From November 2023 to July 2024 I served as FAO Afghanistan’s Head of Communications, Strategy and Resource Mobilization. I plan to write about it and will edit this post soon. For the time being, here is a short movie shot by Barmak Akram that we edited together into a 6 minute teaser.
It follows me as I travel through Northern Afghanistan speaking with farmers about climate change and what can be done to adapt to it/mitigate its effects.
Barmak is a great filmmaker; he shot this on a new iPhone and barely intervened in my natural activities, managing to catch everything on the fly. We’d like to make a full length movie on climate change in Afghanistan…
Other language versions of this article were published in the World & New World Journal in Arabic, Russian, Spanish and German.
Is it justifiable to continue not recognizing the Taliban government, which has been in power for more than three years? This stance does nothing to improve the situation of Afghan women and prevents the international community from fully engaging with other critical issues playing in the country.
Selfie by the author with two senior Taliban officials (Director of International Trade and Head of Fairs and International Exhibitions) Continue reading →
Ensemble avec Emmanuel Al Miah et Dércio Tsandzana, j’ai écrit le premier chapitre du livre ‘Enquêter en Terrain Sensible’ (Presses du Septentrion). Le livre examine les difficultés inhérentes aux études de terrain dans les zones liminaires – soit parce qu’il y a la guerre ou d’autres types de violence, soit à cause des politiques institutionnelles d’acteurs qui sont habitués à la discrétion, soit encore à cause du positionnement du chercheur face à son objet d’enquête.
Un grand merci aux directeurs de l’ouvrage pour l’initiative qu’ils ont pris, voici il y a deux ans, et leur patience pour mener ce projet à sa fin. Les autres contributions, y compris l’introduction à la première partie du livre par Roland Marchal, sont aussi très intéressantes.
Notre chapitre décrit comment on peut faire, malgré les difficultés, des recherches dans les zones de conflit, en prenant la Somalie, l’Irak et le Mozambique comme exemples.
Sudan’s resistance committees are still active – by necessity, because they are the only networks supporting the people of Sudan, taking care of public services while the state has failed nearly completely.We should support these democratic popular forces in whatever way possible.
In January 2022 the resistance committees of Khartoum state (the urban agglomeration of Khartoum, which holds between a third and half of Sudan’s population) published a Charter for the Establishment of People’s Authority. This charter is an open source document, and it leaves most specifics of the transitional governance structures open to be decided in a democratic way. But some of its principles reveal what self-governance coordinated by resistance committees may look like:
This is my 1.5 page contribution to “Un Monde en Crises“, an analytical digest of the world today written by researchers of the Centre de Recherches Internationales. It argues that the Somali state is not a failure for Somali elites, who distribute international funding to their clan constituencies. Since all clans are represented in the current make-up of the Federal State, this maintains some stability in the country.
I participated in a workshop on academic publishing in peer-reviewed journals, given by the editors of a journal based in Central Europe. This journal has become part of the Palgrave-Springer conglomerate.
While nearly all journal editors, all reviewers and authors work for free, and authors that want to publish ‘open access’ with one of those journals need to pay a fee of typically 1500-3000 USD (so their article does not appear behind a paywall), the journals themselves make whopping profit margins of 40% on average by selling subscriptions and individual articles for very high prices.
This article, based on recent fieldwork by Somali researchers and the insights they have kindly provided me with, and on 70 interviews I conducted in Mogadishu and other places in and around Somalia in 2019-2021, examines how Al Shabaab exerts its rule over the southern and central regions of Somalia. The movement depends on local support, as it receives practically no international support, and thus needs to gain legitimacy through its governance. The opposite is true of the federal government of Somalia, which receives most of its funding from abroad. The insurgents outgovern the federal government of Somalia in practically all aspects. They also govern the population in Mogadishu and other areas supposedly under government control.
To explain Al Shabaab’s staying power despite the international community’s continuous efforts to militarily defeat it, the insurgency is examined as a social movement and through the lens of rebel governance. Its political project, to supercede fractious Somali clan identities by imposing an Islamist state, is shared by many Somalis, even if they dislike Al Shabaab’s religious fervour and would prefer to live in an open society accepted by the rest of the world.
It appears likely that when international support for the dysfunctional Somali state wanes, the group will sweep to power as swiftly as the Taliban did in Afghanistan.
Abstract: Recent studies suggest that Al Shabaab’s rule is tolerated among Somalis and has garnered some legitimacy through predictable governance, the provision of justice and a nationalist Islamist discourse. Based on extensive field work and recent scholarly research, this paper describes how Al Shabaab has successfully evolved through two critical junctures from a social movement to a quasi state-like structure. Al Shabaab outperforms the Somali state in most fields of governance. The legitimacy this brings does not translate into popularity: Somali respondents rarely align with the movement’s ideology or wish to be ruled by it. Nevertheless, the movement is fundamentally transforming the Somali sociopolitical order, harnessing clan power to impose a Weberian legal-rational, albeit illiberal type of rule.
Map from 2021 showing the extent of Al Shabaab influence over south & central Somalia (about 50% of the total territory of Somalia + Somaliland).
This article will appear soon in the Canadian Journal of African Studies after a two-year peer-review process. The link will be shared here upon publication.
Robert Kluijver | Expert internationale betrekkingen
In de Hoorn van Afrika verkruimelen staatsstructuren. Het Westen moet steun geven aan plaatselijke zelfhulpinitiatieven van burgers, zegt Robert Kluijver.
De Hoorn van Afrika staat in brand en staatsapparaten verkruimelen. In Somalië ging de centrale staat al ten onder in 1991, in Ethiopië nemen sinds 2020 regio’s het op tegen de centrale autoriteit. En in Soedan raakten de machthebbers vorige maand onderling slaags. Maar de bevolking zit niet bij de pakken neer en werkt aan alternatieve vormen van bestuur. De vraag is hoe om te gaan met dit proces van eroderende staatsstructuren. Misschien is het misplaatst om een sterke centrale regering te willen vestigen en moet juist steun worden gegeven aan plaatselijke zelfhulpinitiatieven van burgers, zoals de verzetsgroepen in Soedan en de lokale vredesinitiatieven in Somalië. Dat betoogt Robert Kluijver, die westerse pogingen bestudeert om liberale democratieën te vestigen in landen die cultureel vaak enorm verschillen.
Two books I read recently, ‘Limonov’ by Emmanuel Carrère and ‘Le Mage du Kremlin’ by Guiliano da Empoli, ignited my old passion for Russia.
In 1997 I spent a few days in Moscow on my way to Tajikistan, where I learnt to speak Russian. I took the train from Bishkek to Moscow on the way back, managing to blend in sufficiently to cross into Russia without a visa, and spent a week or so in Moscow figuring out how I would travel onward. After that experience I did a Masters in Post-Soviet Studies (in a programme set up by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, the mother of Emmanuel) and returned a few times to Central Asia, Russia and Ukraine for research or simply travelling, before life pushed me southwards to Afghanistan and the Middle East.
