Description
This paper will interrogate the contradictions of statehood and nationalism as they are worked out in the politics of a particular community: the Somali people. Here, the colonial encounter produced an extremely amplified tension between imagined state and national forms, with ‘Somali’ populations being divided by competing imperial powers into five distinct and largely self-governing territorial units: (southern) Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti, the Somali Regional State of Ethiopia, and the Northeastern Province of Kenya. In the immediate aftermath of decolonisation, attempts at dissolving the territorial-administrative boundaries between these communities under the banner of ‘Greater Somalia’ (as a form of singular nation-state) led to both the unification of Somaliland and (southern) Somalia into what is today known as the state of ‘Somalia’, as well as a failed campaign of militant irredentism, which saw Ethiopia and Kenya fight back against Somalia’s belligerent attempts to annex their Somali-populated territories during the 1960s and 1970s. When rebellion and civil war caused the collapse of the government in Somalia in 1991, the people of Somaliland declared their separate independence and succeeded in building an indigenous model of political organisation aspiring to recognised statehood, thereafter ushering in an end to the dream of making coterminous the spaces of Somali identity and unitary Somali statehood.
This paper will look at how various Somali polities came to terms with this disjuncture between ‘ethno-national’ community and political community, particularly by constructing alternative notions of relationality and inclusion/exclusion that transcend modern models of statehood and nation. In Somaliland, for example, a horizontal social contract between a multiplicity of kinship groups served as the basis for polity-building, thus undercutting the hierarchical and abstract state form, as well as the unitary and homogenising view of the nation, while maintaining the idea of a collective social space. Furthermore, despite attempts by local and international actors to re-solidify sovereign order and territorial borders between communities through internationally-sponsored ‘state-building’ initiatives, Somalis have evaded such impositions through establishing deep networks of transboundary exchange, migration, political belonging and representation. This relationality is captured in the local idea of ‘Somali-ness’ (Soomaalinimo), a form of collective Somali identity divorced from politicised ideologies of a unitary Somali nation-state (qarnimada soomaaliyeed). Based on empirical research and analysis gained through extensive field research in the region, this paper will trace how struggles to (re)define the nature of collective sociality have been worked into broader Somali post-colonial efforts to construct political communities that overcome the violence and estrangement brought about by colonialism. It will argue that the historical experience of disillusionment with Somali nationalist irredentism has fostered the emergence of conceptual experimentation with alternative sources of identity, governance and international relations more attuned to indigenous models of justice, inter-communal contract and reciprocity—based on non-exclusionary and associational forms of peoplehood (beyond nationhood) and non-sovereign and consensual forms of political organisation (beyond statehood).
