Somali Nomads in the Anthropocene

With the ushering in of the concept of the Anthropocene, we must rethink how humanity as a whole relates to the natural environment and the Earth. For want of political imagination, we currently expect that somehow the state-system must adapt to the notion of the Anthropocene, despite its manifest incapacity to address the impact of human activities on the environment after fifty years of warnings. Meanwhile we are in the final throes of a millennia-long struggle of the state against nomadism. The effort to subject the last peoples that live in communities outside state structures, but in close harmony with the natural environment, has reached the far-flung peripheries. The international drive to create a state in Somalia, which is the subject of my doctoral research, can be seen in the longue durée as one of the final acts in this dialectical process. A close look at Somali political culture, which is largely derived from a pastoralist existence, consensual decision-making and the communal property of land and other resources, reveals impossible contradictions with the neoliberal state based on private property, a settled life and centralized decision-making. But this state is the only accepted model today, and the international community is spending billions of dollars to impose it on societies with a semi-nomadic culture or traditions of self-governance. That this effort is leading to chaos and ‘failed states’, war and mass migration can be seen not only in Somalia but in many other societies as well. In my doctoral research I question that the state is the only possible form of human organisation. Drawing on Bourdieu, Gramsci and James C. Scott to explain how the state, a social construct, has embedded itself so deeply in our imaginary, in this presentation I would like to explore an alternative scenario, where the Somali nomad finds a place in the Anthropocene. What would a state look like that accepts cross-border migrations of unregistered people, communal decision-making and collective property of resources? Can we even call that a state? Is it maybe time to explore alternative models of global governance? Take our cue from Somalia to re-imagine Western politics? To thrive in the Anthropocene, we must transform the political structures of humanity first. And become collectively more intelligent. Far from the End of History, we should understand humankind still has most of its history in front of itself. Here’s a role for social scientists like us: to imagine the structures of future global society.