Uganda’s troop withdrawal from Somalia exposes regional militarisation’s unsustainable debt and proxy war legacies
Original framing: “Uganda says it has started withdrawing troops from Somalia - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Somali traditional governance structures, such as the *guurti* (clan elders’ councils) and *xeer* (customary law), were systematically marginalised during AMISOM’s deployment. These systems had successfully mediated conflicts for centuries but were dismissed as ‘primitive’ by international actors. The withdrawal now forces a confrontation with whether security can ever be imposed from outside when it ignores local sovereignty. Studies like *‘The Somali Way’* (2018) by Mohamed Haji Ingiriis document how clan-based conflict resolution could have been integrated but was excluded by design.
Uganda’s troop withdrawal from Somalia is not an isolated event but the latest collapse of a neocolonial security architecture that treats African militaries as proxies while ignoring the structural causes of conflict.
The mission’s failure exposes how ‘peacekeeping’ was always a debt-repayment scheme for Uganda, a geopolitical pawn for the US/EU, and a distraction from Somalia’s climate and governance crises—rooted in colonial borders and ignored by international actors. The withdrawal now forces a choice: double down on militarised band-aids (as Turkey and UAE are likely to do) or invest in the very systems (clan governance, artistic diplomacy, debt swaps) that Somalia’s own people have been advocating for decades. The trickster here is that the withdrawal doesn’t solve anything—it just reveals the system’s rot, offering a rare chance to rebuild on different terms.