Economies of Access: Inter-Clan Alliances, Resource Gatekeeping, and the Architecture of Collective Security in Post-Conflict Hargeisa, Somaliland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53819/81018102t2598Abstract
Studies of clan-based order in Somaliland routinely credit inter-clan alliances with generating the economic cooperation and collective security on which the territory’s stability rests. Drawing on an original corpus of 128 participants across 77 sessions in six sub-districts of Hargeisa, generated through in-depth interviews, focus-group discussions, key-informant interviews, direct observation and document analysis, this article reports a finding that complicates that consensus. The study examined how inter-clan alliances mobilise resources, sustain economic cooperation, and underwrite collective security in the city’s post-conflict transformation. It began from the expectation, shared with much of the hybrid-governance literature, that alliances would be visible as cross-clan commercial partnerships. The corpus contains no such instance. What it documents instead is an economy of access, in which the object of clan control is not a good but a gate: alliances did not distribute resources so much as license who might approach them, and collective security was produced not by shared enterprise but by a negotiated order that made the withdrawal of protection its standing sanction. The operative mechanism, across mediation, credit, land and diaspora remittance, was permission rather than price, and access was governed by a genealogical standing that money could not purchase. Reading these data through the Negotiated Hybrid Stability Framework, and against Cooper’s account of the gatekeeper state, Roy’s account of informality as a practice of the strongest, Khan’s political-settlements analysis and the social-capital tradition, the article theorises the gate in three dimensions, showing how it is constructed by tying goods to lineage claims, maintained by network closure and the asymmetry of conversion, and contested at the seams where those supports weaken. It argues that the alliances which stabilise Hargeisa systematically externalize their costs onto those without a genealogical claim, chiefly minority lineages, women, the young and the returned diaspora, and that this externalization is constitutive of its stability. Situating the case within the field of social transformation, the article concludes that Hargeisa’s economy has stabilized without being transformed, and locates the site of transformation not in the volume of resources delivered but in the architecture of access itself.
Keywords: clan alliances; economy of access; hybrid governance; collective security; gatekeeping; Somaliland; Hargeisa; peacebuilding
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