State-Making In Somalia And Somaliland

… Nation-Building…

A central problem with many approaches to state-making lies in their equation of the ‘state’ with ‘central government’. Almost invariably, this leads to an understanding of state-making as a process of strengthening institutional capacity (Khan 2004:165), and wrongly suggests that state-making is a purely scientific, technical and administrative process. Thus, it is not surprising that most approaches to state-making gloss over its inherently political nature (Chandler 2006:5f.; Ferguson 1994), reducing state-making to state-building, thus turning it into a form of ‘antipolitics’ (Jayasuriya/Hewison 2004). Yet, as “[g]overnance is about the relationship between the state and society” (Brinkerhoff 2007:18), and as “it is in the realm of ideas and sentiments that the fate of states is primarily determined” (Holsti 1996:84), I argue in a manner analogous to the dictum of Evans et al. (1985) on the state, for the need of ‘bringing the nation back in’. Consequently, I propose that state-making was not merely about ‘getting institutions right’, but also about the establishment of political identities, common mental models, and, more generally, socio-cognitive systems.

This Map: Colonial Partition and Ethnic Distribution of the Somali People

While the connection between the ‘state’ and the ‘nation’ was realized in the nineteenth century and encompassed by the term ‘nation-state’ (Giddens 1985:83-121; Navari 1981), this crucial link is absent from much of the current literature. One of the very few scholars to call for a reunification of these concepts to better understand state trajectories is LemayHébert (2009:22), who argues that “[t]o be effective, state-building has to take into account not just the rebuilding of state institutions, but also the complex nature of socio-political cohesion, or what some refer to as nation-building.” As “the creation of institutions has concrete repercussions on the nature of the socio-political cohesion” (ibid.:32) and as nation-ness still represents “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (Anderson 1983:3), I propose that concepts of state-making and state-breaking have to incorporate the socio-cognitive issue of political identity into their analytical frameworks, in order to enhance our understanding of state trajectories. I, thus, challenge those scholars who assert that “the goal of nation-building should not be to impose common identities on deeply divided peoples but to organize states that can administer their territories and allow people to live together despite differences” (Ottaway 2002a:17), as this implies the questionable assumption that it is possible to ‘organize states’ while leaving the ‘identity’ of their populations untouched.

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