Contributor(s): Ilham Gassar, Khalif Abdirahman, Dr Nisar Majid, Mark Bradbury | Galkaio town represents a boundary on the ground and in the imagination within Somali society. The 1993 Peace Accord held a fragile peace for many years as political and developmental trajectories differed markedly on either side of this border town. This talk explores the 2016/17 peace agreement, in its local and national dimensions, and which occurred as part of the state-building project that is still ongoing in Somalia and offers insights on the quality of international intervention.

Nisar Majid is the Research Director for the CRP-Somalia. He has worked in and on Somalia and the Somali territories of the Horn of Africa for over twenty years, in various applied research capacities. This included his doctoral research which explored transnationalism in the Somali context. He a co-author of Famine in Somalia: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures, 2011-21 (Hurst, 2016).

Khalif Abdirahman is Senior Field Researcher on the CRP- Somalia. He has conducted research across the Somali regions for the last seven years including for Tufts University, the Rift Valley Institute and the Overseas Development Institute.

Mark Bradbury is Executive Director of the Rift Valley Institute. He is a social analyst with over 20 years’ experience in international development and humanitarian aid. He has worked in and written about Somalia, Somaliland, Sudan, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Uganda, and Kosovo as a development worker and researcher. He is author of Becoming Somaliland (Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2008), Search for Peace, a synthesis report of a Peace Mapping study on Somalia, and Whose Peace is it Anyway? Connecting Somali and International Peacemaking.

Ilham Gassar is CEO of KIGS Consulting. She is currently a Senior Stabilization and Conflict advisor to the International Organization of Migration (IOM). Prior to that she served with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM), as a Political Advisor to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Somalia (SRSG), from 2016 to 2019. Ilham was the chief negotiator of the Galkayo Peace agreement and chief facilitator for the Ahla Sunna Wah Jama and Galmudug State power sharing agreement. She has over 10 years’ experience in social advocacy, strategy and programme development and project management. She has undertaken two research assignments for the CRP-Somalia.

Matthew Benson is the CRP’s South Sudan Research Director and the CRP’s Research Manager. He has conducted researched on, and worked in, South Sudan and Sudan in various capacities since 2008, with on-going research on taxation and state-formation in these countries. Matthew has also researched the equitable provision of public services in the Horn with the World Bank, the Rift Valley Institute, the Overseas Development Institute, the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex, the UN Refugee Agency, and Oxfam America.

The Conflict Research Programme is based within LSE IDEAS.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSESomalia