The World's Most Dangerous Place

Starred review from June 24, 2013
Veteran journalist Fergusson's riveting narrative about strife-riddled Somalia is a glimpse of a potential future "should our own systems of governance ever be allowed to collapse." His journey to understand the problem took him beyond Somalia to visit diaspora refugees who fled during the two-decade span marked by the lack of a functional government. Taliban-influence al-Shabaab saw opportunity in a Somalia weakened by civil war, drought, and famineâand home to scores of fatherless young males vulnerable to indoctrination. Interviews with members of peace-enforcing AMISOM, local generals, medics, and a young man whose family had been destroyed give face to the suffering in a country where the estimated violent death figure is 500,000 and where few people are educated. Somalia's future lies with refugees who have become educated Western professionals, which Fergusson confirms in interviews with Somalis in Minneapolis and London, although he also details their struggles to adapt. Horrific suffering, brutality, and devastationâoften caused by outside influences, including the U.S., but also by the "self-destructive obstinacy" of Somalis themselvesâare all detailed in fluid reportage. Fergusson rounds out this invaluable work by noting the glimmers of hope appearing with the demand for education and disdain for the clan system. Maps & photos.

May 1, 2013
An intrepid journalist investigates the civil war, foreign interventions and mass starvation of Somalia. Before focusing on Somalia, Edinburgh-based journalist Fergusson (Taliban: The Unknown Enemy, 2011, etc.) spent 16 years writing about Afghanistan, a similarly ungovernable nation that has resisted conquerors for centuries. The author is a worthy guide to the seemingly endless deaths in Somalia, often ranked by international observers as the most poorly governed, risky nation in the world. The vast majority of Somalians is illiterate, desperately poor and so committed to genetic ties within their particular geographic clan that pulling together as a nation seems hopeless. Many of the peacekeeping soldiers are from Uganda, ironic given that nation's recent bouts of sectarian violence. Since the Taliban had become one of Fergusson's specialties as a journalist, he found it intriguing that a similar group was gaining ground in Somalia: al-Shabaab. The movement considered itself populist and pure in its devotion to the Islamic faith--much like the Taliban. In the United States, perceptions of Somalia have been shaped in many ways by Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down and its film adaptation. As a result, American views on the Somalian people are negative and based on fear. Fergusson agrees that fear is justified in such a dangerous place, but he shows the shades of gray along with the black and white. An especially fascinating portion of Fergusson's investigation took him to Minneapolis, which has become home to a huge number of Somalian refugees, surely the largest diaspora of them outside the Horn of Africa. Some of the Somalians there, writes the author, are linked to violent groups overseas and thus might end up as terrorist threats. A compelling example of investigative reporting that suggests continuing mass death for an African population that cannot or will not help itself find peace.

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May 15, 2013
Pundits, diplomats, and geopolitical strategists often speculate that Pakistan could become a failed state. If one wishes to see what such a state might look like, read this shocking and disturbing survey of the ravaged nation of Somalia located on the strategically important Horn of Africa. Fergusson, a freelance journalist and television commentator, has seen the carnage in Afghanistan, but he found the shattering of Somali civil society to be far worse. In a functional sense, Somalia has no national government. The Somali cabinet often has to meet in neighboring Kenya. Instead, power is exercised at the local level by competing clans and subclans, who rule by force of arms and terror. Often, the law is what the particular strongman in a locality says it is. One group, the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab, tried enforcing Islamic fundamentalism through brutal methods often carried out by teenage boys. The result of this chaos has been mass emigration of the most talented and productive Somalis along with near total breakdown of health-care, educational, and law-enforcement institutions. This is a sobering but necessary examination of the process of national disintegration.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)