Issue No. 796

And Now Comes 'Fragile State' Denialism

Somalia's incumbent political elite remains engaged in a grand national self-construal project to recast the image of the country. At the enterprise's core is the notion that Somalia is 'rising' or 'risen,' and the narrative is becoming ever more feverish and urgent. It is partly animated by 'positive psychology'; the desire, perhaps, to project a 'positive image' of Somalia and boost Somali self-esteem, but it is also driven by a negative impulse – hostility to the 'fragile state' lens through which most of the world views Somalia. 

Somalia's Deputy Prime Minister Salah Jama, the intelligent, urbane and charming spokesman of 'Somalia Rising,' confidently asserted that Somalia was "out of failure and will soon be out of fragility" at a global forum on fragility and conflict in 2024. This is perhaps the closest a Somali official has come to publicly acknowledging the country is a fragile state. The same official told another meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva in February 2025 that "Somalia today is a nation on the rise, one that departed with the challenges of the past and has keenly focused on a prosperous future. Our government, under the leadership of His Excellency President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud, has indeed embarked on very transformational changes." 

In both instances, Salah provided no convincing evidence to back up his optimism. Instead, he reverted to familiar Villa Somalia talking points by reeling out a lengthy list of Mogadishu's external foreign policy achievements– from the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) completion point to the entry of Somalia into the East African Community (EAC). The fact that many elements of HIPC remain incomplete, including the unification of port tariffs across the Federal Member States, and that Somalis still do not enjoy visa-free travel into Kenya as part of the EAC went unmentioned.

Salah is the federal government's most valued technocrat and salesman, often wheeled out to 'educate' foreign dignitaries and conference audiences. But he also has a habit of reducing everything to a 'perception problem.' This is a familiar tactic. Once you diagnose Somalia as an 'image problem', a 'perception problem' and blame foreigners for a 'false narrative,' one need not bother with evidence or even a cure for that matter. One only has to simply communicate your counternarrative, your 'truth' and your perception. To put it differently, Somalia's political elite rarely engage in any meaningful or serious way in the debate on state fragility. When they do, it is usually to push back, 'correct perceptions' or outright denialism. This is partly motivated by the fact that if they acknowledged the transitional and fragile nature of Somali politics, it would undermine the federal government's claims of a mandate to unilaterally overhaul the Provisional Constitution and electoral systems.

The 'fragile state' concept is imprecise and contested, but it draws on the 'failed state' literature of the 1990s and the global tumult and conflicts triggered by the end of the Cold War. Since 2000, it has become ubiquitous in usage, and its definition has become ever more expansive, spawning a sub-genre-- 'fragile situations'-- which expands the fragility concept beyond the state.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2013 provided a definition that is now conventional: "A fragile region or state has weak capacity to carry out basic governance functions, and lacks the ability to develop mutually constructive relations with society. Fragile states are also more vulnerable to internal and external shocks such as economic crises or natural disasters. More resilient states exhibit the capacity and legitimacy of governing a population and its territory. They can manage and adapt to changing social needs and expectations, shifts in elite and other political agreements, and growing institutional complexity. Fragility and resilience should be seen as shifting points along a spectrum."

The Fragile States Index (FSI) 2024, an annual global survey of state fragility, puts 6 African states in the top 10. The OECD in 2022 classified 57 states in the world as fragile, most of them in Africa. That number has certainly increased since then. And Somalia has, for over a decade, been consistently ranked as the world's most fragile state by different surveys. Somali elites, like their counterparts elsewhere, often dispute the methodology of the fragility index or charge that it 'stigmatises' them. Nationalist media in Somalia generally shuns reports that portray the country negatively.

The FSI is not perfect, nor is it the most accurate measure of a state's condition and vulnerabilities. Yet, it does offer a more coherent and rigorous analytical framework to assess Somalia and its trajectory. The FSI's Conflict Assessment Framework (CAST) is a useful research tool and indispensable for policymakers. The standard CAST methodology uses several indicators to assess fragile contexts - (a) Cohesion: Factionalised elites, group grievance; (b) Economic decline, poverty, uneven development, human flight, and brain drain; (c) Political: State legitimacy, public services, human rights, and rule of law; (d) Social: Demographic pressures, refugees, and internally displaced persons; (e) Cross-cutting: Geopolitics and external intervention. Somalia, unsurprisingly, ranks poorly on all these indicators. 

Somalia's National Development Plan is one of the latest victims of the 'rising' evangelism in the Hassan Sheikh court-- now dubbed the 'National Transformation Plan.' The hefty document is bland and not grounded in reality. As an aspirational document, it might read well, but it cannot serve as the foundation for any grand policy strategy. Moreover, the plan is 'aspirational' because it assumes that Somalia's immediate challenges– constitutional, electoral, and security– will all have been resolved. And resolved in such a way that the federal government has ordained and preferred-- even while its control of the country shrinks by the day. Unless the Transformation Plan is from where Somalia is rather than where the federal government wants the country to be, it is unlikely it will even reach the starting point.

The federal government generally avoids engaging donors on fragility indices unless, of course, the prospects of extracting concessions and rents are positive. Yet officials are keen to appear at fragility conferences not to learn or impart useful experience but invariably to sell Somalia as a rising Horn power. One perennial concern is that the donor-driven exercises in fragility knowledge and diagnostics are all part of an elaborate scheme to impose or introduce 'benchmarking'. Still, if Salah is correct and the Somali federal government has genuine aspirations to "come out of fragility", then it must return to reality and abandon its feverish rhetoric. Engaging with the granular and rigorous analytical framework provided by organisations such as the Fund for Peace's Fragile State Index would be a start.

The Somali Wire Team