1.1 Presenting the Research Project
The Iterative Process
I set out on this PhD project in October 2007, intending to explore and explain the apparent success of Somaliland’s state-making project, which was supposedly not only unique (Hoyle 2000:85; Kaplan 2008b:148; Jhazbhay 2009:50), but had, in the absence of large-scale international development assistance, undertaken remarkable self-directed ‘autonomous recovery’ (Weinstein 2004; Bradbury 2008:4; Eubank 2010). My curiosity was heightened by the fact that I had just finished consulting with the World Bank on a project in Timor-Leste, a state that remained highly fragile despite – or, possibly, because of – the significant support and involvement of the international community (see e.g. Engel and Vieira 2011). What interested me, in particular, was why Somaliland’s state trajectory supposedly diverged so much from other (Somali) state-making endeavors and how the general lack of international involvement had contributed to this alleged ‘success story’ (Jhazbhay 2007; Henwood 2007:168).
Embarking on my research, I was increasingly less convinced that Somaliland constituted such a triumph of modern state-making. Moreover, I started questioning its alleged uniqueness, not only because this claim turned out to have a long tradition in Somali studies, but also because I started seeing a number of parallels to other state-making endeavors within and outside Somali boundaries. Combined with a thorough re-reading of the literature on state-building, nation-building and the role war had historically played in these processes, I decided to shift the analytical focus of my research towards identifying the mechanisms that underlie processes of state-making and state-breaking, while still addressing the questions of why and how Somaliland might be different. I was eager to accord special attention to the role violent conflict played in these processes, aiming to disaggregate the ‘black box’ of war to uncover under what condition wars could unleash “dynamics that have the potential to help bring about progressive long-run change” (Cramer 2006:10).
A central motivation to study the Somali case lay in my endeavor to better understand the trajectory that has beset the Somali people who have endured so many decades of war and poverty. Thereby, my research was driven by the goal of finding out how to substitute which bellicose components that were constitutive of state-making, so as to achieve similar outcomes by non-violent means. In this sense, I was interested in following Gerschenkron’s (1962) idea of ‘catching-up’ and ‘burning stages of development’ for the context of statemaking. After having undertaken a feasibility study in Somaliland in July and August 2008, the overarching theme of the research project developed into an exploration of common patterns and divergent processes of state trajectories in the past Republic of Somalia (19601991) and the self-styled Republic of Somaliland (1991-2010). I articulated a number of propositions, whose validity I aimed to establish by empirical research and data analysis in subsequent years. Of these propositions, the most central three are presented in the subsequent part, while a number of further ones are touched upon in section 1.2, which situates the thesis in the wider literature.
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