In Framing Somalia, Abdi Samatar goes beyond the gaze of Africa''s Merchants of Misery and offers a fresh and progressive rethinking on Somali cultural and political studies. Rather than turning Somalis, their culture, and politics into an orientalist fossil, this new book offers a more complex, dynamic, and context sensitive rendering of the political and cultural developments in the country over the last century. Abdi Samatar uses three case studies focusing on democratic politics, Islam, and piracy to show case alternative ways of being Somali and understanding Somalia.