A veteran journalist's account of the life of a colorful former mayor of Mogadishu offers insights into the complex realities of a city and a country often reduced to caricature.

While transitional politics and the war against Al Shabab are dominating headlines, … a combination of intense pressures is making subsistence livelihoods less and less viable and producing massive, irreversible migrations with enormous long-term implications for Somalia and Kenya.

One lesson learned since September 11 is that the expanded war on terrorism has created a lens that tends to distort our vision of the complex political dynamics of countries like Somalia. Local political realities are not always assessed in their own right, but instead are interpreted through, and reduced to, the logic of the war on terrorism.