Complexities of State-Building in Somaliland

Abstracts Since the mid-2000s, state-building in Somaliland has emerged as a complex mixture of coexisting, competing programs, political aspirations, and foreign agendas. This article applies a dialectical approach to focus on the scalar relations among actors and models of capacity-building, from programs’ design to their implementation. Drawing on science and technology studies, I use the term “complexities” to describe the “multiplicities” of programs, actors, and different ways of ordering that coexist and overlap, sometimes in tension among them, other times in coordination. Specifically, this article examines two approaches to state-building in Somaliland: the United Nations Development Program’s institution-building and US Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded stabilization programs. Going beyond fixed binaries, such as international and local, homogenous and hybrid, state-building and state-formation, this article observes how these dichotomies are formed and how, rather than being separate, they combine together, generating techno-political arrangements. Somaliland’s complexity is made up of techno-political arrangements that are coproduced by both technical expertise and national political aspirations. Technical capacity-building programs, such as the redesign of the Somalia Institutional Development Project (SIDP), the creation of Somaliland’s National Development Plan (NDP), and the allocation of USAID’s grants, have become the terrain for political claims over the redistribution of resources and the control of state institutions.