My new book – When There Was No Aid: War and Peace in Somaliland – https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501747151/when-there-was-no-aid/#bookTabs=1 - is out with @CornellPress. A thread:

2/For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of countries in the global South that are even relatively untouched by it.

3/Somaliland’s level of isolation from the international system during its foundational years (roughly 1991-2001) is so unusual that it offers a rare window onto post-conflict reconstruction in the absence of significant external intervention.

4/This book is about how peace and relative order emerged in Somaliland in the absence of aid or other forms of external intervention, and asks what this suggests about why poverty and conflict persists elsewhere in the global South.

5/Takeaway: Aid matters less than we think to the prospects for peace and development because it is does not challenge the broader asymmetries that entrench violence and poverty.

6/Takeaway: Stronger governance institutions do not necessarily cause peace and civil order. Both can be sustained not only when, but even partly because, domestic institutions cannot reliably control violence.

7/Takeaway: This matters for how we understand what institutions actually *do* when we say that they manage violence. It shows that even ‘strong’ institutions are no guarantee against disorder because order is a function of ideas about what order means.

8/Takeaway: As the current crisis illustrates, change can be very fast, no matter how ‘strong’ we think our institutions are.

Aaaand, I’ve just found out that the book is fully (and freely) available at the moment on MUSE, as part of their Covid access:
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/73086/