Unsteady state: Somalia in disarray
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
4.4 • 4.9K Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The country had been on the rise: beating back jihadists, strengthening its federal structure and gaining international stature. That has all reversed. In Britain levels of crime have fallen—but the changing nature of criminality has meant a smaller fraction of crooks getting caught. And 80 years on to the day our Archive 1945 project revisits the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. |
| 0:31.0 | Good news and bad news about crime in Britain. There's less of it, but a smaller fraction of cases are being solved. We look into why. And as the world marks 80 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, we return to our |
| 0:42.3 | Archive-1945 project, reliving the end of the Second World War through the Economist's |
| 0:47.8 | coverage from the time. But first... |
| 1:02.0 | Somalia is one of those places that frequently attracts the modifier fragile alongside state, |
| 1:16.6 | which is already a step up from the years when the modifier was failed. |
| 1:21.6 | With international and regional partners playing a part, it's become one of the world's longest-running state-building projects. |
| 1:29.3 | And a project it is, keeping its constituent statelets and breakaway regions held together |
| 1:34.9 | in the face of jihadist violence on multiple fronts. |
| 1:38.6 | It's a lot to ask of a fragile state. |
| 1:41.4 | The capital Mogadishu and the federal government of Somalia is looking weak at the |
| 1:47.8 | moment. Tom Gardner is an Africa correspondent for the economist. Some recent gains against al-Shabaab, |
| 1:55.8 | the jihadist group which controls much of central Somalia and has ties to al-Qaeda, those have been largely reversed |
| 2:02.2 | in recent months. And indeed, a growing number of observers fear that Mogadishu could eventually |
| 2:08.2 | fall to the jihadists. So that's the disheartening side of the ledger, though I should stress that |
| 2:13.0 | I do think there is a more positive story as well to be told. |
| 2:19.0 | Let's wind back a little bit in history and talk about the early gains that you mentioned. |
| 2:24.5 | When was the disheartening side of the ledger more empty? |
| 2:27.3 | About three years ago when President Hassan Sheikh Mohammed was elected for his second term in office, |
| 2:33.6 | and he made early strides against al-Shabaab. |
| 2:36.3 | He also chalked up diplomatic victories, such as the lifting of the UN arms embargo, which |
| 2:41.5 | was imposed on Somalia when the state collapsed in the 1990s. In 2023, creditors granted |
... |
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