NYtimes - Back From the Suburbs to Run a Patch of Somalia

Mr. Aden, 37, is part militia commander, part schoolteacher, part lawmaker, part engineer, part environmentalist, part king — a mind-boggling combination of roles for anyone to play, let alone for a guy who dresses (and talks) like a rapper and recently moved from Minnesota to Somalia in an effort to build a local government.

Think of him as the accidental warlord.

This story is quite interesting, but although it’s supposed to be a “fish out of water” thing, I don’t really buy that angle. In this case, a guy from Somalia lived in the USA for a number of years and got an education in business. But if you look around the world, many of the developing world’s leaders are educated at Harvard. Why did everyone love the late Benazir Bhutto? Because she went to Harvard and wrote for Slate.

The more you study global politics, the more apparent it is that certain parts of the game are played on a very small scale. Yes, big players like Obama can emerge out of nowhere in the USA, but in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai emerged from a family that had been important to the King back in the day when there was a king of Afghanistan.

Back to this case, if this guy can stick around long enough, maybe he’ll do all right, but sadly, the more likely outcome is that he becomes indistinguishable from the warlords he replaced. The nature of the polity puts pressure on the leaders to change to match them. It takes a true 聖人 to resist these pressures and change the people instead, but good luck to him anyway.