Publisher's Synopsis
How does political violence occur? Should we analyze it in an isolated criminal environment or within a broader political context in which the mobilization of social movements takes place? This book stands for the latter. The central focus of this book is to explain the social mechanisms through which the radicalization processes unfolded on the part of al-Shabaab between 2001 and 2009 in Somalia. The author traces the intricate interactions of social mechanisms that gave rise to the steady escalation of more militant forms of action from a relational, dynamic, and process-oriented perspective.
The book offers an alternative approach to the extant models linking violence to ideological preferences, cultural templates, or ethnic and state-centric pathologies. Rather, the author argues that historical and contentious political interactions play a crucial role in explaining violence. The author looks into the complexities in Somalia's recent political history, influenced by multiple actors ranging from faction leaders to violent networks and external powers, and demonstrates how the interests of local, regional, and international actors have overlapped within the Global War on Terror framework. Alegöz finds that radicalization dynamics have undergone two consecutive episodes of contentious social interactions that, at the onset, were related to the formation of the Mogadishu-based warlord alliance and escalated following the Ethiopian military intervention in Somalia. It prompted a power vacuum which allowed al-Shabaab to expand its tactical repertoire of action and modify its target preferences into a relatively institutionalized, aggressive, and clandestine character.
