Electricity is not only critical infrastructure for contemporary human life. Power systems are among the first casualties of conflict. Turning the lights off is a weapon of war.
This project aims to document experiences of rebuilding energy systems after war. What materials, knowledge, and capital are used—by whom?
The project analyses post-conflict reconstruction of electricity infrastructure in Hargeysa, the capital city of Somaliland, a self-declared independent state in north-west Somalia. Now home to over a million people, Hargeysa was destroyed by bombardments in 1988 and became the capital of a state-building project in the 1990s. Local businesses powered the post-conflict city, establishing micro-grids as a state-led electricity project floundered. My research foregrounds how, as nascent power suppliers, companies navigated the politics of providing for the public amid an encompassing state-building project, merging over time to create a city-wide utility company with investments in renewable energy.
Drawing on extensive interviews and documentary research in Hargeysa and beyond, the project asks how the future of infrastructure is shaped by post-conflict realities and investigates the politics of reconnecting and re-energising a shared space in a changing world.
The Fellowship will allow me to consolidate already collected data, carry out new research and write the book ‘Rewiring the Post-Conflict City: Powering the public in Somaliland’, analysing the politics of electricity provision in Somaliland. Through presentations in Somaliland and to international organisations working on post-conflict reconstruction, I will launch conversations on how societies coming out of conflict reconstruct, repurpose or reimagine infrastructure for providing power. Through my innovative analysis of repowering from the neighbourhood to city level, I will make a critical contribution to real world debates on processes of peacebuilding, economic reconstruction, and energy systems design in regions facing the dual threat of armed conflict and climate change.