DISCOVERING THE CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS OF AFRICAN PEACEKEEPING MISSION IN SOMALIA (AMISOM): THE SOMALI PERSPECTIVE

Abstract: There is an ongoing debate on evaluating peacekeeping missions sent to conflict settings and whether such interventions be successfully achieved or not. Assessing the challenges that peacekeepers face in a conflict environment, like Somalia, is difficult, yet the reasons have not been evaluated extensively. Many scholars tried to consider peacekeeping missions internally, such as funding, capacity, and the composition of peacekeepers. However, the role of internal factors such as the knowledge and the ability of local people is overlooked, and the voices of the Somali traditional leaders seems missing. Therefore, this paper delves into this by examining the challenges and the prospects that the African Mission in Somalia, known as AMISOM, faces, from the Somali point of view in stabilizing and building peace in south and central Somalia. This case study of Somalia uses elite interviews with an open-ended questionnaire to collect data from 12 respondents, including males and females from different Somali communities. The empirical findings of this thesis presented that AMISOM is not practically doing the work it is mandated to do due to some fundamental challenges. Every troop-contributing state of AMISOM has different and separate interests, overlapping and challenging the overall mission mandate. It further revealed that international peacekeeping principles are either non-applicable to AMISOM or not deliberately applied and chosen from other unknown and conflicting principles. The study also proposes that engagement of local knowledge with peacekeeping efforts and removal of neighboring countries from the peacekeeping efforts would ease the peacekeeping challenges in Somalia.