The Somali militant Islamist and proto-state insurgent organization known as “Al-Shabaab” (Harakat Al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen in Arabic and Xarakada Mujaahidiinta Al Shabaab in Somali) is a group with multiple layers of identity. Ranging from the local and national to the regional and transnational, it is a group whose multifaceted self-perception and public portrayals have been some of its greatest sources of endurance since its emergence in 2006. On the one hand, Al-Shabaab’s ideology, goals, and membership are grounded in the domestic Somali context, though it has been able to localize and establish networks of sympathizers and recruits in neighboring East African states, including in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. On the other hand, Al-Shabaab is also the official East African affiliate of the transnational militant Islamist group al-Qaeda. Al-Shabaab first emerged publicly in 2006 as the most radical faction within the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). The ICU succeeded in forming a coalition that led to the establishment of an environment of both relative law and order as well as economic stabilization. When, in 2006, the Ethiopian military invaded Somalia and occupied parts of the country to prop up the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG), the ICU collapsed. Al-Shabaab emerged as an independent group spearheading a growing insurgency against Ethiopian military forces and, later, African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) peacekeepers. Beginning in 2008, as Al-Shabaab started to rapidly capture territory, it pursued the establishment of civil-governing mechanisms in areas it controlled. These mechanisms and institutions included a judiciary, police force (the Jaysh al-Hisba), a military wing (the Jaysh al-Usra), and offices of taxation, political affairs and clan relations, education, religious affairs and missionary propagation (daʿwa), health services, agriculture, and social services and charity programs, including a drought and humanitarian relief committee. Alongside its domestically rooted identity, Al-Shabaab also has a transnational, globalist aspect to its organizational identity and is an official affiliate of al-Qaeda, with its leadership having pledged allegiance to the group publicly in February 2012, an oath accepted by al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri. As of 2021—and despite national, bilateral, and multilateral efforts to combat it—Al-Shabaab continues to operate as both an insurgency and a proto-state power, controlling and governing wide swathes of land within the southern, central, and western parts of the country. This article seeks to provide an overview of the best literature available on the history, evolution, activities, and multifaceted identity of Al-Shabaab as an organization with local/domestic Somali, regional East African, and transnational/globalist markers. While existing literature on the group is heavily focused on security issues, more-recent studies have also begun to pay more attention to other aspects of the group, including its proto-state governance and engagement with domestic Somali and local dynamics in other East African countries.
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