Israel’s recognition of Somaliland exposed a deeper shift across Africa: political Islam no longer seeks states, but governs through non-state administrative systems. Somaliland stands apart—and unsettles the model.
This article discusses the shift of political Islam in Africa away from formal state structures and towards decentralized systems of administration.
Here’s a concise breakdown:
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The Failure of the Party-State Model: Islamist movements’ attempts to govern after the Arab Spring largely failed, leading to a decline in their direct political power through traditional government structures.
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Rise of Decentralized Systems: Islamic influence has shifted to “distributed systems of administration,” such as legal mechanisms, fiscal networks, and security regimes that operate outside of formal state control.
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Tamkīn (Institutional Entrenchment): Islamist groups are focusing on embedding themselves in various infrastructures like legal, educational, humanitarian, and financial systems.
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Examples in Africa: In regions like the Sahel and East Africa, Islamic governance functions as a practical framework for administration where state authority is weak, offering services like adjudication, taxation, and security. Groups like Boko Haram and JNIM exemplify this through their control and administration in specific territories.
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Somaliland as an Exception: Somaliland’s relative stability, achieved without significant Islamist mediation, challenges the notion that administrative Islamic ecosystems are the only or inevitable model for governance in areas with weak state control.
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East Africa: Islamic influence is growing through institutionalization rather than insurgency.
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Overall: The author argues that political Islam in Africa is evolving into a more decentralized, administrative form, filling the void left by weak or failing states, but Somaliland offers an alternative.
The complete piece is as follows:
Political Islam Without a State: The African Formula
Why Israel’s recognition of Somaliland exposed a deeper shift in Islamic governance across Africa.
By Esther Surkis
Israel’s decision to recognize Somaliland triggered a predictable wave of regional outrage. Arab governments and pan-Islamic institutions rushed to condemn the move as a violation of territorial integrity, despite the fact that Somaliland has existed as a de facto state since 1991 — with functioning institutions, regular elections, a professional security sector, and no record of sponsoring transnational jihad — while continuing to manage internal tensions, economic vulnerability and unresolved social and territorial disputes. The intensity of the backlash is therefore revealing: it reflects less concern for Somali unity than discomfort with a precedent — a Muslim polity that has remained institutionally functional outside the dominant ideological and infrastructural ecosystems of contemporary political Islam.
That discomfort points to a deeper transformation that has been unfolding for more than a decade. Political Islam has neither disappeared nor been decisively defeated. What has collapsed is its party–state model — the attempt to translate Islamic identity into formal sovereignty through elections, constitutions, and centralized authority.
After the Arab Spring, Islamist movements finally had the opportunity to govern. They failed. From the Muslim Brotherhood and Ennahda to Islah in Yemen, Islamist networks in Sudan under al-Bashir, Libya’s Justice and Construction Party, and Morocco’s PJD, none succeeded in translating ideology into a sustainable model of statehood. One by one, they were pushed out, banned, or hollowed out — absorbed into administrative systems that retained Islamic language as a social code while abandoning it as a political project.
This failure produced a structural shift. Over the past decade, Islamic political agency migrated away from parliaments and ministries into distributed systems of administration: legal mechanisms without states, fiscal networks without treasuries, and security regimes without clear borders. Islamic structures proved resilient only as long as they operated outside the formal state. Once absorbed into state institutions, they tended to reproduce coercion rather than governance. This pattern is visible across very different political environments — including the Palestinian arena, where competing Islamist and quasi-secular actors alike struggle to convert fragmented authority into coherent statehood, while non-state Islamic infrastructures continue to exercise decisive influence on the ground.
This reorientation did not occur spontaneously. It reflects a strategy long articulated within Islamist thought as tamkīn — institutional entrenchment. As documented in ISGAP research, Islamist actors increasingly prioritize embedding themselves in legal, educational, humanitarian, and financial infrastructures rather than competing for formal political power. Where elections failed, systems remained.
In the West, this logic operates through dense networks of NGOs, advocacy groups, educational initiatives, and legal platforms — often unbranded and formally non-partisan, but united by a shared normative framework. Turkey and Qatar have invested heavily in this ecosystem, enabling Islamist vocabularies to circulate through civil society, academia, and international institutions without requiring electoral victories or overt political control.
In the Middle East, the same logic governs fragmented sovereignty. From Turkish-administered northern Syria under the formal authority of Ahmad al-Sharaa, to Houthi-controlled Yemen, to the liminal spaces of Sinai and Libya, Islamic governance increasingly functions as administration without statehood — regulating access, movement, and resources where formal institutions no longer operate. The Red Sea basin, with its direct implications for Israel’s security environment — including maritime pressure, operational depth for the Houthis, and logistical corridors — has become one of the clearest theaters of this transformation.
In Africa, this shift takes its most operational form. Across the Sahel and parts of East Africa, Islamic governance functions less as ideology than as a governing language: a practical toolkit for adjudication, taxation, security provision, and resource allocation in spaces where state authority has thinned or collapsed. What emerges is neither an Islamic state nor a classic insurgency, but durable non-state regimes of administration embedded in everyday life.
Groups such as Boko Haram, now operating largely through its ISWAP branch, maintain control through organized systems of violence. Mass kidnappings of schoolchildren, forced taxation of villages, and the regulation of movement across controlled territory form part of a coherent administrative practice. Abductions are used not episodically, but as a calibrated instrument — to extract resources, enforce compliance, and eliminate alternative local authorities. Governance here is built through routinized coercion, in which predictability is achieved by the systematic removal of competing power structures rather than by social integration.
The most illustrative case remains JNIM. Formed in 2017 from several Sahelian jihadist factions, it never aimed to proclaim an Islamic state. Under Iyad ag Ghali and Amadou Koufa, it positioned itself as a governing authority where states had collapsed — combining agreements with Tuareg and Fulani groups, systems of taxation and fines, control of roads, mediation in disputes, and regulation of trade.
Reporting by The Washington Post and research from NUPI show that JNIM now operates as a para-state across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and adjacent border regions. Its courts function because state courts have vanished; its taxes are collected because armies no longer control highways; its “security” is tolerated because, in some areas, it is perceived as more predictable than the violence of state-aligned militias. Violence here is the cost of maintaining order.
Somalia demonstrates why administrative Islam is not synonymous with stability. Alongside al-Shabaab’s parallel governance system, the country hosts a competing model in Puntland, where Islamic State affiliates operate without interest in taxation, mediation, or durable administration. There, violence does not support governance — it replaces it entirely. Somaliland’s durability rests on rejecting both models: the jihadist nihilism of ISIS and the administrative Islamism of al-Shabaab.
In East Africa, Islamic influence increasingly enters through institutionalization rather than insurgency. This is visible not only in Somalia but across the wider Horn and Red Sea corridor. In Sudan, Islamist networks survived the fall of al-Bashir by embedding themselves in logistics, trade unions, humanitarian access, and local administration — a factor that continues to shape the current war. In Djibouti and Eritrea, Islamic actors operate through port labor, informal taxation, and cross-border trade regulation. In Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado, jihadist violence coexists with parallel systems of local control over routes, labor, and resources. Across these cases, Islam operates as a practical framework for regulating access, authority, and legitimacy within administrative systems rather than as an articulated political program.
Berbera, the main deep-water port of Somaliland on the Gulf of Aden, sits on a corridor linking the Gulf, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. It lies within operational reach of the Yemeni theater and the Red Sea basin, along routes long used across the wider Somali and Red Sea smuggling environment. With a second round of interconnected regional wars increasingly likely, this geography carries operational weight rather than symbolic meaning.
Yet geography alone does not explain the intensity of the reaction to Somaliland.
For decades, political Islam and state failure have been interpreted through three dominant narratives. Arab political discourse has treated Islamic infrastructure as a condition of governability. Islamist movements have claimed a monopoly over order in spaces of weak sovereignty. Western analysis has largely oscillated between security frameworks and civil society engagement, leaving non-state governance itself underexamined.
The case of Somaliland cuts across all three.
Its stability rests on authority structures that organize power and constrain behavior: clan hierarchies capable of enforcing collective responsibility, negotiated political arrangements that discipline elites, and administrative practices rooted in local legitimacy rather than external mediation. Unlike in many African settings where clan power fragments authority and fuels open competition over resources, these structures in Somaliland have been absorbed into negotiated political frameworks instead of operating as autonomous economic actors.
Conflict has not disappeared, but it has remained bounded — limited in scale, managed through known channels, and prevented from escalating into systemic collapse. This does not make Somaliland exemplary or transferable. Its internal tensions, demographic pressures, and unresolved territorial questions would likely overwhelm less constrained systems. What makes it analytically disruptive is that it has remained functional without Islamist mediation.
That is why the reaction has been so sharp. Somaliland does not challenge the region through force or ideology, but through precedent: it demonstrates that the administrative Islamic ecosystems now filling institutional vacuums across Africa are neither the only available model nor an inevitable one.
Esther Surkis was raised in a religious Jewish family and spent her childhood in Switzerland, the UAE, and Russia before moving to Israel in her early twenties. She writes about the Middle East, Islam, and geopolitics. Also a Judaica artist and traveler (18 countries), she is deeply interested in Jewish history. Her background is in political science and international law. She lives with her family in Jerusalem.
