Puntland State’s Lessons: Leadership, Democratization and Alliances in Somalia’s Changing Politics

Puntland State’s quiet experiment: What a restive Somali state can teach a nation

At daybreak in Bosaso, the trucks rumbling down from the Cal Miskaad mountains carry fish, frankincense and the unvarnished news of the day. In this corner of northeastern Somalia, where the mountains meet the sea, Puntland State has spent years testing an idea that feels almost radical in a country long defined by outside interventions: that security, politics and dialogue work best when they are owned, designed and led by communities themselves.

It is a lesson forged in hard places. The Islamic State’s Somalia branch—small compared to al-Shabaab but stubborn and mobile—dug into the crags of the Cal Miskaad (Golis) range nearly a decade ago. Militants briefly seized the coastal town of Qandala in 2016 before being pushed back by Puntland State forces. Since then, the fight has been less about dramatic battles and more about attrition and intelligence. UN monitors in recent years have put the group’s strength in the low hundreds, sustained by extortion and smuggling. That ecosystem doesn’t crumble with airstrikes; it yields to patient, local work.

Security that grows from the ground up

Puntland State’s counter-ISIS playbook has favored informants over loud announcements—and it has had results. Intelligence-led operations, backed by community elders and local police, have disrupted cells without tearing up the social fabric that insurgents exploit. Security officials run their own rehabilitation tracks for defectors, while elders reinforce the message that young men should not vanish into the mountains. A Somali proverb captures the approach: “Nabadi waa naas la nuugo”—peace, like milk, must be continuously nourished.

It’s a model that also fits broader global experience: in Nigeria’s Borno State and Iraq’s Anbar, counterinsurgency turned when local knowledge was trusted and funded. Puntland State’s difference is that it has never had the luxury of walls. The thin line between a fisherman and a smuggler, between an informal tax and a protection racket, is where ISIS thrives. Narrowing that space has required a constant bargain between security and livelihoods—a bargain negotiated in Somali, not in acronyms.

That doesn’t mean the danger has passed. ISIS-Somalia has proven resilient, and its revenue streams—especially “taxes” levied on traders—are hard to uproot. But the scale of violence has been contained, and the state’s message is consistent: security is a civic project, not a contractor’s job.

Democracy by inches, not decree

On politics, Puntland State has been an imperfect but genuine laboratory. Over the past few years, the state has tested multiparty competition at the local level and experimented with universal suffrage in selected districts—unusual steps in a national system still anchored in clan power-sharing. Women and youth groups have pushed to be heard, and in council elections, some communities cast their first direct ballots in decades.

The story is uneven. Constitutional wrangles in Garowe, opposition protests and court challenges have all intruded. Ambitions for one-person, one-vote elections collided with budget limits and political mistrust. Yet the direction of travel matters. Institutional habits—publishing procedures, training poll workers, setting up electoral dispute mechanisms—become muscle memory only by doing. Every orderly town council transition, however small, reduces the political temperature.

There’s a practical lesson here for Mogadishu and the other federal member states. In fragile environments, legitimacy often grows slower than the news cycle. Imported blueprints tend to snap under pressure. Puntland State’s incrementalism—the decision to start local, learn, and expand—may feel unsatisfying. It is also how institutions become real.

Bridge-building in a federal maze

Somalia’s federal architecture remains an unfinished house. Disputes over powers, revenues and security responsibilities flare regularly between the center and the regions. In that landscape, Puntland State has often positioned itself as a broker—sometimes working with Jubaland or Galmudug on common security interests, sometimes aligning with opposition forums that call for national dialogue, and at other times arguing head-on with the presidency in Mogadishu.

Even when those engagements have been testy—over resource sharing, over election timelines—the effect has been to keep political negotiation alive. Across Somalia, the most stabilizing actors tend to be those willing to talk to adversaries without abandoning core interests. Puntland State’s calculus is straightforward: a functional federal system protects local autonomy better than a zero-sum contest with the capital.

The North Western State of Somalia file adds complexity. The frontier is not just a map line but a web of family, trade and grievance. Channels of communication exist and matter—especially after the violence that shook Las Anod in 2023—but they are fragile. The incentive to maintain de-escalation is both humanitarian and economic. Conflict along that northern corridor strangles the very commerce that keeps Puntland State’s markets alive and pays for its reforms.

The wider regional lens

Zoom out, and Puntland State’s approach speaks to a broader rethinking across Africa and the Middle East. The dominant counterterrorism model of the past two decades—elite forces, outside funding, short-term metrics—has struggled to convert battlefield gains into political stability. Where communities have shaped strategy, the results have been more durable, if slower. Where politics has been opened, even modestly, extremist narratives lose oxygen.

International partners have a role. They can fund police, justice and reconciliation with the same rigor they fund kinetic operations. They can tie assistance to public financial transparency, so taxpayers see where the money goes. And they can resist the urge to insist on national reforms that outpace reality on the ground. In Puntland State, the pace of change has been dictated by capacity and consensus, not communiqués.

What to watch next

• Security consolidation in the Cal Miskaad: Are extortion networks shrinking, and are defectors being reintegrated with jobs attached?
• Local elections: Does the next round expand the number of districts voting directly, and are women’s and youth participation rates rising?
• Fiscal governance: Are port and customs revenues reported publicly, and are municipalities seeing predictable transfers that let councils plan?
• Federal dialogue: Does Puntland State help broker a national compact on elections and security that reduces year-to-year brinkmanship?

The bottom line

For a region often caricatured by crisis, Puntland State’s story reads differently: a work-in-progress, stubbornly local, occasionally messy, but anchored in the belief that Somalis can argue their way to a workable peace. The approach does not promise quick victories. It does promise ownership—and in Somalia’s long reconstruction, that is the currency that lasts.

The question for the rest of the country is not whether Puntland State is perfect. It is whether the blend it is testing—homegrown security, democracy by inches, and negotiation as a habit—can be adapted elsewhere. If the answer is yes, then the rumble of those Bosaso trucks at dawn signals something more than commerce. It sounds like a state, slowly, becoming itself.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.