1.0 Violence and Political Settlements
1.1 Why did Somaliland’s civil wars end while Somalia’s continued?
This paper uses a case study of Somaliland to examine several questions that are critical to contemporary development and state-building assistance. Principally: why do some countries develop the capacity to deliver security and inclusive development while others do not, and what is the role of leadership in determining these outcomes? Having emerged from serious civil conflict, the case of Somaliland offers insights into why some domestic power struggles – including violent ones – build the foundations for relative political order while others perpetuate cycles of economic malaise and political violence?
This paper also asks how we are to understand the politics that shape the institutions that give expression to relatively stable political orders? In so doing, it explores the delicate question of whether the lack of political and/or economic inclusivity might be an inevitable part of forging a stable political settlement in the short term and if so, what the implications for international development and state-building assistance are?
This piece is concerned with the place of political violence – and perceptions thereof – in establishing relatively robust political settlements. It asks whether violence is, as Charles Tilly (1975; 1985) suggested in his study of European state formation, still critical for the processes by which locally legitimate institutions are consolidated, and identities attached to the state are embedded. Alternatively, does political violence create ‘conflict traps’ that, as Paul Collier has argued, are more likely to prevent states from developing effective institutions and economic growth? (Collier, 2007).
Is political violence, therefore, necessarily akin to ‘development in reverse’ (World Bank, 2003) or can it also play a more constructive role in establishing the means by which violence is channeled towards the provision of security and protection of property? If so, under what conditions, and under what types of leadership, might violence be tamed, and what are the implications for external actors? This paper asks these questions through an examination of the structural and agential factors that drove central and southern Somalia to massive political violence and disorder while the northwest of the country – Somaliland – managed to overcome its civil wars and establish relative peace during the same period.
1.2 The analytical framework
This study employs a political analysis methodology grounded in a structure-agency framework (Hudson and Leftwich, 2013) to explore the development of Somaliland’s political settlements. In this context, ‘political settlements’ refer to the formal and informal agreements between contending groups over the organization of power in society and the rules of political engagement. Being the product of power struggles, political settlements are dynamic and open to renegotiation but ‘[i]deally, they embody an elite consensus on the prefer-ability and means of avoiding violence’ (Brown and Gravingholt, 2009: 1). This study looks particularly at:
- Political negotiations during the peace-building process.
- Pre-existing networks of trust between the elites that facilitated those negotiations and that have helped to uphold the political settlement since that time.
- Powerful ideas about Somaliland’s exceptionalism, self-reliance, and internal balance of power that provided an overarching narrative for the maintenance of peace.
It argues that the defining feature of Somaliland’s political settlement is that protection from violence (understood as the absence of civil war) is exchanged for popular acquiescence to elite capture of the key drivers of economic growth. Only a small portion of the wealth that is captured through this settlement is redirected towards providing public goods.
Rather like the nature-nurture debate on the determinants of individual human behavior, the structure-agency problem concerns the determinants of socioeconomic and political behavior. Structuralist accounts highlight the influence of circumstances that are beyond the control of the individual on either individual or collective behavior. Agential accounts, on the other hand, highlight the ability of individuals or coalitions to make choices, drive change, and alter their circumstances (Leftwich, 2010: 94).
By adopting a structure-agency lens, the paper seeks to account for the ways in which actors (agents) are constrained or enabled by – but can also innovate to change – the circumstances (structures) within which they find themselves. This framework is useful for identifying and disaggregating the various components of a political settlement, and part of the aim of this paper is to illustrate the adaptability and relevance of this approach. Actors in Somaliland succeeded in setting some of the ‘rules of the game’ through which they approached one another after the collapse of the Somali state, but they did so within a context that was partially but never wholly, available for reform.
The paper pinpoints several critical structural and contingent factors – both inside and outside Somaliland – that created space for actors to maneuver, and which allowed them to further shift structures to consolidate hybrid institutions. Within this setting the paper analyses the institutions, politics, and ideologies of Somaliland to explain the ways that agents in Somaliland were able to extricate themselves from the type of violence that engulfed the rest of Somalia.
In the literature, and in the way that Somalilanders narrate their own political history, the centrality of clan-based mechanisms tend to predominate in explanations of how peace was built. While undoubtedly crucial, this paper will suggest that the ‘clan lens’ can simplify the components that facilitated the process, and will explore other factors that created or impeded trust in Somaliland’s political settlements.
The piece, therefore, asks a number of overarching questions about what happened in Somaliland before drilling down further to ask how it happened and why. Fundamentally, the paper seeks to explain how relative peace and political stability was achieved and how it has since been maintained. But it also asks what resources and relationships are brought to bear in the political negotiations that underlie these successes? And what are the structural factors (such as the nature of overseas development assistance, clan affiliation, external threats to the leadership, demographics, etc.) and agential factors (for example, educational backgrounds, trust networks, etc.) that have helped to maintain peace?
Its second broad avenue of investigation involves the ways and extent to which, Somaliland’s politically relevant elites are dependent on each other for their survival. It asks whether the level of co-dependence between them affects their ability to establish ‘rules of the game’ that are reasonably effective and locally appropriate, and what external factors (non-recognition, territorial threats, donor programs, diaspora networks, etc.) contributed to this outcome?
1.3 Why is the case of Somaliland important?
Despite the billions of dollars that the international community devotes to state-building initiatives each year, a formula for ensuring the construction of effective state institutions remains elusive. Statebuilding projects have become a fundamental priority in international security practice in an effort to overcome the likelihood of conflict ‘spill-overs’ from so-called unstable or fragile states. However, the success of such projects has been limited and has often resulted in external actors reinforcing weak political settlements or political dysfunction in the states that they target (Phillips, 2011; Paris and Sisk, 2009; Barnett and Zurcher, 2009; Rubin, 2006; Egnell 2010).
An important caveat must be made when discussing any contemporary process of development: outcomes are fluid, uncertain, and cannot be assumed to be linear. At the time of writing, Somaliland’s political and economic development excludes considerable portions of the population and monopolistic practices are common within the elite.
Opinions vary wildly as to whether greater inclusiveness is likely within the foreseeable future or not. What can be said, however, is that Somaliland has not seen large-scale violence – defined by Antonio Giustozzi as the mobilization and organization of ‘large numbers of men (at least hundreds) in a coordinated fashion to achieve specific military and political aims’ (Giustozzi, 2011: 7-8) – since the conclusion of its civil wars (December 1991 – November 1992; and November 1994 – October 1996).
Moreover, so strong is the collective desire for continued peace amongst Somalilanders that they are sometimes referred to as ‘hostages to peace’ (Bryden, 2003: 63; Human Rights Watch, 2009) – a description that will be discussed in greater detail in Section Three.
Because of its unrecognized status, the government of Somaliland has been generally ineligible for official international grants and loans and so has had to rely more heavily than most states on its internal capacity to extract capital, whether from its domestic population or its diaspora. The increased dependence of political leaders on internal revenue is widely accepted to have been critical to state formation in Europe (Schumpeter, 1918/91; Tilly, 1985; Tilly, 1992; Levi, 1988).
Contemporary state formation is, however, an increasingly internationalized endeavor. In the post-WWII era, there are far greater opportunities for domestic elites to extract resources internationally (through resource exports, strategic rents, international loans, or overseas development assistance), which can reduce the relative importance of extracting resources domestically (van de Walle, 2004: 108; Reno, 2010: 60; Collier, 2009: 223).
Such external opportunities also have a significant influence on the internal politics of developing states and are complicated further by shifts in the priorities and expectations of external actors. Unlike many ‘fragile’ or post-conflict states targeted by international state-building initiatives, the political settlements that limited large-scale violence in Somaliland evolved without explicit externally driven expectations, schedules or technical indicators of success (Bradbury, 2008: 246-7). As Lewis and Farah (1997: 373) explain of Somaliland’s most important peace conference in 1993:
The Boorama [Borama] conference was set to start in January but was delayed until February. To discredit the government, which was against it, the elders declared it open on February 24th with virtually no preparation. It was opened with seven days devoted to reciting the Koran so as to give time to effect (sic) arrangements. The actual business started on March 3rd.
In other words, the Borama Conference reflected highly local power struggles without the need to respond to timeframes or benchmarks of those not intimately attached to the process.
1.4 The ‘political settlement’ and development
The role of ‘political settlements’ in providing the fundamental precondition for stability and growth has come to form an important focus in development theory and policy in recent years, especially – but not exclusively – in ‘fragile’, ‘failed’ or recently conflict-ridden states and societies (Parks and Cole, 2010; Khan, 2010; Di John and Putzel, 2009; Whaites, 2008; Unsworth, 2009). But there are few studies that expose the inner dynamics of such settlements, that is, the ways that actors negotiate in shifting and, crucially, shift-able contexts to affect change.
Without this detail, it is difficult to compare across cases and thereby build a robust conceptual framework for understanding the drivers of effective and locally appropriate institutions. This paper is thus an attempt to add to empirical understandings of how political settlements emerge in contemporary settings. It attempts to build a better understanding of how and why Somaliland’s leaders perceived an incentive to act broadly in the interests of the population, particularly with regard to ending the violence.
Despite desires to the contrary, the government of Somaliland remains internationally unrecognized, isolating the country from international funding channels. Somaliland’s peace agreements were negotiated locally but perhaps more importantly its internal conflicts were also fought between local actors. No external power attempted to end or prolong the civil wars that occurred in the early-mid 1990s.
It was, therefore, not only the domestic peace-building process that underpinned the development of political settlement but also the insular nature of the conflict and the limited access that its belligerents had to external revenue streams. These structural aspects of Somaliland’s political processes provide supporting evidence for The Developmental Leadership Program (DLP) proposal that the most effective institutions are locally devised, locally appropriate, and locally legitimate – something that this piece will explore further in Section Four.
This study suggests, however, that it was not simply the near absence of external assistance that mattered, but the fact that Somalilanders were not pressured to accept ‘template’ political institutions and could negotiate locally legitimate institutional arrangements. This in turn meant that the incentives for elites to cooperate with one another were primarily local rather than externally derived. These factors were at odds with the way that peace was being pursued in the rest of Somalia at the same time, where the international community was spending vast sums of money to bring political competitors to the negotiating table in the hope of forging a durable peace.
To date, there have been at least 17 internationally sponsored peace talks aimed at achieving national reconciliation in Somalia, most involving hundreds of delegates and millions of dollars. These have been ongoing since June 1991, and have been facilitated at different times by the United Nations, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Arab League, the African Union, and the governments of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya, Yemen, United Kingdom, and Turkey (Interpeace, 2009: 10-23). One such conference in Nairobi endured for over two years and, according to Mary Harper, was only brought to a close after the Kenyan authorities held a ‘farewell party’ as a means of politely suggesting that it was time for the delegates to go home (Harper, 2012: 64).
Furthermore, the considerable resources invested for ending the violence (and famine) in southern and central Somalia by the international community, served to provide more reasons for competition between local actors there – such resources did not exist in the north.
Somaliland’s political settlements drew on existing institutions and established new ones in order to overcome the violence that beset the north, and in so doing created a hybrid political order consisting of locally appropriate norms and rules of political engagement. The ‘rules of the game’ that were consolidated during this process established that the building and maintenance of peace should:
- Be highly inclusive
- Use widely understood (though not strictly ‘traditional’) mediation techniques • Maintain a relative balance of power between clans and sub-clans
- Not rely on outsiders to solve Somaliland’s problems.
This political settlement has become increasingly exclusive since the last national conference ended in 1997 but it nevertheless underlies ‘rules of the game’ that regulate competition over power and resources and the handling of differences in non-violent ways. This was not an inevitable outcome. When resources are viewed as scarce, it is common for actors to assume a zero-sum game in which opponents’ gains will be viewed as their-own losses. As is discussed throughout this piece, incentives to act are politically and socially constructed.
The comparison between events in Somaliland and the rest of Somalia (which remains beset by conflict despite having access to large amounts of foreign financial assistance) has been made elsewhere (Eubank 2012; Bryden, 2003; Bradbury, 2008; Hagmann and Hoehne, 2009; Lewis, 2009; Interpeace, 2008; Harper, 2012). This piece contributes to this literature by exploring the incentives and threats that drive domestic bargaining when external assistance is not readily available.
Deviating from the existing literature, however, this study also highlights the interplay of the structural and agential factors within Somaliland that made such an outcome possible. It looks beyond the clan structures that are widely accepted to have been the essential foundation of the peace process (Lewis, 2009; Lewis and Farah, 1993; Bradbury, 2008) to also examine the interplay between Somaliland’s structural context and its socially and politically constructed perceptions of peace, violence, and stability.
In so doing it explores other details about those involved in the peace-building process and in maintaining the political settlement in an effort to better understand the drivers of non-clan-based cooperation that this entailed. One of the key contributions that it makes in this regard is to expose the disproportionate influence that actors with access to quality secondary education had in forging the early years of Somaliland’s political settlement. In fact, it appears that roughly 25-30 percent of the influential non-traditional elites in Somaliland’s formative period passed through one of two secondary schools: Sheekh School or Amoud School.
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