Foreign Affairs committee  Getting better and getting worse in Somalia varies by location and sector. When we talk about—

Foreign Affairs committee  You're pressing an academic to give a blanket statement. We qualify everything, but—

Foreign Affairs committee  I will try to answer your question as directly as I can. The overall trend is that there are some pockets of good things happening, but the broad national trend is either stagnant or worrisome. We could be looking at a situation that could get actively worse in the next few yea

Foreign Affairs committee  I think we need to continue to engage, because if we were to see Somalia backslide into a real crisis, the spillover to the region would be enormous and the humanitarian impact would be unthinkable.

Foreign Affairs committee  Do you want me to go first, Jay?

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a great question, and a really challenging question. Somali political culture is fascinating in that you can simultaneously have a really enduring, extreme level of parochialism around clan; a very powerful undercurrent of Somali nationalism, despite everything that has h

Foreign Affairs committee  Top-down approaches in Somalia have not succeeded. There's no question. That's where the vast majority of external support has gone and that's where the vast majority of foreign aid dollars have been lost. The federal government has a number of built-in problems. One is that it'

Foreign Affairs committee  The question of federalism in other countries and what Somalis can learn from that has been around since the late 1990s. There was a publication called “A Menu of Options”, which was produced by the European community, I think. It looked at countries like Switzerland and elsewher

Foreign Affairs committee  All right. This is going to be a speculative answer. I wish we had better data. We do have some public opinion polls of youth, which give us some clues to this question, but I don't have a definitive answer. I think the first thing to point out is that 75% of the Somali populati

Foreign Affairs committee  There is a huge danger in calling out aid agencies and their projects and saying, “Look how well they're doing”, because that immediately elicits counter-responses: “Oh, no; they messed up here and here and here.” I'm a little reluctant to give a shout-out to specific aid agencie

Foreign Affairs committee  Puntland is not a secessionist state. It is formally part of the federal government of Somalia, unlike Somaliland, which has declared secession since 1991. The challenge with Puntland is that it has the ability to exercise veto power over developments it doesn't like by threate

Foreign Affairs committee  Lots of donors work with whatever authorities they find most reliable. There's no question that there are pockets of competence within the federal government; they work with them. There are areas of competence, even excellence, at the local and substate level, where we have seen

Foreign Affairs committee  Jay, do you want to take that?

Foreign Affairs committee  As you've rightly put it, there's been a vacuum on the political side in U.S. policy toward Somalia. The result has been to substitute military strategy for political strategy. The good news is that this is changing. The U.S. has confirmed and sent out a new ambassador, Ambassa

Foreign Affairs committee  You're pointing at a fundamental problem in Somalia, which is that there are a lot of constituencies in Somalia that are benefiting from perpetuating the status quo. This is not an ideal situation for anyone, but it's a condition within which some very powerful elements in Somali