Key words: Ethiopia, USA, Somaila, foreign occupation, terrorism, insurgency, political Islam, financial crisis, peace, democracy, horn of Africa, regional conflict, Islamic Courts Union (ICU), Transitional Federal Government (TFG)

Ethiopia's occupation of Somalia has recieved significantly less attention from world media than other ongoing conflicts. Afyare Abdi Elmi discusses some of the reasons behind this silence and warns against the consequences of its continuation.

Somalia's Special Envoy to the United States, Abukar Arman, provides first-hand commentary on Somalia's hard-hit reality. Rejecting conventional confines proposed by the interest groups within international community and the "political vultures of the 21st Century", he calls on Somalia's Traditional Federal Parliament to assert itself against the limiting aspects of

If there is any lesson that the war on terror, now ten years old and counting, has brought to the surface, it is that conventional military is the worst possible tool to fight an insurgent group that coexists with and feeds from a complex crisis. The harder you hit the

Is Global Media Setting the Agenda for UN Peace Keeping Operations: Revisiting the UNOSOM Debacle Author: Dominic Pkalya Originally Published at Peace and Conflict Monitor on: 11/30/2006   The United Nations Peace Keeping Operations have received ambivalent reactions. Many have welcomed it as a necessary precondition and process for not

Somalia Special Envoy Abukar Arman reports on public perceptions of government in Somalia, the many challenges facing the states and communities in the region, and the threat of violence emanating from the fault lines of religion, ethnicity, economics, and nationalism.

With the year 2003 drawing to an end in less than two months, Ferdinand Katendeko, despite the history of conflict and simmering violence in many parts of the region, looks at the countries that compose the Inter Government Authority on Development (IGAD), and finds much to be hopeful about.

Islamic Courts Union was Better Placed to Pacify Somalia Author: Dominic Pkalya Originally Published at Peace and Conflict Monitor on: 04/17/2007 When the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was driven out of Mogadishu in December 2006 by a combination of Ethiopian and the Transitional Federal Government forces, many pundits were quick

Somalia has been making political and economic progress recently, with an age of peace and prosperity seemingly on the horizon. What is necessary now, according to the author, is for the Somali people to put aside the division and depression left over from years of traumatic conflict and insecurity and