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This article traces the foundations, development, and evolution of Al-Shabaab's multi-tiered media and information operations through a historical lens from proto and early Al-Shabaab media in 2006 and early 2007 up to the beginning of 2021. Arguing that the group's media campaign is an integral part of its broader proto-state governance operations and kinetic actions, the article pays particular attention to central narrative frames aimed at domestic Somali, regional East African, and international audiences – both friendly and non-friendly – as well as to the role of media and information operations as part of the group's domestic governance operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than 20 years, Somalia has experienced state failure. Today, radical political Islam and groups such as al-Shabab with links to al-Qaida are gaining ground. The current federal government is failing to provide public goods, such as security, education, and health, to the population it claims to represent. To date, more than a dozen peace negotiations to end this conflict have failed. The objective of this article is to shed light on why past peace processes have failed. The study of the Mbagathi peace process that preceded the United Nations–led Djibouti peace process can help to better understand the current political stalemate and conflict in Somalia. Moreover, some of the challenges of state formation in Somalia will be discussed, including the claim that hidden and vested interests threaten a viable and politically stable state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article first traces events in Somalia since 9/11: the rise of the Islamic Courts, the Ethiopian occupation, the recalibration of the interim government and the al-Shabaab insurgency. A second layer of analysis brings into focus three fluctuations in the external perception of the Somali crisis: (i) a post-Cold War narrative of 'state-building'; (ii) the post-9/11 'war on terror'; and (iii) a reloaded vision of 'state-building-as-counterterrorism'. Such models inform US policy, yet their roots lie in an Anglo-Saxon intellectual edifice, detached from the Somali context. Nomothetic fallacies over US political agency encourage paradigms to linger long after the facts have failed them — a disjuncture brought to light most visibly during the second term of the Bush administration. In this period, the unrealities of the 'war on terror' were refracted instrumentally by local actors in the Horn of Africa, creating a web of distorting friend-enemy distinctions. While the Obama administration is less devoted than its predecessor to imagining an opponent in Somalia, it too has misread the core political logic. The article explores how this dissonance between external perception and local reality creates difficulties for post-interventionary states, whose politicians must win favour in Washington in the knowledge that favour alone cannot ensure political survival — and may subvert domestic attempts to secure it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]