Stephen Bunker in Bosaso

Problems of Pastoralism

For Americans, the name Somalia — rather than Congo, or Sierra Leone — is the one that most readily conjures up the images of civil war and poverty stereotypically associated with Africa. This is curious, since to the extent that Africa can be said to exist as a cultural and social, rather than merely geographical, reality Somalia is probably the least African nation south of the Sahara. Somalia’s higher name recognition for Americans relative to most other African countries is almost certainly due to mainly to Black Hawk Down. The classic action film recasts as heroic, in the best traditions of American cinema, what in fact was a profound humiliation that US Army special forces suffered in Somalia in 1993. But when the failed Operation Gothic Serpent is remembered in America, it is typically as a misguided intervention into one of Africa’s many confusing sectarian conflicts. Culturally, Black Hawk Down is not associated with the tropes of desert warfare and of hostile Islam found in American media about the War on Terror. The American intervention in Somalia is regarded as a separate historical moment, in a region culturally and geographically and racially distinct from Iraq and Afghanistan. Which is very odd, given that Somalia is in many ways a culturally, religiously — and as I will argue here, economically — Arab country.

Somalia is by far the most ethnically homogeneous nation in Africa, with about 85% of the population being ethnic Somalis. Somalis are an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim ethnic group, which in itself is not novel for Africa. But what sets Somalis apart from co-religionists like the Hausa is the depth of their historical and cultural ties to the Arab world. The interminable “are-Somalis-Black” discourse on Twitter means most readers who use that inimitable platform have probably encountered cartoonish, phenotypical and shock-value claims to Somali uniqueness. But the ambiguous African-ness of Somali owes much more to geoeconomics and cultural linkages than relative hair-straightness. A look at any map reveals that Djibouti, a Somali-majority country, sits across the narrowest point of the Red Sea from the Arabian peninsula. Present-day Somalia proper is not very much further. Somalia is a member of the Arab League, has Arabic as a second official language alongside Somali, and foreign media consumed there is almost exclusively Arabic-language.

My argument will first start with Somalia itself, before dialectically progressing towards situating it as part of what I describe as a pan-Arab regional economy. Since Somalia is mostly arid and thus unsuitable for agriculture, most of its people traditionally survived as nomadic pastoralists. Indeed, the rural population continues to almost exclusively consist of extended family groups who move several times yearly in search of grazing land and fresh water. Westerners tend to have a romantic image of nomadic herders as tough, self-sufficient people who answer to no man — a trope which probably dates back to the Mongol conquests. But Somali pastoralism, at least in its present form, is anything but an anachronism. It is central to Somalia’s integration into the Arab regional formation I will describe below, as well as into the capitalist world-economy more generally.

Although the export breakdown of the Arab gulf states resembles that of other peripheral zones of the capitalist world-system, oil is rather different from other primary commodities. The insight of classical dependency theory that under normal conditions the world-market will steadily impoverish peripheral commodity exporters is turned on its head in the Middle East. Price formation for specifically West Asian oil happens through political processes rather than impersonal market ones. This is a well-known story, that of the entire petrodollar system since Roosevelt first visited Saudi Arabia in 1945. Its end result is that major producers in the region, particularly those whose position is backed by American military might, are not really powerless neo-colonies in the way we think of countries in Latin America or Africa that also have an export makeup which overwhelmingly consists of primary commodities. The Arab Gulf states have truly peripheral economies, but opulent living standards for much of the population and thus deep consumer markets. We should here stop to note that this situation is completely unique to the Gulf petrostates, and not at all equivalent to other countries whose degree of world-system peripherality is sometimes debated (like Argentina). Such nations are fully exposed to competition on a world-market shaped to the advantage of imperialist states, rather than being blessed with a semi-monopoly thanks to the armed backing of those same centers.

This brings us to the main theoretical point I wish to make today, one that in its broad strokes is an invitation to further thought on the political economy of Somalia.

Let’s go back to Argentina for a moment. Aside from the bare fact of having a largely Euro-descendant or phenotypically “white” population, it invites confusion because a large enough segment of the population appear to live like Europeans. If the classic example of an extractive periphery is the DR Congo or Gabon, we should expect this type of formation to feature grinding poverty for all but the ultra-wealthy, even in urban areas. But Argentine cities boast a substantial middle-class who have all the same automobiles, consumer electronics, international vacations, etc., as average citizens of the opulent United States. Countries like Argentina might export mostly low-value added primary commodities, but they nevertheless draw migrants from seemingly much poorer neighboring economies to work in urban service industries like countries of the Global North do. To the unfamiliar eye, the relationship between Argentina and Bolivia (or for that matter, Russia and Tajikistan) can look an awful lot like that between Mexico and the United States.

The Argentina I, here writing an article to inform English-speakers, am personally familiar with is the one described above. That is, an image of wealth is often transmitted to the outside world because wealth is overwhelmingly concentrated in the geographic areas where cultural production, academic institutions, communications technology, etc., are most intensely clustered…

The cities!

We typically think of unequal exchange as a process taking place only across national borders, since after all, the theory originating with Arghiri Emmanuel (1972) is both based on and meant to explain wage differentials between nation-states. But this picture is incomplete, at least in the case of extractive peripheries. Socially necessary labor-time, embodied labor, or whatever else you want to call it, is at the end of the day just an input of energy into production. That is why Marx is so concerned with reproduction costs — without calories, rest, etc., the worker had no bodily energy which can purchased for a working-day by the capitalist. Resource extraction is also a process of making quantities of physical matter/energy available for conversion into capital. The difference between human labor-power and raw materials is one of medium and of specific utility, but not of nature. It’s simple physics. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, only rearranged — and under capitalist social relations such a rearrangement occurs via the accumulation process (Bunker, 1985: 32-35).

This is relevant when talking about geographically-mediated forms of exploitation such as (ecologically) unequal exchange because extractive production represents a straightforward transfer of matter/energy across space. In the first instance across nation-state borders, from South to North, periphery to core. Obviously some Northern countries such as Canada and Australia have an export makeup reflecting a huge share of agro-extractive sectors in their national economic composition. But relative levels of compensation for this type of production, as any other in the imperialist countries, is incredibly high by global standards. Northern governments bring their fiscal efficiency to bear on taxing extractive sectors, and then can use the revenue for cleanup and regulation which mitigates their near- and medium-term damage to local ecologies. High wages and rigorous workplace safety standards extend not just reproduction costs, but relative affluence to the workers in Northern extractive sectors. The American blue-collar male can make make a small fortune very quickly working in North Dakota gas fields, or on an Alaskan crab boat — which is why easily tens of thousands migrate yearly for such employment.

In the periphery, things are rather different. Lacking meaningful power over their economic destiny, non-core states are subject to a global race-to-the-bottom against each other just to export enough to stay afloat. This takes the form not only of extreme wage suppression (often to levels incompatible with human survival) but also of seeking to offer lower environmental costs than competitors. Multinationals (in mining, etc.) will simply leave a peripheral state which imposes high cleanup costs (Wallerstein, 2004: 48) unless the relevant resource can be found nowhere else on Earth (which is basically never the case). Again, so far we have been going over an old story. Ecologically unequal exchange is theoretically not much different from the Marxian version of Emmanuel except, well, ecological.

But the bottomless suppression of levels of renumeration for peripheral extractive sectors is distributed unevenly. Agro-extractive production happens in the countryside in all countries, but as explained above in the imperialist countries there is a pre-existing high level of income at all points in the supply chain. In the periphery, by contrast, the already much lesser income is returned not to the country as a whole but in the first instance to urban centers — where the finance, administration, transport etc., sides of an export economy are located. Since peripheral capitalists by definition have a purely external orientation and no interest in the internal market, little or no export profit actually makes it back to the rural interior where the commodities in question are physically produced. As a result, extractive capitalism in the periphery consists in essence of outright plunder by the cities of their rural hinterlands (Galeano, 2006: 225-228). This is part of Marini’s (2022) famous point about super-exploitation. In general, the “development of underdevelopment” of the countryside by the city is a dynamic that has been most robustly theorized by writers coming from Latin America, since here it has been going on the longest and is most starkly visible. My reason for mentioning Argentina earlier was that, just as wealth in Europe is possible only because of poverty in the colonies, wealth in Buenos Aires is the result of poverty in Santiago del Estero, Tucumán and Jujuy. Core-periphery type dynamics like labor migration between Argentina and Bolivia, respectively, exist mainly because Bolivia is geographically contiguous with the equally exploited Argentine interior. What takes place is not an imperialist exploitation of Bolivia by Argentina but an exploitation of the broader region by the parasitic middle class of Buenos Aires (Galeano, 2006: 229-230). We could just as easily substitute Bolivia, Tucumán and Buenos Aires with Tajikistan, Saratov and St. Petersburg, which is why it is obnoxiously wrong to speak of “Russian imperialism” in Central Asia. But that is a different essay entirely.

In any case, the problem faced by Gulf peripheral capitalisms is that they physically do not have an internal hinterland to exploit. First, with the exception of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the Gulf states are simply too small in the most literal, geographical sense. While in the KSA an exploitative rural-urban dynamic does exist between the major population centers and the Shia-majority regions where the bulk of oil reserves are actually located, this does not allow it to escape the second problem. The Arabian Desert is probably the most climactically extreme zone of permanent human habitation outside of the Arctic Circle. Buenos Aires and Moscow are not only enriched by their respective interiors, but fed by them. Only one form of food production is really possible in the Gulf, nomadic pastoralism. For thousands of years, this was how the Bedouin forebears of present-day oil sheikhs lived, herding ruminants from water source to water source. That is what Saudi King Faisal famously alluded to in 1975, during the oil embargo, when he warned the Americans that while they could not live without oil, his people could happily return to the desert and once more live simply on goat milk. What is ironic is that the Saudi upper and middle-classes in fact did and do live like Americans, and if it was debatable to imagine then that they would be content to give that up at the drop of a hat then today the proposition is simply absurd.

Mall of Dubai

All of which is to point out the Gulf extractive peripheral formation has, by necessity, to extend beyond the borders of any one nation-state. This is only a slight tweak to the argument we have been making so far with examples drawn from Latin America and Eurasia. The Buenos Aires-es of the world do to a certain extent exploit arenas beyond their own nation-state containers. But this is only the wake of a dynamic in which they live by sucking the blood out of the vast productive zones contained within their own expansive nation-state borders. Now, the fact that the Gulf capitalisms have such limited domains should according to our model mean that societal wealth is virtually nonexistent. It implies that unlike in geographically larger and more environmentally welcoming peripheral states, there is virtually nothing for upper- and middle-classes to skim off from the surplus they deliver to core countries. We know this is not true in reality. Dubai is fast becoming a byword for extravagance. Why?

The explanation lies in the aforementioned unique nature of West Asian petroleum as compared to other primary commodities. According to Christopher Chase-Dunn (1998: 183), the antebellum American South was the most successful peripheral economy in capitalist history. Fueling Britain’s textile-sparked Industrial Revolution with raw materials grown by literal slave labor created the picture of an ostentatiously wealthy Southern planter class so familiar from American pop culture. I don’t want to rag on Professor Chase-Dunn (this author can attest to his incredible warmth and kindness), but I do disagree with him on this point. The most successful peripheral economies in history are without question the Arab Gulf states. Core-type capitalist development had to be imposed on the American South through armed force, so enthralled were the planters by resource rents. The Gulf, by contrast, has profited so spectacularly from its peripheral integration into the capitalist world-economy that it is now trying to use accumulated rents as a platform to simply jump into the core and it stands a very real chance of succeeding. Southern planters were not the red-carpet clients of London banks, nor did they own huge tracts of the ritziest cities in the world or a large share of the global leisure industry. But the Saudis alone meet this description.

First, some definitions:

Both the antebellum South and the contemporary Arab monarchies can be classed as peripheral economies in the classic sense. I realize that some readers might question this classification because of their wealth. That is what makes them historically exceptional peripheries, but peripheries all the same. Neither is/was at all competitive or even a player in the most technologically advanced, capital-intensive production processes of the day. Peripherality is probably easier to understand in the antebellum case. Here we have an formation which is based on its labor force being mobilized through pure physical coercion with no wage payment of any kind. It cannot, nor was it ever intended to, develop an internal consumer market of the type needed for investment and thus meaningful capital accumulation to take place. Plantation profits do become capital, but this is entirely exported abroad in order to pay for luxury goods produced in the industrialized countries of Europe and Northern states. From a rational standpoint, the Southern planter-capitalist is content with this arrangement — his labor costs are zero, so there is no incentive to raise productivity by investing in machinery. So far we need nothing more than the basic categories developed by Marx.

The Gulf is different. First, the share of world wealth that accrues to it through peripheral production is actually enormous — both because oil is central to contemporary capitalism as cotton never was to its 19th-century incarnation and because it is subject to a unique political pricing arrangement agreed to by the strongest military power in history. Second, the Gulf monarchies are for the most part literal city-states and thus demographically tiny. Oil is also unique among commodities in being incredibly labor un-intensive. So basically the entire population gets a cut of resource rents (Pelletiere, 2001: 220-224). In other words, citizens of the Gulf are in their high standards of living not comparable to Northern labor aristocrats but rather to any other peripheral bourgeoise. The Gulf economies are unique because they are peripheral economies where (roughly) everyone gets to be the peripheral capitalist.

I will pre-empt a few probable objections to this picture:

1. Yes, the Gulf has coerced labor, and yes, in some of its constituent countries this workforce consists of a majority of the actual population. However, this is different from antebellum slavery because in the Gulf slaves are primarily engaged in service work and superfluous to the peripheral-type production process itself (what we are focusing on here).

2. This demographic picture of the Gulf might have been true in the 1970s, but today Saudi Arabia at least has a mid-size population by world standards. Yes, but the forward linkages created during the period of very low population (mainly in the form of sovereign wealth funds with huge financial portfolios) have greatly mitigated the effects of rising population on standard of living.

Where does this all leave us in relation to the Horn of Africa?

I started off talking about how large peripheral countries contain islands of urban affluence who share the fruits of imperialist exploitation with the core, using the example of Argentina. We have now established that the affluent Gulf monarchies are a kind of giant agglomeration of such privileged cities. Who are they exploiting, exactly?

(don’t laugh!) The core-type overconsumption of Gulf citizens is illustrated well by the following graph:

Prevalence of Obesity in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) States (Khoja et. al., 2017)

By comparison:

Obesity in the United States.

The type of North American diet is reflected by such public health data is, as everyone knows, heavy in animal products. Now, wealth and meat consumption are both necessary but not sufficient conditions for epidemic obesity. Wealthy Argentines and Chinese consume North American quantities of beef but thinness is still the visible norm in both societies. North America is not the only core zone of the world-system — and Europeans also consume meat at per-capita rates far above the global average but on average are much healthier than Americans. Culture, etc., play a big role in obesity. None of this changes the fact that it is a disease that cannot become prevalent in absence of societal wealth and high meat consumption. And the rising population of the Arab Gulf states that we noted above of course also increases their demand for meat and all kinds of food products.

Speaking of culture, meat (particularly beef) is obviously a big part of American identity. This reflects the socio-ecological reality of settlement on a continent-sized space with nearly infinite grazing land. As we have already gone over, the Gulf has no such natural blessing. Its meat comes from:

It is here that I would like to address the fact that I am belatedly finishing this article after having it in my drafts at least since last spring.

You see, just this month I got beaten to the punch. Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton (2023) published a (very good) article in the most recent Review of African Political Economy along much the same lines. In it, they note the correlation between skyrocketing livestock exports to the Gulf from the Horn of Africa and the latter’s descent into permanent war accompanied by worsening internal food insecurity.

Duffield and Stockton particularly note how the overgrazing caused by increasing herds to the sizes necessary to keep up with Gulf meat demand is the primary cause of a truly horrific drought currently gripping the Horn — one whose origins in class and empire are elided by international development institutions under the depoliticized rhetoric of “climate change” (Duffield and Stockton, 2023: 10-11). This is by far the best part of their contribution, which is otherwise a brief outline meant to stimulate discussion.

I think my contribution here can help to address a few issues that Duffield and Stockton do not:

1. Putting the issue in world-systemic perspective. This was outlined above with the analysis of how the Gulf states are beneficiaries of their form of peripheral production which results in the creation of extreme peripheries within their geographic region.

2. The specific dynamics of Somali state disintegration along clan lines, and why its effects have remained so difficult to overcome.

Like the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula to whom they are culturally linked, ethnic Somalis have historically been nomadic pastoralists. Also like the Arabs, Somali society centered on tribal/clan structures. These were originally extended family networks where kinship ties provided a basis on which to organize the defense of large herds, that over time evolved into complex political formations.

The difference is that many, many Somalis still live this way.

Duffield and Stockton explain the primary antagonism driving the state of permanent war in Somalia as that of ethnicity. I don’t want to score cheap shots on them here by saying that this repeats the cliches of mainstream Africanist writing. Duffield and Stockton have a fundamentally political-economic lens, that is they are actually trying to transcend the conventional ascription of African conflicts to ancient ethnic hatreds and they do this very well. Also, the phenomenon they describe is very real (Duffield and Stockton, 2023: 5-6):

During the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, state policies and external terms of trade tended to favour the farmers, and their political representatives, while disadvantaging the herders. During the last decades of the twentieth century, the shift from subsistence to commercial modes of production among groups like the Bantu, Fur and their semi-nomadic neighbours was intensifying conflicts over water and land as desertification drove herders further south. While often characterised as ‘Bantu versus Somali’ or ‘African versus Arab’, these increasingly heavily armed exchanges were in reality two historically complementary peasant modes of production being confronted with the emergence of fossil capital’s inexorable demand for meat in the post-1973 urbanisation, construction and population explosions in the Gulf states. These were booming economies that opened new opportunities for livestock traders and their military patrons, fixers and owners of the major ports along the Red Sea coast.

From what little I do know of Sudan, this picture of an ethnically-mediated land dispute between farmers and pastoralists seems reasonable for that case. But for Somalia, it has never been more than a secondary conflict dynamic. The overlapping civil wars that have gripped Somalia for decades have been primarily between different Somali clan federations (i.e., within the pastoralist ethnic group). Remember that Somali Bantus are, by African standards, a small minority. The leadership of the last truly unitary Somali state, that of Siad Barre, was in no way dominated by Bantus. Whatever the historical racist animus faced by Somali Bantus for their language, animist religion, “Black” features like fuzzy hair and dark skin, Somalia fell apart because of mutual hatred and othering between ethnic Somalis who all prided themselves on not having these traits. Siad Barre was overthrown by a group called the Somali National Alliance, led by Mohamed Farrah Aideed and whose ideology entirely consisted of defending Hawiye (the largest Somali clan family) interests. Their primary grievance was a perception that Siad Barre was ruling on behalf of his own Darood clan, evidenced by its overrepresentation in his government. For that matter the largest ongoing secessionist dispute in Somalia has nothing to do with ethnicity or even Salafi jihadism. It is about the desire of the Isaaq clan federation to carve out its own statelet called Somaliland.

This leads into the biggest contribution I think Stephen Bunker has to make to the political economy of Somalia.

We have already seen how Bunker sets the Marxian account of capitalism within a larger perspective of ecological economics. Energy and matter are the building blocks of the universe and all things within it, including human societies. Indeed, one can interpret the concept of mode of production in Marx as basically being about distinct modes of organizing ecological webs of life. In the first instance all human activity, as that of any other species, is about modifying nature to the advantage of our own survival. We are just better at it. Class struggle is a conflict over the definition of this survival — since under capitalism accumulation for its own sake is claimed to be synonymous with it (Moore, 2015).

Extractive production denudes certain geographic areas to the benefit of others. We have seen that some parts of a given extractive formation are relatively less denuded and thus able to carve out a pretty comfortable niche for themselves. But in areas which suffer only a net ecological loss, governance and state-formation become impossible (Bunker, 1985: 51-54). Bunker illustrates this with case studies of the Sisyphean task faced by federal bureaucrats in the Brazilian Amazon when trying to implement any kind of national development project. There is a reason this part of the world gets compared with the American Wild West (Galeano, 2006: 71). Of course, Washington and New York eventually transformed their Western states into something beyond a source of gold and timber. Brasilia and Rio, benefitting from their place at the center of a peripheral formation, have no incentive to do the same.

My point is that although Bunker primarily understands “extractive formation” as referring to large peripheral nation-states themselves, the ecological uniqueness of the Gulf means that in its case this concept should be extended beyond national borders. Gulf capitalism cannot exist without food, and for that it needs to incorporate Somalia as part of its own hinterland. The price for Somalia itself as that it is bled dry, the resources for stable state-formation disappear. Since it is relegated to being a land solely of pastoral herders, who sell their livestock to intermediaries for convenient shipment to the nearby Arab states, it is only logical that the forms of identification created by this archaic agrarian system should remain more salient than modern ones like nation. Indeed, since Somali pastoralism is not continuing as it always did but rather being intensified — with ever-growing herds an imperative of pastoral capitalism — it is only logical that traditional divisions like clan would be deepened, and become far more violent.

References:

Bunker, Stephen G. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Chase-Dunn, Christopher K. Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy. Updated ed. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.

Duffield, Mark, and Nicholas Stockton. "How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan." Review of African Political Economy (2023): 1-12.

Emmanuel, Arghiri. Unequal Exchange; a Study of the Imperialism of Trade. New York: [Monthly Review Press], 1972.

Galeano, Eduardo. Las venas abiertas de América Latina. 77. ed. México, D.F: Siglo Veintiuno, 2006.

Khoja, Tawfiq, Salman Rawaf, Waris Qidwai, David Rawaf, Kashmira Nanji, Aisha Hamad, and Tawfik Khoja. "Health care in Gulf Cooperation Council countries: a review of challenges and opportunities." Cureus 9, no. 8 (2017).

Marini, Ruy Mauro. The dialectics of dependency. Monthly Review Press, 2022.

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. 1st edition. New York: Verso, 2015.

Pelletiere, Stephen C. Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Gulf. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001.

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. World-Systems Analysis: an Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.