Land conflicts and state-society relations in Somaliland: The case of Warshadda Kabista, Hargeisa

This paper examines how land conflict participates in the assembly of political authority in post-conflict urban Somaliland. Through the 2012 Warshadda Kabista dispute in Hargeisa, it argues that urban land conflicts should be understood as generative political arenas in which historically transformed state institutions and historically transformed customary authority are jointly recalibrated under pressure. The paper specifies generative sequencing as an observable mechanism with three effects: the routinisation of procedural pathways, the documentary translation of customary settlement into evidentiary form, and the reputational recalibration of institutional conduct under public scrutiny. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2014–2015 and supplementary interviews and documentary material gathered in 2023, the analysis reconstructs the dispute’s movement across executive allocation, military adjudication, customary mediation, appellate review, and presidential pardon. The case shows how layered histories of military expropriation, post-war reoccupation, and peri-urban commodification condensed into a single spatial claim, producing a sequence of institutional encounters that ranked forums, stabilised expectations about closure, and coupled distinct normative registers without fusing them. The analysis also delineates the limits of this ordering work. Returnee and dispossessed claimants were structurally inaudible within both statutory and customary forums until armed confrontation reframed the dispute as a security crisis, and the closure the sequence eventually delivered did not address the conditions producing that inaudibility. By foregrounding dispute trajectories and the micro-politics of adjudication, mediation, and recognition, the paper contributes to debates on hybrid governance, legal pluralism, and post conflict urban political geography, demonstrating how peri-urban land conflicts operate as mechanisms of institutional redistribution within Somaliland’s evolving political order.