Rethinking peace-building practices through the Somaliland experience

Reflecting on the Somali case, the article argues that the systematic failures of international interventions in the country have largely derived from the modernising orientation underlying UN peace-building practices. Following this logic, the solution to the Somali problem becomes dependent upon the construction of a centralised authority. Resisting an alternative romanticisation of the Somaliland experiment, the article suggests that the multiple attempts to build a sui generis model of democracy, which combines Western and local forms of governance, are giving way to a hybrid political order that may, in turn, help us to rethink UN peace-building practices in less ethnocentric terms.