@HeavenlyPossum this is good. What I always point out when people bring up Somalia and similar is the fact that they are fighting over obtaining the legitimized station and powers of the state — each one wants to assume statehood and control the territory and prevent the others from doing so. They disagree on basically everything else, but the one thing they all seem to agree with is that a state is necessary. That includes actors like the United Nations as well who will recognize and legitimize the state that forms and to my recollection were actually *encouraging* the need for a state to exist. So all of this conflict and all of these problems were actually created by the continued existence of statism after the state itself had ceased to exist: the conflict was predicated on the idea that a state needed to exist and someone needed to fill that slot; it was that agreed upon statism that created a state shaped "power vacuum" in the first place. But "power vacuums" only exist if everyone agrees that that power must exist and that that station needs to be filled by *someone*, and if the populace will acquiesce to it and others will legitimize it. If everyone agrees that some station or power is unnecessary, and the actors who might want to attain that power realize that no one would treat them as legitimate, then there is no such power vacuum needing to be filled at all. Power vacuums are created essentially BT collective consensus in believing a certain station may exist. So in Somalia's case, it was the residual statism on all sides, encourages by the UN, that believed that the station of statehood actually did exist and just needed to be filled, that caused the conflict.