Complexities Of State-Building In Somaliland

Abstracts

Since the mid-2000s, state-building in Somaliland has emerged as a complex mixture of coexisting, competing programs, political aspirations, and foreign agendas. This article applies a dialectical approach to focus on the scalar relations among actors and models of capacity-building, from programs’ design to their implementation.

Drawing on science and technology studies, I use the term “complexities” to describe the “multiplicities” of programs, actors, and different ways of ordering that coexist and overlap, sometimes in tension among them, other times in coordination. Specifically, this article examines two approaches to state-building in Somaliland: the United Nations Development Program’s institution-building and the US Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded stabilization programs. Going beyond fixed binaries, such as international and local, homogenous and hybrid, state-building and state-formation, this article observes how these dichotomies are formed and how, rather than being separate, they combine together, generating techno-political arrangements.

Somaliland’s complexity is made up of techno-political arrangements that are coproduced by both technical expertise and national political aspirations. Technical capacity-building programs, such as the redesign of the Somalia Institutional Development Project (SIDP), the creation of Somaliland’s National Development Plan (NDP), and the allocation of USAID’s grants, have become the terrain for political claims over the redistribution of resources and the control of state institutions.

1. Introduction

In the early 2000s and for almost two decades, state-building in Somaliland has been implemented as a series of single efforts, or single outputs, that targeted specific institutions, such as the Institute for Civil Service, but lacked an overall coordinated effort across different ministries (Amici et al. 2011). Despite UN official narratives, which reflect a shift to more efficient international state-building efforts, the reconstruction of Somali institutions has presented problems of dependency on foreign donors, inefficacy, and fragmentation of governance (Walls 2014).

However, moving away from critiques about the fallacies and inefficacy of state-building, this article instead focuses on competing notions of capacity-building to illustrate the complexities of state-building in Somaliland. The idea of complexities (Law and Mol 2002), borrowed from sciences and technology studies, makes it possible to move beyond the implicit and explicit polarities of order versus chaos, state-building versus state-formation, and international versus local, which have shaped the language of international agencies and donors and are still present in some scholarly criticism of state-building.

This article highlights the multiplicities of practices of intervention with special attention to juxtapositions and tensions while foregrounding the perspectives of Somali diaspora technical experts involved in state-building. While it shows how juxtapositions between technical and political aspects are created through the language of international interventions to justify further interventions, the interviews presented here also illustrate how technical issues about capacity-building have become the ground on which political claims and contestations take place. Technical assistance and political concerns combine to create new techno-political arrangements of governance.

State-building programs become the new political terrain where access to funding, resources, and participation in decision-making processes are discussed and contested. Moreover, through a scalar analysis, this article brings to the fore the relations and interconnections among diverse actors in the design and implementation phases of programs at different scales. By focusing on these tense relationships between actors and competing views between models of capacity-building, the article also shows how programs can upset scale hierarchies when decisions about design, funding, and priorities are challenged, rejected, or supported.

This article begins by visualizing the complex coexistence of multiple state-building programs in Somaliland, and before focusing on two competing approaches deployed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), it overviews selected literature on state-building, pointing out the shortfalls of some of its criticism as well as identifying its seminal contributions. Differently, from existing scalar analyses of state-building, this article notices how dichotomies are formed between technical knowledge and political claims and how the interrelations of actors and models of state-building bring about new techno-political arrangements.

It argues that technical capacity-building programs, such as the redesign of UNDP’s programs, including the creation of Somaliland’s National Development Plan (NDP), and USAID’s stabilization grant disbursements, have become the new contested terrain for rebuilding the state, expanding the very notion of politics. It ultimately shows how programs are designed in tension with each other, yet they still present similarities in their technical language and efficiency-oriented goals.

While institution-building has been a standard feature of UN-led capacity-building programs since their early presence in the area, economic growth and development programs were newly implemented by USAID in Somaliland and in the Somali regions in the early 2010s. Both institution-building and economic growth are traveling models of state-building, as they have been created and tested in other countries before being implemented in Somaliland, where they are adapted through a process of translation by Somali technical experts.

2. Multiplicities of Programs, International Actors, and Donors

Since the 2000s, many capacity-building programs have been established to strengthen Somali institutions in the three UN-designated regions of Somaliland, South Somalia, and Puntland. Through trainings, workshops, conferences, and daily skills transfer programs, Somali diaspora and non-Somali international experts have been recruited for institution-building programs and economic development grant schemes. Between 2011 and 2012, I was able to conduct interviews with program officers and Somali diaspora technical experts involved in state-building programs run by international organizations operating in Somaliland. Interviews took place in Hargeysa, Somaliland; Garowe, Puntland; and Nairobi, Kenya. However, for the scope of this article, I will limit the discussion to excerpts from a few interviews that occurred in Somaliland and Nairobi between August 2011 and April 2012. Dozens of programs were and are still being implemented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), UNDP, and Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI), among others, in the region, where state-building has been one of the most impactful forms of intervention since the early 2000s. Indeed, the presence of international organizations, as this article shows, affects Somali civic, administrative, security, military, economic, and political domains at large.

Table 1 shows a list of programs I was able to map out in relation to their donors and target institutions using their acronyms: Qualified Expatriate Somali Technical Support-Migration for Development in Africa (QUESTS-MIDA), Capacity Building for Somalia (CBS), Finnland Somalia-Migration for Development in Africa (FINNSOM-MIDA), Transition Initiatives for Stabilization (TIS-Somalia), and the Partnership for Economic Growth (PEG). The first three programs were implemented by UNDP and IOM with funding from European or Asian governments, while the last two were implemented by an American business company called “Development Alternatives Incorporated” and funded indirectly by USAID. The list in the table is not exhaustive, but it visualizes, in a graphic map, the programs I was able to study in the country at that time. Even if this list is partial, a closer look at these programs contributes to a broader understanding of the mechanisms of operation of state-building in practice as it plays out locally, providing evidence for some general insights.

Table 1. Coexisting programs of state-building in Somaliland (2011–2012)

Other capacity-building programs have been implemented by both governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as by business development partners, such as DAI, an American “global development company” created in the 1970s with projects in one hundred and sixty countries. In Somalia, DAI operated as a recipient of two USAID programs: TIS-Somalia and PEG. TIS had two implementing partners, DAI and IOM, and was designed “to increase confidence in all levels of government through targeted, strategic interventions that improve service delivery and government responsiveness” (USAID 2016).³ TIS’ aim was to support regional and local governance institutions and communities through light community infrastructure, technical assistance, and livelihood support projects. Among other programs, USAID invested $107 million in TIS (2010–2016) and expanded the program in 2015 for another six years, calling it TIS Plus (USAID 2016).⁴

The USAID program’s PEG focused instead on local authorities and private sector groups to facilitate the improvement of the investment environment within Somalia and increase employment opportunities (DAI 2022).⁵ These USAID-funded programs were the first economic programs implemented by the US government in Somalia since the 1990s, after the failure of the American-led military and humanitarian mission “Operation Restore Hope.” DAI targets both the private and public sectors, with a strong emphasis on enabling an environment for investment and economic growth.

All these programs coexisted in Somaliland, sometimes in competition with each other. These initiatives worked to implement the capacity of a single institution but lacked a comprehensive and sustainable vision, as many Somali diaspora experts and public officers would admit (Fagioli 2015). Programs had their own agenda, and they had to report to different agencies and donors; some programs functioned with an imposing external agenda and a lack of understanding of the context. Moreover, UN head offices were operating from Nairobi after the 2008 attacks that directly affected UNDP in Somaliland (UNDP 2010; Security Council Report 2020).⁶ Jokingly, an interlocutor involved in state-building referred to UNDP’s presence as “remote governance” to describe a system that, by implementing projects from a distance, was perceived as disconnected from actual experiences on the ground. In 2012, when the security situation was deemed safer, UNDP Somalia and other agencies gradually settled back into their regional head offices in the capital city of Hargeysa.

The multiplicity of programs and their multiscale dimensions, from their design stage in IOM, USAID, and UNDP headquarters across the United States and Europe, and their sponsorship through foreign donors, to their implementation in Somaliland via remote management and administrative passages in Nairobi’s offices, speak volumes to the complexity of state-building interventions (SBIs) well beyond the Somali regions. The multiplicity of programs has also created overlaps and tensions within the same institution, such as the struggle over the Public Finance Management reform between the World Bank and UNDP within the Ministry of Finance in Hargeysa.⁷ The tense coexistence of different approaches to rebuilding a central governing order and the multiple subprograms of institutional capacity-building have caused more fragmentation, perpetuating Somaliland’s financial dependence on foreign donors. However, as this article will illustrate, it is in these tensions, competitions, and contestations that political aspirations and claims emerge.

3. Critiques of State-Building, Their Limits, and Gains

The complexities of ongoing global state-building are only partially captured in much of the specialist literature. This section will overview the works of international relations scholars and legal critical scholars on state-building, underscoring their limits along with some key contributions over four main points. On one side, scholars of state-building have often overlooked power dynamics at the margins of the state as well as racial hierarchies. Moreover, the concept of hybridity in governance scholarship has reinforced dichotomies between international state-building and local politics. On the other side, in addressing colonial and imperial genealogies and the politics of scale, scholars have explained how the state has been depoliticized, transnationalized, and fragmented. By adding to a scalar framework of analysis, this article brings in the notion of complexity to address the multiplicity of programs, actors, interactions, and the emergence of techno-political forms of governance in Somaliland.

First, state-building has survived its critiques as scholars focused their analyses on the centrality of the state in processes of reconstruction,⁸ living aside the margins of the state and ignoring decolonial critiques and resistances to intervention by those most affected (Rutazibwa 2018). Even scholars who have questioned “the rise of postliberal governance” (Chandler 2010) and the “liberal peace consensus” (Paris and Sisk 2009) have agreed that state-building is an inevitable response to state fragility, which “will continue to be at the top of the international peace and security and development agendas for years to come” (Chandler and Sisk 2013, xx). Scholars have described state-building as a viable and necessary mechanism for stabilizing and reconstructing the state in postconflict countries (Heathershaw and Lambach 2008; Bliesemann de Guevara 2012; Lemay-Hébert 2019), and for expanding the autonomy, authority, legitimacy, and capacity of the postconflict state (Sisk and Chandler 2013, xxii). Since the late 1990s, state-building has been invoked as an antidote against the lack of state capacity and instability, which are considered the main drivers of conflicts. State-building continues to be a viable interventionist solution these days, despite early criticism of state-building missions in ex-Yugoslavia, Kosovo, East Timor, and transitional international administration in Iraq and Afghanistan (Hehir and Robinson 2007; Hameiri 2009; Paris and Sisk 2009; Chandler 2010) that ignored existing local dynamics, assets, and social and cultural capital (Ghani, Lockhart, and Carnahan 2006) and lacked evaluation mechanisms, as well as local accountability. State-building has also been scrutinized for being part of empire politics in denial (Chandler 2006) and was criticized for missing local politics (Debiel and Lambach 2009). Yet, some of these critiques (Chandler 2010, 2009) against neoliberal state-building (Fukuyama 2004) still retained an emphasis on the centrality of the state. As such, critics of state-building often overlooked the importance of power dynamics at the margins of the state (Das and Poole 2004) or along with and in relation to the state (Roitman 2005), as highlighted by anthropological studies. Also, as decolonial critiques later pointed out, these early critiques missed the fact that asymmetrical dominance has persisted since colonialism, with racial hierarchies of dependency and inferiority strengthened by international interventions (Sabaratnam 2017).

Second, critiques of state-building have often reinforced binary categories of analysis, creating fixed notions of international and local agency and thereby missing the interrelations and coproduction of reconstruction processes at different scales. International relations scholars have described “state-building” as “failing by design,” or as a Eurocentric top-down approach, and focused on the importance of “peace formation” at the “grassroots level” (Richmond 2014), or “how local actors have taken peace into their own hands to form a post liberal peace” (Richmond 2014, xiv). Yet, this turn to “local” and “grassroots” forms of politics was often invoked in tensed juxtaposition to international liberal state-building actors and policies, creating a polarized scenario where liberal peace initiatives from outside the country were in charge and local actors were on the receiving end of these initiatives. It ultimately implied asymmetrical power relations between active and passive actors, their agency frozen in the historical present.⁹ According to these scholars, the “encounter” between “external intervention” and “local peace formation” can generate “contextualized,” “anarchic,” “evolutionary,” and “organic forms” of ‘hybrid peace” (Albrecht and Moe 2015; Bargués-Pedreny and Randazzo 2018) or “hybrid political order” (MacGinty and Richmond 2015). Similarly, while criticizing the politics of intervention and state-building as “western self-flattery and self-deception” (Bliesemann de Guevara 2012, 16), Bliesemann de Guevara makes the analytical distinction between state-building, a conscious process of creating an apparatus of control, and state-formation, an unconscious and conflicting process made of compromises and negotiations among diverse groups. However, this analytical distinction risks essentializing another binarism in racialized terms, separating what she calls “liberal interventionism” or state-building and “the globalized Western idea of state” from “non-Western” states that function in a “hybrid way,” circumscribing non-Western states to “ambiguous” states that are forever reaching to close the gap “between formal facade and social reality” (Bliesemann de Guevara 2012, 7). In sum, the concepts of “hybridity” and “the local turn” seem to reinforce the binary hierarchical terms of international and local, formal and informal, legitimate and illegitimate, state-building and state-formation, therefore reproducing Eurocentric and hierarchical notions of statehood.

Third, early critiques of state-building have also overlooked interventions’ historical continuities, both in terms of similarities and differences, with colonialism and imperialism. Scholars have found that state-building began in the early 1990s as a response to the disastrous results of humanitarian interventions in places like Somalia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. This was in response to a shift from good governance to capacity-building in development practices and policies, which led to the problem of equating state-building with institutional capacity-building in response to poverty and state weakness (Chandler 2006). Because of its association with capacity-building, state-building has also been criticized for “naturalizing and depoliticizing market-led approaches to development as encapsulated in the concept of state capacity” (Hameiri 2009, 81). These seminal criticisms, however, did not provide a historical analysis of the continuities with past colonial modalities of dominance. It is mainly scholars of international law who have taken it upon themselves to look at the continuities, similarities, and differences between colonialism and present forms of state-building, questioning the very legitimacy of contemporary international territorial administrations (i.e., the UN mission in Kosovo, East Timor, and Somalia). While colonial administrations’ legality was probed, the legality of contemporary international territorial administrations remained unquestioned, even when their operations produced the same results (Wilde 2007, 2008), thereby restricting the capacity for self-governance of the administered state. Historically, the trusteeship system was born in relation to the issue of self-governance in former colonial territories, or, in other words, within the colonial assumption of a “lack” of governance capacity that needed to be taught to “native” and “uncivilized” populations. Anghie’s seminal work has explained how this assumption about the “lack” of a legal personality or “backwardness” in the system of sovereign states is still deeply embedded in international law, showing how colonialism not only lies at the foundation of international law but also grants the conditions of its universality. Through what he terms the “dynamic of difference” (and the civilizing mission), “international law posits a gap, a difference between European and non-European cultures and peoples, the former being characterized, broadly, as civilized and the latter as uncivilized” (Anghie 2006, 742). Similarly, Bain has questioned the moral foundations of the UN and the concept of human rights as universal claims that still legitimize many international SBIs and transitional administrations today (2006). While Wilde has pointed to the historical presence of ideas of trusteeship and colonial administrations by comparing “foreign territorial administrations” in their differential treatment in international law (Wilde 2008, 297), Bain (2003, 2006) traced the colonial history of the mandate and trusteeship systems in the British Empire in India and South Africa to highlight the genealogies and implications of contemporary forms of international administration and state-building. Much of the literature on state-building has failed to take these works into account and incorporate a critical legal genealogy of current forms of administrative interventions. Sabaratnam’s (2017) decolonial work is a notable exception. She has rethought the role of colonial structural differences in the experiences of the people who were the targets of intervention while resignifying failing state-building efforts as the space for political action and response.

Lastly, Hameiri’s work in the early 2000s challenged the idea of SBIs as building state capacity. SBIs transnationalize local government functions through multilevel governance structures, shifting from welfare state models to neoliberal states. They focus on expert managers and technical competence to counter perceived threats from fragile states. Western states have utilized SBIs to transform states internally and externally, redefining statehood in terms of “politics of scale” (Hameiri 2009, 2010). Like other countries subject to international state-building, Somaliland’s internal state capacity has been transnationalized through the involvement of foreign donor countries, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the mobilization of international governance experts, including Somali diaspora technical experts and elites. As we have seen, state-building in Somaliland is composed of a complex multiplicity of programs and modalities of ordering that involve interactions among diverse actors across different scales. This article adds to the debate on the politics of scale by applying the concept of complexity borrowed from science and technology studies. Resisting binary simplifications, the notion of complexity allows us to show how apparent opposites, such as the technical and the political, or state formation and state-building, coproduce new techno-political arrangements that not only shape new forms of statehood in Somaliland but also broaden the idea of what can be considered political.

4. Complexities of State-Building: Scalar Relations as Coproduction of Sociotechnical Arrangements

Drawing on Law and Mol’s articulation of the working concept of “complexity,” I describe contemporary state-building in Somaliland as a case that is not merely representative of an already-given theory about transnationalized statehood or as just another local iteration of a larger theoretical framework with anticipated outcomes. Through interviews and ethnographic accounts, I present a case that, although informative of ongoing processes of transnationalization of the state, it must still be observed and understood in its own right without anticipating any fitting into existing explanations of liberal state-building. Thus, differently from some of the works on state-building focused on Somaliland (Albrecht and Moe 2015; Balthazar 2012, 2015; Bereketeab 2013, 2015; Richards 2014; Walls 2014), this study does not endorse prescriptions about how the state in Somaliland should be rebuilt or what capacity-building should look like.

Law and Mol provided a list of possible articulations of complexity, specifying that it is not just the opposite of simplicity, in the way the dominant counterinsurgency agenda has used it so far, or a synonym for chaos and intricacy. Instead, I use complexities to describe the “multiplicities” (Law and Mol 2002, 11) of programs, actors, scales, orders, or different ways of ordering that coexist all at the same time. In Somaliland, various modes of state-building have coexisted and overlapped at times, often in a nonorganized and fragmented way, sometimes in tension among them, other times in coordination. Somaliland’s complex state-building has been formed by multiple modalities of capacity-building, which often coexist in competitive terms, presenting similarities, while other times synchronizing without competing. Moreover, international organizations, such as UNDP and IOM, relied heavily on expertise, including both international governance experts and Somali diaspora technical experts. As Barry illustrated in the case of the European Union, expertise was mobilized “to reduce the complexities and, in this way, to form a unified political order” (Barry 2002, 159). Barry considers complexity as “an index of irreducibility,” or that which is complex and is targeted by governing orders to be reorganized in “a unified political and economic order” (Barry 2002, 142). Yet Barry shows that the outcome of such a unifying endeavor ended up reproducing complexity rather than reducing it (Barry 2002, 147). Niang also mobilizes the concept of complexity and calls for a deeper understanding of new wars in the context of Africa, which takes seriously complex conflicts in the Sahel region, not to define them superficially as “ethnic war(s)” but as the result of “overlapping security governance agendas, overlapping and competing development, and humanitarian mandates attached to these with divergent policy outcomes” (Niang 2021, 141).

Taking a cue from Niang, Somaliland’s complexity cannot be simply defined as yet another illustration of transnationalized and fragmented statehood. Rather, drawing on interviews with state-building practitioners, this study focuses on juxtapositions, competing notions of capacity-building, and tensions emerging in the contingencies of implementation. In “intervention encounters” (Gilbert 2020) between Somali diaspora technical experts, civil servants, and International Organizations (IOs) officers, interactions made up of adaptations, contestations, negotiations, sabotages, and refusals could change the hierarchies of scale in state-building projects. Some of the interactions presented in this article, specifically the practices of implementation by the Somaliland NDP, show how models and protocols of capacity-building are contested and renegotiated, creating new alliances among the actors involved and alternative avenues to pursue techno-political aspirations. Hierarchies of scale from international donors to implementing agencies to Somali diaspora-qualified experts and civil experts might get destabilized, resulting in unanticipated forms and alternative political solutions to capacity-building.

State-building has been a key component of counterinsurgency since complexity and resilience thinking became central tenets of a major shift in counterinsurgency discourse and military protocols. This shift was primed by the US Army and Marine Corps in 2006 (Moe and Müller 2017)¹⁰: It enabled the expansion of military operations into local political and governance issues, such as institution-building, infrastructure, and basic services. Ultimately, this shift created the conditions for a larger presence of security and military procedures in the everyday lives of local populations in conflict or postconflict scenarios (Moe and Müller 2017, 14). Counterinsurgency’s local turn, with its new strategic discourse on complex and resilient societies and its thirst for local knowledge of communities, often simplistically defined as “clans” or “tribes,” reflected the new direction of international interventionist policies that turned local to harvest a more strategic understanding of the “field.” In what has been called “a new era counterinsurgency,” international interveners have taken on the roles of facilitators, advisors, and technical expert consultants, also in response to the critiques against top-down military and humanitarian approaches of the 1990s. However, as Moe and Müller (2017) have shown, counterinsurgency’s turn to local knowledge did not signal a break from the liberal security agenda. Since the mid-2000s, transnational counterinsurgency programs have shown continuities not only with liberal interventionism based on militarized security missions and humanitarian aid of the 1990s but also with colonial security strategies and practices of the past. Moe and Müller argue that counterinsurgency has been a reflection of illiberal violent practices inherited from liberal interventionism, serving Western vested interests to expand its domain and control over small-scale local communities and racialized groups. International donors’ focus on local knowledge and empowerment, did not respond much to local demands. Rather, donors’ interests in rescaling local administrations in postconflict countries responded more to the needs of international governance that often defined domestic public administrations as “dysfunctional” (Hameiri, Hughes, and Scarpello 2017, 7). Transnationally rescaling local governance has consequently produced “fragmented forms of multiscalar statehood” (Hameiri, Hughes, and Scarpello 2017, 8), thereby transcending and fragmenting sovereignty all at once. In Somaliland, international organizations, like IOM, USAID, and UNDP, have implemented such rescaling of local public governance in order to meet international standards and donors’ expectations. Here, similar to what scholars have observed elsewhere, accountability is catered toward the international community, leaving program design and decision-making processes in the hands of international organizations with the limited participation, or sometimes outright exclusion, of Somali diaspora experts and government officials. Pursuing stabilization and capacity-building, programs operate on a system of multiscalar governance that has indeed transnationalized the state. However, beyond noting Somaliland’s administrative sovereign functions being transnationalized, this article focuses instead on tensions, claims, and political aspirations over the redistribution of resources and the control of state institutions. These technical disputes over the redesign of programs and access to funding have indeed become a new political terrain.

Looking at Somaliland’s complex state-building processes, this article applies a scalar analysis from a different angle than Hameiri’s politics of scale. Rather than combining the politics of scale with Gramsci’s theory of the state, which transcends a state/civil society dichotomy, I draw inspiration from Barry’s expanding notion of politics and its interconnection with technology as a form of techno-politics (Barry 2001). Somaliland’s complexity is made up of techno-political arrangements that are the results of scalar relations between technical expertise and national political aspirations. Both technical knowledge and political claims co-form new techno-political arrangements of governance; state-building has become a new political terrain where matters of access to donors’ resources and decision-making processes are discussed and contested. Scalar relationships of power are forged between international agencies, foreign donors, Somali diaspora experts, ministers, government officials, and International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) officers, giving shape to a specific techno-political form of statehood in Somaliland. These emerging techno-political arrangements include all the various practices of capacity-building and activities of implementation of technical skills, such as the design of memos and letters of agreement (LoA), the drafting of NDPs, etc., which have become the contested ground of political aspirations. Expanding the domain of the political, scalar relations within programs of state-building have become the objects of contestation; practices of capacity-building have occupied the material and ideal sites of the political. Technical controversies have become political controversies (Barry 2001, 8–9); there is no split between technology and politics, as technical expertise has long been part of state-making processes. Technical knowledge and expertise are indeed not to be seen as simple forms of circumventing and avoiding political issues or as less important forms of knowledge if compared to political solutions. Rather, this article presents excerpts from conversations and interviews that illustrate how the controversies and tensions around technical programs are interlinked with political concerns and aspirations. In other words, scalar relations between actors and programs of state-building are also processes of state-formation, in which both technical and political matters coproduce new forms of governance.

This article shows how the technical is kept separate from the political in capacity-building implementation practices without drawing a line between technical foreign interventions and local sociopolitical agencies. It observes how technical expertise and political concerns are co-shaping the state and coproducing sociotechnical arrangements in the form of projects, such as the NDP, or private business development grants. After having shown a list of state-building interventionist modalities that are partial, nonsystematic, and open, in the following sections, I proceed with an account of two specific programs of institution-building and state-building, and their differences and similarities.

5. Traveling Models of Institution-Building and Stabilization Programs

Somaliland’s multiple programs presented diverse models of state-building with parallel, overlapping, and competing objectives reflecting the different interests and agendas of international agencies and donors. Beyond Somaliland, where they were likely to be tested first because of its accessibility and stability, programs were later implemented by international agencies across the Somali regions, in South Somalia and Puntland. Since the mid-2000s, UNDP and USAID have promoted two different approaches to state-building within the same institutions in Somaliland. In the conversations with program officers, experts, and other actors involved in capacity-building programs, tension emerged between two approaches to state-building described in juxtaposition to each other.

On the one hand, UNDP Somalia’s institutional development projects have focused on creating the capacity of the Ministry of Planning and National Development with a focus on aid coordination, providing a framework for Public Finance Management, and creating a Civil Service Institute (CSI) from scratch in order to train young Somali civil servants to work in public institutions. In 2009, to provide institutional development in these three areas, UNDP Somalia created the Somali Institutional Development Project (SIDP) in response to a scenario that was defined as “lacking” institutional capacity and resources. UNDP Somalia premised its intervention on the understanding that Somali administrative institutions had been “severely damaged” by a decade of violence during the civil war and that their human resources were “outdated” (Amici et al. 2011).¹¹ Between 2011 and 2013, UNDP Somalia designed and redesigned its projects to realign their outcomes to the Five Peace- and State-Building Goals (PSGs)¹² after signing the Somali Compact, a document that established the modes of engagement between the Federal Government of Somalia and the international community (International Dialogue 2020). Prior to its redesign, SIDP was one of the three pillars of UNDP Somalia’s democratic governance programs, along with local governance and the constitution programs. This last one consisted of supporting the Transitional Federal Government, based in Mogadishu, to draft the new Somali Constitution. In 2015, SIDP was discontinued, and a new program called Strengthening Institutional Performance (SIP) (UNDP 2017)¹³ continued to foster the institutional capacity of the Federal Government of Somalia and the State of Puntland, using the experiences of SIDP as a template across the Somali regions without any substantial change in its objectives. Despite SIDP’s many structural faults, as observed in the independent evaluation report commissioned by the EC,¹⁴ UNDP continued to refer to it as a successful project to draw on and enhance institution-building in the larger context of Somalia. SIP was thus implemented in the administrative regions of South Central Somalia and Puntland, focusing on the following three aspects: capacity injections through short-term advisory hires, often by mobilizing Somali diaspora technical experts and international advisors; civil service management; and the support of new development plans for core government functions (UNDP 2017, 1).¹⁵ Since 2009, even after the creation of a new international framework for engagements in fragile states, UNDP Somalia’s priorities and objectives on governance have remained focused on the same three aspects mentioned above. Still considered “fragile” and “lacking” institutional capacity, even after thirty years of UN presence, institutional development in the Somali regions is the result of internationally prescribed models of intervention.

In 2011, an evaluation of SIDP was commissioned by its main donor, the EC, while the program’s redesign was already taking place in Nairobi’s headquarters. The evaluation was requested because of tensions and complaints laid against SIDP management by Somali diaspora experts, who were recruited by UNDP and IOM to work on the civil service reform at the CSI, established by UNDP in Hargeysa. Somali diaspora experts and civil servants working at CSI were disappointed by the lack of inclusion in decision-making processes on civil service reform and the allocation of its budget by donors. Another conflict emerged around the redesign of SIPD and how to establish its priorities. UNDP managerial decisions were questioned by Somali UNDP field officers, Somali ministers, Somali diaspora experts, and civil servants in Hargeysa. At stake were questions about how the redesign should have taken place, which issues to prioritize, and who is entitled to establish those priorities. SIDP’s redesign caused a series of effects that were negatively received by Somali diaspora experts, civil servants, and ministers. While SIDP’s redesign was in progress, SIDP management, based in Nairobi, decided to suspend the use of LoA, an implementation tool used by UNDP to establish a working relationship with some selected Somali institutions where capacity-building projects had been taking place since 2009 or earlier. This decision prevented these projects, such as the implementation of Somaliland’s NDP, from being implemented and left Somali experts and civil servants without salaries for months.

The redesign of programs is not an exception but is routine and part of the way IOs function. Besides SIDP, UNDP Somalia’s larger priorities had also been redesigned throughout the years, reflecting an international agenda that was mainly focused on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).¹⁶ In an interview with former Minister of Planning and National Development (2010–2015), Dr. Saad Ali Shire, I asked him to describe the impact of UNDP’s programs. Similarly to other Somali officers and experts, he emphasized the experience of not being listened to:

…. when the new head of the unit was appointed, she thought of redesigning, I have no objection to it. What is not clear is what it is that is replacing. The essential thing is: we know what we need; is to listen to us and then meet our needs as we see them, not as they see them. That will make the program effective. We welcome the continuation of the program and scheme, which is very useful, but we need to look forward and put in place mechanisms that will enable communication, and enable them to listen…¹⁷

The redesign was perceived as a challenge by most of those involved, both in Nairobi and Hargeysa, but from different perspectives. In Nairobi, UNDP managers described the concerns of having to redesign SIDP as a way to account for the challenges and faults of the program for the donors. In Hargeysa, UNDP field officers described the difficulties of being in between two fires: the Nairobi-based UNDP management and the Somali government’s officials, or what UNDP calls its “counterparts.”

The support received by UNDP Somalia in the making of the NDP for Somaliland was also suspended between 2011 and 2012. Interviews conducted in those years about the making of the NDP highlighted the effects of the redesign on this particular project. Once again, disputes about priorities and who should be involved in the decision-making process emerged. SIDP’s plan for capacity-building in Somaliland included support for the Ministry of Planning and National Development (MoPND) in the design of the Somaliland NDP, which was launched at the end of 2011 with a five-year plan (2012–2016). The plan was originally meant to start in 2011, but its preparation was delayed and launched a year later. The Macro Economics Management Office (MEMO), a unit created by UNDP within the MoPND in consultation with SIDP in 2009, wrote and prepared the NDP. The plan was drafted in consultation with every state institution and agency in Somaliland, and the priorities that each of them laid out were divided into five pillars: economic, infrastructure, governance, social, and environmental. As stated in its official executive summary, the NDP provided “a medium-term framework for achieving the country’s long-term development aspirations as embodied in Somaliland Vision 2030 and the Millennium Development Goals.”¹⁸ The NDP was aligned with UNDP Somalia’s priorities as officially presented in documents like the Somaliland Vision 2030 and in accordance with the MDGs’ international agenda.

A Somali expert with an Ethiopian passport hired as a local expert coordinated the drafting of the NDP. He was an expert in agricultural development economics and was hired as the head of the MEMO Unit. In our first conversation, he described how the NDP came about:

Somaliland didn’t have any national plans. …There were a lot of duplications and gaps in the country. Development assistance was not coordinated. Organizations have their own interests, and there are disparities in terms of regions. The NDP was necessary to harmonize the disparities. The NDP came as a necessity from the Ministry, it’s an idea of the Ministry of Planning and National Development. SIDP was only supportive of the capacity-building. There were no experts if it wasn’t for SIDP, it provided the expertise on specific knowledge. Without them we couldn’t prepare a NDP.¹⁹

He also explained how they looked at Kenya and Ethiopia as models for the plan and how the budget for the plan was covered entirely by the international community. A few months later, he informed me that SIDP had cut his salary twice. His contract had recently ended with no clear understanding of how the NDP was going to be implemented. However, working as a volunteer, he was still thinking about fundraising strategies to continue implementing the plan:

Somaliland has no capacity to develop this budget. We expect some change, the government has to contribute to some percentage of the development; other contributions are expected from the diaspora, and private sectors. We will tap into remittances. We will strategize with the Somaliland Diaspora Agency- or find a way to charge the diaspora $1 for each money transaction. They will implement it.

[…]

We have received some commitment from donors: …. IGAD²⁰ will help to lobby to get funding for Somaliland; the Somaliland Trust Fund will be established by the UK and Denmark; and they will open their offices here in Hargeysa soon. Danida, the Danish agency for international cooperation, has already set up a call for a position to work as a senior advisor for this Trust Fund.

[…]

Maybe we need a [different] fundraising conference for donors to tap into [other] resources…Besides the Trust option which is still not in place, the other option is the private sector and the diaspora, but also bilateral agreements…Turkey has supported the education sector in Somalia but did not show any concrete commitments in Somaliland…²¹

The disputes around the redesign of SIDP had become a new site where technical expertise and national political aspirations combined through tensions and disagreement, while also creating the conditions for new alliances, “bilateral agreements,” and strategies for partnerships to take place. Programs such as SIDP represented the contested political domain where claims about governance priorities could be elaborated and negotiated.

On the other hand, USAID forged a different approach to state-building, according to their project managers. In Somalia, thanks to USAID funding, DAI deployed capacity-building mechanisms that involved the disbursement of financial grants that were allocated after a participatory budgeting process. Small business projects receive grants to build light infrastructure, and for capacity development projects in several ministries. Among a variety of programs, USAID brought the program called “Transition Initiatives for Stabilization” (TIS) to Somalia in 2010. As an American IOM TIS manager told me in Nairobi:

TIS comes out of OTI, which is a USAID office program that did something similar in capacity-building in Timor East and Afghanistan.²²

The program called “Office of Transition Initiatives” (OTI)²³ was created in 1994. ), under the Clinton administration, at the end of the Cold War. The first mission of the program was in Haiti, and even though it was supposed to last only a few years, in 2014, OTI celebrated twenty years of existence with a conference in Washington, DC²⁴ (USAID 2022). OTI programs operated in Afghanistan and other countries for several years before being replaced by other long-term development USAID programs. Currently, OTI works in ten different areas and countries across all continents,²⁵ where US foreign policy’s priority is “transition” and “stabilization” after the end of conflict (USAID 2020). Similarly to MIDA and other institution-building programs designed and implemented by UNDP Somalia, USAID’s OTI is a “traveling model” (Rottenburg, Park, and Behrends 2014) of state-building that was exported to several countries and implemented in a specific way in Somaliland through the contingent work of translation by Somali diaspora experts. As an OTI program, Somalia’s TIS program had the following official objectives:

USAID’s Transition Initiatives for Stabilization (TIS) program seeks to increase confidence in all levels of government through targeted, strategic interventions that improve service delivery and government responsiveness. Through TIS, Somali government institutions, the private sector, and civil society collaborate to design, evaluate, and deliver projects with a quick and lasting impact on the lives of Somali citizens in critical risk areas.²⁶

Rather than focusing on institution-building like UNDP has done, USAID’s approach was more concerned with “building trust” in local governments and promoting private sector financial initiatives across the Somali regions, engaging locally with newly emerged administrative districts, especially in south-central Somalia. An evaluation report on USAID East Africa’s programs came to the conclusion that there was no unifying strategy behind USAID’s stabilization intervention in Somaliland and Somalia at large. The report also discussed the sources of instability, referencing key USAID documents on stabilization, where the linkage between causes of instability and terrorism was ostensibly implied (USAID Somalia 2015)²⁷. The assumption behind USAID’s stabilization program, TIS, was that “by supporting a legitimate governance framework through inclusive processes and improving access to service delivery and economic opportunity, public confidence is increased and the appeal of extremists is reduced” (USAID Somalia 2015, 4). The framing of stabilization in relation to the provision of social services to counter terrorist threats reflected a specific mode of governance, which was an alternative to UNDP’s liberal institution-building. However, Hehir (2007) has already disentangled a direct correlation between state fragility and terrorism by providing clear evidence of the inaccuracy of the idea that democratic governance might provide a reduction in terrorism. More than anything, as observed by Moe and Müller (2017), USAID’s emphasis on security in relation to social services has allowed for a broadening scope of military intervention in a larger variety of social domains. Philips (2019 and 2020) documents how the equation between order and the proximity of violence can be easily reversed. She argues that Somaliland’s discourse on its proximity to violence has actually granted the country a prolonged period of stabilization and peace. At the same time, Malito (2020) has shown that it is precisely because of the multiple and persisting military and humanitarian international interventions that the Somali regions continue to experience fragmentation and instability.

6. Beyond Politics: Stabilization as Transformation and Participation

Upon establishing a direct link between instability and extremism, USAID’s agenda unfolds by providing stabilization programs that can create state legitimacy and stable market opportunities. Within this policy framework, “stabilization” stands for building trust or confidence in institutions and aims at getting the Somali “private sector,” “civil society,” and “government institutions” all involved in the process of defining the priorities or reconstruction. Stabilization involves the participation of all stakeholders involved. In line with the international development agenda following the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, USAID has adopted a participatory approach to stabilization that emphasizes local ownership of aid delivery. Moreover, USAID has officially defined “stability” in a series of key documents that have informed its activities since 2009, which were based on the “support for multiple levels of stabilizing governance bodies”²⁸ as the main “strategy.” This strategy was consistent with the US Department of State’s “dual-track” policy, established in 2010 under the Obama administration, which consisted of engaging both with the federal and regional governments in Somalia at the same time. However, as the dual-track policy ended with the recognition of the federal government of Somalia in 2012, stabilization has continued to be the main focus of US intervention in the Somali region.

In Hargeysa, an IOM TIS senior project advisor, a young Somali woman who received her training at a college in Virginia, USA, explained to me in an American accent that “stabilization” actually stands for “transformation,” or changing the way Somali citizens perceive Somali institutions and improving the delivery of services:

TIS is a whole package of stabilization, we just don’t focus on getting people, but we make sure that those people have people to train and have the institutional capacity to actually transfer the knowledge. It’s all about transformation for us, as opposed to what CBS and MIDA [other IOM programs] are doing, which is solely getting experts, and placing them in institutions. For us, it is more like getting that transformative agenda. We need to change how the people of Somaliland and Somalia see the government and at what level we can improve service delivery, whether through MIDA or infrastructure.²⁹

She continues in detail:

The entire project is divided into 45 grants, and they all range from small scale constructions to re-habilitating existing regional offices, to building the capacity of the institution either by providing the right kind of equipment or the right kind of technical capacity. It’s largely focuses on the government body and how to make sure that they actually do provide social services to their citizens. It is a bigger context than just providing experts.

A few weeks later, at a coffee place in Nairobi, I talked to an IOM TIS top manager, a white American man in his forties, and asked what kind of approach USAID is using and how stabilization works in this context. He described stabilization as an approach characterized by a “joint budget”:

Everybody has a word at what we do. It is not about what we do, but honestly is about how we do the project. The project we have, and the joint budget are run by the Somalis. We had huge joint planning meetings with Somali Ministries, civil society, and private sectors, in which USAID said, “here is a check of three million dollars going to Somaliland, how do you want to spend it?” It was three days of meetings; you can imagine how intense it was. But it was really fascinating. Most of the meetings were held in Somalia. Now they have done the same thing with DAI. Also in Somaliland with different Ministries, in Puntland, and then in Geddo and there are plans to do it in Hiran.[…] Joint budgeting,…[I have to] give credit to the Project manager at USAID, she brought this methodology with her, and it has been used as a consensus building activity that really creates ownership of the project.

During our conversation, I interrupted him to ask if “joint budgeting” could be called “participatory budgeting.” “That’s what it is!” he exclaimed, and he proceeded to explain how an apparently technical decision-making process like participatory budgeting gets politicized locally. In his account, TIS appears to be a program of capacity-building void of any political meaning, while politics becomes “interesting” and therefore visible only at a local level:

In the participatory budgeting presentation we gave in Hargeysa, we said this is what you can do, so when you do your budget, if you want to spend all your money on diaspora placements, you can do that; it’s up to you. So, I was curious to see what they [Somali ministers, civil society, and business representatives] would say. […] They expected the contract with DAI to be six months faster than it was. So, to fill the void, we started supporting NGOs and other border area activities before DAI came on board. The MIDA budget gave us an advantage; we [IOM] were already in Somaliland; we are in Mogadishu. The Ministry [of Interior] responded that they had not seen any contractors yet, and he was angry. So in our next participatory budgeting, even if the Ministry was not there, they [IOM] gave them [the Ministry of Interior] two MIDA diaspora placements, …So it’s really politics; it’s very interesting: Somaliland politics….³⁰

According to these two IOM officers, stabilization programs are technical capacity-building tools to transform Somalis’ perceptions about their institutions, as well as participatory tools that transcend politics. Stabilization is described as a neutral technical intervention aimed at improving service delivery by fueling donors’ aid into small grants allocated through participatory budgeting mechanisms. According to this IOM manager, and more generally in the technical language of international SBI, participation is conceived as something neutral to improve local ownership, while Somali ministers’ requests to receive such grants are labeled as “Somali politics,” something “interesting” that seems to unexpectedly emerge locally. Similarly to UNDP Somalia’s state-building programs, USAID and IOM’s notion of stabilization was described as merely technical, neutral, and apolitical. The dichotomy between technical stabilization programs and local politics is manufactured by the narratives and practices of international agencies in the Somali region. Rather than merely technical, Somaliland’s stabilization initiatives are the product of techno-political interventions. Somali ministers’ political claims over TIS’ resources were directly interconnected with the implementation of technical models of capacity-building. Technical stabilization interventions are inherently political, insofar as beneficiaries as well as international state-builders have different political stakes involved. Politics is already present in technical interventions, as state-building is far from being removed from local politics or neutral. Instead of transcending politics, political claims seem to be the direct result of state-building stabilization programs, which are better understood as a mixture of technical capacity-building and political claims. I borrow Mitchell’s notion of techno-politics as a “mixture” (Mitchell 2002) between technical intervention and political practices and ideas to explain the co-constitutive relation between remotely designed programs of capacity-building and contingent political concerns. Techno-politics emerges more visibly in the administrative field (von Schnitzler 2016), where political issues are fully implied in seemingly technical questions, such as transforming “how” citizens see institutions and skills transfer from the diaspora to their home country. Here, USAID programs are the results of foreign, as well as domestic, political concerns, which have created the manufactured link between instability and terrorism, and stabilization programs cannot be merely defined as technical or neutral. Rather, state-building programs are a combination of techno-political elements, a mixture of technical expertise and development models utilized worldwide, and political concerns, claims, and aspirations about domestic and foreign issues. As we have observed for UNDP programs, TIS and other USAID-sponsored state-building initiatives become the terrain for articulating political claims about access to state services, resources, expertise, and infrastructure.

7. Development as Business and “Technical Assistance”

DAI implemented state-building programs in the Somali regions as a subcontractor business company receiving USAID’s funding. At the head of the DAI office in Hargeysa, I talked to a professional from the Canadian-Somali diaspora who had resettled in Hargeysa a few years earlier and had been running the office since 2011 until 2013. When I interviewed him, he insisted on the different approaches USAID and the UN deployed in the Somali region:

US foreign policy has a lot to say about how and when this program was designed. But they could not come here and establish a USAID office, so they partnered with DAI and IOM. DAI calls USAID “a client,” and USAID calls them contractors. Honestly, it is far more sincere; development is a business! Otherwise, it won’t continue. DAI is a private company; they have a business model; they are here to make money; and they are honest about it. It’s reflected in the way things are done. You achieve more. By November, we will have put up more buildings than the whole UN and NGO system has put up. forty by DAI and thirty by IOM, seventy [projects or grants] all together from Zeylath to Gabiley and across the country. The buildings are governance complex offices, local markets, conference halls, and roads (small infrastructure). IOM is working on customs and revenue collection buildings. It’s all under TIS.³¹

Unanimously, all IOM TIS and DAI managers defined USAID’s distinctive approach as a business model with a participatory approach, something they defined in contrast to the development and institution-building initiatives carried out by UNDP Somalia over the many years of UN presence in the country. An emphasis on the “new” and more effective approach brought to Somaliland by USAID in contrast to UN agencies’ “traditional development” is also underscored in an evaluation report on TIS. The report summarized the meeting that took place in May 2011 in Djibouti, where USAID had invited representatives from Somaliland’s government, NGOs, and business companies. Under the title “In-Kind Grants Versus Direct Cash Provision,” this section of the report describes the difference between USAID and other “typical” development initiatives:

The TIS program will be implemented in a manner different from traditional development initiatives. Typically, funding is wired directly to NGOs, thereby circumventing local government, or funding is sent directly to government representatives, but the work is often not completed. TIS is an innovative program whereby stakeholders and beneficiaries are consulted during the planning process. This program will award grant funding to select government ministries, while bids for implementing individual activities will be opened for competition by local organizations. The work will be completed by private sector companies and civil society actors, while the community benefits from improved services and more empowered leadership. Invariably, the Somaliland government will take credit for successes. Activities will be based upon a strategy for support that is co-developed with grantees and partners. Activities are not based on humanitarian need but rather on strategic planning for stability.³²

Like the IOM TIS manager in Nairobi, the director of DAI emphasized the importance of a participatory approach in USAID’s work in Somalia. Moreover, he also stressed how this kind of approach is different from humanitarian intervention and is rather to be defined as “technical assistance”:

TIS is not a development nor a humanitarian program. There is a degree of capacity-building that has been done, and we provide technical support. TIS-MIDA provides government partners with experts in particular areas of need. I met with the Minister of Public Work, they have several needs, and we can’t cover them all. They identified two key areas: one is to streamline the design of their government buildings to make sure they meet certain standards. So, streamline and standardize regulations. And secondly, road safety. They need an expert to come in and put in place policies to curb death. The leading cause of death is road accidents. […] They call this “technical assistance.”³³

By using a participatory approach to establish budget priorities and offering in-kind grants to build light infrastructure, such as city roads, markets, and new headquarters for the Ministries’ buildings, along with salaries for experts, USAID’s presence in Somaliland is perceived and self-portrayed as a “new” way of doing “technical assistance.” When compared to existing UN programs, USAID’s approach was described as “refreshing,” more “honest,” and merely technical.

8. Conclusion

These binaries between traditional and new or “refreshing” approaches to development, between direct cash provision versus in-kind grants, and between technical intervention and local political claims speak to the dialectical complexities of SBI in the Somali regions. In practice, state-building in Somaliland is the product of a complex mixture of both elements of these apparent binaries invoked by IOs as a necessary condition to assert the technical neutrality and positive impact of state-building programs. The emphasis on the novelty of USAID’s model implied a critique of UNDP’s model, which was described as slow and ineffective. However, the language used by DAI and IOM managers, who praised one model of state-building over the other, remains anchored to the categories of “efficacy,” “legitimacy,” and neutral “technical assistance” that have characterized much of the UN approach. Like UNDP capacity-building programs, such as SIDP, that mobilized Somali diaspora “technical” experts to transfer skills for capacity-building in Somali institutions, USAID-funded programs similarly revealed the tensions in the fixed dualism between international and external technical assistance and local political context. This dualism is anchored on the assumption that the external is always providing technical and neutral assistance, while the local context is always “interestingly” political and in need of transformation, capacity-building, and stability. These dialectics show scalar hierarchies of power between those who “own” the ability to fix a state and those who “lack” the ability to govern themselves if they have not been trained. This dichotomy reinforces the coloniality of intervention. Yet, in the contingency of implementation, those scalar hierarchies are destabilized through criticism, negotiation, and the creation of possible political alliances and sponsorship alternatives, as Somali diaspora experts have done.

The multiplicities of state-building programs and models illustrate the complexities of techno-political arrangements in Somaliland resulting from the unique combination between national political aspirations and technical expertise. Despite their differences, both approaches to state-building relied on the same categories of legitimacy and efficiency, as they are still defined as technical assistance or technical skills transfer, to indicate their apparent neutrality toward Somali political dynamics. The analytical concept of complexities is neither a mere critique against simplification nor a simplistic way to say that there are many approaches to state-building. Rather, by describing the multiple models, agendas, implementation processes, and objectives, the complexity of state-building emerges as a specific combination of techno-political arrangements: a mix of technical procedures and protocols interacting with political aspirations and agendas that, when combined, cocreate a specific political order in the Somali regions. State-building in Somaliland is a complex combination of specific techno-political forms of statehood, which is coproduced by the interconnection of constructed dichotomies, such as efficient technical assistance versus local politicized context, and institution-building versus business approach.

While state-building’s most visible effects are the expansion of transnational and multileveled governance, this article has highlighted the less visible forms of politics. Observing how dichotomies are formed and how they interrelate in practice has shown how seemingly technical capacity-building programs, such as the redesign of SIDP, the creation of Somaliland’s NDP, and the allocation of USAID’s grants through participatory budgeting strategies, have become new contested political grounds for rebuilding the state. State-building is here better understood as a complex and multiple set of coexisting programs that coproduce techno-political arrangements, travel across transnational scales, and reemerge in specific ways in Somaliland.

Author Biography

Monica Fagioli is an independent researcher and works as a special educational needs teacher in Italian public schools. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology (The New School for Social Research, USA). Her research studies the techno-politics of intervention in Somaliland, the Somali diaspora’s participation in state-building programs, and migration for development policies.

Notes

Author’s note: The research for this article was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback and express my deepest gratitude to the interviewees who agreed to participate in this research. Save for one individual, the names of the interviewees for this piece are withheld in the interest of confidentiality.

Footnotes

© The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.