Revolutionary and Quasi-Revolutionary Events in Somalia (1960–2023)

Abstract

The analysis of Somalia's post-colonial history has allowed the identification of two democratic (or quasi-democratic) revolutions, an ethnosocial revolution, a national-separatist revolution, four Islamist revolutionary episodes, as well as a revolution analogue. In addition, we find two important failed military coup attempts—the 1961 attempted military coup in Somaliland (which can also be characterized as a failed revolution analogue) and the 1978 attempted military coup in Somalia. Mostly, the above-mentioned revolutionary events produced a rather destructive impact. However, two revolutionary episodes also had some positive effect. The revolutionary insurgency of the Rahanweyn Resistance Army of the late 1990s somehow finally contributed to the stabilization of situation in Somalia by raising the traditionally inferior status of the Rahanweyn agriculturalists to a level that is more or less equal to the one of the “noble pastoralist” clan families—Hawiye and Darod, and, thus, sufficiently integrating the Rahanweyn into the sociopolitical system of the Federal Republic of Somalia. A special note should be made of revolutionary insurgency of the Islamic Courts Union/ICU (2000–December 2006). The establishment of effective ICU power throughout most of southern and central Somalia demonstrated in a rather convincing way that many elements of Shari’ah could work very effectively in this country, contributing strongly to the stabilization. After the Ethiopian counter-revolutionary intervention in December 2006, the elimination of the ICU power in Mogadishu, and the establishment there (with a direct military support of Ethiopia and the USA) of the Transitional Federal Government/TFG, the TFG soon confronted an armed insurrection of Al-Shabaab radical Islamists, which it failed to counteract in any effective way. By mid-2008, the TFG recognized that it was unable to confront the Somali radical Islamists without the help of the moderate Islamists from the Islamic Courts Union (that re-named itself into the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia/ARS, but retained Sheikh Sharif Ahmed as its leader). In June 2008, the Somali Transitional Federal Government signed an agreement with the ARS stipulating the integration of the ARS into the federal government. One of the points of 2008 agreement was the doubling of the size of the transitional parliament (People’s Assembly), which allowed to accommodate 200 MPs representing the ARS. In its turn, in January 2009, this helped the leader of the ARS (and the former leader of Islamic Courts Union) Sheikh Sharif Ahmed to get elected by the People’s Assembly as the President of Somalia. This allowed soon after that to implement Shari’ah as the nation's official judicial system. Thus, the revolutionary insurgency of the Islamic Courts Union finally turned out to be more or less successful, as its members finally managed to get a considerable degree of power in the country and to implement some of their most important demands. Of special importance is that those developments allowed to integrate moderate Somali Islamists into the Transitional Federal Government (and later in the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia the transition to which was performed with a direct participation of the moderate Islamists). In its turn, this allowed to stop the onslaught of the radical Islamists of al-Shabaab and to go on an at least partly successful counteroffensive, contributing in a very substantial way to the stabilization of the situation in Somalia.

Appendix: On the Definition of Revolutions Used in This Chapter

In this chapter,⁶ for the identification of revolutionary episodes, we rely on the following definitions of revolution:

• 1. “[Revolution is] an effort to transform the political institutions and the justifications for political authority in a society, accompanied by formal or informal mass mobilization and noninstitutionalized actions that undermine existing authorities” (Goldstone, 2001: 142).

• 2. “Revolution is a collective mobilization that attempts to quickly and forcibly overthrow an existing regime in order to transform political, economic and symbolic relations” (Lawson, 2019: 5).

• 3. “Revolution is anti-government (very often illegal) mass actions (mass mobilization) with the following aims: (1) to overthrow or replace the existing government within a certain period of time; (2) to seize power or to provide conditions for coming to power; (3) to make significant changes in the regime, social or political institutions” (Goldstone et al., 2022b: 50–51).

Note that all these definitions imply the following main criteria for the identification of revolutionary episodes:

• 1. Mass mobilization (operationalized as, e.g., “at least a thousand civilian participants” [Beissinger, 2022: 4]). This excludes almost automatically coups that can well result in “quick and forcible overthrow of an existing regime” (e.g., replacing a partial democracy with autocracy), but that do not involve mass mobilization.

• 2. It should contain at least an attempt to overthrow or replace the existing government.⁷ This excludes so-called “quasi-revolutionary episodes” (see Beissinger, 2022 for detail).

• 3. It should be aimed at “significant changes in the regime, social or political institutions”.

In this respect, for example, the ISIS insurgency in Syria and Iraq fits all the above-mentioned criteria of a revolutionary episode very well. It was accompanied by very substantial formal and informal mass mobilization (some of whose survivors could be found till now in a number of special detention camps in Syria and Iraq). It clearly attempted to quickly and forcibly overthrow existing regimes in Syria and Iraq. And it evidently aimed at significant changes in the regime, social or political institutions (though the changes that the Daesh revolutionaries wanted to make, and were actually making would not look attractive to us in any way). Incidentally, this reminds us that revolutions should not look necessarily attractive; in fact, they are sometimes unequivocally ugly events (another evident example is, of course, the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia) (see Lawson, 2019 for more detail).

Note that these definitions do not imply that revolutionary episodes should be necessarily violent, or successful. A salient recent example is the Byelorussian revolution of 2020–2021 that was both saliently nonviolent and clearly unsuccessful. But it fits the above-specified criteria of the revolutionary episode as perfectly as the very violent and unsuccessful Daesh insurgency, as nonviolent and successful Velvet revolutions in Czechoslovakia (1989) and Armenia (2018), or as very violent and successful Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

As noted by Goldstone et al., (2022a: 2), “these definitions are broad enough to encompass events ranging from the relatively peaceful revolutions that overthrew communist regimes to the violent Islamic revolution in Afghanistan. At the same time, these definitions are strong enough to exclude coups, revolts, civil wars, and rebellions that make no effort to transform institutions or the justification for authority. They also exclude peaceful transitions to democracy through institutional arrangements such as plebiscites and free elections, as in Spain after Franco”.⁸