Resilience of a City at War: Territoriality, Civil Order and Economic Exchange in Mogadishu

Abstract

Over the last three decades, African cities have displayed enormous resilience in the face of economic adversity. Mogadishu, the war-ravaged capital of Somalia, however, provides the most extreme example of resolve to carry on with daily life amidst material deprivation and extreme physical insecurity on the part of its residents. This chapter considers how this has been accomplished – how commodity and money supplies have prevailed and how the business class have surmounted, accommodated and sometimes capitalized on the anarchic vacuum in state power.