Waging Peace, towards an Africa Union Stabilisation Strategy for Somalia

Abstract

Over the last few years, successful military operations across Somalia have helped to unshackle towns south of Mogadishu from al Shabaab, demonstrating the capacity of the African Union Mission to Somalia (amisom) to achieve parts of its mandate. However, friction between the Federal Government of Somalia and the Federal Member States have heightened tensions and rifts over elections, state management and overall security, despite significant international support. Despite amisom s efforts, the legacies of the 1990s civil war have remained unresolved, and state restoration has been disrupted by political, clannish, environmental and structural challenges. In contrast, al Shabaab remains adaptable, resilient and exploits grievances, local dynamics, and competition over resources. This paper argues, the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council needs to re-mandate and reinforce amisom in conjunction with an AU stabilisation strategy for Somalia which exploits experiences from the AU’s Regional Stabilisation Strategy for the Lake Chad Basin.

Transferring Policy: The African Union's Protection of Civilians Policy in Peacekeeping Missions in Somalia and South Sudan

“…Despite AMISOM's challenges, such as a lack of initial investments and resources as well as a reluctance to deploy forces from some African Troop Contributing Countries (TCCs) (TRF, 2007), AMISOM made significant progress. It succeeded in areas where neither the UN nor the United States (US) was able to achieve success during the early 1990s under the United Nations Operation in Somalia I (UNOSOM I) (1992)(1993), the United Nations Operation in Somalia II (UNOSOM II) (1993)(1994)(1995), and the US-led Unified Task Force (1992)(1993) Operation Restore Hope (Tchie, 2022). Troops from Burundi and Uganda were among the first to be deployed as part of AMISOM to fight Harakat al Shabaab al-Mujahideen (al-Shabaab) in Mogadishu.…”

“…The AU would adopt a PoC policy for AU PSOs. However, the mandated task of protection for AMISOM would move away from being mandatefocused to adopting an institutional focus through its AU-PSO doctrine in an attempt to meet the mission's IHL and international obligations to donors (Tchie, 2022). However, AMISOM did not reconfigure its operations to carry out holistic forms of PoC.…”

“…This significantly distinguishes them from the UN peacekeeping doctrine's principles of consent, impartiality, and minimum use of force, naturally allowing for the PoC. Additionally, the AU's civilian component is not formally institutionalised like its military equivalent (Tchie et al, 2022). Therefore, the AU PSOs, for the most part, have focused on carrying out peace enforcement tasks and it lacks multidimensional features like UN PKOs (Bara and Hultman, 2020).…”