Mobile money, (dis)empowerment and state reconstruction in Somalia's conflicted digital economy.

Mobile money has developed as an indigenous digital innovation in a Somali setting characterized by state weakness and scarcity of local physical currency. On one level, this article presents experiences of this financial technology (and 'cashlessness') from perspectives of marginalized people displaced by conflict and ecological shocks. However, we also analyse these everyday experiences in the context of rapid urbanization, connecting them to the role of the Somali telecoms sector within a wider political economy of conflict and internationalized statebuilding. Leveraging its power as an intermediary transactions platform, the telecoms sector has assumed various state-like functions. This demonstrates how diverse forms of virtual sovereignty may emerge beyond globally dominant centres of technology production. Although humanitarian mobile money aid infrastructure is being positioned by donors to evolve into digitized social protection systems that will empower Somalia's fragile state, this imagined transition is underpinned by a commercial telecoms sector that continues to consolidate its power in the wider economy by capitalizing on the circulation of digital financial flows. Greater policy attention therefore needs to be paid to the capacity of this sector to create conditions that may constrain the (re)construction of state authority vis-à-vis future monetary policy, the conflict economy and (international) governance of recurrent humanitarian crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]