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The resurgence of Al-Shabaab in Somalia and implications for the humanitarian sector

Context · Access

When an armed group controls territory and taxes the movement of goods across it, the humanitarian question stops being whether agencies can reach an area and becomes whether they can operate in it without becoming part of its economy.

The pattern that emerged in Somalia is not unusual and it is worth setting out, because agencies working in comparable environments keep meeting it.

Territorial control changed the terms of access. Where a group governs an area, access is not a matter of a single negotiation with a national authority. It is a set of local arrangements that have to be made and remade, and the arrangements include what the organisation will pay, in cash or in kind, for the ability to move.

Taxation made neutrality a financial question. Groups that finance themselves from checkpoints and from the movement of goods treat every vehicle as revenue. An agency that pays at a checkpoint has funded the group; an agency that refuses may not pass. There is no comfortable position, and the sector has not resolved it. What an organisation can do is decide its position in advance, record it, and apply it consistently, so that the decision is a policy rather than a series of improvisations by individual drivers.

Staff became a target and a resource. National staff working for an international agency are, in the group's terms, both a security problem and a source of leverage. Their exposure is higher than that of international staff and their options are fewer, which makes the diverse profiles question an operational one rather than a matter of policy.

Remote management became the default for some areas, and it carries its own risk. Running a programme through partners and local staff while international staff stay in the capital moves the risk to the people who remain. It also reduces the organisation's ability to see what is happening, which weakens every subsequent assessment.

The security response became a military one. Where the state response to an armed group is a military campaign, humanitarian agencies operating in the same space are affected by it whether or not they are parties to it. Movement restrictions, convoys, curfews and evacuation orders come from the campaign, and the organisation's access is shaped by decisions it has no part in.

The practical implications are the familiar ones, applied seriously: assess at the district level rather than nationally, record every access arrangement with its date and interlocutor, treat payments at checkpoints as a policy question with a written position, and be explicit with national staff about the additional risk they carry and what the organisation is doing about it.