ABSTRACT
In 2011, a severe drought combined with intense political violence and general governance failure, causing widespread hardship in south-central Somalia, with famine declared in parts of the territory. The construction of crises—in Somalia as elsewhere—depends critically on the perceptions and pronouncements of dominant actors, and it is a process that is shaped by political agendas often as much as by empirical realities (see Lindley and Hammond forthcoming). However, the situation in Somalia in 2011 certainly fulfilled the criteria set out by the editors of this book in their working definition of a humanitarian crisis: there was a widespread threat to life, physical safety, health and subsistence, which exhausted the coping capacity of many individuals and communities. By September 2011 an estimated four million people, around half the Somali population, were thought to be in need of basic humanitarian assistance (Hammond and Vaughan-Lee 2012). It is estimated that some 258,000 people died as a result of the famine, about half of whom were children under five (Checchi and Robinson 2013). This humanitarian crisis generated—and indeed was itself partly constituted by—high levels of forced displacement, with around a quarter of the population living in displacement, within the Somali territories and abroad, in 2011 (UNHCR 2011). This was accompanied by major protection problems, with many people on the move struggling to access humanitarian support and securing very limited protection of their rights in the various Somali areas and foreign states to which they travelled.
