(De)constructing research ‘expertise’ in transnational participatory warfare

Introduction

Smartphones and social media have transformed modern armed conflict, enabling new actors to participate in new ways in warfare. Participation is often focused around influencing understandings of particular conflicts, while digital networks also enable civilians and other non-military and non-state actors to undertake targeting, surveillance, trolling, disinformation propagation, and crowd-sourced conflict fundraising (Boichak and Hoskins, 2022). Such activities are often undertaken far away from physical battlefields and frequently involve transnational flows of data and resources. This article probes a gap in existing research on ‘participatory warfare’ (Asmolov, 2022) by focusing on the status of the academic researcher and the concept of ‘expertise’ in such highly networked and transnational theatres of conflict. It does this through an auto-netnographic reflection on my long-standing (and digitally mediated) connection with a particular region in which I do not reside–the Somali Horn of Africa–and a specific conflict case-study focused on a recent conflict around the disputed city of Las Anod.

This armed conflict has occurred in what protagonists either refer to as ‘Eastern Somaliland’ or the ‘Sool, Sanaag and Cayn’ (SSC) region of Somalia. Because of the ambiguous diplomatic status of the belligerents, the politics of place names is contentious. The Republic of Somaliland broke away from Somalia in 1991, following the collapse of Somalia’s military regime and the brutal repression and devastation of its north-western territories. At the time of writing, Somaliland lacked international diplomatic recognition, ¹ but had functioned as a de facto independent state boasting a relatively democratic system of governance, at least in its central heartlands. The Somaliland story – an ‘island’ of apparent peace and security in a conflicted region – has long captured the attention of global media, academic researchers and other external ‘experts’. However, its critics argue that Somaliland is dominated by one clan that predominates in its central regions at the expense of others at its peripheries. This narrative uses historical tropes of pan-Somali solidarity and critiques of foreign divisions of ‘Greater Somalia’ that resonate in a global ethno-linguistic digital public (Chonka, 2019). In late 2022, long-standing grievances in Somaliland’s eastern periphery exploded into large-scale protests in the city of Las Anod. Following violent repression, this became an armed uprising against Somaliland authorities, leading to the shelling of the city by the latter. In April 2023, Amnesty International reported that ‘more than 100 people [had] been killed and over 600 injured including dozens of civilians’ (2023, n.p.). Other sources reported total casualties (killed and injured, combatants and civilians) in the several thousands, with around 200,000 people being displaced (Al Jazeera, 2023). However, by August, Somaliland troops had been forced out of their bases. This wider territory was taken by an emergent ‘SSC-Khatumo’ administration that in 2025 was recognised by Somalia’s Federal Government as the ‘North Eastern State of Somalia’.

Although this conflict unfolded at the peripheries of political entities seldom at the forefront of international media attention, its local complexities have global implications. Diasporic digital connectivity – as well the digital connections of external researchers/commentators–brought the conflict around Las Anod into debates in Western capitals, concerning possible diplomatic recognition for Somaliland (by the United Kingdom/United States) and controversies over the allegedly conflicted loyalties of high-profile politicians in the United States and their expressions of pan-Somali identity on the global stage (Ali, 2024). Located across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen and the gateway to the Red Sea, conflict in Somalia/Somaliland is of geostrategic interest to established and emerging global powers jockeying for influence in the region. As such, the stakes of debates around digitally mediated conflict expertise are high.

Throughout the Las Anod conflict, social media has been a crucial arena for ‘participatory warfare’. Messaging platforms such as WhatsApp have become central to diaspora political and economic mobilisation in the context of Las Anod’s commercial growth in recent years and subsequent conflict dynamics (Norman, 2023). My contribution, however, focuses on externally based researchers’ exposure to–and engagement in–the public social media activity of various groups propagating opposing narratives around the war. Cycles of mis/disinformation dissemination and debunking have been (predictably) prominent, focusing on the extent of conflict damage and the alleged role of Al Shabaab ‘terrorists’ or other proxy actors in Somalia’s fragmented political environment. Social media has also been used to target and ‘dox’ individuals for possible reprisals both in the region and beyond.

Researchers like myself have been forced to consider whether – or how – to leverage or engage with these spaces and practices. As a UK university–based, white, male, non-Somali academic researcher, with almost two decades of personal, professional and academic connections and work experience in the Somali Horn of Africa, I undertake here a reflexive analysis of the ‘digital fields’ (Airoldi, 2018) that I am situated in. This considers the type of content I am exposed to through algorithmically and interpersonally shaped networks and newsfeeds, and draws on observations as a participant-observer in debates about conflict in Somalia, as well as my online and offline conversations with other researchers (both those who identify as Somali and non-Somali) who have engaged in social media discourse around the Las Anod war. Certain figures have emerged as activists on particular sides and have faced reprisals for their activities. Other social media accounts appear to have been constructed in order give the impression of external, impartial, ‘expert’ commentary on the situation – sometimes (and problematically) coded with ‘whiteness’.

Research on diasporic media engagement in conflict highlights the multiple roles and activities undertaken by dispersed communities connected ideologically, affectively and practically with ‘homelands’ (Osman, 2017). Others have focused on the politics of race in mainstream media coverage of conflict in Africa and the ways in which social media users on the continent challenge global narratives (Nyabola, 2016). In terms of reflexive consideration of the impact of social media on research practices, scholars have also emphasised the significance of digital platforms in collapsing spatial and temporal boundaries between external researchers and detached ‘fieldwork sites’ (Dalsgaard, 2016; Käihkö, 2020). Nonetheless, a gap exists at the intersection of these literatures as to how research expertise is established, promoted, fabricated, challenged or engaged with via social media. I argue that researchers’ reflexive consideration of the role of digital connectivity is significant in complex situations of violence that are marked by long-standing, racialised north-South global power imbalances. Digital platforms allow for these research-based power dynamics to be both leveraged and contested by actors on different sides of armed conflicts that rage in locations that are (geographically) detached from dominant centres of knowledge production.

To make this argument, the article proceeds with a literature review that synthesises work on digital hostility, participatory warfare and the politics of researcher engagement and expertise, particularly in contexts shaped by transnational, diasporic conflict engagement and global power imbalances. I then present the role of ‘auto-netnography’ in this field, explaining how my positionality has informed the application of this approach to the complex conflict case study that follows. The growing significance of social media platforms in Horn of Africa conflict settings is then explained in relation to the Las Anod war and new types of conflict actor. This has become the terrain on which various forms of expertise are leveraged, constructed and challenged in relation to participatory warfare in a transnationally connected African context. This article analyses and problematises examples of these digitally mediated debates around expertise and auto-critiques my own positionality and choices made vis-à-vis this particular conflict. Given frequent silences around researchers’ own engagement in social-mediatised war, I contend that this type of auto-netnography contributes to both the empirical and methodological literatures adjacent to participatory warfare. The article concludes with reflection on ongoing shifts in the platform landscape and their effects on the activity and orientation of researchers connected to conflict and digital hostility more broadly.

Digital hostility, transnational participatory war and research expertise

In the complex conflict case study that follows, participatory digital warfare (Asmolov, 2022; Boichak and Hoskins, 2022) intersects with broader digital hostility in ‘everyday’ online cultures (Cover, 2022; Jakubowicz, 2017; Jane, 2015; Marwick, 2021). For Cover (2022), ‘digital hostility’ encompasses a range of online acts including cyberbullying, hate-speech, pile-ons, public shaming, cross-platform trolling, doxxing (circulation of a person’s private information with malicious intent) and revenge porn (p. 80). Cover notes that ‘the offence, marginalisation or removal of a user of a digital space’ cannot necessarily be equated with ‘the loss of life in war’ (Cover, 2022). However, these acts can also take place in settings of armed conflict and can be added to larger repertoires of participatory warfare, involving conflict propaganda, partisan open-source intelligence gathering, platform organisation of battlefield activities, logistics and fundraising, as well as distributed computing for cyber-attacks (Asmolov, 2022). This intersection can be transnational, with ‘digital diasporas’ (Brinkerhoff, 2009) sometimes taking part in everyday digital hostility in situations of armed conflict, potentially moving between different positions of physical proximity and direct/indirect participation in warfare.

Researchers – that is, ‘experts’ – are among these transnational participants, and, as Norman (in press) argues in relation to the same conflict addressed here, global digital connections are making it more untenable for scholars to occupy ostensibly ‘neutral’ positions among broad constellations of conflict actors. Of course, diasporas are themselves sources of expertise, and many experts on conflict in different parts of the global South–whether academic researchers, media commentators or policy analysts–have family connections with ‘homelands’ affected by war while at the same time being based in global north institutions (Olukoshi, 2006). This is not my positionality (as I reflect on in subsequent sections), but the multiple, and often fluid, mobile and overlapping identities of ‘local’/transnational/external researchers (Adebayo and Njoku, 2023) further adds to the complexity of the digital, media and research environments in which conflicts are studied and represented.

It is in this space that the transnational intersection of digital hostility/participatory war shapes how knowledge is generated about complex conflicts, where research expertise is both solicited (by external policy-makers) and challenged or used (by belligerents). Scholars working on politicised digital hostility in western contexts have faced online attacks from some of the communities they do research on (Jakubowicz, 2017). While distressing and potentially dangerous, in many such instances (e.g. when researching identifiable neo-Nazis) the ethics of engagement may be fairly clear-cut for the researcher: that is, we – and our scholarly communities – know, for the most part, who the ‘bad guys’ are in such situations. However, in relation to complex armed conflict dynamics in regions on the periphery of global mainstream attention or understanding – and where historical inequities deeply politicise researcher identities–the ethical terrain is often significantly more ambiguous. This is especially true where access to reliable information about armed violence is hampered by connectivity restraints or limits to physical site access. These are precisely the contexts where research ‘expertise’ is sought by external audiences, whether policymakers or media commentators.

Inaccessible conflict research sites are often vicariously accessed by researchers via the same social media platforms that are implicated in the local intensification of political polarisation and historical instability (De Bruijn et al., 2022). Ethiopia – bordering Somalia/Somaliland – has been a focus of significant research in this regard. Ethnic hate speech has proliferated on digital platforms in the country’s recent civil war (Chekol et al., 2023; Pohjonen, 2022), contributing to the mobilisation of intercommunal violence and the further fragmentation of the ethnic-federal state (Chala, 2023). Even in contexts with relatively low mobile/Internet connectivity, social media dynamics and discourses can impact wider communities who are not necessarily using the same platforms themselves (Wilson et al., 2021). While Ethiopia and Somalia have contrasting state and telecom sector historical experiences, diaspora engagement in these contentious social media debate (Madebo, 2020; Skjerdal, 2011) is prevalent in both contexts. Since recognising the significance of global Internet connectivity for diasporas’ ‘homeland’ engagement (Brinkerhoff, 2009), scholars have explored the implications of digital transnationalism for conflict dynamics (Koinova, 2018; Ogunyemi, 2017; Orjuela, 2008; Osman, 2017; Ponzanesi, 2020; Smets, 2018). This literature warns against a dichotomising analysis of ‘bad’ diasporas that foment conflict from a distance, and ‘good’ diasporas that engage in peacebuilding, emphasising instead the multifaceted complexity of transnational involvement in contentious politics.

Nonetheless, some of this involvement includes explicit engagement with external actors. In Chernobrov’s (2022) study of Karabakh conflict diaspora actors’ leveraging of algorithmic visibility and virality, this was designed to reach international journalists who were seen to have the capacity to influence wider perceptions of a conflict that was obscure to wider western audiences and policy makers. Academic researchers – particularly ‘area studies’ specialists – are another group that partisan conflict actors attempt to engage through social media. In the same way that journalists have come to rely on social media for tips, content and insight into hard to access settings (Christensen and Khalil, 2021), researchers studying intensely mediatized conflicts also often use platforms as windows on violence. Meanwhile, scepticism and hostility towards ‘experts’ in (Western) networked digital publics has also been a feature of ‘post-truth’ politics and concerns over mis/disinformation (Marres, 2018). Van Dijck and Alinejad (2020) argue that the ‘institutional model of science communication, based on linear vectors of information flows between institutions, has gradually converted into a networked model where social media propel information flows circulating between all actors involved’ (p. 1). Looking at Dutch public debates about Covid-19, they contend that while popular trust in scientific expertise may be undermined in this networked public, scientific experts and policy makers also themselves ‘appropriate social media logic to steer information and to control the debate’, alongside journalists and citizens (Van Dijck and Alinejad, 2020). This points to tensions between institutional/traditional scientific commitments to directing ostensibly rational public knowledge, and algorithmic incentives for actors to maximise attention by ‘hyping trends and encouraging opinionated dissent’ (Van Dijck and Alinejad, 2020: 3).

How do such tensions intersect with the international politics of expertise in relation to war? Although largely lacking explicit consideration of social media logics, there is abundant scholarship that problematises the (often racialised) power imbalances in global circuits of knowledge production in this field (Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen, 2018; Olukoshi, 2006; Peter and Strazzari, 2017), and the power of externally derived and orientated scholarly/media/NGO frames to shape dominant understandings and engagement with conflict, often to the detriment of those directly affected (Autesserre, 2012; Kosmatopoulos, 2021). Focusing on academics, de Guevaraa and Kostićb (2017: 4) argue that ‘material and ideological practices of neoliberalism’ now define the space for policy-relevant knowledge production and limit what can be produced. They trace a post-2000s proliferation of policy-influencing voices, and heightened perceptions that academics are detached from social realities. This coincides with neoliberal incentives and imperatives for academics to take part in the wider ‘knowledge market’, with implications for the branding, narrating and networking of knowledge production, including on social media. The shifting communicative landscape of knowledge production also relates to digital ‘remote access’ data collection (Duffield, 2018) and its enabling of short-term research engagement. But these possibilities also affect area specialists with long-term connections to particular contexts. The building-up of researchers’ online networks over time has a significant algorithmic and interpersonal influence on the fields in which they operate (what and who they are exposed to through curated newsfeeds) and how they subsequently engage with identities, discourses and practices of ‘expertise’.

The new politics of decentralised and marketized conflict commentary also engages pre-existing inequalities, prominently around race and the different ways in which ‘whiteness’ (Du Bois, 1910; Nakayama, 2017) is constructed, leveraged and contested within digital participatory warfare. This space is fraught with ethical dilemmas for researchers. In Ethiopia’s recent civil war, Fisher (2022) describes an ‘utterly toxic’ online battle ‘directed by trolls and propagandists on all sides down a highly polarised route characterised by ad hominem attacks, insinuations, threats and triumphalist revelry around military successes or setbacks of different sides, regardless of the human cost’ (p. 30). A pro-government nationalist narrative associated any criticism of the government’s war against ‘rebels’ in Tigray with nefarious outside interests and resonated, Fisher argues, with many Ethiopian (and African) audiences, due to legacies of colonialism, while severely limiting the capacity of researchers to engage online with issues related to the protection of civilians in conflict. I pick up this analysis of the conditions of knowledge production in a fragmented digital public that shares similar (also understandable) suspicions about external agendas, probing the complexities that emerge in contestation over different forms and identities of expertise in conflict.

(Auto)netnography and conflict studies

The destabilisation and despatialisation of research ‘sites’ through transnational connectivity has been of methodological concern to anthropologists since the global spread of social media (Dalsgaard, 2016). In relation to conflict, Hauter (2023) describes the promise of platform data offering unprecedented access to information from warzones, weighed up against pitfalls of endemic mis/disinformation, arguing that academic researchers need to adapt security actor, activist and journalistic practices of ‘open-source intelligence’ (OSINT) to transparently leverage conflict data. Emphasising researcher reflexivity in the remote access of conflict data, Käihkö (2020) notes how the merging of offline and online research contexts leads to despatialisation, and the blurring of personal and professional boundaries. This throws into question ‘the traditional notion of the ‘field’, while more immediately threatening to limit [the researcher’s] private life’ (Käihkö, 2020: 71).

There is scope, however, to take this methodological reflexivity further – especially in violently contested settings. My approach attempts to auto-critically attend to both the influence of the researcher’s specific online milieu on the conflict data they are exposed to, as well as the impacts of their own platform engagement on the very conflicts that are their ‘objects of study’. My previous collaborative methodological research – in reflecting on (global north-funded) research projects focusing on violence and displacement in Africa – has emphasised the pervasive interconnectedness of research participants, researchers and policy actors (Chonka et al., 2022). Building on Aradau and Huysmans (2019), we challenged perceptions of clear separations of site-research-policy domains and the very possibility of detached, objective and neutral vantage points for knowledge production. Research (and how we do it) affects the contexts that we study, thus recursively influencing findings. We are inescapably part of the ‘field’, and the same goes for digital research(er) engagement with complex conflicts.

My approach here entails the use of ‘auto-netnography’ to a context of participatory war. Auto-netography (Kozinets and Kedzior, 2009) is a combination of auto-ethnography (the researcher reflexively considering their own experiences vis-à-vis the object of study) and digital/net ethnography (the researcher studying online communities). Given the ubiquitous influence of individuals’ digital traces on their online experience of platforms – for instance, the impact of one’s social graph on newsfeed curation, or the pervasiveness of data driven marketing – it can be argued that that any digital ethnography could/should incorporate reflexive analysis of the researcher’s digital positionality. However, explicit methodological auto-netnography has rarely been invoked in relation to studies of digital warfare, even where the participatory affordances of platforms may also be engaged by researchers themselves. In other disciplines where armed violence is studied, auto-ethnography remains a marginalised methodological stance but has been invoked powerfully in the context of fieldwork in places affected by conflict (Dauphinee, 2010). An auto-ethnographic approach to research is inherently about expertise and the question that Dauphinee turns on herself in her methodological reflection comes directly from an interviewee who has experienced the conflict: ‘what expert are you?’(Dauphinee, 2010: 803).

My auto-netnographic approach to the study of transnational digital violence does not focus only on my own behaviours – in fact, my direct online engagement in the conflict case study was quite limited, for reasons that I explain below. Rather, the reflexive approach allows me to consider my response to the wider circulation of content that I was exposed to and the behaviour of other researchers whose positionalities vary in their levels of similarity with my own. I am a white, male, securely employed academic based at a university in the United Kingdom. I have had personal, professional and research connections with the Somali Horn of Africa since 2007. I worked for 2 years for a university in Somaliland, 3 years as a Somali-language interpreter for an international humanitarian organisation, later conducting doctoral and post-doctoral fieldwork in the context. I am part of an international milieu of scholars (non-Somali, Somali diaspora, Somalis based in the region) that focus on this part of the Horn of Africa. While I am deeply uncomfortable with the term, I am sometimes referred to as an ‘expert’ on Somalia – for instance when I am asked to provide testimony to global north immigration courts about conditions in Somalia. One of the reasons for my discomfort is the fact that Western courts prefer the testimony of researchers who do not come from the regions they do research on/in, due to problematic assumptions about their supposed neutrality and objectivity. Although providing such testimony fails to challenge (and may reinforce) this racialised hierarchy of expertise, I find it politically and ethically difficult to refuse requests to provide evidence for asylum claims that might prevent a person’s deportation.

This wider milieu of researchers is active on social media, particularly Twitter/X. I reflect on the activity of these researchers and draw from conversations with these Somali and non-Somali colleagues about their perceptions of the wider social media discourse on the conflict and the particular actors, researchers or influencers who they perceived to be most significant. As a Somali speaker who has lived and worked in different parts of Somalia/Somaliland I follow (and am followed by) Somali users from across the polarised discursive landscape. This influences my newsfeed and the material I am exposed to, both pro-Somaliland and pro-SSC-Khatumo content and online activism. My approach to this daily content stream (encountered through my own networks and algorithmic curation) also reflects on my own conduct in these spaces. I am not an ‘expert’ on Las Anod. I have visited the town during my work for an international humanitarian organisation and know people from the area. However, I have not conducted fieldwork there and my research has focused on other Somali cities. Partly because of this, I limited my commentary on Twitter/X about the war to isolated posts about patterns of potential mis/disinformation – a subject of my previous research on Somali digital publics. While attempting to amplify what I judged to be reliable content showing the humanitarian consequences of Somaliland’s military operations against Las Anod, I did not adopt a clear partisan position in the online battle that took place on my Somalia-focused newsfeeds. I reflect below about how previous external engagement in the Somaliland story has been significant for global understandings of the recent conflict, and deeply contentious due to historically rooted fears of foreign interference against pan-Somali unity since the colonial era.

Although I present a range of English and Somali language social media content and interactions around the Las Anod conflict, this is not a systematic and overarching analysis of the full range of content that was shared in intra-Somali community debates across the diaspora and within the Horn of Africa itself. A comprehensive ‘issue mapping’ of this space is difficult, for several reasons. For example, scraping data for a ‘hashtag ethnography’ (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015) is complicated by the frequent non-use of hashtags and spelling inconsistencies across the different relevant languages. Indicative of the importance of linguistic nuance in algorithmic interaction with content for trending/virality, Las Anod is spelled in multiple different ways across both Somali and English content (including various transliterations, for example, #LasAnod/#laascaanood/#laasanod/#lascanod/#lascaanood). Although various partisan hashtags did emerge, none became dominant within the content directed towards international/policy understandings of the conflict. Another reason why it is difficult to analyse the role of ‘social media’ (in the singular) in this conflict is the fact that different platforms offer different affordances in participatory warfare. Facebook remains the most widely used platform in Somalia, while TikTok has emerged as a popular and important means for conflict footage and commentary to be shared, primarily among Somali-speaking audiences. I first contextualise the significance of social media in this conflict through reference to an interlinked selection of material on these platforms before turning to the politics of expertise that played out on Twitter/X as a site for the engagement of global audiences.

Influencers and intra-diasporic conflict participation

In November 2023, YouTube videos were uploaded of a demonstration held in Puntland to celebrate the victory of fighters aligned with the newly formed SSC-Khatumo administration that had installed itself in Las Anod. ² This took place 3 months after the Somaliland military was expelled from their base at Goojacade, from which they had been attacking Las Anod. This also marked Somaliland’s loss of control of a large chunk of its eastern territory, land within the colonial boundaries of what had been the British Protectorate, on which the Republic of Somaliland bases its independence claim. In the celebrations participants held a banner welcoming ‘Jamahiirta social media’. Derived from the Arabic for ‘masses’ or ‘congregation’, jamahiir, had become a prominent trope in the SSC-Khatumo conflict discourse, with connotations of armed and/or activist youth mobilisation.

Reinforcing the perceived significance of social media in this war, the Somali title of the YouTube video–‘we are taking Captain Ayuub to Goojacade’–quotes one of the rally speakers as they embark on a journey from Puntland into what was the conflict zone. ‘Captain Ayuub’ is a prominent influencer with a significant following on TikTok (500 K + followers, over 8 million video ‘likes’). Allegedly a former pirate leader (during the period in the 2000s/early 2010s when maritime piracy was a global security concern), the influencer frequently appears in his videos in military fatigues. Based in Germany, Ayuub’s videos made frequent reference to the conflict in Las Anod, often couched in inflammatory and derogatory terms around clan identity and politics. Ayuub’s content sought to mobilise sub-clans from the major clan families in Puntland to send militiamen to support the SSC-Khatumo forces with which they share genealogical ties–in contrast to the dominant clan family within Somaliland’s political project that is represented in the centre of its territory but not – historically – in the borderland areas. The significance of ‘clan’ politics in the Somali context is historically fluid and contested in the literature (Eno and Kusow, 2014; Hoehne, 2016; Tahir, 2021). Nonetheless, clan identity and social organisation is popularly understood to have influenced conflict dynamics in Somalia’s civil war in the 1980s and the unresolved political fragmentation that sporadically flares up in places like Las Anod. Clan has also become semi-institutionalised through clan quotas used for political representation in the Federal Government of Somalia in the continued absence of one-person-one-vote elections. While public discussion in mainstream Somali-language media of specific clan names and conflicts is a taboo, explicit clan-discourse is prominent on social media. Captain Ayuub’s content addressed specific clan constituencies (including through long-historied and derogatory clan nicknames) with direct messages calling for political, military and charitable mobilisation, interspersed with an eclectic selection of pop-song lip syncing and duet videos featuring conflict footage, or his engagement with various Somali diaspora communities.

On returning to Puntland, Ayuub became embroiled in local politics, lending controversial support to the Puntland president leading to an armed confrontation in Garowe the regional capital. At the time of writing, his TikTok profile has him dressed in quasi-military uniform and self-described as ‘Media Advisor at @Puntland State House’. A TikTok search now provides an AI-generated platform description of the influencer, inviting me to ‘discover the impactful journey of Captain Ayub, a key figure in Somali culture and media’. Showing the rapid and insidious penetration of generative AI into platform information-retrieval mechanisms, it is troubling that such a conflict-influencer is being described and amplified here with reference to ‘Somali culture’.

In general, clan-inflected conflict participation has proliferated on all sides across social media. Importantly, it is easier for many diaspora influencers to monetise their social media content, given platform restrictions for users with Somalia-based IP addresses. This potentially further amplifies the already out-sized influence of diasporic media actors in conflict dynamics in the Horn of Africa. For example, there has been much debate in Somalia about a TikTok ‘live battle’ trend known as the ‘Big Tribal Game’ where influencers claiming to represent their clans engage in verbal sparring and compete to solicit live payments from viewers. Reports suggest that while this has been a major topic of conversation in Somalia, the battling influencers are mostly based in the diaspora (BBC, 2024). Obstacles to content monetisation in Somalia and greater security risks are cited as reasons for this imbalance (including by Somalia-based influencers who have experienced targeted violence themselves).

Mediating conflict complexity: social media and the racialised politics of expertise

As a publicly identifiable researcher focused on Somali digital politics, I have frequently been contacted by individuals drawing my attention to particular content, often with the intent of leveraging my position to influence this environment in favour of one side in the conflict. There is often an expectation that I might have an impact on platforms in terms of content moderation, or on government policy-makers’ understanding of a complex social, political and geopolitical conflict. This was the case with contact that I had at the height of the Las Anod conflict with a UK-based member of the Somaliland diaspora, a young man working in an unrelated industry but with an interest in the online dimension of the war. He emailed me to share Facebook posts from a media outlet known as DarwiishTV, a partisan outlet supporting the SSC-Khatumo forces against Somaliland. I met with him to discuss the posts and also to explain my connections with researchers and political actors on both sides of the conflict, and my perception of the profusion of mis/disinformation and hate speech in content produced by both Somaliland and SSC-Khatumo supporters. My contact produced preliminary analysis documenting a sustained doxing campaign by DarwiishTV against figures in the diaspora and the Horn of Africa who were associated with the Somaliland government, and/or described as ‘traitors’ to the people of Las Anod. Somali language posts featured names, pictures and mobile telephone numbers of individuals, with the frequent call to readers of, ‘shaqo halaga qabto’, roughly translating to ‘let [us] do the work [on them]’. My interlocutor had reported these posts to Facebook for violations of their platform policies, however they remain online at the time of writing. While they are clear examples of doxing, the threats of violence are veiled, with the choice of language likely evading any automated keyword scanning/filtering. This speaks to wider limitations in content moderation for content in African indigenous languages (Chonka et al., 2023). My attempts to speak with Meta about such posts were unsuccessful, showing my own limitations as a researcher to engage with platforms – something that my UK-based interlocutor assumed that I would be able to do.

In relation to policy and popular understandings of conflict researchers may have a greater capacity to influence prevailing narratives. In comparison to the scale of subsequent/contemporaneous civilian-targeted violence and man-made humanitarian catastrophes of Sudan and Gaza, the 2022/2023 conflict around Las Anod pales in comparison. Nonetheless, it remains geopolitically significant in the wider Horn/Red Sea region and the leveraging of ‘expertise’ (increasingly promoted, amplified and contested on social media) can bring relatively obscure conflicts to the attention of wider audiences. One dimension of the Las Anod conflict that could animate external policy actors related to the alleged involvement of Islamist militants. In Somalia, the ‘global war on terror’ is ongoing. Al Shabaab is a high-profile Al Qaeda affiliate that has been fighting recognised governmental authorities, African Union troops and other international ‘security partners’ for two decades (Al-Bulushi, 2014). Its attacks on civilian targets in the wider region established the group’s international notoriety, while its operations in Somalia continue. Al Shabaab still controls territories–primarily in southern Somalia–and runs a parallel system of governance based on taxation/extortion, even in areas that it does not control. Although Las Anod had not been a centre of organisation or offensive operations for Al Shabaab, commentators were speculating from the start of the war about its role and the potential impact of instability in this part of Somalia for the group’s activity. This played out extensively on social media, including through the use of questionable documents and manipulated images that attempted to show Al Shabaab engagement.

Both sides in the war crafted a tenuous and reductive Al Shabaab narrative to draw international attention and support for their position. On balance, this was more prominent on the Somaliland side, as its government, along with some supporters on social media, tried to portray the uprising in Las Anod as an Al Shabaab takeover. Claiming the group was playing a clandestine role within the SSC-Khatumo and allied clan militias, Somaliland supporters aimed to delegitimise their opponents in the eyes of international policymakers. This narrative leveraged Somaliland’s distinctive position in the region as a democratic bulwark against Islamist militancy, part of the wider independence success-story that various external academic and media commentators had helped bolster since the 2000s.

Although some prominent figures within the anti-Somaliland militias did have connections with Islamist militancy in the south, this is hardly unusual in Somalia’s politically fragmented context, where experiments with Islamist governance have a long history involving multiple groups and various instances of external intervention (elsewhere, former militants have left Al Shabaab and joined institutions within Somalia’s emerging Federal system of governance). Although Al Shabaab has historically exploited conflict faultlines among clan-political actors, there was little evidence that it was directing the Las Anod violence. Instead, this was primarily driven by acute local grievances against the Somaliland political project that was seen in Las Anod as exclusionary in political and economic terms (Norman, 2023), with Hargeisa’s secessionist/independence trajectory increasingly being critiqued in terms of historical narratives of pan-Somali unity.

Conversely, from the SSC-Khatumo side, some supporters on social media attempted to connect Somaliland and Al Shabaab, pointing to the Somaliland origins of many senior Al Shabaab leaders, including the former leader of the group. This narrative drew on long-standing (and characteristically unevidenced) conspiracy theories about Somaliland’s alleged clandestine relationship with Al Shabaab as a means to protect its own territory, foment instability in southern Somalia and strengthen its own case for independence. Such conspiracy theories have proliferated on social media, often engaging diaspora voices commentating on Somalia’s clan-political intrigues and Al Shabaab’s shadowy parallel governance (Chonka, 2022).

Importantly, these conflicting narratives were largely aimed at external journalists and policy-makers, with various commentators involved in sense-making and legitimisation among these audiences. It was through monitoring these narratives that I identified particular social media accounts that ostensibly belonged to non-Somali commentators. One, on the Somaliland side of the debate, self-described as an ‘expert’ in African Studies, diplomacy and international relations, used a profile picture that a reverse image search identified as belonging to a deceased white US professor with no connections to the Horn of Africa. A relatively prominent commentator on the other side (engaged in the Somaliland-Al Shabaab connection narrative) had a non-Somali name and a profile picture that only showed Red Cross vehicles (presumably after their visit to the city). This account self-described the individual as an investor, located in the United States. Its output focused almost entirely on Las Anod, along with some pro-Palestine content and support for the US Democratic Party. Both of these accounts had relatively small follower counts (in the thousands) but were followed by significant individuals (such as the Chinese ambassador to Somalia), and others within my own social network of Somalia-focused scholars, researchers and policymakers.

If both of these accounts were maintained by Somalis in the diaspora or the region (unproveable but reasonable to surmise) then an attempt was being made to construct an image of ‘neutral’ expertise that was coded with whiteness. This is ironic, because one of the (genuine and identifiable) researchers who was most active in the Las Anod conflict on social media – Markus Hoehne–had previously been the central character in a controversial episode in the field of Somali studies that problematised the racial politics of expertise in the region. Around 2015, a debate exploded on Somali social media about the identity and positionality of external, white researchers generating knowledge on the Horn of Africa. Critical academic commentators, largely based in the Somali diaspora, had initially focused on the lack of Somali representation on the board of a new journal, but the situation escalated when Hoehne, a German anthropologist, made Facebook comments about the willingness and (his critics would argue) the capacity of young Somali researchers to pursue academic careers in the social sciences and redress the overrepresentation of white scholars. This #CadaanStudies (‘white studies’) debate (Aidid, 2015) came to a head at the 2015 Somali Studies International Association conference, which I attended. Although bitter, it forced an important moment of introspection among this research community and reflection on wider, enduring legacies of colonialism on knowledge production and contemporary racism in the external coverage of a marginalised and highly securitised part of the African continent.

Hoehne, however, is one of the very few internationally recognised academic researchers (Somali or non-Somali) with in-depth research fieldwork experience in Somaliland’s eastern periphery (Hoehne, 2015). Post #CadaanStudies, he had maintained a low profile on social media, but increased his activity on Twitter/X as the violence in Las Anod escalated. Given his knowledge of the context and personal contacts in Las Anod, Hoehne adopted a pro SSC-Khatumo position, criticising the Somaliland government for its long-term marginalisation of the region and excoriating its military for indiscriminate bombardment of Las Anod and other forms of violent repression. This took the form of English and Somali-language tweets, links to his extended analysis and research reports (Hoehne, 2023), along with amplification of pro SSC-Khatumo accounts. Hoehne’s follower count increased rapidly, including partisans and observers on both sides of the political divide. Responding to what he saw as a profusion of conflict mis/disinformation, Hoehne explained to me that he believed his direct contact with SSC-Khatumo figures had an influence on their communications and conflict documentation strategies – for instance, in the increasing trend that I observed of geolocation-tagging of photos of damage and casualties of the violence. Hoehne also felt that it was partly his rapidly expanded Twitter/X presence that brought him back to the attention of high-level diplomatic figures, which, in turn, may have influenced reporting to the UN Security Council on the conflict.

Pro-Somaliland activists responded with the type of vitriolic trolling that often characterises polarised Twitter debates. This ‘digital hostility’ (Cover, 2022) escalated into attempts to get Hoehne sacked from his university employer through (unevidenced) accusations of alleged paedophilia in Somalia/Somaliland. While Hoehne is an experienced, senior academic, in the German system he is not securely employed (not being a full professor). Although the accusations did not cause him to lose his job, he described to me their significant toll on his mental health and his ongoing legal proceedings against at least one high-profile individual in the Somaliland diaspora who amplified the ‘paedophile’ narrative.

I present this case as an illustration of the compulsion to engage that social media platforms can manifest for researchers who are connected to complex conflict contexts. Hoehne felt compelled to leverage his expertise in a situation that he understood in terms of resistance to persecution, and was openly critical of what he saw as the silence of the wider Somaliland-focused research community. The 2015 #CadaanStudies controversy corresponded with wider African social media activism, with platforms being seen to provide to opportunities for users to speak back against negative and stereotyped depictions of the continent in global media (Adeiza and Howard, 2016). Arguably, external research and journalistic coverage of Somaliland was influenced by this trend, with commentators attracted by the possibility to tell a different story about a successful, self-sufficient and relatively democratic political project in a region more commonly associated with conflict and humanitarian crisis. Multiple one-person-one-vote elections in the breakaway Republic have underpinned this narrative, bolstered by comparatively easy access to its capital and central regions for external researchers (in comparison to Somalia). However, as events in Las Anod have shown, the legitimacy of the Somaliland project has been contested outside of its heartlands and a battle has ensued over Somaliland’s international image in which academic researchers have been embroiled as central actors on social media.

Although I did not agree with every aspect of Hoehne’s social media approach, I was disturbed by the digital hostility he faced and recognize the impact this had on my own growing disinclination at the time to engage in any depth in these debates. For researchers like myself, the whole episode has (or should have) invited greater introspection on the role of ‘experts’ in the co-construction of narratives around complex political developments in the region. Indeed, the Somaliland story continues to confound the type of polarised, one-dimensional analysis that social media platforms tend to reinforce. In late 2024, free and fair elections in the de facto Republic resulted in the victory of the opposition presidential candidate and a peaceful handover of power – all still rarities in the wider region. Of course, the eastern regions around SSC-Khatumo-controlled Las Anod did not participate in these elections and these clan constituencies have been further (and perhaps irrevocably) marginalised from the Somaliland project by the bombardment of the city during this war and the increased polarisation of transnational social media debates about Somali political identity.

Conclusion

Writing this article has been – in part – a personal attempt to think through the complex platform space through which I observed the conflict in Las Anod. Beyond the case study, however, the article has sought to fill a reflexive gap in the wider methodological and digital-ethnographic literature on war in the social media age, highlighting the need for researchers to interrogate the features and affordances of platforms that shape their processes and experiences of knowledge generation, exchange and engagement with stakeholders. While a clear delineation between ‘objective’ analysis and ‘partisan’ advocacy within research has always been problematic and contested (Sanford and Angel-Ajani, 2006), conflict researchers’ use of platforms like Twitter/X further blurs these boundaries and can create situations where maintaining this distinction becomes increasingly untenable. On one hand, the Twitter/X environment has opened up possibilities for a wider range of audiences to contribute to policy-relevant knowledge production in ways that can challenge problematic (and often racist) external narratives of violence in the global South. Conversely, however, the case study also shows how certain forms of participatory warfare in transnational digital publics can reinforce the same racial power-imbalances in knowledge production – for example, in the use of platform anonymity to code ostensibly neutral and objective ‘expertise’ with whiteness.

The long-term status of Twitter/X as a major platform for public discourse on global events is highly uncertain. Post Musk – who himself famously beat a legal defamation lawsuit brought by an individual he had baselessly called a paedophile on the platform – X’s far-right and ‘free speech’ lurch has led to advertiser, government and mainstream-media withdrawal. It is unclear whether another platform will emerge to occupy the position that Twitter undoubtedly held in the 2010s as the preferred outlet for journalists, policy-makers and academics for public dialogue over global events. Twitter/X’s competitors have not yet achieved the critical mass that the platform enjoyed during this period and the demand (from research communities) for an analogous ‘public square’ may have waned as a result of some of the types of toxic public engagement that this article has outlined.

Nonetheless, as the platform landscape evolves, transnational participation in complex situations of armed conflict is unlikely to diminish. As area-focused researchers–usually part of and/or connected to these diasporic networks – we need to be more attentive to the specificities of different platforms and consider in greater depth how our own digital engagement is imbricated within the violence we purport to study. The auto-netnographic approach I have used here to engage with an (important) slice of digital activity around a specific conflict in the Horn of Africa has been my own attempt to do this, which I hope will be critiqued and adapted by others who occupy various complex and compromised positions vis-à-vis their ‘expertise’ in situations of violence.