1. Introduction
The debate over the future of the Somali Peninsula, whether through a repaired federation, confederation, or formal dissolution, is urgent and long overdue. I welcome it. For too long, fundamental questions of sovereignty, legitimacy, and political possibility have been deferred. The old reliance on Pan-Somalism and the nostalgic pull of the 1960s have outlived their usefulness. What is needed and what seems to be emerging now is an honest reckoning with the hard questions: What political arrangement could be viable and just? The fact that this debate is taking place suggests a political maturity among Somali thinkers now grappling more seriously with issues of identity, statehood, and sovereignty. It is a conversation worth having.
The discourse around Somali unity has been shaped more by nostalgia than institutional reality or historical accuracy. The notion of restoring a unified, functional state, a view still widely held in Mogadishu, is, in truth, the ghost of a state that no longer exists. Sixteen years ago, I argued that a collapsed political order cannot be revived by will or symbolism, and time has only confirmed that view. Despite billions in donor aid, a succession of transitional charters, two externally supported constitutions, and countless summits, no inclusive or legitimate national authority has emerged. Instead, the so-called Federal Government has steadily regressed into an increasingly authoritarian and dysfunctional apparatus, far removed from the federalist and democratic hopes that once, however cautiously, resonated in places like Puntland. In recent weeks, several contributors at WardheerNews have responded thoughtfully to Puntland’s proposal for a confederal model. This engagement is both timely and essential, even where I disagree.
I want to begin by acknowledging the contributions of those who have seriously engaged this issue. Their work reflects a sincere attempt to address the legal and governance dilemmas facing the Somali territories.
1) Abdelkarim A. Haji Hassan, in “No Adult in the Room” (May 11, 2025)and “The Federal & State Rift: Structural or Leadership-Driven?” (May 20, 2025).
2) Faisal Roble, in “Sub-States in Africa: Challenging Statecraft” (May 22, 2025).
3) Abdikarim Haji Abdi Buh’s “Time for Reform: Puntland Faces Pressure to End Constitutional Anomalies” (May 23, 2025).
4) Dayib Sh. Ahmed, in “The Crisis Isn’t Federalism, It’s a Failure of Leadership” (May 23, 2025).
These contributions are serious and deserve close engagement. However, when assessed through the lens of comparative federalism, post-conflict studies, institutional theory, and the experiential realities of Somali governance, a common set of blind spots emerges: overreliance on constitutional formalism, lack of engagement with governance literature, and assumptions that overlook Puntland’s lived political experience. Puntland’s proposal must be evaluated from this position of sustained institutional erosion.
2. Evaluating the Debate: Critique and Counterargument on Puntland’s Proposal
Abdelkarim A. Haji Hassan’s twin essays offer a clear and sober assessment of the Somali governance crisis. His work commands respect, particularly for its grounded and incisive deployment of political realism in diagnosing elite behavior. He names opportunism, zero-sum politics, and institutional decay with rare clarity. However, his analysis falters when it comes to the longstanding philosophical tension between structure and agency. In political theory, agency refers to the choices and actions of individuals, while structure refers to the institutional and systemic conditions that shape or constrain those choices. Hassan knows this philosophical issue, but he disregards it and treats agency (the elite behavior) and structure (the Somali federal system) as distinct, placing primary blame on elite behavior without fully accounting for the institutional environment that enables and often rewards such behavior. By separating the two, his analysis overlooks how dysfunctional structures permit and actively reproduce elite misconduct.
To be clear, I agree that behavior matters. Nevertheless, behavior is not self-generating. As Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) argue in Why Nations Fail, institutions shape incentives, and incentives, in turn, shape behavior. Elites do not hoard power or sabotage reform because they are uniquely unethical. They do so because the system allows, even encourages, such actions. Scholars like Skocpol (1979) and Slater (2010) have shown that in post-conflict settings, stability arises not from virtue but from constraint, through institutions that manage rivalry, impose costs, and contain ambition.
This is where Hassan’s critique of confederalism misfires. He suggests that if elites undermine the Constitution under federalism, they will surely do so under a weaker confederal structure. Again, this assumes that political systems only work with ideal actors, a standard no real-world system can meet. Puntland’s proposal does not count on better behavior; it presumes that behavior will not change unless the incentives do. Confederalism seeks to codify the autonomy Puntland already exercises, while creating a legal structure for coordination that does not rely on centralized enforcement.
Hassan also leaves unexplored why Puntland is seeking this shift. He treats the proposal as a reactionary impulse. It is not. It is a rational response to sustained breaches of the federal compact: unilateral budget decisions, unauthorized military deployments, manipulation of constitutional processes, and efforts to erode federal pluralism. Confederalism is not about secession. It is about redefining flat relations through mutual recognition, not hierarchy.
This becomes even clearer when comparing Puntland to Mogadishu. The Federal Government continually undermines cooperation through unilateralism and hostile rhetoric. Since 2012, this behavior has been consistent, if varied. Hassan flattens this distinction, placing Puntland and Mogadishu in the same dysfunction category. That equivalence obscures more than it clarifies. Puntland’s path towards federation and Mogadishu’s centralization efforts arise from fundamentally different political logics.
I agree with Hassan mostly. However, his analysis can benefit from a broader lens. Agency and structure are not opposite; they are interdependent. To build a viable system, we must move beyond blaming elites in isolation and instead redesign the institutions that align incentives with stability. Puntland’s proposal is a step in that direction.
Among the contributions, Roble’s stands out not for lack of the article’s ambition, but for its conceptual looseness and reliance on rhetorical flourish. Marked by significant conceptual errors and a pattern of rhetorical excess, the article reflects an unconventional and often imprecise use of foundational political science terms; “primordial feelings,” “organic nations, and “post-colonial state.” These concepts are not engaged analytically but instead repurposed and stripped of their disciplinary rigor. Most notably, Roble misattributes the concept of “primordial feelings” to a non-existent theorist, “the late Danial Monyihin”, likely a misspelled reference to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American sociologist and U.S. Senator. Moynihan’s work addressed race and class dynamics in the United States, urging attention to ethnic realities in domestic policy, not theorizing primordialism, and certainly not commenting on African state formation. Roble’s invocation of Moynihan is a factual error.
I must admit that it gives me no pleasure to critique Faisal Roble. He is a well-read and capable thinker, and I have no doubt he could have produced a more rigorous and disciplined exposition. It is precisely because Roble is a capable thinker, great writer and a historian.
Abdikarim Haji Abdi Buh offers a thoughtful legal appeal for constitutional alignment between Puntland and the Provisional Federal Constitution (PFC). Polished in tone and grounded in formal reasoning, the article frames Puntland’s constitutional divergence as a threat to legal coherence. While the call for harmonization may appear reasonable, it reflects a view of federalism that risks overlooking the empirical and institutional complexities of the Somali landscape. Puntland is not a reluctant participant in federalism—it is one of its earliest architects. Established in 1998, years before the formation of the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS), Puntland has functioned as a working regional governance model. Buh’s framing presumes a top-down federalism, but this federalism, as it stands, is still formative, and its constitution remains provisional. The enforcement mechanisms necessary for constitutional oversight, such as a constitutional court and a functioning federal legal system, are still absent.
More broadly, Buh’s legal reading, while precise in language, appears to rest on assumptions of a functioning legal hierarchy that has not yet materialized. References to terms like “Puntland citizenship” as constitutional violations presume a federal coherence that remains aspirational. What is missing is a recognition of Puntland’s long-standing role in institutional development: from judicial reform to structured constitutional amendments, it has often led where the center has lagged. Puntland’s withdrawal from the constitutional review process was not a rejection of federalism, but a protest against procedural imbalances and unilateral actions. To portray Puntland as a constitutional outlier is to miss the deeper dynamic: genuine convergence requires mutuality.
For Buh, history and precedent are discounted. He never engages with the historical rationale for Puntland’s legal framework, why these provisions exist, what they were designed to safeguard, and how they evolved without a credible national authority. He treats legal divergence not as contextually necessary, but as deviation, as something to be corrected. In doing so, he misses that Puntland’s constitutional path has never been an obstacle to federalism, its earliest and most durable expressions.
Dayib Sh. Ahmed offers a principled legalist defense of the PFC, arguing that the country’s governance crisis stems from elite misconduct rather than structural flaws. It is a position that echoes a broader optimism about constitutional repair. However, it rests on two problematic assumptions: first, that an unratified, provisional document with no enforcement mechanisms can serve as a binding framework; and second, that elite behavior will improve absent institutional redesign. As Hart (1961) reminds us, legal systems depend on a shared rule of recognition, something the Somalis have yet to establish. In this regard, Dayib’s argument aligns closely with Abdelkarim Hassan’s, treating federalism as functionally intact if only elites acted in good faith. Such an assumption overlooks how institutional breakdown permits and perpetuates elite impunity.
At the same time, Dayib’s emphasis on constitutional fidelity parallels Abdikarim Buh’s legal formalism—treating the Provisional Constitution as inherently supreme without accounting for Puntland’s earlier constitutional formation, legal evolution, and consistent institutional development. Like Buh, he calls for harmonization yet offers little engagement with the federal government’s repeated breaches of the very compact he invokes. By casting Puntland as the party in need of compliance, rather than as a foundational contributor to the Somali federal experiment, Dayib advances a vertical constitutional vision that is fundamentally at odds with the political geography of the Somali Peninsula since 1991.
Across this debate, writers like Hassan, Ahmed, and Roble tend to locate the Somali crisis in elite behavior, zero-sum logic, legal subversion, and power hoarding. There is truth in that, but elites are not inherently destructive. They are essential to any functioning order. The problem is not elite dominance; it is elite dominance in the absence of institutional constraints.
In fragile and post-conflict states, elite cooperation is often the foundation of survival. The rift between Puntland and the FGS can, in fact, open space for reform. Durable settlements can emerge from elite negotiations (Migdal, 1988; Skocpol, 1979; and Grindle, 2007). However, the real challenge in the Somali context is not the prevalence of elites, but the absence of constraints and the lack of structures that channel their influence toward shared governance.
It is against this backdrop of structural vacuum that Puntland’s proposal must be properly understood.
That is precisely what Puntland’s proposal aims to address. It does not rely on moral renewal; it proposes structural realignment. One that reshapes incentives, secures autonomy, and embeds cooperation within a legal framework. Instead, it lets go of the centralist illusion and offers a model grounded in local legitimacy and political realism. It may not be perfect. It is just plausible, and plausibility, now more than ever, matters.
3. The Case for Puntland’s Proposed Model of Confederation
Like the authors I critiqued here, I have also expressed skepticism toward the notion of Confederation, albeit for different reasons. In my writings, I have long favored complete and permanent separation. I once called for an outright partition of what remains of the former Somali Republic. Nevertheless, in the spirit of constructive dialogue, I am willing to seriously consider Puntland’s recent confederal proposal—or even a plausible model of re-federation—as a starting point for renewed discussion.
Puntland’s Proposed Model of Confederation is misunderstood, dismissed as separatism, or caricatured as bureaucratic chaos. In reality, it offers a legally structured, historically informed framework for cooperative governance. Unlike federalism, which divides power vertically through a central authority, confederation is horizontal. It formalizes relationships among self-governing units based on mutual consent, not imposed hierarchy. Puntland’s proposal is a model that seeks to codify the existing political autonomy and build coordination through law.
This model reflects the lived reality since 1991 and responds to repeated failures of centralization, unilateralism, and broken trust. It does not abandon the idea of cooperation. It proposes that if cooperation is to work, it must be structured and reciprocal.
To the authors I critiqued and fellow Somalis, consider whether the current path leads anywhere. Somalis have tried nostalgia. Somalis have tried performance. Somalis have attempted to resurrect ghosts. None of it has worked. Perhaps it is time to do something radical: to tell the truth, to stop pretending that a structure held together by international subsidies and press releases is a sovereign republic, and to build an honest union, if one is still possible. And if not, then salute Puntland and let it go as an independent state. In the end, the question I posed years ago still stands, now with greater urgency, and perhaps with greater clarity: Why not?
Abdul Ahmed III
Personal email: drahmed0604@gmail.com
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Abdul Ahmed III is Chief Research Officer and President of Foresight Labs at the Horn of Africa Institute. A former employee of international financial institutions in Washington, D.C., he is a strategist, military scholar, economist, and expert in institutional evolution. He holds advanced degrees from multiple U.S. institutions.