Restraint and Silence: Customary Conflict Resolution and the Erosion of Public Voice in Somali Federalism

AbstractSomalia’s political crisis is usually explained through clan competition, external intervention, and the weakness of its institutions. This paper points to a factor that gets less attention but helps sustain these failures: a pattern of political silence among elites and officials, paired with a growing public disregard for the country’s future. The paper traces this silence through the colonial period, the Siad Barre era, the state collapse of 1991, and the federal settlement of the past two decades. It draws on Somali customary values and conflict-resolution practice, including xeer, diya-paying groups, the guurti and shir, and the tradition of oblique speech, to show that Somali society has long possessed effective means of naming wrongs and restraining violence. The paper argues that the decline of these mechanisms at the national level, and their replacement by a political culture in which naming a violation carries a high personal price, is a central cause of the federal breakdown now under way. It also addresses the counterargument that silence has often been a rational strategy for survival, and it distinguishes strategic silence from the civic silence that erodes the conditions for agreement.Scholarly contributions. This paper makes four contributions to the study of Somali politics and African federalism. First, it separates strategic silence, a temporary and purposive restraint tied to negotiation, from civic silence, a durable failure to name violations of the public good, and it offers a test for distinguishing the two. Second, it defines political silence as an observable phenomenon with three dimensions and extends Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty framework to a setting in which exit runs through clan and diaspora channels. Third, it treats customary restraint as both a resource and a liability: the discretion that settles disputes between kin can conceal violations when the cost falls on those excluded from the negotiation. Fourth, it brings xeer, the diya-paying group, and the guurti into federal analysis as inputs to institutional design. It takes Puntland, which the paper treats as the first pillar of Somali federalism, as its central case for testing when customary legitimacy supports a durable federal settlement, and it uses the Borama process in Somaliland as a comparison.