The Ottoman Shadow: Federal Bypass Capture, Emerging-Donor Concessions, and Contested Development in Turkey’s Horn of Africa Diplomacy

Turkey’s engagement with Somalia since 2011 is usually presented as the renewal of an Ottoman-era partnership and as an example of emerging-donor engagement free of the conditionality attached to Western aid. This article asks what that engagement does to authority and revenue inside a fragile federation. It argues that Turkish agreements over Somali state assets and natural resources have been concluded almost entirely with the federal government, including over resources that the Provisional Constitution assigns to negotiation between the federal government and the member states. It names this pattern federal bypass capture and specifies three observable implications against which it can be tested. Process tracing of Turkish port, airport, defence, fisheries and hydrocarbon arrangements from 2011 to 2026 finds the first and third implications supported and the second partly supported, and shows that the resulting opposition, centred on Puntland, has been framed in constitutional terms. The Ottoman connection invoked in official discourse is real but narrow and discontinuous. Plausibility probes of Emirati port concessions in Puntland and Somaliland, and of Kurdish oil exports from northern Iraq through Turkey, suggest that the mechanism belongs to a wider pattern of tier selection. The article closes with four hypotheses for comparative testing. For development scholarship, the case suggests that the effect of emerging-donor engagement on a fragile federation depends on which tier of the federation the donor negotiates with.