*Originally published in 2024 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

In an article entitled “Is Somaliland Defying the Odds, or Are the Odds Based on a Flawed Premise?” Jamal Abdi attempts a new interpretation of Somaliland’s gestation. On the one hand, he distances himself from colonial anthropology, represented by the work of Ioan M. Lewis, which suggests that the main explanatory factor for Somali politics is clan (as a shorthand for all kinds of forms of collective belonging defined by patrilineal descent). On the other hand, Jamal Abdi tries to save a bit of the classic account of Somali society by Lewis, who provided his initial account of Somali kinship, the role of elders and customary law based on ethnographic research in the north (today’s Somaliland) by stating that indeed, some cultural traits of Somalis have been preserved in the region, which lay the foundation for peace building there in the early 1990s. Moreover, Jamal Abdi suggests that there is some kind of perennial democratic tradition among northerners which explains the contemporary democratic success in Somaliland.

To develop these points, Jamal Abdi first lashes out on Lewis (as is common among a younger generation of Somali studies scholars), and writes:

Since the publication of his 1961 ethnographic study A Pastoral democracy, British anthropologist I.M. Lewis has profoundly shaped the outside world’s understanding of Somali society, culture, and history. Throughout his long career, Lewis maintained that Somali society is best understood through the lens of the segmentary clan system, in which corporate groups conflict, leading to endemic violence. This interpretation construes Somalis as a fundamentally warlike people, with loyalty to their clan taking precedence over all else. According to the Lewisian interpretation, this ultimately explains the root causes of the civil war and the subsequent disintegration of the central state in 1991. Although anthropologists have long argued that cultures, customs, and traditions constantly evolve and change, Lewis stubbornly denied the possibility that colonialism negatively impacted Somali culture and society.

Since the publication of his 1961 ethnographic study A Pastoral democracy, British anthropologist I.M. Lewis has profoundly shaped the outside world’s understanding of Somali society, culture, and history. Throughout his long career, Lewis maintained that Somali society is best understood through the lens of the segmentary clan system, in which corporate groups conflict, leading to endemic violence. This interpretation construes Somalis as a fundamentally warlike people, with loyalty to their clan taking precedence over all else. According to the Lewisian interpretation, this ultimately explains the root causes of the civil war and the subsequent disintegration of the central state in 1991. Although anthropologists have long argued that cultures, customs, and traditions constantly evolve and change, Lewis stubbornly denied the possibility that colonialism negatively impacted Somali culture and society.

It is correct that the old Lewis stubbornly stuck to the logics of the anthropological model of “segmentary lineage society” and indeed explained the Somali civil war simplistically through the lens of clan. Yet, the young Lewis was more nuanced, as already Lidwien Kapteijns (2010) found in her seminal critique of Lewis’ clan-paradigm. If one reads the early works of IM Lewis, especially his “A Pastoral Democracy” (1961), carefully, one can see that he conceptualizes Somali society as more complex, and “clan” is only one aspect of kinship, besides uterine and affinal ties. Moreover, clan is inherently dynamic and relative. Here are a few quotes from “A pastoral democracy” underlining this point. Lewis observed that “[r]eal or putative uterine alliances are thus as much a feature of the Somali lineage system as is agnatic segmentation”(Lewis 1961: 156). Lewis (1961: 159) argues: “In principle, within the clan diya-paying groups oppose diya-paying groups, and within the clan-family clans oppose clans. But the simple model of agnatic segmentation with equipoised units at every level is distorted by the recognition of irregular growth and by the importance given to the uneven distribution of man-power and fighting potential.” Lewis also stresses that “the system of units which we have distinguished as clan-families, clans, primary lineage-groups and dia-paying groups suggests a more stable hierarchy of segmentation than actually exists” (Lewis 1961: 133). He continues: “What is most characteristic of the Somali system is its relativity and its flexibility” (ibid.).

So: relativity and flexibility characterize the Somali segmentary lineage society, according to the young Lewis (and those terms – “relativity” and “flexibility” – can still be productively used in analyses of Somali politics today). But Jamal Abdi, and before him, critiques of (the later) Lewis like Catherine Besteman, Abdi Ismail Samatar, Lidwien Kapteijns and others are correct in the sense that Lewis did not really consider colonialism and structural changes in Somali society introduced through it. This is a blind spot, and it was replicated in later accounts of his. Additionally, his later accounts indeed reduced Somali society often to clan, which remains........

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