Selection of Case Studies
While the puzzles raised by the case of Somaliland constituted my starting point in the selection of case studies, I deployed a comparative approach to shed light on its trajectory. The Somali cases lend themselves to a comparative approach, not least because their state trajectories are marked by an interesting heterogeneity. First, there is the newly-independent democratic Somali state of the 1960s, which was perceived as constituting one of Africa’s rare real nation-states.69 Second, there is the autocratic Somali state of the 1970s and 1980s, which can itself be subdivided into two cases – one encompassing the period between 1969 and 1977, which largely witnessed processes indicative of state-making, and the other comprising the era from 1978 to 1991, which was generally marked by patterns of state-breaking. The years of 1977/78, which saw the Ogaden War between Somalia and Ethiopia, “the most ferocious conflict in Africa since World War II” (Woodward 1977:281), are widely considered to be a watershed in the Somali state trajectory. Third, there is the Somalia of the 1990s onwards, which came to be known as probably the most “full-blown case of state collapse” (Milliken/Krause 2002:754). Fourth, and finally, there is the allegedly opposed case of Somaliland, which developed into “one of the most stable polities in the Horn [of Africa]” (Bradbury 2008:1; ICG 2003:10; World Bank 2005:19).
While a comparative study of contemporary state-making processes throughout the territory of Somalia would have been intriguing, especially juxtaposing the experience of Somaliland since 1991 with that of south-central Somalia during the same period, it was beyond the scope of the current study. It would have been impossible to replicate the primary research I undertook in Somaliland in south-central Somalia. Instead, I have had to confine the comparative dimension of the study to Somali state development between 1960 and 1991. It follows that what the thesis has to say about the wider dimensions of Somalia’s state trajectory in the post-1991 era is by implication rather than through primary research.
That said, due to their broad similarities in social, cultural, linguistic, and religious terms, the comparison between the state trajectory of Somaliland and past state-making endeavors in Somalia constitutes – despite important differences such as dissimilar colonial experiences and changing geopolitical environments – a loose approximation of a social scientific ‘natural experiment’. Particularly Somaliland appears to fit this characterization, leading other scholars to argue that “Somaliland seems like a perfect laboratory of statehood in Africa, providing numerous lessons about how the concept and the idea of statehood can be relevant and important in Africa today” (Renders/Terlinden 2010:723). Moreover, the Somali cases also lend themselves to test the ‘war makes states’-hypothesis. As argued above, the Horn of Africa has experienced a relationship between war and state formation that has been of longer duration and far more intensive than elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa (Clapham 2001:2; Ahmed/Green 1999). This argument appears to be particularly true for the case of Somaliland, for which other scholars have already hinted at the formative role war played with regards to state-making (Jacquin-Berdal 2002; Huliaras 2002; Bakonyi 2009). Yet, although it is suggested that “Somaliland challenges the image of war” (Bradbury 2008:2), and that the polity was “very much a product of war” (Spears 2004b:185), the Somali literature still lacks an account that fully develops this argument – a gap this research project tries to fill.
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