By Abdisaid M. Ali
Somalia’s crisis is usually described through its sharpest manifestations, insecurity, constitutional conflict, electoral strain, and the persistent threat of Al Shabaab. These pressures are serious. Yet they arise from a deeper condition. Somalia’s central struggle concerns sovereignty in the fuller political sense, the capacity to organize government, exercise accepted authority, discipline power through rules, extend administration with consistency, and maintain direction under stress. The decisive question therefore begins with institutions before it reaches territory.
Somalia already possesses juridical sovereignty. It is recognized internationally and represented diplomatically. The harder task is to convert that status into governing sovereignty. That requires durable alignment between authority, institutions, and power. A state may hold its place abroad while still consolidating its governing depth at home. It may enjoy recognition while authority remains contested, administration uneven, and coercive power only partly integrated into lawful order. Somalia reflects precisely this condition. Diplomatic and administrative gains have been real, yet the authority beneath them remains unsettled and the reach of state power remains uneven across the republic.
For that reason, Somalia’s crisis cannot be reduced to security alone or constitutional text alone. State formation is a problem of sequence. Political order holds when ends and means align. A sovereign Somali state requires institutions that function, rules that are accepted, fiscal reach, a settled intergovernmental order, and a restrained governing class. Where alignment weakens, sovereignty endures in form while authority remains limited in practice.
The issue is best understood through three connected stages, tazkiyah ¹, social analysis, and statecraft. This is not decorative moral language placed beside politics. It is the proper order of political formation. Tazkiyah matters because institutions are carried by human beings, and office is shaped by ambition, fear, appetite, memory, and discipline.
Social analysis matters because no state governs well when built on sentiment rather than a sober reading of how people actually behave. Statecraft matters because restraint and realism must be translated into law, administration, and institutional design. Where politics begins with machinery alone, it produces clever operators and brittle systems. Where it proceeds through disciplined character, realistic social understanding, and then institutional design, it has a better chance of producing durable order.
The first problem is institutional sovereignty. A state becomes sovereign in practice when public authority is organized through institutions that endure beyond immediate maneuver. Ministries must function as organs of rule, courts must command obedience, fiscal systems must operate through law, and administration must reach beyond Mogadishu in regular form. Somalia has advanced in parts of this work. Yet the republic’s governing settlement remains incomplete. Power, security responsibility, and revenue authority between the federal government and the member states are still being worked out. The result is a center with growing administrative ambition operating inside an incomplete constitutional order.
That incompleteness generates predictable incentives. In early state formation, centralization often expands discretion faster than it builds institutional order. Where rules remain unsettled, authority travels through persons as much as offices. Offices then become vehicles of leverage before they mature into impersonal instruments of rule. The political economy is clear. Control over appointments, security commands, aid flows, customs, contracting, and diplomatic recognition makes the center attractive to those seeking advantage.
Centralization brings immediate leverage, revenue, and command of political tempo. When it moves ahead of settlement, it contracts the state’s coalition, heightens distrust in the periphery, and hardens rival claims to authority. The strategic question is therefore whether central authority is being converted into a rule-bound institutional relationship or held as a political asset.
The second problem is narrative sovereignty. States govern more effectively when they can explain who holds authority, on what basis, within which limits, and toward what common purpose. Somalia’s constitutional and electoral disputes show that this language remains unsettled. One vocabulary speaks in the name of unity, national mandate, and central direction. Another speaks in the language of federal consent, negotiated authority, and intergovernmental balance. A third reflects the continuing reality of clan allocation and political accommodation. Each corresponds to a part of Somali political life. The difficulty is that they have not been brought into a clear hierarchy capable of stabilizing public authority.
That ambiguity has consequences. When the source and limits of authority remain unclear, constitutional revision is read through advantage, electoral reform becomes a struggle over control, and legal change produces contention rather than confidence. A stronger state requires a more disciplined public doctrine of authority, one that clarifies jurisdiction, sequence, guarantees, and reciprocity. Government becomes more credible when it explains what it intends to do, why it has standing to do it, where its authority reaches, and what protections accompany its exercise.
The third problem is moral sovereignty. No republic rises above the conduct of its governing class. Authority is strengthened by law, but stabilized by discipline in office. Where leadership runs on short horizons, institutions serve advantage and rules bend to competition. Where it rests on restraint and continuity, authority stabilizes and trust accumulates.
This is where tazkiyah enters politics in its serious sense. It concerns restraint in the exercise of power. It is the capacity to distinguish office from possession, mandate from entitlement, and responsibility from advantage. States weaken through insurgency and scarcity, but also through elite habits that treat institutions as spoils, law as tactic, and constitutional order as something to bend toward immediate gain. Somalia’s political renewal depends in part on recovering disciplined officeholding, a culture in which authority is exercised as stewardship within rules.
The fourth problem is operational sovereignty. Citizens meet the state through regularity. They judge it through repeated encounters with salaries, taxes, customs, courts, police, permits, schools, and local administration. Authority deepens when these encounters become coherent and predictable. Somalia’s record remains uneven. Some institutions function more regularly than before. Others remain intermittent across sectors and regions. The result is an uneven experience of statehood. In some places the state appears as a governing system. In others it appears as a partial presence.
Social analysis anchors statecraft. It begins with a clear reading of how people act under incentives, risk, and social ties. Somali politics cannot be governed through abstraction. It must be understood through the structures that organize social life. Effective institutions are those designed for the society that exists. That does not mean surrendering to fragmentation. It means building with enough realism to command compliance and enough legitimacy to widen the field of common rule over time.
The fifth problem is applied sovereignty. This is sovereignty under pressure, the ability to exercise authority through institutions and sustain it with effective power when challenged. It is where security, administration, justice, and revenue meet. Territory becomes part of the state in durable form when authority is administered, accepted, and reproduced through routine rule. Military gains hold when force settles into governance, carried by administration, functioning courts, revenue collection, and accepted authority. Where force advances without governance behind it, presence remains temporary.
Here the tension between international and internal sovereignty becomes sharper. Somalia possesses external recognition, diplomatic partnership, and international support. These matter. They strengthen status and widen strategic room. But external recognition secures place in the international order. Internal sovereignty must still be built through Somali political work. It depends on domestic political settlement, institutional reach, accepted authority, and a stable relationship between center and periphery. This is why Somali agency is decisive. Outside support can reinforce a national project. It cannot define its substance, settle its constitutional terms, or carry its burdens in place of Somali actors.
Historical experience points in the same direction. States are rarely consolidated by proclamation. They are formed through bargains, revenue, administrative penetration, negotiated hierarchy, coercive capacity, and the gradual disciplining of rival claims. European state formation unfolded through long and cumulative struggle. African states largely inherited international form before they secured internal depth. Somalia faces a harder version of that burden, building authority amid insurgency, unresolved federal relations, and an unfinished constitutional settlement. That requires sobriety and sequence. Durable states emerge when reform tracks political conditions and institutional capacity.
That same reality explains the cost of prolonged transitional logic. When institutions remain unfinished, governments often rely on interim devices to preserve continuity. Much of this is inherent to transition. But where provisionalism becomes a habit of rule, institutions remain suspended between aspiration and settlement. A republic matures when exception yields to clarity, temporary devices yield to stable rules, and office is exercised within boundaries recognized as binding.
The strategic sequence is therefore clear. Somalia needs first discipline in the use of office, because institutions do not take root where power is used for patronage and personal leverage. It needs a sober reading of Somali society, because institutions hold only when built on real incentives, durable loyalties, and accepted legitimacy. It then needs statecraft that aligns constitutional order, fiscal authority, security, and the federal settlement. That is the practical meaning of the three-stage sequence. Tazkiyah disciplines the holder of power. Social analysis clarifies the society over which power is exercised. Statecraft embeds power within institutions that can endure.
From that sequence follow concrete priorities. Somalia needs an intergovernmental settlement that clarifies powers, responsibilities, and revenue with enough precision to reduce perpetual contestation. It needs a constitutional order that defines authority through rules broad enough to command compliance and clear enough to limit overreach. It needs a public doctrine of the republic that explains the relationship between the center and the member states in terms that are intelligible, reciprocal, and durable. It needs a security strategy that ties force to administration, justice, and local legitimacy. It needs fiscal institutions that convert revenue into routine authority rather than episodic bargaining. Above all, Somalia needs a governing class that knows sovereignty grows by building institutions others trust, while concentrated discretion weakens that foundation. Its crisis begins in institutional weakness and appears through political struggle.
It will be resolved only when authority, power, and rules are brought into durable alignment. The measure is whether Somalia can build a state in which government endures, authority is accepted and bounded, and power is exercised through rules that outlast the ambitions of those who hold office. That is the measure of sovereignty. Territory follows when institutions hold. Security deepens when authority is accepted. A republic endures when power is ordered by rules rather than absorbed into personal struggle.
Somalia’s opening lies here. The country can convert formal sovereignty into governing sovereignty by restoring alignment between ends and means, between authority and restraint, and between central purpose and negotiated order. That work belongs first to Somalis themselves. When government becomes routine, authority becomes predictable, and power moves within rules that command recognition across the republic, Somalia will possess more than juridical statehood. It will possess a sovereign political order.
Abdisaid M. Ali
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Abdisaid is the chairperson of Lomé Peace and Security Forum and Former Somalia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Somalia. X:@4rukun
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Footnote: Tazkiyah
Tazkiyah (تزكية النفس) is the disciplined refinement of the self through ikhlāṣ, taqwā, and mujāhadat al-nafs. In the Islamic tradition, it grounds ḥusn al-siyāsa, since authority rests with individuals who govern the nafs before governing others. A ruling class shaped by tazkiyah treats office as amānah, disciplines power within ḥudūd, and upholds ʿadl. Inner restraint sustains public order and anchors institutional stability.