Geopolitics, Transnational Spaces and Development: Reflections on the Involvement of US and China in Somalia

Major global powers often utilize diverse bilateral and multilateral aid strategies in their relations with developing countries. Since World War II, development aid has been a necessary tool of the US to expand its global status and influence including on the African continent. Successive US governments have also convinced private foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie to contribute to such undertakings (Berman, 1979). Around the same time in the late 1940s, an emerging centralized state of China equally extended its international engagement following the independence of many African nations from European colonization. Central to China’s international ambition included the procurement of a nuclear power (Larkin, 1971: 1).
Though Washington and Beijing share a common interest in Africa’s strategic resources and geography, they have respectively followed diverging engagement approaches to the continent’s development. While the US forged hierarchical strategic alliances with local elites such as the creation and support for African clientelist regimes, China officially preferred horizontal partnerships with African countries on the basis of common priorities and historical legacy.
This chapter is a product of months of focus group participation and individual interviews with former Somali senior politicians who have profound knowledge of the trajectories of the involvement of US and China in Somalia. It illuminates the relationship of US and China with Somalia since its independence from British and Italian colonialism in 1960—an independence which both the US and China were among the first countries to recognize