Glimpse into an army at its peak: notes on the Somali National Army in the 1960–80s

ABSTRACT

Bagayoko, Hutchful, and Luckham correctly argue that the structures, characteristics, and operating methods of official security institutions in Africa have been somewhat neglected, with a lack of much recent research. The Somali National Army (SNA) sits among these lacunae. Its formal structures can be used as a skeletal starting point and springboard to start to draw the network diagrams that chart informal linkages. This is why recent declassification decisions by U.S. intelligence bodies, coupled with period documents released to the UK National Archives, hold significance in helping us understand early hierarchical SNA arrangements. They show the steady build-up in size of the force, to 1987, to about the time the civil war began to fragment the state.     

Just and Unjust Memory? The Moral Obligation to Remember All Victims of Wars and Totalitarian Regimes

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the philosophical problem of just and unjust memory. There is a general consensus about commemorating fallen soldiers and killed civilians. But, unfortunately, our human memory of such victims is often incomplete. Some victims are remembered, others are not – maybe very few even want to remember the latter. It turns out that in our world, not only wars may be just or unjust, but also the memory of their victims. In this context, a serious problem is the unequal memory of crimes perpetrated by Nazism and Communism in the last century, denying several dozen million victims of the latter totalitarian system their due place in the collective awareness of mankind. Therefore, one of the most important aspects of the ethical analysis of wars and totalitarian regimes should be the moral obligation to commemorate all victims in a just way.