By Abdisaid M. Ali
The chairperson of Lomé Peace and Security Forum and the Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of FGS

Edward C. Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society offered a provocative explanation for underdevelopment in a small southern Italian village. The problem, he argued, was not poverty or colonial history but a cultural mindset he called amoral familism. In a family first society, people focus on the near term interests of their own household, often at the expense of the shared good. Trust seldom reaches beyond the home, collective projects struggle to take hold, and public institutions remain thin and brittle.

While Banfield wrote about mid twentieth century Italy, his framework resonates with aspects of Somali political life. The persistence of lineage based authority, the weakness of national institutions, and the treatment of the state as a prize rather than a platform all reflect the dominance of personalized, kin based loyalty. But Somalia is not a static or backward society. It is a transitional society navigating the violent passage from civil war to fragile peace, from elite coercion to attempted institutionalization, and from fragmented authority to an uncertain federal order.

Segmented Trust and the Two Publics

Banfield claimed the people of Montegrano were incapable of acting in the common interest because they lacked a moral horizon beyond the family. Peter Ekeh’s theory of the two publics in Africa refines this diagnosis. In postcolonial settings, individuals inhabit a moral world where the primordial public such as clan or ethnic community demands moral obligation, while the civic public such as the state is seen as morally neutral or even predatory. This split helps explain why, in Somalia, people tend to place their trust inside the lineage circle and rarely carry it across clan boundaries.

In a transitional setting where state institutions are fragile and often doubted, people lean on what feels familiar and safe, family, clan, and religion. The result is trust that runs up and down within groups rather than outward across them. The result is a moral vacuum at the civic level, even as intense loyalty persists within subnational networks.

Familism, Institutional Inertia, and Transitional Dynamics

Francis Fukuyama’s theory of trust draws a link between the scale of cooperation and institutional capacity. Low trust cultures, he argues, rely on kinship for economic and political coordination, making it difficult to develop impersonal institutions. Somalia fits this pattern. Access to resources, security, and political appointments are typically mediated through clan based expectations.

But Somalia is not culturally static. It is in transition. The challenge is that transitional societies often generate institutional inertia where elite actors deliberately resist formalization to preserve their ability to manipulate fluid political arrangements. In such a setting, institutions do not collapse by accident. They are kept weak by design. Fukuyama emphasized that cultural constraints can be transcended when political institutions reward collective responsibility and professional merit. But this transition is hard to achieve when predation is rational and institutions are captured.

The Political Economy of a Transitional State

Jean François Bayart’s Politics of the Belly challenges the notion that African underdevelopment stems from moral deficit. Instead, he shows that postcolonial elites operate within rational economies of extraction. State offices become sources of personal accumulation and elite control. Somalia mirrors this logic. Government positions, donor funds, and even military appointments are auctioned through a mix of coercion and negotiation. What looks like dysfunction is in fact strategic adaptation within a transitional society where institutions are weak, legitimacy is contested, and violence remains an ever present bargaining tool.

Alex de Waal’s political marketplace framework clarifies this further. In transitional societies, public office is not stabilized by law but by constant recalibration of elite alliances using money and force. Elections, constitutions, and parliaments do not anchor the political order. They are performance, while the real arena of power lies in elite brokerage.

This logic aligns with the concept from Douglas North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast of limited access orders where peace and order are maintained not through public institutions but through elite pacts that restrict access to rents and political opportunity. These are not failures of modernization. They are features of transitional societies that struggle to move from personalized rule to rule based governance.

Somaliland and Puntland Elite Bargains in Transition

Somaliland and Puntland are often presented as relative bright spots in Somali state building. Each has secured periods of stability, assembled working administrations, and asserted de facto authority over defined territory. Yet these gains rest largely on negotiated elite bargains rather than on the consolidation of impersonal, rule bound institutions. But neither represents a consolidated state. Rather, they illustrate how elite bargains, not institutionalization, underpin transitional governance.

Somaliland’s political order after 1991 emerged from clan conferences that brokered peace and power sharing among dominant actors. While these processes prevented large scale violence, they also entrenched clan hegemony and suppressed dissent. Elections have been held, but often delayed. Opposition is tolerated, but often contained. The Guurti, originally a transitional body of elders, has ossified into a permanent chamber that limits democratic oversight. The Laascaanood uprising in 2023 revealed the limits of Somaliland’s consensus, showing that legitimacy has not extended beyond core Isaaq constituencies.

Puntland’s trajectory is similar. Founded in 1998 as a federal entity, it has developed functioning institutions, experimented with elections, and established some fiscal autonomy. But power continues to be distributed through clan based negotiation. Mandate extensions, weak rule of law, and occasional clashes between security forces loyal to rival elites underscore the fluid and transitional nature of its governance.

In both cases, the appearance of institutional strength masks a deeper reliance on personalized authority, negotiated coexistence, and informal control. Public authority is claimed by multiple actors, elders, businessmen, militia commanders, and religious leaders who operate in both state and non-state spaces. This is not institutionalized rule. It is transitional accommodation.

These elite bargains are exclusionary and brittle. They reward those already at the table while marginalizing those without coercive or financial power. When dissent cannot be absorbed, it is repressed. The political systems in both Somaliland and Puntland remain formally transitional but substantively static, functioning less as stepping stones to institutional order and more as elite management systems that delay it.

Violence, Memory, and the Transitional Social Contract

Memory in societies emerging from war is not a neutral record. It is a resource that actors mobilize to contest legitimacy, allocate blame, and define belonging. In Somalia, the accumulation of civil war, collapse of central authority, and communal violence has produced a fragmented moral landscape. That landscape sets the outer limits of reconciliation and shapes the terms on which authority can be rebuilt.

Lidwien Kapteijns shows that key episodes of violence around the fall of the Barre regime were not spontaneous eruptions but organized projects given moral meaning. Through poetry, radio, and coded speech, perpetrators framed the targeting of particular communities as necessary and even virtuous. These cultural repertoires did more than accompany violence. They rendered it intelligible, created permission for participation or silence, and inscribed exclusionary narratives that endure in political life.

Memory is not dormant. It is activated in clan discourse, in silence around the past, and in political claims to victimhood or resistance. Markus Hoehne’s ethnographic work demonstrates that the psychological reverberations of violence persist long after bullets stop flying. In regions like northern Somalia, trauma is passed on across generations through stories, local grievances, and cultural codes. Political behavior is shaped by these inherited memories, which makes trust and compromise difficult to institutionalize.

Somalia’s transitional order has rarely treated memory as a political problem that must be addressed. The 2012 Provisional Constitution mandates a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. On paper it exists. In practice it does not. The reason lies less in legal design than in the political economy of rule. Authority is assembled through bargains among factional elites who prize coalition maintenance and revenue control. A national process that would surface past abuses threatens those bargains, so it is deferred.

Public sentiment points the other way. Consultations in Mogadishu, Garowe, and Beledweyne registered a clear demand for truth and accountability. Where the state cannot project authority, raise revenue, or enforce common rules, rulers choose tools that hold coalitions together rather than institutions that would reset the moral order. The commission remains text rather than institution because the calculus of power still rewards settlement, not reckoning.

Some have argued that customary systems like Xeer offer a pathway to transitional justice. Indeed, they have facilitated compensation, negotiation, and social healing at the local level. But Fowsia Abdulkadir and others caution that these systems were not built to address mass violence or structural exclusion. Their legitimacy, while important, is not sufficient to replace national frameworks for justice.

Ahmed Ali M. Khayre emphasizes that transitional justice must be tailored to fragmented and contested environments like Somalia. It cannot rely on ideal models borrowed from elsewhere. Justice has to be built through bargaining and compromise, and by sequencing reforms to fit the hard constraints of state building. A Jeng similarly argues that justice cannot be divorced from governance. Both must evolve together to rebuild legitimacy from below.

The violence experienced in Somalia was not simply criminal or accidental. It was political, intentional, and rationalized. Any effort to build a legitimate Somali state must begin by confronting this legacy. That requires more than silence, amnesia, or calls for unity. It requires public acknowledgment of harm, recognition of victims as rights bearing citizens, and the building of institutions that stop repetition.

A transitional social contract founded on denial will not hold. One anchored in memory, justice, and civic restoration stands a greater chance of earning loyalty, fostering reconciliation, and transcending clan based distrust. This is not a luxury. It is a precondition for rebuilding institutions that can command both authority and trust across Somalia’s diverse and wounded social landscape.

Seeing Like a Transitional State

James Scott’s critique of technocratic state-building resonates sharply in Somalia. International actors often assume that rebuilding the state means replicating Weberian institutions such as ministries, constitutions, and elections. But transitional societies do not function by blueprint. They are arenas of improvisation, where power is exercised through relationships, not rules.

Somali actors do not resist the state; they bend it to their own ends. They use formal titles to attract aid, positions to build patronage networks, and laws to marginalize rivals. Legibility becomes selective. The state is seen when it benefits elites and invisible when it imposes obligations. This is not unique to Somalia. It is characteristic of transitional polities in many regions.

Conclusion: From Transitional Bargains to Institutional Authority

Somalia is not backward in a Banfieldian sense. It is a transitional society that is struggling to move from elite pact making to institutional legitimacy. Its challenges, personalized power, fragmented trust, and weak institutions, are not cultural residues. They are the rational outcomes of a political economy shaped by war, foreign intervention, and elite preservation.

The question is not whether Somalia will become a state. It already is. The question is what kind of state it will be. One path leads to institutional entrenchment of elite rule in the guise of order. The other, though longer and more uncertain, leads to genuine constitutional authority. The stakes are not merely academic. They are the terms on which Somalis will define their future and whether that future will be governed or merely managed.

Rebuilding institutions requires more than moral exhortation. It demands a realignment of incentives, the dismantling of the political economy of predation, and the construction of a civic public that commands loyalty across lines of identity. Power must flow not through informal networks but through transparent and accountable structures. Violence must no longer be rewarded with negotiation. Office must no longer be traded for loyalty.

This will not happen through technocratic reform alone. Real change begins with a political settlement that turns private bargains into public law and binds rulers to rules they do not control. Transitional improvisation must give way to constitutional order grounded in clear authority over territory, predictable revenue, and enforceable rights. The shift is structural and moral. Citizens learn to claim rights rather than seek favors. Leaders seek office through legitimacy rather than manipulation.

Abdisaid M. Ali
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Abdisaid is the chairperson of Lomé Peace and Security Forum, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and Former National Security Advisor, Somalia.

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References

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