Analysis: How Somalia’s “family feud” shows sameness alone can’t secure peace
Somalia appears, on paper, like a country built for cohesion. Nearly everyone is ethnically Somali, speaks Somali and practices Sunni Islam. Yet three decades after the state collapsed in 1991, the country remains trapped in fractious, often intimate violence. The paradox is instructive far beyond the Horn of Africa: shared identity does not guarantee stability. When institutions fail and rules disappear, homogeneity can magnify rivalries instead of muting them.
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The decisive rupture came with the disappearance of the Somali state. The army dissolved, courts went dark and administrative services evaporated. In many fragile states, even frail institutions provide a minimal brake on chaos. Somalia lost that brake entirely. Without a neutral arbiter to enforce rules or settle disputes, power and protection devolved to the most immediate social unit available: the clan.
Clans, long central to Somali social and economic life, stepped in as de facto authorities. They provided security, justice and access to resources. But they also competed—over towns, trade routes, ports, aid flows and political posts. Loyalty outran law. Local leaders could mobilize fighters and enforce order within narrow jurisdictions, yet no one could stitch the fabric back together nationwide. The fracture lines did not follow religion or language. They followed family and lineage.
This is why Somalia’s conflict often feels less like a conventional civil war and more like a family feud. In close-knit families, disputes are deeply personal, shaped by memory, perceived favoritism and old injuries. The same dynamic animates Somali political life. Clans remember who advanced under prior regimes and who was sidelined. A quarrel over farmland or water is rarely only about access; it quickly becomes a referendum on dignity, honor and historic standing. In the absence of a credible referee, small disputes spiral into larger ones, pulling in allied kin and reactivating dormant grievances—the pattern Somalis capture in the lament “War yaa toleey,” a cry for kin to rally.
Traditionally, Somalia’s customary system—Xeer—kept those spirals in check. Elders mediated and negotiated compensation to defuse blood debts. Xeer worked best where authority was recognized and where disputes remained bounded. But decades of war and militarization weakened that equilibrium. Young fighters with modern weapons learned to ignore elders. In some cases, elders themselves became partisans—privileging their own clans, amplifying disputes or converting mediation into political leverage. Like elders in a bitter household feud who take sides, they eroded trust in the very mechanism designed to end cycles of retaliation.
The mechanics of escalation are depressingly familiar. A disagreement erupts in a village—over grazing land, a damaged well, a contested checkpoint. Parties seek mediation. One side perceives bias and refuses the settlement. A neighboring clan intervenes. Weapons appear. Allies are mobilized. What begins as a hyper-local quarrel metastasizes into a regional confrontation. There is rarely ideology at the core. Instead there is proximity, memory and survival—relationships tight enough that slights cut deeper and forgiveness becomes harder.
Into that governance vacuum stepped Islamist groups, above all Al-Shabaab. In places the state abandoned, they offered courts, enforcement and predictability. For communities exhausted by insecurity, such order can be compelling. But it is order through fear. Al-Shabaab rejects inclusive settlement and undermines local mediation, substituting discipline for reconciliation. Conflict becomes more organized and more punishing, and escape routes narrow.
International efforts, meanwhile, have struggled to win legitimacy. Donors and regional powers have financed transitional governments, peacekeeping missions, elections and development programs. Yet many Somalis view nationally branded institutions as externally brokered and unaccountable. Elite bargains in Mogadishu rarely translate into justice where it is needed most—at the site of daily disputes over land, water and trade. Outsiders can appear like distant relatives trying to referee a fight without understanding its history or emotional charge; their involvement sometimes reinforces divisions instead of healing them.
Somalia’s lesson is not that identity is irrelevant, but that identity without institutions is combustible. Similarity lowers social distance, and that can speed cooperation—as long as there are rules that all accept and a way to end disputes definitively. Remove credible authority and the very closeness that binds can sharpen competition. Loyalty eclipses compromise. Grievances travel faster. Political contests over Mogadishu or over ports and airports are therefore never purely administrative. They are repositories of memory and status, and the stakes feel existential.
What would it take to unwind the feud-like dynamic? The requirements are less about forging cultural unity—which already exists—and more about reconstituting fair, trusted mechanisms that make disputes end. The contours are visible in Somalia’s own experience:
- Neutral, enforceable justice: Courts and arbitration that apply rules consistently, backed by enforcement that cannot be captured by any one clan.
- Revitalized, accountable Xeer: Support for customary mediation that reduces bias, clarifies compensation norms and reconnects elders to community legitimacy rather than political patronage.
- Local first, national linked: Dispute resolution and security provision anchored in local legitimacy but nested in a national framework so settlements don’t unravel at the next boundary.
- Transparent resource-sharing: Clear compacts over ports, taxes and trade routes that limit zero-sum competition and distribute revenues visibly.
- Demobilization with dignity: Paths out of militia life that do not humiliate fighters or leave families destitute, cutting the incentive to rearm.
These are not technical fixes so much as political ones. They demand credible arbiters and enforcement that citizens across lineages accept as legitimate. They require patience and insulation from elite deal-making that confers posts without delivering justice. They depend on behavior change by actors—local leaders, security commanders, even elders—who have sometimes profited from ambiguity and feud.
Somalia’s experience also cautions against two common errors. The first is the belief that elections alone can establish legitimacy where everyday justice is absent. Ballots without trusted courts and neutral enforcement risk turning national politics into another arena for family-style score-settling. The second is the hope that hard security can substitute for settlement. Force can suppress fighting; it cannot settle memory. Where grievances are intimate, durable peace arrives only when people believe they can pursue claims without a gun and accept losses without seeking revenge.
Homogeneity is often cited as a bulwark against civil strife. Somalia shows that sameness can become accelerant when institutions fail. Peace rests not on shared language or faith, but on systems that translate those affinities into cooperation—and that bring closure when cooperation breaks down. Without that scaffolding, societies turn inward. Conflicts become personal, emotional and persistent. Like a family feud, they can last generations.
The warning is stark, and it travels: build legitimacy before it breaks; rebuild it where it has; and never confuse the comfort of similarity for the discipline of law.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
