Thirty years of civil war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency in Somalia and neighbouring northeastern Kenya have hollowed out state services and left borderland communities beleaguered. Yet in this apparently ‘ungoverned’ space, local self-governance persists.
Citizen-led reflection shows how communities are repairing the social and physical damage wrought by violence, organising basic services, and providing public goods. This brief suggests ways that local and international agencies can work with local self-governance in zones of insecurity, acknowledging and responding to community strengths.
Key messages
- A process of reflection by 50 Somalis from rural settlements on both sides of the Somalia–Kenya border shows there is an informal order in place despite widespread insecurity.
- Rooted in cross-clan citizen networks and customary systems based on Islamic law, this informal order governs local affairs, contributes to security, and delivers public goods and services.
- The informal order serves economic, social, legal, and political functions. It helps people negotiate their safety; connects clans and communities; provides insurance to facilitate production and trade; and organises welfare and mutual self-help.
- Governments and international actors delivering programmes in these areas should address people’s distrust of aid and administration, and connect with local systems of accountability and self-governance.
Many local people feel that government and aid agencies in these borderlands are at best distant, at worst dangerous.
Thirty years of conflict brought about by civil war and insurgency in Somalia has left people in border communities at risk of being targeted by armed forces, or being caught in the crossfire. The dangers along the Somalia–Kenya border come not only from Al-Shabaab insurgents but also from counterinsurgency measures that treat people as terrorist collaborators, or shell local settlements in the hope of hitting an Al-Shabaab target.
Formal administration is barely present in these contested lands, and state services are compromised or absent. The main towns are the only places where government and international agencies operate, working with a heavy security presence. Rural people are critical of aid efforts for drawing people from the countryside to towns. They argue that it is possible to provide aid to contested rural areas, by working with the informal order.
The community reflection process
Institute of Development Studies (IDS) supported a local partner to organise a process whereby 50 Somali participants met in small groups multiple times over six months. People came from different clans, with different ways of life (including pastoralists and traders), and from settlements on either side of the border. Participants (women and men, ranging from young people to elders) discussed their lives, difficulties, and possible solutions. They reflected on cross-border issues and governance, security, and social challenges, expressing and agreeing on key areas of concern.
What does local self-governance look like?
These reflection sessions showed how people go about their daily lives in the borderlands, relying on the informal order to fill the formal governance gap in the villages and pastoralist camps on both sides of the border. This informal order gives people a framework of self-governance. Here, we consider three key aspects of the informal order: negotiation, insurance, and welfare.
Local people use the informal order for negotiation to heal divisions between clans and communities or counteract mistreatment. People cited repeated instances of negotiating with insurgent and counterinsurgent forces to resist interference. For instance, one woman explained how she and fellow elders persuaded Al-Shabaab to leave their village so their homes would not be a target for counterinsurgency. An elder in another settlement spoke of convincing Al-Shabaab to let local people manage their own water source. ‘We can’t allow [Al-Shabaab] to take over. These are the services we do for the community,’ he insisted. A group in a third location recounted how they dismantled a Somali government roadblock at the border that was charging extortionate tolls. They lobbied a Kenyan administrative officer for help: ‘When the [officer] got support from us in the community, he got the courage to help,’ they explained, pointing to the capacity of citizens to work with the state on border issues.
Although military forces treat the international border as a defensive line, local people cross it to build relations and do business. Investors, traders, and travellers rely on customary systems for protection and insurance. For example, a member of the diaspora has installed a generator supplying electricity to a village on the Somalia side of the border, knowing that his investment is protected by customary law. He, in turn, is paying a proportion of his profits into the local welfare system. In another example, elders helped businesspeople to resolve a dispute that came about when a Somali group loaned money to a Kenyan group to purchase goods in Kenya. An uptick in armed activity on the border closed off access and the funds were not repaid when they should have been. Eventually, elders from both sides of the border arbitrated together to resolve the issue.
Local people communicate through word of mouth and social media to collect and distribute welfare resources and run basic services, such as schools and water supplies. Individuals and leaders connect with the diaspora for assistance; they help one another, and organise to get what they need from neighbouring communities or further afield.
These three aspects of the informal order differ on either side of the border. In the rural areas of the northeastern Kenya side, there is some government presence at village level, with which local people engage. By contrast, in rural areas on the Somalian side of the border, the state is largely absent, and customary-based activities are prevalent. On both sides of the border, the informal order helps people to navigate their daily lives within a context of conflict and uncertainty.
The informal order is upheld by elders, religious leaders, and other community members according to Xeer, the Somali system of customary justice and dispute resolution. Widely understood, its norms and principles protect individual rights and articulate social obligations to family, clan, and society. People call on elders to mediate between clans, arbitrate individual disputes, and represent them to authorities and armed actors; and people hold elders to account. Elders who perform these roles well tend to be called on more frequently; those who do less well are less in demand (there is no sanction for poor performance). The customary system has few formal councils, regular meetings, or appointments, which may help explain its resilience and adaptability.
On both sides of the border, the informal order helps people to navigate their daily lives within a context of conflict and uncertainty.
Overcoming distrust
Many local people feel that government and aid agencies are at best distant, at worst dangerous. So rural communities get most of what they need, when they need it, from each other and from the diaspora. Citizens also experience government and aid programmes as distrusting them and the informal order. They see both governments failing to act for the public good, and perceive aid as frequently supporting corruption. This is one of the reasons why Al-Shabaab’s claim that it does more for ordinary people than either the state or the international community has led people to tolerate the insurgents (at least to a degree). If programmes could build real trust between the formal and informal orders, one could see new points of leverage on broader goals of security and state-building.
How to engage with the informal order
Forging better relations between communities, their governments, and the international community could go a long way to bringing the strengths of the informal order to bear on the persistent problems of poor state performance, weak services, factional politics, and insecurity in these contested borderlands. What would be needed to make this happen?
First, it is important to look at the potential pitfalls of engaging with the informal order. The history of co-option of the lineage system by armed actors (including the state), and the dominance of certain clans over others in the annexation of land, control of aid, and concentration of political power, gives pause for thought. There are also fears that within the informal order, the voices of women and young people count less than those of older men. Yet women and young people in the reflection sessions expressed faith in the informal order being able to counteract inequality and improbity.
Second, international actors and governments should consider new objectives, accompanied by vigorous action that seeks to understand and improve relations between authorities and communities.
Policy recommendations
Despite the challenges of working amid conflict and insecurity, governments and international actors could do more to engage with the informal order to support rural communities and local self-governance in contested border areas.
- Adopt a new definition of governance success: For rural communities in the contested areas of the Somalia–Kenya border, the informal order is an important actor in the local political economy. Recognising this, one objective for international actors and governments could be to improve relations with local people and the informal order. They could do so by working more closely with local systems of accountability that hold elders to account, and by engaging with customary systems based on Islamic law.
- Invest in context analysis: Local communities are a rich source of knowledge for understanding the factors at play in the local political economy. Especially in contested areas, where it is vital to understand the views of different actors, community analysis gives unique perspectives. Aid agencies should invest more in community-led research methodologies, as they offer real-time insights and can inform timely and effective actions.
- Work more closely with communities: Government officials and aid agency staff should work more closely with communities and the informal order. They need to address local people’s distrust of the state and international aid, and design and deliver more appropriate programming. Doing so will require innovation – generating new ideas for how to listen to, learn about, and respond better to the needs of local communities. They could begin by setting objectives, gaining an understanding of community dynamics, and engaging with accountability mechanisms and Islamic law.
Further reading
Anderson, C. et al. (2023) ‘Everyday Governance in Areas of Contested Power: Insights from Mozambique, Myanmar, and Pakistan’, Development Policy Review 41.suppl. 1: e12683 (accessed 18 March 2025)
McCullough, A. and Saed, M. (2017) Gatekeepers, Elders and Accountability in Somalia, London: Overseas Development Institute (accessed 18 March 2025)
Murtazashvili, J.B. (2016) Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Scott-Villiers, P. et al. (forthcoming) Navigating Violence and Negotiating Order in the Somalia–Kenya Borderlands: Understanding Life in Hard-to-Reach Areas, IDS Working Paper, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2025.017
Credits
This IDS Policy Briefing was written by Patta Scott-Villiers (Institute of Development Studies, IDS) and edited by Kathryn O’Neill. It was supported by the Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends (XCEPT) research programme, funded by UK International Development from the UK government. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of IDS or the UK government’s official policies.
Fifty people from the Somalia–Kenya border communities reflected on their lives between February and June 2024, facilitated by Action for Social and Economic Progress (ASEP), with methodological support from IDS.
© Institute of Development Studies 2025. This is an Open Access briefing distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.
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