Inside Barre’s Prison: Carcerality and its Consequences in Socialist Somalia In the early days of October of 1969, Mohamed Siyad Barre and officers under his command would forcefully assume leadership of the nascent Somali Republic. Just days earlier an unrelated conspiracy had resulted in the murder of the president, Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke. Taking advantage of the chaos, Barre, and his Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC) established themselves in the capital, cordoning off access to the city, and taking full control of the military, media, and parliament. What would follow can only be described as an all-out crackdown on any potential challengers to the legitimacy of the new regime. Major governmental figures, religious leaders, and tribal elders were all arbitrarily detained by the security apparatus. It was precisely this arbitrary imprisonment that led otherwise unconnected opposition figures: Islamists, tribal leaders, and democratically minded civil servants to form a loose coalition of resistance. I seek to interrogate and explore the history, transformation, and trajectories of these prisoners during and following their experience in Barre’s prisons. How did they remember, forget, or memorialize their time in this space? To what ends did the regime seek to punish, re-educated, and reshape its “carceral” subjects? How did religious/tribal/geographic similarity or difference function inside of the carceral space? What are the breaks/continuities of solidarity that formed inside this space? Ultimately, I seek to understand how Barre’s carceral practice was couched in a discourse of power, authority, and the [re]construction of national memory in Somali society.