophes taking place in the world today, and their root causes.