Foreign Intervention and Radicalization in Somalia (2001-2009): How and When Does Conflict Evolve Into Political Violence

Foreign Intervention and Radicalization in Somalia: How and When Does Conflict Evolve into Violence (2001 -2009) analyzes political violence within a broader political context in which the mobilization of social movements takes place. The central focus of this book is to explain the social mechanisms through which the radicalization processes unfolded on the part of al-Shabaab between 2001 and 2009 in Somalia. H. Ibrahim Alegöz traces the intricate interactions of social mechanisms that gave rise to the steady escalation of more militant forms of conflict from a relational, dynamic, and process-oriented perspective.
The book offers an alternative approach to the existing models linking violence to ideological preferences, cultural templates, or ethnic and state-centric pathologies. Alegöz argues that historical and contentious political interactions play a crucial role in explaining violence. The author demonstrates how the interests of local, regional, and international actors have overlapped within the Global War on Terror framework. The book finds that radicalization dynamics have undergone two consecutive episodes of contentious social interactions that, at the onset, were related to the formation of the Mogadishu-based warlord alliance and escalated following the Ethiopian military intervention in Somalia. It prompted a power vacuum which allowed al-Shabaab to expand its tactical repertoire of action and modify its target preferences into a relatively institutionalized, aggressive, and clandestine character.

H. Ibrahim Alegöz, University of Minnesota, USA.