In 1991, certain political and military leaders in Somalia, wishing to gain exclusive control over the state, mobilized their followers to use terror-wounding, raping, and killing-to expel a vast ...number of Somalis from the capital city of Mogadishu and south-central and southern Somalia. Manipulating clan sentiment, they succeeded in turning ordinary civilians against neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Although this episode of organized communal violence is common knowledge among Somalis, its real nature has not been publicly acknowledged and has been ignored, concealed, or misrepresented in scholarly works and political memoirs-until now. Marshaling a vast amount of source material, including Somali poetry and survivor accounts,Clan Cleansing in Somaliaanalyzes this campaign of clan cleansing against the historical background of a violent and divisive military dictatorship, in the contemporary context of regime collapse, and in relationship to the rampant militia warfare that followed in its wake.Clan Cleansing in Somaliaalso reflects on the relationship between history, truth, and postconflict reconstruction in Somalia. Documenting the organization and intent behind the campaign of clan cleansing, Lidwien Kapteijns traces the emergence of the hate narratives and code words that came to serve as rationales and triggers for the violence. However, it was not clans that killed, she insists, but people who killed in the name of clan. Kapteijns argues that the mutual forgiveness for which politicians often so lightly call is not a feasible proposition as long as the violent acts for which Somalis should forgive each other remain suppressed and undiscussed.Clan Cleansing in Somaliaestablishes that public acknowledgment of the ruinous turn to communal violence is indispensable to social and moral repair, and can provide a gateway for the critical memory work required from Somalis on all sides of this multifaceted conflict.
Avoidance of a return to poverty is a priority within postpoverty alleviation programmes in rural China. As traditional social networks, clan‐based networks have long played a pivotal role within ...rural society and governance. However, few studies have examined their influence on the return to poverty of rural families. Therefore, we used the China Family Panel Survey (CFPS) data from 2014 to explore how clan networks influence the risk of a return to poverty among rural households and its mechanisms. Our findings suggest that clan networks can reduce the risk of returning to poverty and that they have heterogeneous effects on families and regions with different characteristics. Their main function is to reduce the borrowing cost through an external support mechanism and to promote movements of the rural labour force to urban areas where they can earn higher nonagricultural stable incomes through an internal sharing mechanism. This study of the role of traditional clan‐based networks in poverty avoidance can contribute to their enhanced role in the new era, while also providing inputs for consolidating and expanding poverty alleviation, innovating existing follow‐up poverty alleviation guarantee mechanisms and promoting comprehensive rural revitalization.
The information technology project control literature has documented that clan control is often essential in complex multistakeholder projects for project success. However, instituting clan control ...in such conditions is challenging as people come to a project with diverse skills and backgrounds. There is often insufficient time for clan control to develop naturally. This paper investigates the question, "How can clan control be enacted in complex IT projects?" Recognizing social capital as a resource, we conceptualize a clan as a group with strong social capital (i.e., where its members have developed their structural, cognitive, and relational ties to the point that they share common values and beliefs and are committed to a set of peer norms). We theorize that the enactment of clan control is a dual process of (1) building the clan by developing its social capital dimensions (structural, cognitive, and relational ties) or reappropriating social capital from elsewhere and (2) leveraging the clan by reinforcing project-facilitating shared values, beliefs, and norms, and inhibiting those that impede the achievement of project goals. We explore how clan control was enacted in a large IT project at a major logistics organization in which clan control was quickly instituted to avoid an impending project failure. Our research contributes to theory in three ways: (1) we reconcile the two differing views of clan control into a single framework, (2) we explain the role of controllers in enacting clan control, and (3) we clarify how formal control can be employed to develop clan control.
This study investigates the impact of clans on a household's informal financing. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find that clans significantly promote informal financing; a ...series of robustness checks verify this result. We further demonstrate that clans motivate affluent households with a collectivist ethos to lend, thus aiding households facing liquidity constraints in entrepreneurship, mortgage repayments, and medical expenses. However, our findings indicate that poor households do not benefit from clans, reflecting the proverb “help the starving but not the poor.” We confirm the indispensable role of clans in informal financing through analyzing the development of formal finance and population outflows. Our results clarify the relationship between clan culture and informal financing in contemporary China.
Modularity is a means of partitioning technical knowledge about a product or process. When state-sanctioned intellectual property (IP) rights are ineffective or costly to enforce, modularity can be ...used to hide information and thus protect IP. We investigate the impact of modularity on IP protection by formally modeling the threat of expropriation by agents. The principal has three options to address this threat: trust, licensing, and paying agents to stay loyal. We show how the principal can influence the value of these options by modularizing the system and by hiring clans of agents, thus exploiting relationships among them. Extensions address screening and signaling in hiring, the effects of an imperfect legal system, and social norms of fairness. We illustrate our arguments with examples from practice.
This article explores the ways in which emergent police forces in conflict-affected Southern societies are shaped by cultural practices operating through social phenomena. It uses the record of the ...prototypical police forces found in the Somali cities of Kismayo and Baidoa, 2014-2017, to explore the ways in which culture, power relations and local realities — in this case, clan-based calculations, Somali and international politics, and physical insecurity — influence police development. It draws on the cities' experience of a donor-funded 'basic policing' programme to identify the motivating forces shaping police evolution in a society familiar with many aspects of conventional policing operations and vocabulary but positioned at the opposite end of the technical and institutional spectrum to those shaping police studies' canonical literature.
Winner of the 2011 African Studies Association Herskovits Award
Beyond the Royal Gazeshifts the perspective from which we view early African politics by asking what Buganda, a kingdom located on the ...northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, looked like to people who were not of the center but nevertheless became central to its functioning. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines-history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology-Neil Kodesh argues that the domains of politics and public healing were intimately entwined in Buganda from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted throughout Buganda, Kodesh demonstrates how efforts to ensure collective prosperity and perpetuity-usually expressed in the language of health and healing-lay at the heart of community-building processes in Buganda. Kodesh's work offers a novel approach to the use of oral sources and opens up new possibilities for researching and writing histories of more distant periods in Africa's past.Beyond the Royal Gazewill appeal to students and scholars of health and healing, political complexity, and the production of knowledge in places where limited documentary evidence exists.
Since at least the 1980s, scholars have highlighted parties’ reliance on external actors, with Panebianco’s ‘electoral–professional’ party model spotlighting the increasing role of professionals in ...supporting party activities and campaigns. Over successive decades, our understanding of the role of external actors, and particularly consultants, has grown. As parties have begun to embrace digital tools and technologies, however, it has become apparent that our understanding of party organization does not reflect the array of actors who support party activities. In this article, we draw on extensive interview data from Australia and the United Kingdom to offer a new conceptual framework – that we call the ‘party-centred digital ecosystem’ – to highlight the functions that different types of external actor provide for parties. Introducing the classification of CLANS to describe these different actors, we discuss the significance of this trend, highlighting the potential for increasingly porous organizational boundaries as parties call on different types of external actor for support.
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