State Failure, State-Building, and Prospects for a “Functional Failed State” in Somalia
Abstract
Over two decades of external efforts at institution-building in Somalia have failed to revive a functional central government there. There are many reasons for this, not least of which are powerful local interests in perpetuating weak government institutions, facilitating corruption and other illicit activities. But some notable successes have occurred at the local level, both with formal and informal governance mechanisms. Municipalities have been particularly effective sources of formal governance in Somalia’s failed state, providing basic security and services via legitimate and responsive local authorities. In addition, informal hybrid governance arrangements, drawing on a combination of customary authority, sharia courts, business leaders, women’s market groups, and professionals, have been a critical source of routinized, legitimate governance and rule of law in Somalia. External actors have struggled to understand these arrangements and their place in wider state-building efforts. Where external aid has helped with local and informal governance in Somalia, it has been carefully calibrated and based on close contextual knowledge, not template-driven projects.
Get full access to this article
View all access and purchase options for this article.
References
Academy for Peace and Development (APD). 2007. No more grass grown by the spear: Addressing land-based conflicts in Somaliland. Hargeisa, Somalia: APD.
Bradbury Mark. 2008. Becoming Somaliland. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Bryden Matt. 1999. New hope for Somalia? The building block approach. Review of African Political Economy 26 (79): 134–41.
Bryden Matt. 2014. The reinvention of Al-Shabaab: Strategy of choice or necessity? Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Bulhan Hussein. 2008. The politics of Cain: One hundred years of crises in Somali politics. Potomac, MD: Tayosan Publishing.
Clarke Walter, Herbst Jeffrey, eds. 1997. Learning from Somalia: The lessons of armed humanitarian intervention. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Department for International Development (DFID). 2005. Why we need to work more effectively in fragile states. London: DFID.
Elmi Afraye. 13 December 2013. Somalia: Specter of political meltdown. AL Jazeera. Available from http://www.aljazeera.com.
Englebert Pierre. 2009. Africa: Unity, sovereignty, and sorrow. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Fund for Peace. 2013. Failed States Index 2013. Available from http://ffp.statesindex.org.
Hagmann Tobias, Korf Benedikt. 2012. Agamben in the Ogaden: Violence and sovereignty in the Ethiopian frontier. Political Geography 31 (4): 205–14.
Hammond Laura, Awad Mustafa, Dagane Ali Ibrahim, Hansen Peter, Horst Cindy, Menkhaus Ken, Obare Lynette. 2012. Cash and compassion: the role of the Somali diaspora in relief, development, and peace-building. Nairobi: UNDP.
Hammond Laura, Vaughan-Lee Hannah. 2012. Humanitarian space in Somalia: A scarce commodity. Humanitarian Policy Group Working Paper, London.
Harper Mary. 2012. Getting Somalia wrong? Faith, war, and hope in a shattered state. London: Zed Books.
Henze Paul. 1991. The Horn of Africa: From war to peace. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Kibble Steve, Walls Michael. 2013. Swerves on the road: Report by international election observers on the 2012 local elections in Somaliland. London: Progressio.
Laitin David. 1979. Somalia: America’s newest ally. Unpublished paper.
Laitin David, Samatar Said. 1986. Somalia: Nation in search of a state. Boulder, CO: Westview.
LeSage Andre. 2002. Somalia: Sovereign disguise for a Mogadishu mafia. Review of African Political Economy 29 (91): 132–37.
Lewis I. M. 17 August 2011. Understanding Somali society. Inside Story. Available from http://inside.org.au/understanding-somali-society/.
Lyons Terrence. 2011. Ethiopia: Assessing risks to stability. Washington, DC: CSIS.
Lyons Terrence, Samatar Ahmed. 1995. Somalia: State collapse, multilateral intervention, and strategies for political reconstruction. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Menkhaus Ken. 1994. Getting out versus getting through: U.S. and U.N. policies in Somalia. Middle East Policy 3 (1): 146–62.
Menkhaus Ken. 1997. U.S. foreign assistance to Somalia: Phoenix from the ashes? Middle East Policy 5 (1): 124–49.
Menkhaus Ken. 2006/2007. Governance without government in Somalia: Spoilers, state building, and the politics of coping. International Security 31 (3): 74–106.
Menkhaus Ken. 2008a. The rise of a mediated state in Northern Kenya: The Wajir story and its implications for statebuilding. Afrika Focus [Ghent] 21 (2): 23–38.
Menkhaus Ken. 2008b. Somalia: Governance versus state-building. In Building states to build peace, ed. Call Charles T., 187–216. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Menkhaus Ken. 2010. Stabilization and humanitarian access in a collapsed state: The Somali case. Disasters 34 (3): 320–41.
Menkhaus Ken. 2012. No access: Critical bottlenecks in the 2011 Somali famine. Global Food Security 1 (1): 29–35.
Menkhaus Ken. 2013. Stabilization in practice: The Somali case. In Stabilization operations, security and development: States of fragility, ed. Muggah Robert, 120–42. London: Routledge.
Menkhaus Ken. February 2014. Somalia conflict analysis. Mogadishu: UN Mission in Somalia.
Patrick Stewart. 2011. Weak links: Fragile states, global threats, and international security. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rawson David. 1993. The Somali state and foreign aid. Washington, DC: UDS Foreign Service Institute.
Renders Marleen. 2012. Consider Somaliland: State-building with traditional leaders and institutions. London: Brill.
Samatar Ahmed. 1986. Socialist Somalia: Rhetoric or reality? London: Zed Books.
Samatar Abdi, Samatar Ahmed 1987. The material roots of the suspended African state: Arguments from Somalia. Journal of Modern African Studies 25 (4): 669–90.
Styan David. 2013. Djibouti: Changing influence in the Horn’s strategic hub. Chatham House Briefing Paper, London.
United Nations. 1993. UN Security Council Resolution 814 (26 March).
World Bank. 2011. World development report 2011: Conflict, security, and development. Washington DC: World Bank.
World Bank. 2012. Doing business in Hargeisa 2012. Washington DC: World Bank.
Biographies
Ken Menkhaus is a professor of political science at Davidson College and a specialist on the Horn of Africa.
Cite article
Cite article
Cite article
OR
Download to reference manager
If you have citation software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice
Information, rights and permissions
Information
Published In
Article first published online: October 9, 2014
Issue published: November 2014
Keywords
Authors
Metrics and citations
Metrics
Journals metrics
This article was published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
VIEW ALL JOURNAL METRICSArticle usage*
Total views and downloads: 7630
*Article usage tracking started in December 2016
Altmetric
See the impact this article is making through the number of times it’s been read, and the Altmetric Score.
Learn more about the Altmetric Scores
Articles citing this one
Receive email alerts when this article is cited
Web of Science: 43 view articles Opens in new tab
Crossref: 26
-
Ungoverned Spaces and Kidnapping in Nigeria
-
Enhancing federal inter-governmental relations and state building in S...
-
Interview with Christophe Hodder, the United Nations Climate Security ...
-
Famine, remittances, and global justice
-
The Past, the Present, and the Future: A Bibliometric Analysis of Fail...
-
Who governs? State versus jihadist political order in Somalia
-
Developing the Child Protection Workforce: Collaborative Development o...
-
Somalia: Experiments in Knowing and Doing Capacity Building
-
Understanding vulnerability and resilience in Somalia
-
Liminal sovereignty practices: Rethinking the inside/outside dichotomy
-
Worse Than “Bushmen” and Transhumance? Transitology and the Resilient ...
-
Participation of civil society in decisions to mitigate environmental ...
-
Insurgency and international extraversion in Somalia: the National Int...
-
The Silent Backdrop: Colonial Anxiety at the Border
-
Oil to cash in Somaliland: a debate whose time has come
-
Disaster risk reduction amidst armed conflict: informal institutions, ...
-
From Pre-Colonial Past to the Post-Colonial Present: The Contemporary ...
-
The interplay of interventions and hybridisation in Puntland’s securit...
-
Limited Statehood and its Security Implications on the Fragmentation P...
-
Somalia: federating citizens or clans? Dilemmas in the quest for stabi...
-
Trouble in paradise: Contesting security in Bali
-
Effect of foreign military intervention and controlled territory on th...
-
Victorious rebels and postwar politics
-
MILITARY INTERVENTION AS MEANS TO ESTABLISHING EFFECTIVE MODEL OF STAT...
-
Courts, Clans and Companies: Mobile Money and Dispute Resolution in So...
-
Deciding Through Not Deciding: The 2009 OTP Communication on Palestine...
Figures and tables
Figures & Media
Tables
View Options
Get access
Access options
If you have access to journal content via a personal subscription, university, library, employer or society, select from the options below:
loading institutional access options
Alternatively, view purchase options below:
Purchase 24 hour online access to view and download content.
Access journal content via a DeepDyve subscription or find out more about this option.
