The strange wars of liberal peace: hybridity, complexity and the governing rationalities of counterinsurgency in Somalia

This article examines the contemporary interconnections between the politics of peacebuilding and the politics of counterinsurgent warfare in Somalia. Differing from much of the existing critical literature on Somalia that emphasises problems associated with top-down orthodox stabilisation approaches, this article explores the trajectories of counterinsurgent warfare that places 'the local' at the centre of intervention and work on logics of 'small footprints', hybridity and complexity. Here, it is no longer primarily the state and its institutions but the population and the everyday of 'the local', in and of itself, which constitutes the key object for counterinsurgency interventions, and as such the new main battle space in which insurgencies are to be defeated. In the context of these human-centred approaches to overcoming 'subversion', the means and ends of peacebuilding and those of 'everyday warfare' are becoming increasingly blurred.