Beyond Black Hawk Down

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(68 68 68 1)>The story of Black Hawk Down is a familiar one. On 3 October 1993 two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and in the ensuing Battle of Mogadishu eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis were killed. But very few appreciate that this was just one day in a two-and-a-half-year operation; the most ambitious attempt in history to rebuild a nation. The United States sought to show the world that the UN could rebuild a country but in a dire foreshadowing of the failed efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later the intervention in Somalia was plagued with political infighting policy mismatch confusion and fatal assumptions.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(68 68 68 1)>In 1992 Somalia saw the largest ever deployment of American troops to the continent of Africa and 1993 brought the first UN-led peace enforcement mission and the most ambitious experiment in nation-building. In </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(68 68 68 1)>Beyond Black Hawk Down</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(68 68 68 1)> Jonathan Carroll provides the first scholarly military history of the entire intervention from its early and largely successful humanitarian phase in 1992 through to the ultimate withdrawal of UN forces in 1995. Carroll dispels the myths and misunderstandings surrounding one of the most infamous episodes of the 1990s to present a new interpretation of events most notably by including the Somali perspective to argue what went so wrong in Somalia and more importantly why.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(68 68 68 1)>Understanding the intervention in Somalia its successes and the roots of its failures is invaluable to contemporary debates on concepts of nation-building and counterinsurgency. Moreover the increasing regularity of inter-state and intra-state conflicts across the world means the international community will continue to be called upon to intervene in other failed or failing states in the future. </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(68 68 68 1)>Beyond Black Hawk Down</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(68 68 68 1)> is an important new history that will inform the shape and nature of future military interventions.</span></p>