Only geographers understand

How Insecurity is Preventing Development...

-Somalian pirates mean other countries are reluctant to trade by sea

-Pirates on the Indian ocean have also waylaid dozens of foreign vessels bearing food aid

-Drought, militia road blocks and devalued currency makes the situation worse

-Militia groups descend on arable land during harvest and claim crops for themselves

-Millions now depend on food aid and fighting is pushing the country towards a humanitarian crisis

-Fighting displaces people from their homes and large crowds gather at feeding centres in Mogadishu and elsewhere

-Somalia refugee camps 'unfit for humans' Oxfam 209: eg. Dadaab camp in North East Kenya was meant to hold 90,000 refugees, but it is now home to 300,000 with 8,000 arriving every month

-As fighting continues in Somalia, many are unable to flee the country

-Afgooye, near the capital of Mogadishu, is home to the world's deepest concentration of displaced people

Politics -Somalia's inhabitants are traditionally herders of goats, camels and cattle who share the same Islamic faith and Somali language

-They have a clan system where separate clans have dominated particular expanses of land, each with a sub-clan system

-Have been both times of peace and conflict between clans for centuries

-In colonial times the country was spit between British to the North and Italians to the South

-In 1960, colonial powers departed and dictator (General Siad Barre) took power: he outlawed clans, promoted socialism over tribalism and stripped elders of judicial authority, however he bought stability to the country

-General Barre was overthrown in 1991 following an unsuccessful war in Ethiopia

-There has been no unifying government since General Barre

-Various militias control different parts of the country and the capital

-TFG is a broad based government led by moderate Islamists which has strong international support: backed by the UN and African Union

-However tis government has struggled to maintain control against the militias and hardline Islamist insurgents who have control over much of Central and South Somalia

-Militias operate under a banner called the 'Islamic Courts Union', but have a variety of factions; some of which are linked to Al Qaeda

-The majority are all committed to an Islamic state and have little desire for democracy

Development and Security Case Study: Somalia

Current Conflicts and Insecurities

-Somalia's Northern coastline is a base for pirates preying on sea traffic between Europe and the East

-Interior of the country experiences fierce clashes between insurgents and government troops (the makeshift government is known as the Transitional Federal Government, TFG)

-Chaos has invited foreign fighters to Somalia which has become a haven for terrorists who see themselves involved in global Jihad

-Somalia's inhabitants have been engaged in constant competition for its scarce resources of water and pasture since antiquity

Separatism:

-because people of different ethnicities have little in common with the majority, they should be kept separate

-eg. Australia pursued a 'white Australia' migration policy in the 1960s

-eg. the Apartheid in South Africa

Assimilation:

-expects new migrants to lose their distinctiveness such as style of dress/beliefs

-expects people to adopt the host country culture

Pluralism:

-expects ethnic groups to participate and contribute to their host country, yet maintain identity

-everyone has equal rights and access to services; in turn migrants must accept the society and actively participate in the community

The Andes

-Nazca late moving eastwards towards the South American plate

-When the two plates meet, the denser oceanic lithosphere of the Nazca plate is forced down under the less dense continental South American plate by subduction

-This is marked on the ocean surface by the presence of the Atacama Trench

-Friction between the two plates prevents the subducting oceanic plate from sliding smoothly and as it descends it drags against the overlying plate, causing both to fracture and deform

-this results in frequent, shallow focus earthquakes that get deeper as the ocean floor descends further- this defines a zone of earthquake foci known as the Benioff Zone

-As subduction of the Nazca plate continues some of the sediments that accumulated on the ocean floor are scraped off and forced onto the South American plate by a process called obduction

-This creates an accretionary wedge (where layers of the deformed and metamorphosed sediments and oceanic crust are thrust along faults on the plate which add to the size of the continent)

-the effect of the collision of the two plates deforms the leading edge of the South American plate by folding rocks

-This crustal shortening increases the vertical thinness whilst reducing the width of the lithosphere in the collision zone, and hence creating the fold mountains of the Andes

-Continued subduction of the Nazca plate brings sea water (locked the crust) deep in the mantle

-As the plates up, the water is liberated which lowers the melting point of the mantle and causes partial melting

-This process magma which rises and may erupt explosively as andesite at the surface

-Convection currents cause oceanic and continental crust to converge

-Oceanic crust is subducted beneath continental crust because it is denser

-Friction between the two plates causes deep focus earthquakes to occur in the Benioff Zone

-Friction created by the descending slab of ocean floor also generates enormous heat which causes partial melting of the crust

-This newly created magma is less dense than the rest of the magma and so rises and escapes through fissures in the lithosphere to form composite volcanoes

-Continental crust is also compressed into fold mountains