The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia (1996), edited by Catherine Besteman and Lee Cassanelli: the war behind the war

The book

The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia: The War Behind the War is a collection of studies edited by Catherine Besteman, an anthropologist who did fieldwork in the Jubba valley, and Lee V. Cassanelli, a historian of southern Somalia. It was published in 1996 by Westview Press in the United States and by HAAN Publishing in London, with about 222 pages; HAAN reissued it in 2000, 2003 and 2004 (Open Library). Besteman's own study of the Jubba valley is Unraveling Somalia, and Cassanelli's history of the south is The Shaping of Somali Society.

Its question

The publishers' description begins with the scale of the collapse after 1991: the end of the central government, the death or displacement of at least two million people, and a war that destroyed much of the country's infrastructure. It then asks why a country whose people shared a language, a religion and a culture broke apart so deeply. Most explanations, it notes, stressed personalities, clan loyalties or Cold War rivalry. This book instead looks at land and resources as key ingredients in the politics of modern Somalia and in the events that led to the war (Open Library).

What is in it

The nine contributors draw on their own field research. Using evidence of disputes over land rights and natural resources stretching back several decades, they show how land shaped political factions and regional and ethnic rivalries in the south. Local case studies bring out the tensions between village politics and state policy, and between local and national ways of using land. Together they give detailed information on rural life, relations between communities and struggles over resources in the farming areas between the Shabelle and Jubba rivers (Open Library). The background is on Land law and land ownership, Farming and harvests and Minority communities.

The regions concerned are described on Lower Shabelle, Middle Juba, Lower Juba and Bay, and the war itself on Collapse, 1991 to 2000.

How it was received

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, the anthropologist I. M. Lewis called it "essential reading for anyone interested in understanding problems in Somalia" (Open Library). A 2023 land governance review by the Heritage Institute for Policy Studies cites Cassanelli's chapter in it, "Explaining the Somali Crisis", and his later study for the Rift Valley Institute, which traced how in the 1970s the struggle for land moved "from the local to the national arena" as land laws placed all land under state authority (Heritage Institute).

Where to read it

The book is held by research libraries and copies of the HAAN editions are sold second-hand. Later studies on this site that follow similar themes include Somalia: Economy Without State by Peter D. Little.