Short Abstract

This panel uses Somalia and the Horn of Africa as a lens to trace the Indian Ocean world's layered histories, revealing Somalia not as a bounded nation but as a node continuously reshaped by oceanic flows.

Long Abstract

This panel takes Somalia and the Horn of Africa as a prism through which to read the layered histories of the Western Indian Ocean world, arguing that Somalia is best understood not as a bounded national case defined by state collapse or security crisis, but as a node continuously reconstituted by oceanic flows across the longue durée. Three intersecting inquiries animate the panel. The first reconstructs the Somali coast's integration into nineteenth-century maritime circuits of trade, military movement, and slave trafficking linking East Africa to Oman, Zanzibar, the Gulf, and South Asia, tracing how these networks established patterns of mobility that prefigure present-day diasporic geographies. The second examines decolonization as an unfinished and contested process, interrogating how colonial and postcolonial forms of knowledge, education, and institutional authority were transformed or carried forward during the UN Trusteeship and early independence period, and how policies of Somalization sought to redefine nationhood and the relationship between knowledge and governance beyond purely political transitions. The third repositions Somali women's reproductive and healing labor as a historical archive of oceanic connection, tracing how midwifery knowledge and embodied care practices developed through centuries of contact with Swahili, Arab, and South Asian traditions, and how this knowledge survives, unevenly, intergenerationally, amid displacement and the expansion of biomedical institutions. Together, these papers model a cross-temporal, intersectional approach to Somali and Indian Ocean studies, placing precolonial maritime history alongside colonial institutional legacies and contemporary social realities.

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