During the 2000s, Somalia gained the reputation as the ‘longest-running instance of complete state collapse in postcolonial history’ (Menkhaus 2006: 74). With its record of warlordism, piracy, and militant Islamism, following from state collapse, Somalia became a key reference point in policy assessments of global threat and insecurity scenarios. In 2011, for instance, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton justified the intervention into Libya as an action aimed at preventing the country from developing into ‘a giant Somalia’ (Washington Post 2011), while in 2014 United Nations (UN) envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned that international action was urgently required to prevent Syria from becoming ‘another Somalia’ (Der Spiegel 2014; see also Reno 2015). This dovetails with US President George W. Bush’s announcement in the 2002  National Security Strategy that ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’.