Somalia: The Case for a Confederal System

Abstract

Every centralized government Somalia has tried has eventually broken against the same wall: a society organized not as a nation waiting to be ruled from the center, but as a set of clans that behave, historically and in practice, like confederations bound by treaty rather than by blood. This paper traces that claim through the colonial-era diplomatic record, including the 1954 Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement over the Haud, and through the record of Somalia's transitional and federal governance since 2004. Centralized rule failed once already, under Siad Barre; the federal settlement built after the 2004 Transitional Federal Charter and the 2012 Provisional Constitution is now under comparable strain, as constitutional amendments out of Mogadishu collide with the autonomy Puntland, Jubaland, and Somaliland have each built for themselves since 1991. Reading Article 54 of the Provisional Constitution against two working confederal precedents, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, and two cautionary failures, the Ethiopia-Eritrea federation and the Senegambia Confederation, the paper sets out what a confederal arrangement for Somalia would need to look like to avoid both failure modes, and answers the strongest objections the centralist camp can raise.