Monitoring Mogadishu

Abstract

Technology-based surveillance practices have changed the modes of policing found in the global North but have yet to influence police–citizen engagement in Southern cities such as Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Based on the role played by monitoring in Mogadishu’s formal security plan and in an informal neighbourhood watch scheme in Waberi district, this article uses a policy-oriented approach to generate insight into surveillance and policing in a fragile and seemingly dysfunctional environment. It shows that while watching is an integral aspect of everyday life, sophisticated technologies capable of digitally capturing real-time events play no part in crime reporting or in the monitoring of terrorist threats, and information is delivered by using basic and inclusive methods such as word of mouth, rather than by mobile telephones or social media. Indeed, the availability of technologies such as CCTV has actually resulted in the reproduction and reinforcement of older models of policing; even when the need to monitor security threats encourages residents to engage with the task of policing, their responses reflect local preferences and legacy issues dating from the 1970s and 2000s. In other words, policing practice has not been reconfigured. In Mogadishu, as in most of the world, the policing task is shaped as much by residents’ expectations as by the technologies available.