In Somalia, poetry is far more than an art form—it is a language of resilience and rebellion. Rooted in centuries-old oral traditions, Somali poetry has long been a powerful means for women to challenge colonial legacies and patriarchal norms. Through evocative verse, these women not only articulate their struggles but also reclaim their voices and human rights. This exploration invites you to discover how the poetic expressions emerging from Somalia continue to inspire and transform narratives of resistance, identity, and hope.
When it comes to studying war, whether through the lens of colonialism, historically, in foreign policy analysis, or even war as a general concept, scholars have often taken an androcentric approach to study it. Mainly on the basis that war and the military are “an institution conceived by many as the symbol of and training ground for traditional notions of masculinity” (Abrams, 1993, p.217)
Abrams argues explicitly in their work that because of this culture, we have conformed to these sociological norms that war is a masculine thing and this “androcentric culture […] valorised fighting as a male activity” (Bockting, 1997, pp.23–24). However, this societal inclination of accepting that war is masculine and is associated with men continuously fails to consider the ramifications of war on women and fails to acknowledge how they are directly impacted by violence in wars and as people who lost their human rights and rely on the global governances such as the UN as a legal, institutional mechanism to manage conflict and maintain peace.
There is something female about being dead
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates.
The purpose of this research is to show that androcentric approaches to war fail to consider how the civil war that broke out in Somalia abruptly reduced women’s human rights from being seen as full citizens who had autonomy in their freedom of expression to now targets of sexual violence. But more importantly, the lack of consideration of women’s experience is not considered, which is crucial to understanding human rights.
This will be discussed by exploring gender social movements in Somalia in the face of colonialism that originated pre-civil war; and how there are substantial changes in human rights that were subverted during and post-civil war. This will be done about the bilateral nature of the constructivist theory to social norms on how they influence culture in the absence of global governance – but also how social norms can interact with methods of global governance to expedite change.
How norms, ideas and values have contributed to creating and developing a global human rights regime.
As discussed in my introduction, norms contribute to the concept of human rights and interact with methods of global governance to expedite change by acting “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society” (Nations, 2023).
Sikkink’s constructivist perspective lays out the idea that “human rights issues […] exist to ensure the implementation of international human rights standards” (Sikkink, 1998, p.517) because these international human rights rules call into question state dominance over society and national sovereignty; human rights concerns provide particularly formidable challenges to the core logic of a sovereign state system (Bull, 1997, p.146).
To my daughters, I will say ‘when the men come, set yourself on fire
Warsan Shire, “In Love and War” from Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth.
With the implementation and widespread conformity of these norms of these legally binding covenants and conventions by states, as well as the development of other human rights instruments such as declarations, resolutions, guiding principles, and codes of conduct, the international community has moved towards the creation of a comprehensive global code of human rights norms governing practically every aspect of the individual-State relationship (Limon, 2014). This demonstrated how norms have contributed to a worldwide human rights regime by creating a standard on a global scale; when one State adopts human rights to better the standards of living, others follow too.
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR) now specify civil and political rights, which include the right to freedom of expression and the prohibition of torture/ cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
At least in “the West,” many people have long considered these essential human rights (Council of Europe, 2023). Moreover, these civil and political human rights have “been widely accepted as the fundamental human rights norms that everyone should respect and protect” (UNHR, 2023). Still, these rights have not been exercised to protect women in Somalia, as the Civil War left them defenceless and with little to no human rights, as we will discuss later in the literature review.
However the ratification of human rights intends to lead to improvements in countries where enforcement is likely, but as I previously mentioned, my research discusses the gaps in this proposition.
Somali women’s struggle against colonialism creates freedom of expression.
Current literature describes “war [as] a male practice, one of those obvious gender dichotomies that turns out to be not so binary.”(Ferguson, 2021). Bockting delves deeper and suggests that this notion originates from a “Darwinian notion that ‘man is more courageous […] than woman’ promoted aggressiveness manliness” (Tylee,1990, p.124-25 cited in Bockting, 1997, p23).
Even much African literature begins with the androcentrism of anticolonial narratives and how it undermines researchers’ understanding of African power and politics. Despite a large body of literature on African women’s contributions to the anticolonial struggle, they need to be more present in conventional historical and political interpretations of past and present African political landscapes in which their resistance and struggle against colonialism aided them to have human rights. Thus, creating this “female invisibility” (Bradford, 1996, p.351) and demonstrating how they have been “badly neglected” (Bradford, 1996, p.351).
The existing literature around Somali women’s struggle against colonialism begins with creating their human right of freedom of expression (Article 19 of Human Rights (Nations, 2023)) through the use of Somali poetry: buraambur. Although women employed several strategies to make their value known, the most successful technique was to use buraambur as a weapon to unify both urban (reer beled) and rural (reer baadiye) populations in their resistance against colonialism. (Ingiriis, 2015, p.379).
Buraanbur has been regarded as an essential component of the women’s movement with “deep roots in Somali history” (Adan, 1981, p.140). It has arguably shaped history for women in Somalia, and ‘many women employed counter-argumentative discourses to challenge men’s hegemonic setting’ (Ingiriis, 2015, p.378), which it wasn’t considered as their human right of expression in the face of Somalia’s patriarchal cultural norms and values. Still, it was what much literature does not seem to focus on.
This form of resistance came through when, from 1941 through 1950, the buraanbur represented a central opposition mechanism to the military dictatorship of the British Military Administration (BMA), which administered the whole ‘Of Somalia’ (now divided into Somalia and Somaliland in the North), the Horn of Africa.
After the British lost a part of Somali land to Ethiopia in 1948 due to a policy shift by the British Labour administration, the Somali relationship with the British authority worsened and almost broke down. In response to the British decision to cede a piece of Somalia to Ethiopia and give over the sovereignty of southern Somalia to Italy, certain violent events and direct armed clashes occurred in numerous places (Ingiriis, 2015, pp.379–380).
To summarise, the start of Somali women’s rights aligning with universal human rights of expression began with the women’s use of oral literature against Western colonialism. Post-independence, they established their position in the Somali community as the voices that fought against colonialism through their human right of freedom of expression.
The Gap
As discussed in the introduction and literature review, the main discussions around war lack consideration for women’s experience in losing their human rights and focus on wars centring on maleness and masculinity. The discourse around Somali women shows that in the face of patriarchy and de-colonialism, women find their value in oral poetry to establish value and status. However, wars diminish this, evidently in how the right to freedom of expression was quickly diminished as the Civil War broke out, making women victims and the human right not to experience cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment violated and became the norm.
SIDRA reports that to punish their battling enemy, the young male militia took their anger and rage on women’s bodies during the height of the civil war. Women were raped randomly, including in religious locations like Mosques, by individuals they knew and strangers. It was a maniacally calculated plan to humiliate the adversary through their ladies (SIDRA,2019).
As a result, Somali women bore the brunt of unfair gender inequities, exacerbated by the collapse of societal norms and state fragility due to the civil war, which is regarded as the fundamental cause and enabling backdrop of violence against women in Somalia with the UNHCR reporting that as a result of the civil war, women have given birth to “Somali children have been born in refugee camps. These children have never known a life free from exile” (Anon., 2023). Ergo, this sense of male-centeredness does not consider women’s experiences and their violation of human rights.
Bibliography
Abrams, K., 1993. Gender in the Military: Androcentrism and Institutional Reform. Law and Contemporary Problems, 56(4), pp.217–241. https://doi.org/10.2307/1192096.
Anon. 2023. Somalia Refugee Crisis Explained. [online] Available at: <https://www.unrefugees.org/news/somalia-refugee-crisis-explained/> [Accessed 2 March 2023].
Bockting, M., 1997. The Great War and Modern Gender Consciousness: The Subversive Tactics of Djuna Barnes. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 30(3), pp.21–38.
Council of Europe, 2023. The evolution of human rights – Manual for Human Rights Education with Young people – publi.coe.int. [online] Manual for Human Rights Education with Young people. Available at: <https://www.coe.int/en/web/compass/the-evolution-of-human-rights> [Accessed 1 March 2023].
Ferguson, B.R., 2021. Masculinity and War. [online] https://doi.org/10.1086/711622.
Ingiriis, M.H., 2015. ‘Sisters; was this what we struggled for?’: The Gendered Rivalry in Power and Politics. 16(2).
Limon, M., 2014. Human rights norms: it’s the implementation, stupid. Universal Rights Group. Available at: <https://www.universal-rights.org/blog/human-rights-norms-it-s-the-implementation-stupid/> [Accessed 2 March 2023].
Nations, U., 2023. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [online] United Nations. Available at: <https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights> [Accessed 2 March 2023].
Sikkink, K., 1998. Transnational Politics, International Relations Theory, and Human Rights. PS: Political Science and Politics, 31(3), pp.517–523. https://doi.org/10.2307/420610.
UNHR, 2023. International Human Rights Law. [online] OHCHR. Available at: <https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-and-mechanisms/international-human-rights-law> [Accessed 2 March 2023].
Bradford. H., 1996. Women, Gender, and Colonialism: Rethinking the History of the British Cape Colony and Its Frontier Zones, C. 1806-70: Cambridge University Press The Journal of African History Vol. 37, No. 3
Farah, D., Adan, A., Warsame, A. (1995) ‘Somalia: Poetry as resistance against colonialism and
patriarchy’ in Wieringa, edited by Saskia, S. Subversive women: historical experiences of gender and
resistance. London: Zed Books.
SIDRA., 2019 ‘RAPE: A RISING CRISIS AND REALITY FOR THE WOMEN IN SOMALIA
Bull, Hedley. 1997. The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. New York: Columbia University Press
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