Since Somaliland unilaterally declared independence in May 1991, the unrecognized state has achieved a democratic record that only a few countries in the developing world can match. On November 13, 2024, Somalilanders voted in two thousand polling stations across the country. Wadani, the largest opposition party led by Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi (Cirro), won a clear victory with 63.92 percent of the vote, while the incumbent received 34.81 percent. Shortly after Somaliland’s National Electoral Commission (NEC) called Cirro’s election, President Muse Bihi Abdi magnanimously conceded defeat, calling for national unity and expressing his desire to ensure a smooth transition of power . On December 12, 2024, the outgoing and incoming presidents symbolically arrived together, laughing, at Cirro’s inauguration, marking another smooth and peaceful transfer of power following democratic elections in Somaliland. Since 1991, Somaliland has held four multi-party general elections, all of which have been described as free and fair by international observers. More recently, international observers have described the latest elections as “free, fair and credible, despite the constraints of Somaliland’s financial and institutional resources.” So why does democracy work in Somaliland?
Since the publication of his 1961 ethnographic study A pastoral democracyBritish anthropologist IM Lewis profoundly shaped the outside world’s understanding of Somali society, culture and history. Throughout his long career, Lewis argued that Somali society is best understood through the prism of the segmental clan system, in which business groups compete against each other, leading to endemic violence. This interpretation presents the Somalis as a fundamentally warlike people, where loyalty to one’s clan takes precedence over everything else. According to the Lewisian interpretation, this ultimately explains the root causes of the civil war and the subsequent disintegration of the central state in 1991. Although anthropologists have long argued that cultures, customs and traditions evolve and constantly changing, Lewis stubbornly denied the possibility that colonialism had a negative impact on Somali culture and society.
Despite the obvious flaws of the Lewisian interpretation, Lewis’s influence can hardly be overstated, as his framework profoundly shaped mainstream scholarship on Somaliland. Michael Walls, for example, asserts “one way or another, ‘we’re all Lewisites now’, we’ll start with the clan.” In a Party book in honoring IM Lewis, Markus Hoehne and the late Virginia Lulling go even further. According to them, the “career problem” – that is, “the problem of how to bring to Somali studies something that Lewis has not yet addressed” – remains a persistent problem. Responding directly to this, Ali Jimale Ahmed writes:
to explain intellectual, disciplinary and methodological disagreements as a “career problem” is simply ridiculous… to argue as if nothing has changed over the years in the configuration and meaning of clan identity is to ignore the nature dialectic of reality.
Even a cursory examination reveals that the existence of Somaliland, a centralized democratic state, is at odds with the main assumptions of the Lewisian interpretation. According to them, an inclusive and democratic Somali state should not be possible because it would inevitably be corrupted by a pervasive and enduring clan system. Despite the recent local conflict in the Sool region of eastern Somaliland, it is widely recognized that the peace and statehood process in Somaliland has involved the voluntary participation of all communities. Self-directed peace and statehood, achieved through voluntary cooperation between groups that fought on opposing sides in a bloody civil war, are fundamentally irreconcilable with interpretations and characterizations of Somali society and culture that Lewis and his supporters have.
As noted above, critics of Lewis emphasize the negative impact of colonization, arguing that it profoundly altered society and politicized cultural identities (kinship). As Abdi and Ahmed Ismail Samatar, the pioneering critics of Lewis, recently put it: “in essence, old cultural relationships and identities have been emptied of their economic and social content and restructured into a new order totally at odds with the ethos of self-egoism. trust, justice and equality”. While Lewis’s critique, which emphasizes the impact of colonization, offers valuable insights, it is not without limitations. Given its basic claim that colonization fundamentally eroded the ethos of precolonial culture, it offers little explanation to explain the success of self-led peacebuilding in Somaliland.
Recently, Abdi Ismail Samatar, rejecting the idea that traditional governance institutions would have been better preserved in Somaliland than in south-central Somalia due to indirect British rule in the former as opposed to direct Italian rule in the second, attributed Somaliland’s success in part to the acumen of its second president, Mohamed Hagi Ibrahim Egal. First, the trajectory of peace and statehood in Somaliland has involved a multitude of actors and stakeholders, including traditional elders, businessmen, intellectuals, women’s groups, religious leaders, ordinary citizens, etc. Second, Egal was absent from the political scene until shortly before the Borama conference in 2007. 1993. Third, the insight of one person or group cannot explain the immense prosociality that enabled the success of the peace and state formation in the absence of external assistance. Consider the following example: When conflict broke out in 1995, a group of expatriates from Somaliland voluntarily organized themselves, left their comfortable lives in Europe and North America, returned to Somaliland and played an important role in resolving the conflict.
In a future article, I suggest a third interpretation that pragmatically connects competing perspectives in Somali studies. In doing so, the article rejects the notion that Somaliland remained impervious to nearly eight decades of indirect British rule, while also expressing reservations about the claim that colonization led to a complete collapse of the ethos of precolonial culture, given the merits of colonization. documented utility of culturally specific practices in the peacebuilding trajectory in Somaliland. Following this reasoning, peacemakers in Somaliland have benefited from the vestiges of culture-specific factors that have historically induced pro-sociality.
Given Somaliland’s status as de jure As an unrecognized state, it is tempting to infer that it adopted democracy strategically to meet external normative demands. Making this argument, Rebecca Richards writes that “achieving state recognition has become a primary goal of the territory’s government, with the creation of a democratic state at the center of Somaliland’s strategy.” A careful study of Somaliland’s history, however, reveals a lack of causality between democratic governance and the ongoing quest for recognition. Shortly after its creation in 1981, the Somali National Movement (SNM), which fought the dictatorship of Maxamed Ziad Barre from 1982 to 1991, published a political manifesto entitled A better alternative. This manifesto proposed “incorporating traditional institutions of governance into government in a bicameral legislature with an upper house of elders.” Somaliland’s current hybrid regime, which was formally institutionalized in 1993, was therefore first formulated in 1981. Until the declaration of independence in 1991, the SNM maintained that its primary objective was to liberate Somalia of the dictatorial regime of Maxamed Ziad Barre and to restore democracy. In 1986, for example, the SNM declared: “The main objective of the SNM… is to eliminate the dictatorial, decadent and destructive regime of Siad Barre in Somalia and to restore the democratic principles of government. Even in May 1991, SNM leaders opposed the declaration of independence, but were ultimately influenced by elders representing all communities in Somaliland.
In a nutshell, political separation from Somalia was not seriously considered until 1991, even though democracy was indeed part of the plan from the start. There is virtually no evidence to suggest that Somaliland, during its trajectory of peace and state building, has complied with external normative demands. On the contrary, he deliberately deviated from the state model idealized by Weber by creating a bicameral parliament with an upper house of elders (gourti). The main reason democracy works in Somaliland is that it is not an externally or foreignly imposed system of governance. It is important to note that Somaliland was governed by democratic principles long before the arrival of colonial powers. In the post-1991 period, Somalilanders themselves constructed a democratic state suited to their culture and societal structures, rather than seeking to appease the external public. While Somaliland clearly emphasizes its democratic achievements in advocating for de jure recognition of sovereignty, it is evident that the explanatory power of this ongoing quest is limited to understanding the design and function of state and society in Somaliland.
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