Situated polycrises: Somali responses to COVID-19

Abstract

The concept of a polycrisis has become something of a buzzword in academic and policy circles.¹ Referring to the interconnection and mutual reinforcement of multiple global crises, encompassing geopolitical conflicts, climate change and pandemics, it has emerged to capture these multifaceted and seemingly simultaneous challenges. Polycrisis figured prominently in the World Economic Forum's annual global risks report in 2023 and has been identified as a valuable analytical tool ‘for understanding unfolding crises, generating actionable insights, and opening avenues for future research’.² However, the perceived extraordinary and unprecedented nature of the polycrisis, often discussed in broad universal terms, constitutes a western-centric perspective that leaves open questions of its multifaceted impacts and interpretations across different global contexts.

Along these lines, COVID-19 was seen as hurling the world into an unprecedented global crisis. While the pandemic was never regarded as a new permanent fixture or state of affairs, numerous policy-makers and academics believed that it would have deep-seated and long-lasting effects. These were anticipated to extend across social structures, economic systems and political landscapes, long after the immediate health crisis had passed. Indeed, for some observers, the pandemic was a crisis on a scale not seen since the Second World War.³ Others anticipated a ‘COVID-19 society’, felt ‘on every level: social, cultural, environmental and economic’.⁴ Thus, while the pandemic was not regarded as a permanent condition, it was certainly perceived as a catalyst for enduring shifts in societal norms, behaviours and institutional organization. But for whom?

In this article, we present a more nuanced perspective on how crises are interpreted and addressed in contexts where emergencies are recurrent, multiple and cyclical, interlinking and mutually reinforcing. Our point of departure is a collaborative research project on Somali diaspora humanitarianism,⁵ presenting a collective and multi-sited qualitative case-study.⁶ The article examines Somali COVID-19 perceptions and responses in a transnational social field perspective, understood as ‘multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices and resources are unequally exchanged, organized and transformed’.⁷ Rather than constituting a comparative approach, the article sheds light on connectivity across sites in a multi-scalar perspective, spanning key locations in east Africa, Europe, North America and Australia, with additional insights from six separate but interlinked pieces of fieldwork. Using an empirically driven single case-study approach, we thereby engage in an in-depth exploration of the complexities and intricate interplay of social, political and cultural factors that shape Somali crisis perceptions and responses across temporal and spatial scales that often are overlooked in broader comparative studies.⁸

This analysis allows us to make two contributions in this article. First, we demonstrate that COVID-19 was relativized as a private and family-level crisis in the transnational social field of Somalis, with low levels of collective mobilization of emergency assistance, as recurrent drought and other socio-economic emergencies constitute the crisis baseline. This is a challenge of universal crisis definitions and illustrates how perceptions and responses to the pandemic were influenced by (pre-)existing emergencies.⁹ Furthermore, we argue against the treatment of polycrisis as a novel phenomenon and show that the global crisis of COVID-19 materialized within a context where multiple crises had been interconnecting and amplifying one another for decades. Second, we develop the concept of situated polycrises. By combining and applying Haraway's idea of situated knowledges¹⁰ and Heidegger's concept of thrownness,¹¹ the concept of situated polycrises captures the intertwining of enduring crises so as to represent a recurring—indeed, expected—reality, rather than a novelty. Furthermore, the concept highlights how the positionalities of communities, rooted in distinct histories, geographical spaces and socio-political hierarchies, influence collective perceptions and experiences of crises, including the interplay between COVID-19 and other crises.

Somalia represents an unequivocal case of long-term polycrisis. The country has ranked as one of the world's most fragile states since 2007¹²—ranking first in 2024 and second in 2020 when COVID-19 hit—and as one of the most vulnerable to climate change, ranking 182nd of 187 states in 2024.¹³ Complex socio-natural disasters intertwine with localized conflicts that began in the 1980s, escalated to civil war in 1988 and had spread across the country by 1991. Famines struck in 1992 and 2011, resulting in an estimated 220,000 and 244,000–260,000 fatalities respectively.¹⁴ Occurring amid severe drought, limited humanitarian mobilization and access, the famines were compounded by the ongoing civil war in 1992 and the rapid escalation of global food prices in 2011.¹⁵ These emergencies shaping contemporary Somalia demonstrate how different but simultaneously occurring crises interacted to make the ‘whole … even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts’.¹⁶ While less severe regarding fatalities, drought also affected the Somali-inhabited regions of east Africa in the early 2020s, with near famine conditions in 2022 and 2023,¹⁷ combined with devastating floods in southern Somalia in the second half of 2023.¹⁸

When civil war broke out in Somalia, large-scale displacement resulted to neighbouring countries and further afield, adding to the formation of a globally dispersed diaspora of approximately two million people.¹⁹ Through a blend of extended kinship networks and connectivity provided by smartphones and other devices, Somalis inside and outside the Horn of Africa remain closely connected through ongoing, multistranded and multidirectional practices in an overall and stratified transnational social field. Within these networks, family-related remittances and humanitarian assistance from the diaspora are vital,²⁰ even if they are unevenly distributed.²¹ By implication, crises in the Somali-inhabited regions of east Africa also affect Somali diaspora groups in western countries and elsewhere, with the modes and scope of crisis responses constituting a testimony to the nature, scale and perception of an emergency.

A study of Somali perceptions and experiences of COVID-19 amid overlapping emergencies that have shaped the region for decades—a situated polycrisis—calls for a multi-sited approach.²² For this study, our methodology was as follows. Specific themes and research questions were collectively identified by the research team, followed by in-person and online interviews in August and September 2021 with 17 male and female Somali community organizers, activists and other key persons. Access to interlocutors was facilitated by our long-term research networks among Somalis, adding depth to the interactions, with knowledge of local and transnational practices as a key criterion. To promote a broad perspective, the group of interlocutors included people from different age groups and with different regional and clan affiliations, to avoid reproducing views and experiences of specific positionalities. At the time of the interviews, the interlocutors lived in 14 locations across Somalia, Somaliland, Kenya, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia and the United States, primarily in urban centres in the Horn of Africa—like Mogadishu, Hargeisa, and Nairobi—and in the diaspora, e.g. in London, Minneapolis or Copenhagen, which constitute central hubs in the Somali transnational social field. While the interlocutors did not know each other, comprising an unmatched sample,²³ they were co-constitutive of the same overall social field, due to their transnational connectivity and engagement. All gave informed consent to participating in the study and all have been anonymized. Fieldwork was followed by joint analysis to identify dominant themes, ideas and practices across fieldwork sites.

Next, we develop the concept of situated polycrises as the article's theoretical framework and contribution. From this follows an examination of COVID-19 as a contested crisis. Subsequent sections delve into the pandemic's varied impacts across Somali-inhabited regions of east Africa and the Somali diaspora against the backdrop of prior crises. We then shift our focus to the specific perceptions of and responses to COVID-19 observed in our fieldwork locations, analysing these in line with the notion of situated polycrises. These sections emphasize both the continuity and changes in connectivity and transnational practices during the pandemic, a crisis that relative to other emergencies was considered relatively benign in most locations, with the notable exception of the UK. In conclusion, the article reflects on the implications of our findings for the broader discourse on what constitutes a crisis, with a particular emphasis on the concept of polycrisis, and specifically situated polycrises.

From polycrisis to situated polycrises

As a key argument in the article, we posit that what is recognized and responded to as a crisis is defined by the context in which it occurs and the positionality of the gaze observing and living it.²⁴ In essence, we are discussing situated knowledges, a concept coined by Haraway, suggesting that knowledge production is context-specific, influenced by the perspectives and experiences of its creators as well as by the settings in which they arise and evolve.²⁵ However, while we acknowledge human agency, our epistemological standpoint also asserts that individual and collective interaction with the world is grounded in specific positions that are not freely chosen. Thus, we are further inspired by Heidegger's concept of thrownness, which reminds us that perceptions and responses to crises are shaped by the conditions into which people are thrown, significantly influencing their existential starting-points and, by extension, how they interact with the world.²⁶

Situated knowledges highlight the contextual nature of knowledge creation, emphasizing that it is produced and understood within specific social, cultural and historical contexts and shaped by the circumstances and positionalities of those who create and interpret it. In turn, thrownness delves into the nature of human existence and our interconnectedness with the world around us. It focuses on how individuals are inherently embedded in a particular time, place and set of circumstances, rather than on subjective perspectives and interpretations that are emphasized in the concept of situated knowledges. Both standpoints are relevant when conceptualizing crisis, and situated polycrises, compelling analysis—particularly pertinent in International Relations (IR)—to question whether labels such as ‘universal’ or ‘global’ are truly applicable or rather represent specific, often western-centric positions and world-views.²⁷ It is particularly important to note when analysing crises in the Somali-inhabited territories of east Africa that have been longitudinal and overlapping.

Adam Tooze's reflections on polycrisis²⁸ capture some of the above observations. Polycrisis may be experienced as acute and novel from a western perspective,²⁹ with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Israel's war in Gaza and Lebanon, a recently ended pandemic and climate change at a planetary scale³⁰ reflecting the types of crises on which western commentators currently focus through the lens of polycrisis. This dominant uptake reflects an understanding of ‘our historical condition [as] truly unique’, constituting the polycrisis, presented as universal with global reach.³¹ We term this the ‘polycrisis-as-unique’ approach. Instead, we find it more useful to employ polycrisis as a heuristic and historiographic device by insisting on the situatedness of such claims. It thereby denotes a particular historical condition and period, characterized by extreme complexity in how multiple crises interlink, shape and reinforce one another, spanning across different domains, including economics, politics, geopolitics and the natural environment.³² Or, as Heidemann puts it in the introduction to an edited volume on the social responses to polycrisis in Europe, ‘polycrises are not merely temporary moments of large-scale societal disorder [but constitute] stabilized structures of instability’.³³

In this perspective, polycrises can take various forms, each characterized by unique constellations of crises or emergencies occurring over sustained periods of time and across extensive geographic scales. The effects of polycrises can vary depending on one's perspective: some may perceive them as exceptional events, while others may view them as recurrent, if not normalized, dimensions of human and societal existence, reflecting their thrownness-cum-situatedness. Regardless of perspective, polycrises profoundly shape the organization of society and how governments formulate policies and interventions. As such, Hening and Knight are right to observe that the polycrisis framework reads ‘almost like a checklist for the contemporary world’.³⁴ We nevertheless find it to be a productive lens through which to explore the interconnectedness and complexity of crises in a multi-scalar perspective—if detached from its western-centric point of departure and ‘polycrisis-as-unique’ stance.

To further decipher the meaning and importance of polycrisis, we need to distinguish between crisis as deviation from the normal and crisis as norm. Here, it is helpful to emphasize the difference between crisis as event and as process.³⁵ As an event, crisis is seen as a widely recognized, temporary and unexpected threat to shared societal stability, requiring an immediate response.³⁶ This highlights disruptive events as exceptions; unanticipated, contingent, clearly delineated in time and space, and with an identifiable source or cause that results in or produces disproportionate change to society.³⁷ Framing crisis as a process shifts the focus towards the environments that foster crises, emphasizing their chronicity and various stages. In this perspective, the causes and effects of crises are intertwined and less distinct, an understanding aligned more closely with the concept of polycrisis, which highlights the interplay and mutual reinforcement of multiple crises.

This understanding of polycrisis challenges conventional IR theory, in which crises are often understood as resulting from the international system's dynamics or as outcomes of foreign policy decisions.³⁸ Such understandings fall short when confronted with situations characterized by multiple and recurrent emergencies, as observed in numerous regions worldwide where ‘the experience of crisis [is] a constant’³⁹ and chronic uncertainty the prevailing condition. Crisis then constitutes a ‘form of life’ rather than ‘a rupture in the normal passage of time’ followed by a return to normal.⁴⁰ This perspective does not trivialize experiences of emergency, unpredictability and uncertainty. Rather, we consider global crises from the perspective of people most exposed to crisis or simultaneous crises. Furthermore, by approaching (poly)crisis as situated both in terms of human existence and in relation to knowledge production, we recognize that what is urgent and lethal to some is distant, even inconsequential, to others. By implication, we need to pay attention to layers, trajectories and entanglements of crises and how these form part of the position(s) from which crises are physically experienced, analysed and responded to.

In the context of the Somali transnational field, and across our fieldwork sites, the COVID-19 pandemic was compounded and relativized by other ongoing and historically embedded crises. Forecasts were bleak in the early stages of the pandemic, suggesting that ‘more people could die in Somalia than anywhere else in the world’.⁴¹ However, the scale and intensity of COVID-19 in the Somali regions were felt far less than initially anticipated. Mostly its ramifications were perceived as private emergencies and not approached through community mobilization, a trend exacerbated by restrictions on mobility and gatherings in settlement countries that disturbed established patterns of emergency assistance. Simultaneously, and unusually, it was the diaspora that was most affected by the crisis. Thus, the pandemic not only provides insight into different perspectives on and interpretations of crises across various contexts, but also on how notions of crises may be relativized or contested in different locations within the same transnational social field.

COVID-19 as a contested crisis

The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic on 11 March 2020, marking a period of intense international uncertainty. Lockdowns of various length and severity, border controls, restrictions on gatherings, curfews and quarantines followed in most countries in the second half of March, causing considerable disruptions globally. As such, the pandemic was an unprecedented event that was global rather than spatially bound, with a lot of attention in the ensuing literature to the nature and ramifications of mobility restrictions, lockdowns and other interventions to curb the spread of infection.⁴² Other studies described the pandemic as having extensive and pervasive consequences for society and life in general. Indeed, Lupton and Willis suggested that we now live in a global COVID-19 society: ‘The COVID pandemic is far more than a massive global health problem … The COVID crisis is a complex and ever-thickening entanglement of people with other living things, place, space, objects, time, discourse and culture.’⁴³

Published in 2021 during the pandemic, such a formulation accentuates its multifaceted, piercing and all-encompassing nature as a crisis; or rather, as the crisis, affecting all people, everywhere. Its constitutive effects⁴⁴ are deep-seated and transformative at all levels and scales of human existence, it seems. According to Fassin and Fourcade, ‘COVID opened a window that may never close again … Everything from the mundane to the critical may be affected.’⁴⁵ Though the pandemic is not described as such, there are clear affinities to the ‘polycrisis-as-unique’ approach in these perspectives, regarding their incomparable nature of shocks and effects. The emphasis on the exceptional nature of COVID-19 may reflect that global circuits of academic and policy knowledge production were dominated by western perspectives where the scope of restrictions and the number of fatalities were indeed unprecedented. Such a ‘single narrative’,⁴⁶ as Green and Fazi put it, enabled universalized public health responses across the world, and hence across fundamentally different contexts.⁴⁷ However, rather than approaching the pandemic as a singular crisis, we posit that recognizing the varied responses and perceptions is key. Thus, the critical takeaway here is the widespread articulations of COVID-19's magnitude and scope, seen as constituting an exceptionally serious and transformative crisis.

Perspectives from outside the Somali transnational field add further nuance on how the pandemic was perceived in places where crisis and uncertainty are chronic features of life. In a study on Ghanaian small-scale miners who live and work under precarious and volatile circumstances, Pijpers and Luning call for relativizing the effects of COVID-19 and situating it ‘in the broader context of serial interruptions … and structural inequalities’.⁴⁸ From this perspective, while COVID-19 may have constituted a crisis—or an interruption—it was not exceptional. Indeed, what matters is not so much the crisis itself, but the general context of uncertainty and precarity, where interruptions are endemic, expected, but may differ in terms of visibility and external recognition. As such, COVID-19 cannot be treated a priori as the most significant or devastating crisis.

The complexity of COVID-19 has further been explored in studies that focus on how the pandemic exposed and exacerbated already existing inequalities, including socioeconomic disadvantages, poor access to healthcare, and racialized and gendered disparities,⁴⁹ dismantling notions of the virus as ‘the great leveller’.⁵⁰ This literature that includes a focus on refugee and migrant groups comprises three themes. First, a focus on migrants being at risk (and from the perspective of the state as a risk), such as the analysis of an information campaign targeting the Somali population in Oslo as a hard-to-reach group.⁵¹ Second, analyses of racist attitudes and violence, xenophobia and stigmatization of migrant groups, including return migrants.⁵² Third, studies of diaspora relief in relation to COVID-19, emphasizing the central role diasporas played in assisting their families and communities at home and abroad,⁵³ for instance through the contribution of remittances, as we also show in this article.

The pandemic in the Somali regions and in the diaspora

The outbreak of COVID-19 was declared on 16 March 2020 in Mogadishu and on 31 March in Hargeisa, occurring in contexts already marked by past and present experiences of various overlapping crises: that is, a long-term situated polycrisis. Add to this that nearly 70 per cent of the population in Somalia was estimated in 2022 to live below the international poverty line of US$1.90 per day,⁵⁴ and that humanitarian aid has been a vital source of day-to-day support for many people for decades. In January 2020 5.2 million people, almost one-third of Somalia's population, were projected to need humanitarian assistance in the coming year.⁵⁵ Thus, even before COVID-19, the Somali-inhabited territories of east Africa experienced consecutive and mutually reinforcing crises.

The pandemic was met by immediate concern, with leading Somali health professionals stating that the death toll in Somalia could be unimaginable and appealing for international medical assistance to avoid catastrophe.⁵⁶ This sense of looming danger was initially echoed on the ground. In an online interview Mukhtar Ali, a business executive in Mogadishu, observed that ‘a lot of people were buried the day before yesterday [6 April 2020] … there were mass funerals, which raised the question of why all these people had suddenly died’.⁵⁷ Lack of confidence in the healthcare system, and more generally in the federal and Somaliland governments' ability to handle the pandemic, was also widespread.

Initially, and in alignment with international responses, the governments in Mogadishu and Hargeisa implemented stringent measures such as border closures, restrictions on international travel, enforcement of health guidelines, limitations on local flights and efforts to control public gatherings. In localities characterized by conflict, such as Baidoa, the largest city in Somalia's South West State, which is accessible by air only due to the presence of the Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab, shutting down air transport was felt as a ‘heavy burden’ by the local population who were restricted in movements to the outskirts of the city, according to a resident.⁵⁸ Here, mobility restrictions imposed a kind of siege, leading to security repercussions that differed from contexts where road access was available. The repercussions of uniform COVID-19 responses are thus highlighted.⁵⁹ Yet, our material from the early days of the pandemic also shows that for some people, life continued as normal.⁶⁰ Shops, markets, mosques and restaurants were only temporarily shut down, if at all. At the same time, international restrictions had significant economic repercussions,⁶¹ leading to increased unemployment in both the formal and informal sectors in Somalia. This was particularly the case for work that depended on international clients, including sectors directly related to international transport or trade. Osman Mohamed, a United Nations employee in Mogadishu, explained that ‘thousands of casual labourers who worked at Halane [international airport] complex have lost their source of income since the operations of foreign and UN organizations were halted last year [2020]’.⁶²

In addition to loss of employment in some sectors, dramatic inflation affected the cost of living and basic goods. This was attributed to the breakdown of commodity chains and transport infrastructure at the global level and the sluggish arrival of goods by water. In the words of Mukhtar, the business executive:

The cost of living has gone up in Mogadishu in the last couple of months. For example, ten litres of cooking oil were going for $17, and they went up to $33, and a cooking gas cylinder which we used to buy for $17 now goes for $30 in Mogadishu market.⁶³

Similar findings of economic and livelihood repercussions are echoed in a remote study on conditions in Baidoa and Mogadishu. It concludes that the pandemic affected ‘daily lives, incomes and livelihoods due to public health responses’ and that ‘people's vulnerability to further shocks’ was aggravated.⁶⁴ The wider effects of COVID-19, such as mobility restrictions, compounded pre-existing vulnerabilities and inequalities, thereby reinforcing the pandemic's impact through interactions with other crises.

Writing from a post-pandemic position, we can ascertain that Somalia did better than the initial catastrophic predictions proclaimed, with the official number of confirmed COVID-19 fatalities recorded at 1,361 persons.⁶⁵ While measurement and comparison of pandemic mortality is complicated due to different ways of quantifying COVID-19 related deaths—and to the limited health sector and testing facilities in countries like Somalia—the point still stands. The pandemic did not develop into a catastrophe with an unimaginable death toll. Early projections of a 20 per cent drop in remittances flowing into sub-Saharan Africa,⁶⁶ which would have devastated remittance-dependent countries, did not materialize either.

If the impact of COVID-19 within the Somali territories was less severe than initially feared, the situation for Somalis living in Kenya and western countries was dire, with high levels of COVID-19 fatalities. In addition to the ban on international flights and other types of public transport, lockdown disrupted employment, income, education and social lives, as community centres, mosques and other places of assembly were closed in line with international pandemic governance. Furthermore, there were incidents of fatal police brutality in the enforcement of curfews in Kenya.⁶⁷ These measures exerted pressure on livelihoods and families confined to their often small apartments, disrupting well-established and cherished patterns of social interaction. Density of housing in deprived neighbourhoods, language barriers in public health information and employment in front-line work, such as nursing, cleaning and transportation, all added to the risk of being exposed to the virus. Furthermore, some of the highest rates of COVID-19 fatalities, on a countrywide scale were recorded among Somalis in London and Stockholm—cities accommodating two of Europe's largest Somali communities. Scapegoating and stigmatization of Somalis by the media and in the political sphere also continued into the pandemic.⁶⁸ In short, COVID-19 added to existing structural inequalities.

Situating COVID-19 perceptions: Islam as guidance and drought as crisis baseline

To analyse perceptions of COVID-19 among Somalis in the Horn of Africa and the far diaspora, we now explore its situatedness in different sites, positions and contexts in the transnational social field. Drawing on the notion of thrownness,⁶⁹ we emphasize that perceptions of and responses to crises cannot be divorced from individuals' and communities' entanglement in historical, social and cultural contexts shaped by factors beyond their control. This does not indicate predetermined—let alone homogeneous—perspectives or positions, but rather accentuates that context, structures and practices are neither freely chosen nor devoid of significance. Attention to situatedness therefore accentuates how constellations of multiple overlapping crises constitute contexts within which COVID-19 or other phenomena are experienced and enunciated differently. Understanding the situatedness of responses to the pandemic, which in turn serve to challenge universal crisis perceptions, cannot be divorced from these logics reflecting lived experience. As we demonstrate below, two overall dimensions stand out in the Somali context: faith and fatalism in Islam and drought as a crisis baseline.

For Somali populations inside and outside the Horn of Africa, Islam offers a sense of hope and guidance in times of crisis. Adversity is often interpreted through the lens of Islam, which serves as a guiding framework for understanding and navigating life's trials. Within Islamic tradition, adversity is viewed as a test of faith and an opportunity for spiritual growth. Concepts such as sabr (patience), tawakkul (reliance on God), and qadr (acceptance of fate) are deeply ingrained in Somali culture and influence how individuals perceive and respond to challenges. Accordingly, religious guidance and faith were central components in the Somali COVID-19 response. Somalis and other Muslim populations all over the world received normative pronouncements from Islamic institutions and scholars on the origin and prevention of and therapeutic measures against the pandemic, drawing on religious sources and interpretations of the Qur'an and Hadith. Importantly, Islam provided not only explanations and treatment advice, but also the reassurance that a person's destiny is determined and that solutions are prescribed. Several of our interlocutors expressed a sense of thrownness in this regard, as a reflection of their entanglements in specific historicities of socio-religious existence, explaining that their faith was in God's hands, deciding over life and death. As one woman commented, ‘your time is your time, neither before nor after … There are things beyond my control’.⁷⁰

Emphasis on spiritual cure and faith in one's destiny helps to understand the somewhat calm reception of COVID-19 among many Somalis. Together with the pandemic's relatively low-level impact compared to other emergencies, it accentuates the importance of paying attention to situated knowledge production in response to crises. Multiple and recurrent socio-natural crises—aggravated by climate change—form part of the polycrisis context into which Somalis in the Horn of Africa are thrown. In turn, these crises shape the situated knowledge production around and responses to the pandemic. At the time of our interviews in 2021, it was just ten years since a famine that affected 3.1 million people and claimed about a quarter of a million lives had hit in 2011, putting COVID-19 into stark perspective. Accordingly, from Copenhagen to Mogadishu, our interlocutors challenged the perception of the pandemic as the worst crisis in recent history, widely referring to drought and other socio-natural disasters as the baseline of how crises affect populations and society in east Africa. Given that such disasters are recurrent, they resonate with the recollection of previous crises and their responses, with material and human loss still fresh in the memory of many Somalis and their kin. In the words of Safia Nour, a development professional in Denmark, reflecting on COVID-19:

I do not think it is a big crisis. I think we have become very ‘delicate’ [in the West], perhaps, we are not as robust as we usually are. Something reminiscent of the flu, not because the flu can't be deadly, but it doesn't frighten us … Drought affects families on a much larger scale, people lose their lives and their entire economic base.⁷¹

The reference to drought as the crisis was emphasized across fieldwork sites. ‘If there's a drought, there's a collective call for action for the homeland; this time … not so much’, as Warsame Jama, an international consultant in Copenhagen, observed.⁷² Meanwhile Bashir Osman, a factory employee in Melbourne, stated that ‘COVID-19 has been like a global drought because it has affected everyone’.⁷³ Disagreeing about the scale and penetration of the pandemic and its repercussions, our interlocutors nevertheless shared the invocation of drought as a framework for explaining the scale and implication of the pandemic, including the relatively low level of organized diaspora support. The suggested rationale is that COVID-19 did not match the impact of drought, a type of crisis that has largely become the standard against which other emergencies are measured within the Somali transnational social field. Therefore, the pandemic did not warrant the label of a severe crisis, and extensive mobilization efforts were deemed unnecessary. If, conversely, COVID-19 is akin to a ‘global drought’, there will be fewer resources to share because everybody is affected.

The statements of Safia and others highlight the overall context of polycrisis—a situated polycrisis—with which COVID-19 intersected from the perspective of Somalis in east Africa and the diaspora. As our interlocutors observed, drought and other socio-natural disasters constitute substantial emergencies in terms of human fatalities, loss of livelihoods, livestock and degradation of the environment. These existential, inescapable threats have been constitutive of the narratives and experiences of what it means to be Somali, both individually and collectively, and thus have shaped people's understandings of and responses to lived experiences. Echoing the inspiration we find in Haraway and Heidegger, this perspective underscores the importance of recognizing that knowledges of and responses to crises are deeply rooted in specific socio-cultural and existential conditions of long-term lived experience. In this context, how did the pandemic affect Somali crisis responses, if at all? We now turn to this question.

A private and invisible crisis: family support and low-level collective mobilization

Approaching COVID-19 in a transnational social field perspective calls for attention to how Somalis living both in and outside east Africa engage in longstanding and diverse practices of care and connectivity.⁷⁴ Support spans remittances to family members, contributions to infrastructure in individual villages, health and educational projects, and mass mobilization for humanitarian relief to mitigate disasters, with donations and assistance from Somalis living both inside and outside the Horn of Africa. In particular, family-related and emergency assistance are widely considered moral and religious obligations—qaaran and zakat⁷⁵—that must be met, including when living circumstances are difficult.⁷⁶ Therefore, COVID-19 emerged in contexts where crisis responses are already deeply institutionalized practices of social interaction.

Reflecting this pattern, individual and family-based caregiving practices continued unabated or were intensified during COVID-19, accentuating the general importance of giving and mutual support in Somali society, while the priorities and rhythms of organized collective diaspora humanitarian responses were disrupted. Across fieldwork sites, COVID-19 was articulated as private and family-related rather than an overall societal crisis that would require mass mobilization on a grand scale. This is not to imply that the virus did not constitute a health emergency in some families, but responses were more individualized. Safia, in Copenhagen, observed a surge of collections on Facebook and other social media platforms for vulnerable people who were hospitalized or exposed. ‘But that always happens, COVID or not’, she noted, continuing:

People who are ill, with COVID-19 or other things, will get support. This is especially the case if it's a single mom or dad who needs money for hospital. It has not been anything like droughts. Maybe it's because it has not affected society like droughts have. It has not been important, prioritized.⁷⁷

Conditioned by individual and kinship networks, such private collections may generate emotional and economic support across the Somali-inhabited regions and the diaspora. Yet, at the same time, in Borama, Abshir Yassin, a retired consultant, suggested that ‘in a crisis like this, everyone says, “to each his own”. There is not any systematic support for people; it's a family–family issue’, he continued, noting that he was lucky to have a sister working as a nurse in London who ‘sent us money from there, in order to survive’.⁷⁸ As in previous crises, remittances and other forms of family-related support played a critical role, following well-established crisis response patterns⁷⁹ of family and close kin intensifying caregiving during emergencies.

These responses demonstrate the strength of connectivity and show that COVID-19 was addressed as a health and social crisis, but not at the same level as famine emergencies, which demand all-encompassing community mobilization. Indeed, our interlocutors explained that collective diaspora initiatives addressing COVID-19 in the Somali regions were fewer than in other crises. In the words of Bashir in Melbourne: ‘I have not seen anyone involved in the mobilization of help for the home country. This never used to be the case during other natural disasters when community leaders always approached me asking for donations.’⁸⁰ Warsame, in Denmark, expressed it like this: ‘There is no diaspora picking up. There are collections for the floods for the locals, for droughts, but not for COVID-19.’⁸¹ Others observed that when collective diaspora support initiatives did happen, they generated fewer funds than expected.⁸² In Rotterdam, Libaan Abdi, a community and social worker, explained how he donated to different COVID-19 initiatives, including crowdfunding platforms, but found the results ‘very small and disappointing’, having expected more from Somali non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the Netherlands.⁸³

In the Somali regions, interlocutors confirmed the low level or absence of collective diaspora responses and, where such responses were observed, that they mainly related to implications of the pandemic in western countries. Many explained that the Somali regions were hit harder in terms of mobility restrictions, loss of jobs, and not least the pandemic itself, with high numbers of critically ill and fatalities. The asymmetrical impact of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns thus takes centre stage. In the words of Amina Hussein, a researcher who used to live in North America but now lives in Hargeisa, ‘unlike other disasters that Somalis used to respond to, COVID-19 has affected both helpers and helped’⁸⁴—a statement echoing the ‘global drought’ perspective as presented above. Others, however, took a more cynical view. For Yasir Faisal, an NGO worker living in the border area between Somaliland and Puntland, the situation reflects indifference of the diaspora:

They're not proactive, they are silent! Even our local communities ask, ‘where are the diaspora?’ They are many, they have money, but they are not, you know, responding … These people are selfish, they don't want to protect their people.⁸⁵

Here, collective diaspora initiatives are indirectly articulated as an emblem of connection, care and protection through explaining their absence as an expression of selfishness. This example highlights the expectations for diaspora groups to react in situations of crisis, even if the call for collective COVID-19 relief was not widely shared among our interlocutors in the Somali regions.

In addition to the general perception of COVID-19 as a relatively minor crisis at the societal level, the absence of pre-established practices and knowledge on how to respond to COVID-19 also hampered collective responses and mass mobilization of support. ‘There isn't a centralized organized campaigning about where the most affected are located. We know there's a crisis, but there's a lack of visibility about who is affected and what is needed’, Farah Omar, a development consultant in the Danish city of Odense, explained.⁸⁶ Furthermore, COVID-19 lockdown and mobility restrictions disrupted ‘the usual patterns’ of diaspora humanitarian relief, where physical meeting spaces and personal interactions are central, with the implication that social media and other online platforms quickly became central modes of organization and mobilization—as also happened in the rest of the world.

This situation was compounded by low levels of media coverage and information about needs in Somali-inhabited regions of east Africa, combined with widespread perceptions and rumours about the lack of severity of the pandemic, similar to what was witnessed in many other non-Somali contexts. Thus, COVID-19 became an indistinct and, at times, invisible crisis in the eyes of many Somalis both inside and outside the Horn of Africa. This reflects the relative absence of knowledge production on the situation in Somalia, substantiating that in the situated polycrisis we have discussed above, COVID-19 was not experienced, articulated or responded to as the existential crisis it was perceived to be across Europe and North America. In sum, the context of recurrent drought and conflict in Somalia shaped a different perception and response to the pandemic, highlighting the need for situated understandings of crises within the specific existential conditions into which different individuals—and societies—are thrown.

Encompassing and visible crises: intensive collective mobilization and community engagement

The low level of collective mobilization is accentuated further when compared with the response to other emergencies that happened simultaneously—and, as we shall see, when compared with the COVID-19 response in the UK. The engagement of the Al-Rahmah Foundation in Gedo region is an example of an initiative that maintained its focus on socio-natural calamities during the pandemic. Founded in 2014 by the diaspora community, the Al-Rahmah Foundation's aim is to provide emergency relief, education and development in the southern part of Somalia that, for decades, has been inaccessible to the federal government in Mogadishu and international agencies. Before the pandemic Gedo region was affected by severe drought, and the foundation managed to raise a total of US$350,000 for monthly water supply. According to Dr Ali, a Nairobi resident and trustee of the foundation, the priority between March and May 2020 remained the floods, rather than COVID-19, and the foundation mobilized an additional US$100,000 in funds. COVID-19 was a lesser concern, Dr Ali explained, stating unambiguously: ‘We haven't received humanitarian crisis alerts from our people in Gedo region during the pandemic as the effects were minimal in the area.’⁸⁷

While Al-Rahmah kept its focus, other diaspora associations reorientated some of their existing engagement towards COVID-19, a tendency reflected in diaspora-led COVID-19 responses more generally.⁸⁸ The Borama One Dollar initiative is one such example. Founded in January 2020 to develop infrastructure and ‘maintain the beauty of the city [Borama] and the region [Awdal]’,⁸⁹ it is organized around the principle of a voluntary contribution of one US dollar per person. Prior to COVID-19 the initiative had raised funds locally and within the diaspora to clean up the city, but when the pandemic hit, the organizers redirected funds to the Borama hospital to buy oxygen for patients. Similarly, the Arlaadi Aid organization, a diaspora-led humanitarian organization based in Minnesota that operates in Somalia's South West State, started sending face masks to the principal city in that state, Baidoa. A representative of Arlaadi Aid explained that there was a slowdown in the mobilization of humanitarian support, with contributions being ‘small compared to what we usually give’.⁹⁰

So far, the examples given in the article have focused on emergency assistance within the Somali regions, illustrating how drought and floods received a higher level of collective crisis response than COVID-19 as the pandemic emerged and intertwined with the long-term polycrisis experienced by Somalia and the diaspora. However, we found one notable exception to this tendency in the UK. This helps us to nuance the argument and move it forward by noting that even within the Somali transnational field itself, variability existed. It highlights the importance of understanding crises within their specific existential and localized conditions, a fundamental aspect of situated polycrisis. In sum, while we illustrate general trends, it is essential to break down the situatedness-cum-thrownness to explore how unique socio-cultural and historical contexts shape perceptions and responses across different locations.

In the UK, Somali associations and initiatives displayed a high level of collective engagement during the pandemic, in contrast to our other research sites. This situation may reflect the severity of the pandemic in the UK, where it took place in a context of multiple concurrent crises—in other words, a polycrisis⁹¹—and where it hit major cities with large Somali populations hard. Established Somali community organizations, like the Somali Advice and Forum of Information (SAAFI), an organization based in the London borough of Brent ‘founded and led by British-Somali mothers’,⁹² the Somaliland Birmingham Community as well as WhatsApp groups, such as the North London Somaliland Association, became first responders in their communities before government support was deployed. Drawing on existing networks, the organizations held regular online meetings to coordinate the delivery of food and medicines to vulnerable families. Likewise, they engaged in crowdfunding, diverted funding from existing programmes, and sought additional funds from local councils and private donors.

Crucially, support was organized both for Somalis living in the UK and for communities in the Somali regions. For example, the board of the Edna Adan Foundation, which is based in the UK and supports the Edna Adan hospital in Hargeisa, raised £40,000 for personal protective equipment for the hospital through the JustGiving fundraising app, sending two shipments. This was supported by a donation from WorldRemit, a digital money transfer company established by a Somali-British entrepreneur. Others mobilized knowledge and skills transfer. Somali health professionals working in the UK's National Health Service, for instance, underwent training in management of the virus. As Aisha Said, a health worker with Somali Health Exchange (SHE) explained: ‘We were learning a lot and could transfer that knowledge’.⁹³ Moreover, SHE used social media to run online classrooms, advising health professionals and authorities in the Somali regions on how to use personal protective equipment safely and care for patients.

The examples above demonstrate two overlapping dynamics. They highlight that in the overall context of polycrisis in the Somali regions, collective mobilization is directed by needs on the ground where drought, floods and conflict have been considered more severe, pressing and visible emergencies than the pandemic. It is in this respect that people's existential situatedness, individually and collectively, shapes their understanding of and response to crises. Except for the UK case, the relative insignificance of COVID-19 was shared across locations. Likewise, these cases demonstrate that much diaspora associational engagement is characterized by agility, rather than sector-specific involvement, meaning that resources and activities could be redirected from city beautification to oxygen provision, for instance. Furthermore, the examples show that both residents in the Somali regions and diaspora actors are involved in and contribute to emergency assistance and fundraising.⁹⁴ This highlights that making clear distinctions between diaspora and homeland crisis responses is oversimplified and problematic, but it also emphasizes the importance of recognizing the situatedness and nuances of embodied experience, perceptions and responses across transnational social fields.

Conclusion

In this article, we have interrogated the analytical potential of polycrisis as a concept, through an analysis of how Somalis in east Africa and western countries perceived and responded to COVID-19. Reassessing portrayals of the pandemic as a universally shared crisis of unprecedented severity unveils broader implications for our understanding and theorization of global crises, and specifically the polycrisis concept. The combination of geopolitical conflicts, climate change-related weather events and the recent pandemic may appear particularly cataclysmic from western perspectives. However, in contrast to such understandings—what we call ‘polycrisis-as-unique’—we approach polycrisis as a heuristic and historiographic term, with the implication that, both historically and today, there are more polycrises, in the plural. We further propose that intersecting and mutually reinforcing crises across different domains constitute an overall context for how specific emergencies are experienced. This, in turn, requires interrogating the ontology of what constitutes a crisis in the first place, as we insist that how it is experienced—as an existential calamity or a transient and manageable challenge—is related to the position from which it is observed, experienced and responded to. By acknowledging the multiplicity of positions within any crisis scenario, we thus move towards a more comprehensive understanding of and nuanced approach to what (poly)crisis means theoretically and empirically.

To frame this reassessment of crisis, we suggest the concept of situated polycrises, inspired by Heidegger's notion of thrownness and Haraway's emphasis on situated knowledges. The idea of thrownness⁹⁵ helps us appreciate how individuals and communities experience long-term overlapping, mutually reinforcing crises from diverse temporal and spatial positions, being thrown into unique historical, cultural, geographical and socio-political contexts. Haraway's situated knowledges emphasize the importance of considering these diverse perspectives and positionalities when analysing crises, questioning attempts to universalize experiences, perceptions and the production of (objective) knowledge.⁹⁶ We suggest that exploring the notion of polycrisis through this lens allows us to emphasize the multiple experiences of COVID-19 and show the multiplicity of positions that exist within any crisis. This contribution is pertinent academically and in policy, bringing to the fore the differentiated experiences of living through and with crisis.

Based on a multi-sited methodology, our article is, furthermore, a contribution to the nascent literature on polycrisis from below.⁹⁷ In contrast to locally delimited case-studies, the incorporation of multiple connected geographical locations accentuates the importance of a transnational social field perspective. As such, we demonstrate that the severity of COVID-19 was experienced differently depending on socio-spatial location and positionality, and conditioned by past and unfolding simultaneous and longitudinal crises. Across sites, drought and other socio-natural disasters constitute a crisis baseline and framework for understanding the scale of emergency in terms of individual and societal repercussions. In contrast to war metaphors that invoke imagery of cataclysmic and irreversible change—as articulated by international organizations—several of our interlocutors accentuated faith and fatalism in Islam as a guiding principle of hope, shifting the emphasis from human interventions to surrendering to God's hands.

In terms of responses, COVID-19 primarily received attention at the family level, being widely regarded as a private health and livelihood emergency, reflecting established patterns of Somali caregiving practices and hence the perceived relative seriousness of the virus. Pandemic repercussions were articulated as aggravated by inflation and other derived consequences of worldwide lockdowns,⁹⁸ rather than caused by the disease as such. Collective diaspora mobilization was generally modest in comparison with drought and flood emergency assistance, sometimes being articulated as disappointedly so. This highlights ambiguity, as some interlocutors criticized COVID-19 restrictions in western countries, describing them as exaggerated and reflective of ‘delicacy’ and a lack of resilience, thereby implying a critique of the excesses of western (crisis) governance.

Footnotes

Author notes