The outsourced interventions of the west: why has the international community not brought about a viable state in Somalia after more than two decades of engagement?

Garad, Abdiweli (2025). The outsourced interventions of the west: why has the international community not brought about a viable state in Somalia after more than two decades of engagement? University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

International statebuilding intervention has become an extensively debated discipline in IR scholarship. However, it remains unexcavated when the intervention involves outsourcing to an external intervenor with a conviction of a vested interest in the intervened state, and the role of the local elite is missing. This thesis contributes to filling this gap by extrapolating that statebuilding interventions cannot succeed when the international community's intervention efforts coalesce with actors pursuing vested geopolitical interests in the intervened state and local actors do not possess legitimacy in the eyes of the local populace and are seen as puppets.
Using the process-tracing methodology in the case study of Somalia, this thesis investigates the factors that conditioned Somalia's international statebuilding interventions to fail by hypothesising the 'Outsourcing Interventions of the West' as a causal mechanism by which the “world powers-led international community” outsourced the international community’s statebuilding intervention mission to external actors with particular geopolitical interests and by which the same maligned interveners established an inept local elite in Somalia, causing the failures of the international community's intervention to succeed.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):