The interplay of interventions and hybridisation in Puntland’s security sector
| Author | Peter Albrecht |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718768635 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
768635CAC0010.1177/0010836718768635Cooperation and ConflictAlbrecht
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Cooperation and Conflict
2018, Vol. 53(2) 216 –236
The interplay of interventions
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718768635
DOI: 10.1177/0010836718768635
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Puntland’s security sector
Peter Albrecht
Abstract
Hybridisation is often conceptualised as a ‘liminal’ occurrence, a ‘contact point’ or the product
of an ‘interface’. This tends to invoke the very binaries that the concept seeks to overcome,
because it assumes that a meeting between separate entities must occur for hybrid orders
to emerge. Instead, this article argues that processes of hybridisation and how they assemble
disparate types of authority lie at the very core of how social processes evolve. The argument is
substantiated empirically by exploring the internal and external dynamics that have shaped and
partly fragmented the security sector of Puntland, the largest and most stable region in Somalia
(beyond Somaliland). The analysis centres on attempts by the United Nations (UN) to support
the Puntland government in reducing numbers of the region’s constitutionally recognised security
forces. In this analysis, the article shows how the Puntland government necessarily has to balance
and negotiate conflicting demands of clan leaders, the global and regional security interests of
individual governments, notably the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America, as
well as continued pressure from the ‘international community’, formally represented by the UN,
to act as a functioning regional centre within a federal Somalia.
Keywords
Hybridisation, intervention, Puntland, security sector reform, Somalia
Introduction1
Somalia experienced a bureaucratic collapse when civil war broke out in 1988, and has
since then been portrayed as the epitome of a failed state (Loubser and Solomon, 2014;
Luling, 1997; Rotberg, 2003: 10). This representation of the country has guided many,
often uncoordinated and until now largely unsuccessful interventions to stabilise the
country by individual governments and international organisations (Bryden and Brickhill,
2010; Hagmann, 2016; Menkhaus, 2003, 2014). Most of these efforts have centred on the
Corresponding author:
Peter Albrecht, Danish Institute for International Studies, Østbanegade 117, 2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark.
Email: paa@diis.dk
Albrecht
217
capital, Mogadishu, while little headway has been made to establish a centrally governed
political entity with administrative reach and a monopoly of violence outside the city.
This article explores the experience of external support to the security sector in
Puntland, a region in north-eastern Somalia, where constitutionally recognised security
forces, internationally financed counter-terrorism groups and local clan militias are inte-
gral to order-making. International efforts are directed towards recognised state institu-
tions. Yet, the empirical reality is that interventions occur in a context of ongoing
hybridisation. This process encompasses simultaneously intersecting and competing
international, national and local structures of authority, sets of rules, logics of order and
claims to power where ‘state’ and ‘clan’ are intertwined (Albrecht and Moe, 2015; Lewis,
2010). Indeed, Puntland emerged in 1998 through negotiations among elders of the Harti
confederation, comprised of Darod sub-clans. Also today, clan leaders select the 66
members of Puntland’s parliament, and positions in the civil service are allocated accord-
ing to clan quotas.
Much analysis of hybridity within peace and security studies focuses on the encounter
between international and local practices, norms and institutions, and the order that
emerges from that encounter, that is, hybrid political orders (Boege et al., 2009; Millar,
2014a; Richmond, 2006a; 2006b; 2010; 2011; 2012; Richmond and Franks, 2007;
Visoka, 2013). However, this article argues that rather than producing a hybrid order in
Puntland, diverse and often incohesive and peripheral international interventions by,
among others, the United Nations (UN), the USA and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)
become part of ongoing and long-term processes of hybridisation, which they shape and
are shaped by, but never produce per se (Visoka, 2013: 26).
The concept of hybrid political orders constitutes an important critique of the failed
state discourse, and its tendency to produce binaries between the modern state and tra-
ditional or non-state modes of political ordering (Lemay-Hébert and Freedman, 2017:
5; Visoka, 2017). It helps to decentre the analysis of peacebuilding away from simplistic
conceptions of order and disorder in the global South. Underlying this recent applica-
tion of hybridity in peace and security studies is a comprehensive body of literature
within cultural studies, led by Bhabha (1994) and Clifford (1994; 2000), that articulates
the restless and uneasy mixing and permutations that occur in cultural exchanges
(Hutnyk, 2005: 83; Pieterse, 2001). In short, hybridity captures agency and institutions
as dynamic processes that continuously produce and assert authority (Canclini, 1995;
Hutnyk, 2005: 80).
The analytical validity of hybridity is in need of further elaboration. This is precisely
because of the concept’s point of departure in a critique of fragile/failed state discourse,
rather than the production of authority in the long term as a process – hybridisation – that
continuously evolves and morphs. By suggesting that hybridisation is particularly intense
and pervasive in the encounter between the liberal state/international interveners and
local orders/actors, the concept reproduces the dichotomies that it seeks to overcome.
This leads to an analysis that is ahistorical and mutes preceding processes of hybridisa-
tion. When peacebuilding is identified as a unique encounter, the international and local
are reduced to singular and coherent units that meet and merge (Lemay-Hébert and
Freedman, 2017: 6). By contrast, this article’s empirical evidence illustrates that hybridi-
sation is a process, rather than an outcome, that occurs at the very centre of how authority
218
Cooperation and Conflict 53(2)
is shaped and enacted. ‘The international’ – like ‘the local’ – is in this regard not a coher-
ent unit. It manifests itself in, a number of at times, quite marginal or locally concen-
trated effects by various actors and practices.
Empirically, the article takes its point of departure in one element of security sector
reform (SSR) in Puntland, and support of the process by the United Nations Assistance
Mission in Somalia (UNSOM). Presented as a cost-cutting exercise in 2014, the Puntland
government launched a process to reduce the number of personnel within its three con-
stitutionally recognised forces, the police, Darawish (Puntland’s military) and custodial
corps. Financial and technical support was requested from UNSOM, but in a way that
barred UNSOM from engaging with other security actors that only operate under partial
government control in Puntland. Local and extra-local actors propound diverging, often
contradictory, strategies and claims to power, which are drawn into and shaped by strug-
gles to access and defend resources among stakeholders in Puntland. Constitutionally
recognised security actors, a counter-terrorism force funded by the USA, local clan mili-
tias and other, sometimes loosely affiliated, groups that claim a stake in order-making are
integral to the region’s hybridised security architecture. In this regard, the introduction of
foreign resources through interventions is shaped by, and perpetuates, but does not fun-
damentally alter the continuous processes of hybridisation that constitute order-making
in Puntland.
The article first outlines hybridisation as a historical and foundational condition of
authority-making. This is followed by an analysis of how the notion of hybridisation
applies to the intricate relationship between clan identity and state institutions in
Puntland, and Somalia in general. These discussions are followed by a presentation of
how the Puntland government requested support from UNSOM, and how UNSOM
sought to deliver on that request. The article then explores the composition of Puntland’s
security sector as the product of ongoing processes of hybridisation of clan dynamics,
government interests as well as interests of foreign governments, including the USA and
UAE, among others. From this follows an analysis of how Puntland’s security institu-
tions are managed according to clan interests that are the basis on which resources are
distributed in an ongoing process of hybridisation with no set beginning or end.
Hybridisation: A historical process and foundational
condition
An extensive body of literature identifies states as fragile according to whether a central
government exists that is able to enforce order, rather than according to the often decen-
tred conglomerate of individual and institutional actors whereby order is made empiri-
cally (Fukuyama, 2004; Lockhart and Ghani, 2008; Paris, 1997). The consequence is that
the inseparable is separated, for instance, as Hurrell (2015: 19) explains, between ‘a con-
solidated peaceful liberal core’ and ‘failed states and ungoverned spaces’. This depicts
order according to a normative concept of the ideal...
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