The economic aspects of civil wars must always be taken into account for the implementation of measures to resolve conflicts. In the Somali situation, where a salient feature is the absence of a functional central government since the fall of the Siyad Barre regime in 1991, the economic stakes are one of the driving forces in armed violence, as witnessed by the struggles to gain access to and control of resources. These stakes have however evolved over the course of sixteen years of warfare. In the years after the fall of the Siyad Barre regime in 1991 and the intervention of United Nations forces (UNOSOM 1 and 2), military subdual of warring factions and the division of the country into a multitude of fiefdoms redrew the political stakes so that the aim of fighting was not so much to take supremacy by controlling the machinery of government as to gain control of national resources and trade networks. For some of those in the "war business", the aim was to uphold a situation of lawlessness. In the second half of the 1990s, circumstances to which we shall return enabled "traditional" sectors of activity (and sometimes innovating ones as in telecommunications, financial trading and air transport) to develop in spite of the lack of government institutions. Those who promoted the revived economy managed to subdue the warlords and set up original coordination systems to compensate for the inconveniences caused by the lack of government. A third phase which began in the last few years resulted in the setup of groups of firms which were particular in that they were able to combine many different types of business: mixing legal and illegal business; trading beyond the frontiers of Somalia between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa and, more widely, in the global market. The players in the Somali war economy do not all have the same profile and nor do they have the same expectations from the establishment of a central government. While some of them want to prevent a retur