Ismail H. Warsame, MSc, PhD Candidate
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) / Warsame Digital Media (WDM)
Corresponding author: ismailwarsame@gmail.com
ORCID: 0009-0009-6984-7115

Abstract
Somalia fits neither of the standard accounts of federal origins: its constituent units constituted themselves before the federal centre existed, and one of them claims authorship of the settlement rather than a grant of autonomy from Mogadishu. This article makes three contributions. It identifies a third pathway of federal formation, supplies a concept — the founder’s claim — explaining why identical centralising measures produce different political reactions across units, and shows through a comparison of the 2024 constitutional amendments with the 2023 Baidoa agreement that measures imposed by bypass intensify ethno-territorial conflict while negotiated ones remain containable.
Keywords: founder’s claim; ethno-federalism; territorial autonomy; self-constituted units; Somalia; Puntland

1. Introduction
   1.1 What the article contributes
   Three claims organise what follows. I set them out here so that they can be judged against the analysis rather than inferred from it.
   A third pathway of federal formation. The comparative literature organises federal origins around a small set of categories: federations whose units come together from prior independence, federations that hold together by devolving authority from an established centre, and federations put together by coercion (Stepan 1999; Stepan, Linz and Yadav 2011).
   African federal scholarship has extended and contested these categories, distinguishing negotiated bargains from imposed designs and documenting how the origins of a federation shape its later trajectory (Dickovick 2014; Yimenu 2025; Demerew 2025; Fiseha 2025). All of them nonetheless presuppose a centre that exists before the bargain is struck. Somalia belongs to none, because its constituent units constituted themselves during the absence of a centre and the centre was then assembled from them. Building-up federalization has been named as a third way of federal state-formation, with Bosnia-Herzegovina as its other principal case (Zulueta-Fülscher and Welikala 2025). What has not been theorised is what follows. §3.1 develops three consequences: the reversal of legitimation, whereby a centre must justify authority that no unit ever delegated; the temporal stratification of units, a form of asymmetry invisible in constitutional text and durable because no clause can abolish it; and the conversion of membership from a settled premise into a live political question. The third is the condition the rest of the argument depends on, and it is why the established categories cannot accommodate the case.
   A concept that explains uneven reactions to identical measures. The literature on credible commitment explains why constituent units resist central encroachment, the literature on asymmetric federalism explains how formal differences in powers and status structure territorial politics, and the literature on shared rule and co-determination explains what constituent units lose when they cannot participate in decisions that bind them (Riker 1964; Filippov, Ordeshook and Shvetsova 2004; Watts 2008; Rao and Singh 2004; Mueller 2022; Mathieu and Guénette 2020; Popelier and Bursens 2026). These bodies of work together predict the intensity of resistance; none explains why the same centralising measure produces a routine policy dispute in one member state and a challenge to the settlement’s validity in another. The founder’s claim — the self-understanding of a unit that treats its membership as authorship of the union rather than as a grant of autonomy — supplies that explanation, because it changes what a central action is taken to mean. The claim advanced is not that self-constituted units are more legitimate, but that their membership claim is a distinct kind of political demand, which redistribution cannot discharge and bargaining institutions are poorly equipped to absorb.
   A mechanism linking institutional sequence to the form of conflict. Centralization without federal consolidation describes the expansion of central authority before the shared-rule institutions that would be legitimate and constrain it have been built. Taken together with foundational asymmetry — the unequal institutional inheritances that constituent units bring
   into a federation built from below — the framework yields expectations about the form a dispute will take, not merely its intensity. This is the sharpest departure from the credible-commitment account, which predicts resistance in proportion to what a measure takes and how weakly it is protected. The framework here predicts a discontinuity instead: measures bearing on the terms of the settlement should meet constitutional objection however small their material effect, while larger measures leaving those terms intact should not. §4.3 sets out four expectations in falsifiable form, and §6 assesses two episodes of centralisation that followed opposite procedural routes within one country, showing that bypass and negotiation produced categorically different disputes — one over the validity of the settlement, the other over shares within it.
   Federations are usually understood to be built in one of two ways. Either an established centre devolves authority to regions it has always governed, or separate units hold together against the risk of fragmentation. Somalia fits neither pattern. Its constituent units established themselves first, and the federal centre was assembled from them. Puntland declared its own administration in 1998, eight years after the Somali state collapsed and six years before a transitional national charter recognised federal principles. When the national settlement was finally negotiated, one of the parties to it had already been governing for more than a decade.
   This sequence produces something the federalism literature has not described directly. Puntland does not understand itself as a region that received autonomy from Mogadishu. It understands itself as one of the political communities that constituted the federal state. That self-understanding changes the political meaning of almost everything the centre does. actions. A consultation carries the weight of recognition, because it marks the unit as a founding party rather than a recipient of policy. An amendment reads as a revision made by one side to an agreement others helped write. Disagreements that ought to be technical become arguments about whether the unit was ever a party at all.
   This article theorises that self-understanding as the founder’s claim. The concept explains a pattern that competing accounts handle poorly: identical centralising measures produce different political reactions across the constituent units of one federation. Two dimensions need separating at the outset. The claim rests on a belief — historically grounded, held by a political community, that it authored the union rather than joined an existing state — and that belief issues in a demand for a role in decisions about the settlement’s terms. Belief is the independent variable here; the demand for recognition is its political expression. I make no claim that a founding unit possesses sovereignty outside the federation, or that its demand amounts to a veto. The point is narrower: the demand concerns membership, and membership disputes resist the remedies that contain policy disputes.
   Two further concepts complete the framework, and neither is where the originality lies. Centralization without federal consolidation names a process: central authority expanding ahead of the shared-rule institutions that would legitimate and constrain it. Foundational asymmetry names a structural condition: units entering a federation with unequal institutional inheritances, so that formally symmetric rules impose unequal losses. Both describe patterns already visible in the literature on fragile federations. The founder’s claim matters more, because it supplies the mechanism connecting the sequence to the reaction.
   Somalia is a strategically revealing case for examining this mechanism. Recent scholarship describes ‘building-up federalization’ as a process in which sub-state entities establish governance structures and constitutional frameworks before the political settlement at the centre is concluded (Zulueta-Fülscher and Welikala 2025). Puntland is the clearest Somali example: it was established in 1998 through a constitutional community conference, conceived itself as a building block of a future federal Somalia, and developed public institutions before the 2004 Transitional Federal Charter and the 2012 Provisional Constitution. The case therefore permits close observation of what happens after bottom-up federal formation, when a common centre seeks authority over constituent institutions that both predate it and claim a formative role in the settlement.
   The argument concerns institutional sequence rather than the assignment of blame for federal dysfunction. Constituent governments obstruct national coordination, centralise power within their own territories and pursue unilateral policies, and the paper takes those pathologies seriously. The narrower point is that in an incomplete federation, central unilateralism has a distinctive constitutional effect: it can alter the rules of the federation itself. Somalia’s 2012 Constitution was expressly provisional and left major questions of power allocation, fiscal federalism, security and constitutional completion to later negotiation. When federal institutions amend central features of that unfinished settlement without substantial participation by a pre-existing member state, the amendment process can itself become a source of federal instability.
   The argument proceeds in eight further sections. The next establishes why Somalia can support a theoretical claim of this kind and what the case cannot show. The third positions the argument against federal typology, where the first contribution is developed. The fourth defines the founder’s claim and the two conditions, and states the expectations in falsifiable
   form. The fifth and sixth present the case, organised around two centralising episodes that followed opposite procedural routes. The seventh sets out implications for settlements in divided societies, and the eighth examines alternative explanations and the limits of the design. The conclusion returns to the question of membership.
2. Why Somalia, and what it can show
   The study uses a qualitative historical-comparative design and treats Puntland as a strategically revealing case of territorial authority and institutional accumulation preceding national federal consolidation. The purpose is not to generalise from one member state to every Somali territory. It is to identify a mechanism that should travel to other bottom-up federations, and to specify the conditions under which it should be visible.
   The case logic is therefore theory-generating rather than theory-testing in the strict sense, and it is better to say so plainly than to let a reviewer discover it. Puntland is the case in which the founder’s claim is most clearly expressed, because its institutions have the longest continuous history of any Somali federal member state and because its founding documents locate it within a future federation rather than beneath an existing state. The claim advanced here is theoretical: that self-constituted units carry a membership claim that alters how central action is received. The case is selected to make that claim visible and to trace its operation, not to estimate its frequency.
   The scope condition follows from this. The argument applies where three features coincide: a constituent unit whose institutions predate the common centre; a constitutional settlement that remains incomplete at the moment of central consolidation; and shared-rule institutions too weak to absorb disputes over competence. Nepal after 2015, South Sudan after 2011, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entities after Dayton, and Ethiopia after 1991 are plausible additional instances of the first feature, though establishing that they meet the condition is a task for comparative work rather than for this article. Naming the condition is what allows the case to support a general claim without claiming generality.
   The analysis uses process tracing across four periods: Puntland’s formation and consolidation after 1998; the incorporation of federal principles into the 2004 Transitional Federal Charter; the 2012 Provisional Constitution and the establishment of later Federal Member States; and post-2012 disputes over power allocation, fiscal relations, security coordination and constitutional change. Evidence comes from constitutional texts, institutional histories, published scholarship, policy research and independently reported political events. Historical
   claims about Puntland’s founding are cross-checked against Interpeace and PDRC documentation of the 1998 constitutional conference and subsequent institution-building.
   The comparison is structured around a mechanism rather than a preferred constitutional label. A decentralised-unitary model and a federal model may both transfer functions away from the capital, but they differ in who possesses the authority to alter those transfers. The empirical question is therefore whether recurrent Somali disputes are better explained by excessive territorial entrenchment or by the absence of mutually binding rules governing the centre–region bargain. This mechanism-centred approach makes the case relevant beyond Somalia to post-conflict federations in which territorial authority and national reconstruction develop simultaneously.
3. Self-constituted units in comparative perspective
   3.1 Federal typology and the third pathway
   The familiar typology distinguishes federations that come together from previously independent units and federations that hold together by devolving authority to regions that might otherwise leave (Stepan 1999; Stepan, Linz and Yadav 2011). The distinction has been productive, and it organises most of the comparative literature on federal formation and its consequences.
   Somalia belongs to neither category, and the mismatch is not incidental. Here the constituent units did not come together from prior sovereignty, and they were not held together by an existing central state. They constituted themselves during the absence of a centre, and the centre was then assembled from them. Zulueta-Fülscher and Welikala (2025) name this process building-up federalization and identify Somalia as a principal case. The typology cannot accommodate it because both of its categories assume a centre that exists before the bargain is struck — as the party devolving authority, or as the object of a union.
   The distinction is not merely taxonomic. Yimenu (2025) and Demerew (2025) show that the origins of an African federation — whether a bargain among elites, a strategic concession by a threatened centre, or an external design — shape the fiscal and institutional trajectory that follows. The Somali case adds a further consequence: origin shapes not only what a federation becomes but whether its constituent units accept that it was jointly made. Fiseha (2025) reaches a related conclusion from the opposite direction, showing how Ethiopia’s top-down ethnic federalism produced regions whose authority derives entirely from the centre it was meant to constrain. Reading the two cases together suggests that the direction of constitutional
   authorisation — upward from units or downward from a centre — structures the politics of membership long after the bargain is struck.
   The pathway has three properties the established categories do not anticipate, and each has consequences that reach beyond classification.
   The first is the reversal of legitimation. In a coming-together federation the centre holds authority because units delegated it, and the units can point to the moment of delegation as the source of the centre’s standing. Where units constitute themselves first and a centre is assembled from them, no such moment exists. The centre must instead establish authority that was never transferred, and it does so through the ordinary instruments of government — legislation, appointments, revenue collection, security deployment — without ever settling the prior question of where its competence came from. This is not a philosophical difficulty but a practical one, because it means that the centre’s constitutional self-description and the historical record available to the units do not match. Nothing in the coming-together or holding-together literatures prepares us for a federal centre that must legitimise itself in the absence of a delegating act.
   The second is the temporal stratification of units, and it is a source of asymmetry that constitutional design cannot correct. Where all units arrive at the bargain at once, their formal equality corresponds to something real: they entered together. A federation built from below has no such common moment. Some units predate the settlement, formed during the absence of a centre and in possession of their own constitutional orders; others are created by the settlement itself, sometimes with federal assistance, and their authority is inseparable from the centre that authorised them. Both may hold identical competences under the constitutional text. What they do not hold is an identical relationship to the union, because one was a condition of the settlement and the other a product of it. Rao and Singh (2004) describe constitutional asymmetry, and Stepan (1999) describes the asymmetry of national identity within multinational federations. Temporal stratification is a third kind, invisible in the text, produced by the order of events, and durable precisely because no clause can abolish it.
   The third, and the one the present argument rests on, is that membership becomes a live political question rather than a settled premise. This is the sharpest difference from the established categories. In both of them, the act that creates the federation simultaneously settles who the parties are: the treaty, the devolution statute, the constitutional moment. Disputes afterwards are disputes within a membership that is not itself in doubt. Where units constitute themselves first, no such constitutive act exists. Membership has to be built during
   the years that follow, in the course of ordinary political life, and anything built in that way can be contested, revised, or withheld. Political entrepreneurs at either level have an incentive to advance competing accounts of who founded the union and who merely joined it, because those accounts determine standing on every subsequent question. This is what makes federal politics in such settings unusually volatile: the disputes do not take place within an agreed structure of membership but are partly about producing one.
   Taken together, the three properties describe a pathway whose distinctiveness does not lie in the number of units, the allocation of competences or the strength of the centre, but in the absence of a constitutive act that would settle membership once and for all. The founder’s claim is the political form that contest takes when a self-constituted unit is asked to accept terms determined by the centre it helped create. It should be clear what is and is not claimed as novel. That historical origin shapes federal politics is well established, and the coming-together and holding-together distinction rests on that insight. What the literature has not theorised is a federation in which some units are older than the centre and can therefore present themselves as its authors, together with the politics that follows when the centre acts as though it had created them.
   3.2 Ethnic politics, recognition and the shape of territorial demands
   Territorial demands differ in kind, and the difference has consequences. That is why the literature on recognition and self-determination serves better here than work on fiscal or administrative asymmetry. A demand for a larger revenue share can be met by renegotiating the share. A demand to be recognised as a party to the settlement cannot be met by any distribution of shares at all, because distribution is not what it asks for.
   This distinction has a specific consequence for the management of ethno-territorial conflict. If a unit’s grievance is about distribution, institutions that routinise bargaining will generally absorb it, because the unit’s membership is not in question. If the grievance is about authorship, bargaining institutions will be experienced as one more forum in which the unit’s status is decided by others. That is what makes the pattern examined here more than a story about insufficient intergovernmental machinery. Better machinery helps where the disagreement is about shares; it helps less where the disagreement is about whether the unit was ever a party.
   A second literature refines the point. Work on shared rule and co-determination asks not only whether regional governments have authority but whether they participate in the decisions
   that define that authority — an ability to co-determine national policy that binds all units, and in the stronger version a role in codifying a region’s own self-rule (Mueller 2022; Mathieu and Guénette 2020; Popelier and Bursens 2026). This is precisely the dimension the 2012 Constitution gestures toward in Articles 54 and 142, and it is the dimension the founder’s claim treats as constitutive rather than procedural. Where a unit understands its membership as authorship, a shared-rule arrangement is not a mechanism for managing interdependence; it is the institutional form of the recognition that membership presupposes.
   This positions the article within a standing debate in the study of divided societies: whether territorial settlements moderate conflict by accommodating identity, or entrench it by making territory the container of political membership. Lijphart (1977) and McGarry and O’Leary (2005) develop the accommodative case; Roeder (2009) and Erk and Anderson (2009) stress the risks, and a substantial quantitative literature connects territorial autonomy to conflict at the subnational level rather than only at the centre (Cederman, Hug and Wucherpfennig 2015; Juon and Rohrbach 2023; Juon and Bochsler 2026). The Somali case speaks to that debate from an unusual angle. It is not that federal recognition hardened a territorial identity that would otherwise have dissolved, because the identity was already institutionalised in a functioning regional government before recognition was extended. What recognition did was create a situation in which the unit’s standing within the union could be decided by others, which converted a settled fact of local governance into a contested question of national membership.
   3.3 What the literature has not explained
   Three literatures explain parts of the Somali pattern, and the paper’s contribution is defined by what they leave out.
   Scholarship on credible commitment explains why federations require safeguards against unilateral encroachment, and why constituent units resist when those safeguards are weak (Riker 1964; Elazar 1987; Filippov, Ordeshook and Shvetsova 2004; Bednar 2009; Watts 2008). It does not explain why equally weak safeguards produce different intensities of resistance across units of the same federation. The founder’s claim supplies one answer: units that understand membership as authorship read the same encroachment as a different kind of injury.
   Scholarship on asymmetric federalism explains how formal differences in powers, status or fiscal treatment structure territorial politics (Rao and Singh 2004; Stepan 1999). It concerns
   asymmetry in constitutional entitlement. Foundational asymmetry as used here is a different phenomenon: units may hold identical constitutional status while entering the federation with very unequal administrative capacity, security institutions, revenue systems, infrastructure and sources of legitimacy. The literature also has little to say about how units understand the origin of their membership, which is the variable the argument turns on.
   Scholarship on intergovernmental relations explains that divided authority requires institutionalised channels for bargaining, coordination and joint implementation, and that these are weak in Somalia (Hashi and Barasa 2023; Barre 2024; Rift Valley Institute 2021). This is the right diagnosis as far as it goes. It tends, however, to treat the absence of such channels as a technical deficiency to be repaired by institutional design, whereas the founder’s claim suggests that the deficiency has a political dimension that design alone cannot address.
   Somalia-focused scholarship has produced a substantial body of work on these questions, and the argument here is in conversation with three strands of it. One strand reads Somali federalism as externally promoted and its weakness as a consequence of the absence of a genuine domestic bargain (Elmi and Barise 2006; Dahir and Sheikh Ali 2024). A second traces how public authority in Somalia became territorially fragmented well before the federal settlement, and treats the resulting political units as bearers of distinct logics of statehood (Menkhaus 2006/07; Majid and Abidrahman 2026). A third examines the distributional and representational consequences of federal design, including the interaction of clan-based power-sharing with federal institutions (Zoppi 2018; Barre 2024). The argument advanced here shares the first strand’s emphasis on the missing bargain and the second’s emphasis on pre-existing territorial authority, but locates the missing element in the politics of membership rather than in the design of institutions or the arithmetic of representation.
4. The founder’s claim and the conditions of centralization
   4.1 The founder’s claim defined
   The founder’s claim is a historically grounded self-understanding: that the unit entered the federation as a participant in constituting it, not as an administrative subdivision receiving authority from a pre-existing centre. Two properties separate it from ordinary regional assertiveness.
   The claim concerns origin, not entitlement. A unit advancing it does not argue that the constitution grants it more than it presently holds; it argues that the constitution was partly its own making. Redistribution therefore cannot discharge it. More powers, more revenue, or
   recognition of special status can answer an argument about what a unit is owed. None of them answers an argument about who wrote the settlement, which turns on whether the unit stands as a party to it or as a subject of it. Claims of that kind tend to escalate rather than settle.
   The concept does not imply a legal conclusion that the unit possesses sovereignty outside the federation, and it does not imply a veto over federal decisions. It directs attention to the political significance of consultation where a member state’s institutions predate the common government and its founding narrative presents the unit as a building block of the union. The observable implication is specific: consultation procedures will be treated by such a unit as constitutive of its status rather than as a procedural requirement, and their breach will be read as a denial of membership rather than as an administrative failure.
   4.1.1 How the claim does its work
   The concept explains a puzzle that the standard accounts leave open: why the same centralising measure is absorbed as an ordinary policy dispute in one member state and contested as a question about the settlement itself in another. Three steps connect the belief to that outcome.
   The first step is interpretative. A unit holding the claim reads a central action through the question of standing rather than through the question of cost. This is a matter of how the action is understood, not of how large it is, and it explains an otherwise puzzling feature of the Somali record: measures of modest material consequence can provoke constitutional objection, while substantial transfers sometimes pass without incident. The founder’s claim predicts that the relevant variable is not the size of the change but whether the unit reads the procedure through which it was made as confirming or denying its standing as a party.
   The second step is strategic, and it concerns how the objection is framed. Where a unit understands membership as authorship, its public case will be made in the vocabulary of participation, recognition and the validity of procedure rather than in the vocabulary of shares. This is not window dressing. Framing an objection as a membership claim constrains what the unit can accept, because accepting a side-payment would concede that the dispute was really about distribution after all. It also makes the dispute harder for the centre to resolve, since the centre cannot answer a demand for recognition with a larger allocation without appearing to have misunderstood the complaint.
   The third step is dynamic. Because the claim makes membership contestable, it invites the centre to respond in kind. Central actors who read an objection as obstruction can argue that
   the unit was never a co-founder but a beneficiary of the settlement, a claim that is itself available in the historical record because the settlement was genuinely negotiated after the unit had already constituted itself. The result is a contest over origins in which each side can point to real evidence. This is the dynamic that distinguishes the founder’s claim from an ordinary bargaining failure. A bargaining failure can be resolved by improving the bargaining. A contest over origins cannot, because what is at issue is not the terms on which the parties deal but whether they are parties at all.
   The concept also specifies its own limits, and these should be stated rather than left to be inferred. A unit that regards its autonomy as a grant from the centre, however large that grant, does not hold the claim; it may bargain hard, threaten non-compliance, or seek a better settlement, but it will not frame its demands as a correction to the record of who founded the union. A unit that holds the claim may nonetheless decline to press it, where the costs of confrontation are high or where its leadership has other priorities; the belief does not compel behaviour, it structures what behaviour will mean. And the claim is not equivalent to secessionist sentiment, though it can degenerate into it if the membership it asserts is repeatedly refused. Units that regard themselves as founders usually seek to secure their standing within the union rather than to leave it, and the Puntland position in 2024 — asserting independent exercise of powers pending an inclusive settlement — is best read in that light.
   Somalia’s 2012 Provisional Constitution supplies an unusual textual bridge between this self-understanding and the federal order. Article 54 requires the allocation of powers and resources to be negotiated and agreed between the Federal Government and Federal Member States, except for four enumerated federal functions. Article 142 provides that Federal Member States existing before provisional adoption retain the powers endowed by their own constitutions until harmonisation, and states that those existing member states must be consulted in decision-making regarding the federal system and security arrangements (Federal Republic of Somalia 2012, arts. 54, 142). The founder’s claim therefore does not rest on rhetoric alone; in the Puntland case it intersects with explicit constitutional requirements for negotiation and consultation.
   4.2 The two conditions: sequence and asymmetry
   The claim explains how a unit will read central action. It does not explain why central action takes the form it does, or why the effects are uneven across units. Two conditions do that work.
   Centralization without federal consolidation describes the expansion of effective central authority before the institutions of shared rule that define and constrain that authority have been settled. The concept does not treat every increase in national capacity as recentralisation. Federations require effective common institutions, particularly for defence, macroeconomic coordination, external representation and nationwide rights. The concept applies only where central authority expands in domains whose allocation or implementation remains constitutionally or politically unsettled, and where the institutions for obtaining constituent participation have not been consolidated. It is therefore relational rather than ideological. A strong centre can coexist with robust federalism where constituent units have a meaningful role in defining shared competences and enforcing agreed limits. Conversely, even modest central initiatives can provoke resistance where the rules of vertical authority remain contested and no trusted mechanism exists for resolving disagreement.
   Institutional bypass is the mechanism through which the sequence becomes visible. Bypass describes the settlement of a question normally associated with federal bargaining through a channel dominated by one level of government, an ad hoc coalition, or a procedure whose authority is itself contested. It does not necessarily amount to a formal legal violation. Its significance lies in substituting positional authority for a federal procedure that all relevant actors recognise. Where the founder’s claim is present, bypass is received as something more than an irregular procedure: it is read as an assertion that the unit’s participation was never required.
   Foundational asymmetry is the second condition. It arises when constituent units enter a federation with significantly different institutional inheritances because some developed functioning governments before the common federal order was formed. The relevant inheritance is not limited to formal constitutional powers. It includes bureaucratic routines, security organisations, revenue systems, courts, regulatory practices, public infrastructure and established relationships with citizens, firms and external actors. Unlike constitutional asymmetry, these differences persist under formally symmetric rules.
   Foundational asymmetry also explains why the consequences of bypass are uneven. Where a unit has accumulated authority over more than a decade, a central standardising measure displaces more than it does in a unit whose institutions were created by the federal process itself. The same rule can therefore represent a routine adjustment for one member state and a substantial loss for another. This is the sense in which formally symmetric rules need not produce symmetric political effects.
   4.3 Expectations
   The framework yields four expectations, stated here in falsifiable form so that the case can be assessed against them rather than merely illustrated by them.
   Expectation 1. In federations built from below, centralising measures advanced by bypass will produce disputes about the validity of the settlement, whereas measures advanced through negotiated procedures will produce disputes about shares within it. The form of the conflict, not merely its intensity, is what the argument predicts.
   Expectation 2. Resistance will be stronger, and less amenable to side-payments, where the affected unit possesses substantial pre-federal institutional capacity, because standardisation entails a larger loss of established authority.
   Expectation 3. Where a unit’s objection is framed in terms of denied participation rather than denied resources, the founder’s claim is operating. Where objections are framed in terms of budget shares, sectoral competences or implementation costs, the mechanism is absent and an ordinary asymmetry account should suffice.
   Expectation 4. Identical centralising measures will be received differently across member states of the same federation, in line with differences in institutional inheritance and in the position the unit holds in the settlement’s founding narrative.
   The third expectation is the most demanding, and deliberately so: it requires attention to how actors justify their positions, not only to what they demand. A mechanism defined by self-understanding leaves no trace in the distribution of powers or resources. A study claiming to test it through those indicators alone would be measuring something else.
   What the framework predicts is therefore the form a dispute takes rather than its intensity, and the distinction is worth explaining because it separates this account from the credible-commitment literature it otherwise resembles. That literature predicts escalation as a function of the stakes at issue and the credibility of the safeguards protecting the constituent unit:
   larger encroachments, and weaker safeguards, produce stronger resistance. The framework here predicts something categorically different. The same encroachment, presented the same way and resisted with equal force, can be a dispute about shares or a dispute about validity depending on whether the affected unit holds the founder’s claim. The two are not points on a single scale of conflict. A distributive dispute presupposes an accepted settlement and asks who gets what within it; it can be settled by agreement and leaves the settlement intact. A validity dispute questions whether the settlement binds the parties in the way the centre asserts; it cannot be settled by agreement on shares, because no distribution answers it, and a settlement reached under it does not restore what was lost.
   This gives the argument a distinctive observable implication. Where the credible-commitment account is sufficient, we should expect centralising measures to provoke resistance in proportion to what they take and how weakly they are protected. Where the founder’s claim is also operating, we should expect a discontinuity: measures that bear on the terms of the settlement itself, however small their material effect, should meet constitutional objection, while larger measures that leave those terms untouched should not. The two predictions are distinguishable, and §6 is organised to bring the difference into view.
   4.4 Relationships to existing debates
   These expectations align with credible-commitment and asymmetric-federalism scholarship, but they add a temporal and an identity dimension that matters especially for post-conflict federalisation. Institutions that restrain opportunism in an established federation may not yet exist while the federation itself is being built, and constituent units may arrive at the bargain with sharply unequal institutional inheritances and with different stories about how the bargain came to exist. The order in which central authority expands, shared-rule institutions become credible, and inherited institutional stocks are accommodated can therefore affect whether state-building produces cooperation or defensive autonomy.
   The argument also avoids assuming that constituent autonomy is benign. Regional executives can centralise within their territories, exclude minorities, resist national standards or misuse fiscal discretion. The relevant comparison is not a virtuous region against a predatory centre. It is between unilateral authority-building at either level and institutions that force bargaining, reciprocal restraint and enforceable coordination. The distinction matters because the centre occupies a distinctive system-level position. National institutions commonly control or influence constitutional amendment, external recognition, security coordination, fiscal
   transfers and the legal interpretation of shared competences. Unilateralism at the centre can therefore change the terms on which all constituent units participate, while unilateralism by a single unit normally has a narrower territorial reach.
   4.5 Shared rule as the missing layer
   Consolidation is not the same as central strength. Somalia’s Provisional Constitution contains elements of both self-rule and shared rule, but many connecting institutions remain incomplete. Article 51 requires cooperative relations between levels of government; Article 54 provides for negotiated allocation of powers and resources; Article 142 embeds consultation into the transitional architecture (Federal Republic of Somalia 2012). The constitutional problem is therefore not insufficient central authority. It is the weakness of the institutional bridge through which two constitutionally recognised levels are supposed to negotiate common rule.
   This is a familiar problem in post-conflict constitutional design. Interim constitutions and incomplete settlements are common where agreement on fundamental questions cannot be reached at the moment of transition, and they succeed or fail according to whether they specify a credible process for completion (Widner 2008; Nathan 2020; Albert 2024; Zulueta-Fülscher 2023). Where they do not, the rules governing amendment become the arena in which the unfinished settlement is contested — a dynamic constitutional scholarship has documented extensively, since amendment rules are rarely as constraining in practice as they appear on paper, and their effective rigidity depends on the number and alignment of veto players rather than on the procedural threshold alone (Albert 2015; Lorenz 2022, 2026). Somalia’s Articles 54 and 142 supply the substance of that process. What the settlement does not supply is an institution capable of enforcing it.
   The provisional character of the 2012 settlement is analytically important: the constitution did not complete the federal compact but created a framework for completing it. Incompleteness can operate in two opposite directions. It can encourage negotiated institution-building, or it can create openings for one level to convert unresolved questions into accomplished facts. Where constitutional amendments are adopted while a major pre-existing member state is absent from, or contests the adequacy of, the consultation process, formal change may deepen rather than settle the underlying bargain (Rift Valley Institute 2024; Reuters 2024). For this reason the paper treats intergovernmental institutions as constitutive of federalism rather than as administrative accessories.
5. Puntland and the making of a claim
   Puntland emerged in 1998 from a locally negotiated constitutional process, following the collapse of the Somali state. Interpeace and PDRC documentation records a preparatory and consultative sequence culminating in the Garowe Constitutional Community Conference of May to July 1998. The resulting administration did not claim independent national sovereignty comparable to Somaliland’s 1991 declaration. Its Transitional Charter instead envisaged Puntland as an integral entity of a future Somali federal state and as an initial building block in a bottom-up reconstruction of the union (Interpeace and Puntland Development Research Center 2008, 2011).
   The process was imperfect. Representation reflected clan structures, power was unevenly distributed, political disputes persisted, and later governments did not always honour the consultative practices that made the founding settlement possible. Yet the institutional sequence matters. Political bargaining preceded the consolidation of a regional administration, and security and political authority were built through accommodation among communities that expected to remain together, rather than imposed by a recovered national centre. Interpeace and PDRC describe Puntland’s peace-making as a cumulative process rooted in local conferences, customary authority and negotiated compromise; during its first years the administration re-established public institutions, law and order, police and paramilitary units, constitutional rules and socioeconomic planning while participating in national reconciliation efforts (Interpeace and Puntland Development Research Center 2008, 2011).
   By the time Somalia’s contemporary federal order was formalised, Puntland already possessed a government, constitutional rules, security institutions, administrative routines and public infrastructure accumulated through more than a decade of regional state-building. Later Federal Member States entered the federation through different temporal and institutional pathways. The claim here is not that Puntland’s institutions were uniformly stronger in every sector, but that the federation inherited unequal institutional stocks generated before the common settlement. That is foundational asymmetry under formally symmetric rules.
   The same sequence generated the founder’s claim. A unit whose institutions predate the common centre, and whose founding charter framed it as a building block of a future federation, does not experience federal consolidation as the receipt of delegated authority. It experiences it as the pooling and coordination of authority it had already exercised. The political meaning of consultation changes accordingly: consultation is not administrative courtesy but part of the process through which the constituent relationship is maintained.
   The historical record here rests on documentation produced within Somalia and on independent academic work. Interpeace’s collaboration with the Puntland Development Research Center provides the detailed account of the founding conferences and the years that followed (Interpeace and Puntland Development Research Center 2008, 2011). Somali constitutional and legal analysis has examined what Article 142 protects and how the category of existing member states operates (Somali Dialogue Platform 2021; International IDEA 2025). Where the argument moves from institutional history to claims about how Puntland’s leadership understood the settlement, it relies on the record of what those actors said, examined in §5.1.
   Two clarifications belong in the text rather than in a footnote. Clan identity is not a sufficient institutional description. Clan affiliations structured representation and security, but Puntland also developed territorial, constitutional and administrative institutions governing ports, taxation, policing, courts and local administration; political authority became territorially organised and administratively routinised before national federal consolidation, whatever happened to clan politics in the process. The history also complicates explanations that treat Somalia’s federal order mainly as an externally sponsored choice. External states and international actors influenced later federal bargaining, but Puntland’s regional institutions preceded the current national settlement, so federalisation worked on an already territorialised distribution of authority rather than creating one from a blank slate.
   5.1 The evidence of self-understanding
   The claim that a unit understands itself as a founder is an empirical proposition about belief, and it requires evidence of a different kind from constitutional text or the distribution of powers. Three sources bear on it. [This subsection requires the author’s primary evidence, gathered and quoted. The categories below indicate what that evidence needs to show.]
   Founding texts. Puntland’s constitutional and charter language from 1998 and 2001 on its relationship to a future Somali state, read for what the unit said about its own standing rather than for what powers it claimed. [Quotations to be inserted.]
   Constitutive moments. The record of Puntland’s participation in the 2004 Transitional Federal Charter and the 2012 Provisional Constitution, read as evidence of self-description as a participant rather than a recipient. [Documentary evidence to be inserted.]
   Justifications during the 2024 dispute. Statements by Puntland’s leadership, examined for the terms of objection rather than its content. If the objection is framed around being denied a
   role in determining the settlement, the founder’s claim is operative; if it is framed around policy loss, an ordinary asymmetry account suffices. This is where Expectation 3 is assessed. [Statements to be cited and quoted.]
   Two kinds of evidence must stay separate here. Articles 54 and 142 show what the settlement permits and requires, and therefore what a founder might reasonably expect of it. They say nothing about what a political community believes regarding itself. The argument needs both, and treating the constitutional text as evidence of the belief would substitute one for the other.
   5.2 The decentralised-unitary alternative
   A decentralised-unitary model deserves consideration because it identifies genuine pathologies in Somalia’s federal practice. Federal member states can reproduce elite domination at a lower territorial level; overlapping governments can duplicate scarce administrative capacity; external actors can cultivate subnational partners; and uneven regional capability can translate formal autonomy into unequal services and citizenship (Elmi 2015, 8–22). The model responds by preserving a single national constitutional hierarchy while moving political, administrative and fiscal responsibilities closer to citizens, seeking the practical benefits of dispersed government without constitutionally dividing sovereignty.
   Its attraction is clear, and the relevant question is not whether decentralisation has benefits. It plainly can. The question is whether those benefits solve the problem that generated demands for constitutionally protected territorial authority in the first place. Somalia’s own debate has addressed this since before 2012: Ismail asked whether federation would become a constitutional panacea or another source of division, Abdi treated federalism as both a promise and a possible pitfall in reconstructing the collapsed state, Sufi examined the political order of the prospective federal units and Farah assessed the emerging system’s achievements and challenges. These writers disagree about institutional form but share an empirical starting point: Somali political order must address distrust of concentrated authority, territorially rooted political communities and the risk of reproducing exclusion at either level (Ismail 2000; Abdi 2003; Sufi 2003; Farah 2013). A devolutionary solution addresses the first of these concerns and leaves the second and third untouched, which is why it cannot settle the question of membership.
6. Two routes through the same dispute
   The framework can be assessed against a comparison available within the case. Two centralising efforts followed opposite procedural routes within a three-year period, and
   Expectation 1 predicts that the form of the resulting conflict will differ accordingly. The first is the constitutional review culminating in the amendments of 2024. The second is the revenue agreement reached at Baidoa in 2023.
   Dimension
   2024 constitutional amendments
   2023 Baidoa revenue agreement
   Route
   Bypass: amendments advanced through federal institutions while a pre-existing member state was outside the process.
   Negotiated: reached between the Federal Government and Federal Member States.
   Constituent response
   Substance and process both rejected; independent exercise of governmental powers announced pending an inclusive settlement.
   Broad participation; contested in implementation rather than in principle.
   Form of the conflict
   Constitutional: an argument about the validity of the settlement and the unit’s standing within it.
   Distributive: an argument about shares within a settlement both sides accept.
   Against Expectation 1
   Consistent — bypass of an incomplete compact produced a membership-level dispute.
   Consistent — a negotiated route produced an ordinary policy dispute.
   The 2024 episode is the clearer case. Federal institutions approved amendments to the political and executive framework while Puntland’s leadership was outside the constitutional amendment process, and contemporary policy analysis identified Puntland’s absence, fragile centre–periphery relations and the need to restore broader stakeholder participation as significant challenges to constitutional completion (Rift Valley Institute 2024). Puntland rejected both the substance and the process and announced that it would exercise governmental powers independently pending an inclusive settlement in which it participated (Reuters 2024).
   The analytical point is not that Puntland’s legal interpretation must be accepted, nor that the federal parliament lacked authority to debate amendments. It is that amendments to an expressly incomplete federal constitution, pursued without substantial participation by a pre-existing member state that the constitution itself requires to be consulted on federal-system questions, can transform constitutional revision into a dispute over the compact’s legitimacy. The process illustrates centralization without federal consolidation: formal change at the centre enlarged common authority before the shared-rule institutions needed to legitimate that change had been consolidated. It also illustrates the founder’s claim in operation, in that the objection was to the denial of a role rather than to the content of particular provisions — the subject of §6.2.
   6.1 Fiscal relations and intergovernmental machinery
   Fiscal relations show the same sequencing problem in a less dramatic form. Somalia has made progress in revenue mobilisation, but recent policy research continues to describe fragmented tax administration, unresolved revenue-distribution questions and uncertainty about the respective rights and roles of federal and state authorities. These are not merely technical deficiencies. Where fiscal rules remain unsettled, attempts at national harmonisation can be interpreted either as necessary state-building or as encroachment, depending on whether the process is jointly institutionalised (Rift Valley Institute 2025).
   Intergovernmental relations and security architecture reveal a parallel pattern. Scholarship finds that federal–state relations have often been conflictual and that Somalia lacks a consistently effective, agreed model for intergovernmental coordination (Hashi and Barasa 2023). Policy work on power allocation and security emphasises the need for negotiated clarity. The implication is that additional national capacity is unlikely to resolve disputes if the channels through which federal and member-state governments jointly define that capacity remain weak (Rift Valley Institute 2021).
   Reading the two episodes together supports a more symmetrical interpretation of Somalia’s federal instability than either a centralising or a regionalist account allows. Constituent governments can obstruct coordination and pursue unilateral policies; central authorities can attempt to settle contested questions through institutions they dominate. The consequences are nevertheless not uniform. A member state with greater inherited institutional capacity can resist more effectively, and a member state making a founder’s claim reads unilateral central action as constitutionally transformative rather than merely administratively intrusive. The incompleteness of the 2012 Provisional Constitution magnifies the dynamic: because important elements of the compact were left to later negotiation, unilateral amendment without substantial consultation can harden a disagreement over procedure into a disagreement over the federation’s authority itself.
   6.2 What the comparison shows, and what it does not
   The comparison is not controlled. Better to say so than to let a reader supply the point. The two episodes differ in salience as much as in procedure. The 2024 amendments concerned the political and executive framework, which touches the settlement more directly than revenue shares do, and a reform of that kind invites contention whatever route it takes. The revenue agreement, by contrast, was negotiated where all parties had material reasons to reach terms.
   Part of the difference in outcome belongs to what was at stake rather than to how it was decided.
   Two features nonetheless resist explanation by issue salience alone. First, the objection raised in 2024 was framed as a denial of participation, not as disagreement with particular provisions, which is the pattern Expectation 3 specifies. Second, in the revenue case contention persisted into implementation without the settlement itself being challenged, which is the pattern predicted where membership is not in question. Taken together, the episodes are consistent with the argument; they do not establish it. What would establish it is the pattern across a set of federations built from below, which is why the scope condition in §2 matters and why the comparison with Nepal sketched below is a direction for further work rather than a demonstration.
   6.3 Beyond Somalia: Nepal as a comparative case
   The scope condition set out in §2 predicts that the founder’s claim should be visible wherever a unit predates or escapes the authorship of the settlement that governs it. Nepal offers the closest available comparison, and it displays both a confirming and a disconfirming pattern that sharpen rather than weaken the argument.
   The confirming pattern is the convergence of institutional inheritance and contested authorship. Nepal’s transition from a unitary state, initiated in 2007 and completed with the constitution of September 2015, was driven by demands for identity-based federalism from Madhesi, Janajati and Dalit groups operating both inside and outside established parties (Malagodi 2018, 2019). The Madhesi movement had already forced the state to concede federal restructuring as a principle, and it framed its claim in explicitly constitutive terms: there could be ‘no constitution without federalism and no federalism without identity’. When the 2015 text was promulgated, the Madhesi Front rejected it on the demarcation of provinces, constituency delineation and inclusion — that is, on grounds that the settlement had been written over them rather than with them (Accord 2017; Malagodi 2020). That is the founder’s claim in a different institutional setting, and it produced the same kind of contest: not a demand for a larger share of an accepted settlement, but a denial that the settlement was jointly made.
   The disconfirming pattern is more instructive. Nepal’s units did not constitute themselves before the centre; they were the object of a constitutional process in which their participation was contested but never absent. Unlike Puntland, Madhesi political forces did not hold
   territorial institutions that predated the union, and the Madhesi claim was therefore made by a movement rather than by an existing government. The outcome reflects the difference. Where Puntland could respond to exclusion by exercising powers it already possessed, Madhesi actors could escalate protest but could not withdraw an administration from a settlement in which they had never held one. The comparison thus suggests that foundational asymmetry is the condition that converts a membership claim into an existential dispute. The claim supplies the grievance; the pre-existing institution supplies the capacity to act on it. Nepal shows what the claim looks like without the second condition.
   Two further cases mark the outer boundaries of the argument. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the other principal instance of building-up federalization, and its entities — above all the Republika Srpska — possess exactly the pre-union institutional inheritance and the authorship claim the argument describes (Zulueta-Fülscher and Welikala 2025; Vanjek 2018). Ethiopia is the inverse case: Yimenu (2025) and Fiseha (2025) document a federalism imposed from the centre on regions whose boundaries and powers were drawn by the governing party, and the resulting regional governments have strengthened over three decades without ever attaining the status of a founding party to the union. Both cases are consistent with the scope condition, and neither can be assessed here at the depth the argument requires. They are named to show where the claim should and should not travel, not to establish it.
   Taken together, the comparison with Nepal and the boundary cases suggest a refinement that the single case could not produce. The founder’s claim is not simply a function of exclusion from a settlement; it is a function of exclusion combined with an institutional basis for asserting an alternative. Units that can point to a government, a constitution and a security force of their own already possess the material of membership. Units that cannot possess only the grievance. This is why foundational asymmetry and the founder’s claim belong together, and why the second alone would be an incomplete explanation.
7. Implications for divided-society settlements
   If the founder’s claim is operative, the remedy for an incomplete federation is neither to freeze the centre at a permanently weak level nor to impose uniformity on unequal constituent units. It is to sequence national capacity-building through institutions that make shared authority credible while recognising inherited differences in institutional capacity. Three implications follow, each tied to the membership dimension of the argument.
   Recognition before machinery. Where a unit’s grievance concerns authorship, building better intergovernmental machinery without addressing its standing treats a membership dispute as a coordination problem. Institutionalising the consultation requirements of Articles 54 and 142 — converting them from episodic political demands into predictable procedure — addresses the recognition dimension directly. The devices are familiar: upper chambers with genuine territorial representation, double-majority amendment rules, consent procedures, referendums or constitutional courts, each designed to prevent one level from unilaterally redefining the bargain.
   Asymmetry managed rather than denied. Where constituent units possess unequal administrative and infrastructural capacity because of different state-building histories, identical implementation schedules or recentralising measures impose unequal losses. Transitional asymmetry, differentiated implementation and negotiated safeguards may be justified while weaker institutions develop, provided such arrangements remain transparent and compatible with equal citizenship. The distinction that matters is between equality of constitutional status and uniformity of institutional treatment.
   Consolidation downward as well as upward. Somalia’s federal debate concentrates on relations between Mogadishu and state capitals, yet the Provisional Constitution places local administrations within Federal Member States. Strengthening local government, minority representation and equal citizenship is necessary if resistance to centralisation at the federal level is not to reproduce centralisation within member states — a risk that any recognition-based settlement must confront, since claims about authorship can themselves become instruments of internal domination.
   Taken together, these implications redefine state-building in an incomplete federation. Building the centre and building the federation are not the same task, but neither can be durable without the other. National capacity becomes federal consolidation only when its growth is embedded in institutions of shared rule.
8. Alternative accounts and scope conditions
   Three competing explanations deserve consideration, and none can be dismissed.
   One holds that constitutionally entrenched member states deepen clan territorialism and weaken national citizenship — the classic objection to ethno-federalism, and the central finding of much of the recent Somali literature (Elmi and Barise 2006; Dahir and Sheikh Ali 2024; Barre 2024) as well as of the comparative work on subnational conflict under ethno-
   federal arrangements (Roeder 2009; Juon and Rohrbach 2023). This risk is real. Federal institutions can harden territorial identities and expose minorities within regions. The mechanism does not imply, however, that unitary hierarchy is the only remedy; it implies that federal self-rule must be paired with enforceable national citizenship, mobility, anti-discrimination guarantees and institutions of shared rule. Another emphasises administrative cost: multiple governments duplicate scarce institutions and generate coordination failures. Cost alone cannot determine constitutional form where the underlying dispute concerns who may exercise authority, and efficiency gains from centralisation may prove politically unsustainable where they depend on arrangements constituent actors do not regard as binding. The third concerns security. Armed groups exploit jurisdictional fragmentation, and neighbouring states cultivate regional relationships. Yet national command on paper is not an integrated security system. Effective federal defence requires agreed command protocols, intelligence sharing, interoperable forces, transparent financing and rules for deployment across member-state territory — arrangements harder to negotiate than central orders, but more likely to be obeyed when constituent governments regard them as legitimate.
   The study’s scope conditions are the following. The argument applies to federations in which a constituent unit predates the common centre, where the settlement remains incomplete at the moment of central consolidation, and where shared-rule institutions are too weak to absorb disputes about competence. It does not claim that self-constituted units are more legitimate than others, that every objection to centralisation expresses a founder’s claim, or that the claim always produces escalation; where a unit’s objection is distributive, the ordinary literature on asymmetric federalism should explain it, and Expectation 3 is the test for distinguishing the two.
   Three limitations follow. Puntland is not representative of every Somali territory, and its comparatively long institutional history makes it a particularly revealing case of both foundational asymmetry and the founder’s claim; a unit created by the federal process would be expected to behave differently, and that expectation is itself testable. The paper does not measure institutional stock with a standardised cross-state index, nor does it directly observe elite beliefs through a new interview dataset; the founder’s claim is inferred from institutional history, founding texts and the framing of public positions, and should be examined further through elite interviews, archival evidence and comparison across Federal Member States. Finally, the within-case comparison in §6 is not controlled, and the argument should be read as a set of expectations for wider comparative testing rather than as a settled causal account.
9. Conclusion
   Somalia’s recurring federal disputes resist reduction to a choice between a strong centre and autonomous regions. Institutional sequence accounts for much of the pattern. The founder’s claim describes a unit that treats its membership as authorship of the settlement, which turns procedural questions into questions of political standing. Centralization without federal consolidation describes common authority expanding before shared-rule institutions can legitimate or constrain it. Foundational asymmetry points to the unequal institutional stocks units bring into a federation built from below, and to why formally symmetric rules impose unequal costs.
   Puntland makes these dynamics visible. Its territorial institutions predate Somalia’s contemporary federal settlement, its founding process accumulated governing institutions before the common centre was consolidated, and its charter located Puntland within a future federal Somalia rather than beneath an established unitary centre. The 2012 Provisional Constitution partly reflects this history through Article 142’s preservation and consultation clauses and Article 54’s negotiated allocation of powers. The contrast between the 2024 constitutional amendments and the 2023 Baidoa agreement suggests that how a centralising measure is reached shapes what kind of dispute it becomes: bypass converts ordinary policy disagreement into a contest over the settlement’s validity, while negotiation keeps contention distributive and containable.
   The case does not show that centralisation is inherently destabilising, that pre-existing member states are inherently more legitimate, or that every demand for consultation amounts to a veto. It shows that the sequence through which common authority is built matters, and that it matters most where a unit believes the union was partly its own creation. National capacity that grows through negotiated allocation, institutionalised consultation, fiscal rules and accepted dispute-resolution mechanisms can strengthen a federation. Capacity that grows through institutional bypass risks converting policy disputes into disputes about whether the federation was ever jointly made.
   For the comparative study of divided societies, the implication is that territorial settlements are not only about how much authority each level holds. They are also about whether the parties recognise one another as authors of the arrangement. That recognition cannot be engineered by constitutional design alone, which is precisely why the institutional question and the politics of identity have to be considered together.
   Disclosure statement
   No potential conflict of interest is reported.
   Funding
   The research received no external funding.
   Data availability statement
   No new dataset was created for this study. The analysis is based on publicly available constitutional documents, institutional reports, published scholarship and cited news reporting.
   Author biographical detail
   Ismail H. Warsame is a Somali policy analyst, author, and one of the founding figures of Puntland State, a Federal Member State of Somalia. He served as the state’s first Chief of Staff (Chief of Cabinet) to the Presidency during Puntland’s formative years (1998–2004), helping build its administrative institutions during the early period of decentralized constitutional governance in Somalia. He later worked with the joint UN–World Bank Reconstruction and Development Programme as Zonal Technical Coordinator for Puntland, and subsequently as National Aid Technical Coordinator with Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government in cooperation with the European Union. Warsame is the founder of Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) and Warsame Digital Media (WDM), through which he has published editorials, policy papers, and historical essays on Somali federalism, constitutional governance, security, and state-building.
   Declaration of generative AI use
   OpenAI ChatGPT (GPT-5 family) was used during manuscript preparation for structural organisation, language revision, drafting support, literature organisation and formatting. The author determined the research question, source selection, analysis and conclusions, reviewed and verified the manuscript and references, and accepts responsibility for the submitted work.
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https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/somalias-economy-at-the-mercy-of

Somalia’s Emptying Bases And The Security Question No One Has Answered – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/04112026-somalias-emptying-bases-and-the-security-question-no-one-has-answered-oped/

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/puntland-constitutional-amendments

Qiimayn Dastuuri ah iyo Talooyin ku Saabsan Sagaalka Qodob ee Xukuumaddu Soo Jeedisay

Qore: Ismail H Warsame

Hordhac

Dastuurku waa heshiiska aasaasiga ah ee shacabka iyo dowladda, waana saldhigga sharciyadda hay’adaha, xuquuqda muwaadiniinta iyo xaddidaadda awoodda dowladda. Wax-ka-beddelkiisu waa inuu waafaqsanaadaa mabaadi’da sarreynta Dastuurka, awoodda shacabka, kala-soocidda awoodaha, madax-bannaanida Garsoorka iyo isla-xisaabtanka.

Qiimaynta Sagaalka Qodob

1. Qodobka 37aad – Xuquuqda Shaqaalaha

Kordhinta nasashada toddobaadlaha ah iyo ilaalinta fasaxyada shaqaaluhu waxay xoojinayaan xuquuqda aasaasiga ah ee shaqaalaha. Hase yeeshee, xuquuq dastuuri ahi waxay u baahan tahay dammaanad sharci iyo awood lagu dhaqan-geliyo.

Talo: In si cad loo qeexo cidda xuquuqahani khuseeyaan, waajibaadka loo-shaqeeyayaasha iyo habka lagu xaqiijinayo fulintooda.

2. Qodobka 41aad – Xuquuqda Siyaasadeed ee Muwaadinka

Xaqa codbixintu waa muujinta awoodda shacabka. Isdiiwaangelinta hore waxay fududayn kartaa ka-qaybgalka dhallinyarada, balse madmadowga da’du wuxuu dhalin karaa muran sharci iyo kala-duwanaansho ku yimaadda hirgelinta xuquuqda codbixinta.

Talo: In la kala caddeeyo da’da isdiiwaangelinta iyo tan codbixinta, lana xaqiijiyo in muwaadinku xaqa codbixinta yeesho marka uu buuxiyo 18 sano.

3. Qodobka 44aad – Doorashada Madaxweynaha iyo Madaxweyne Ku-xigeenka

In doorashada tooska ah lagu beddelo mid Baarlamaani ah waxay beddelaysaa habka ay madaxda fulintu ku helayaan awooddooda doorasho. Labada habba waxay yeelan karaan sharciyad dimuqraadiyadeed, balse waxay ku kala duwan yihiin xiriirka Madaxweynaha, Baarlamaanka iyo shacabka.

Talo: In Xukuumaddu soo bandhigto sababaha iyo caddaymaha keenay dib-u-eegista nidaamkii 2023, lana caddeeyo sida loo ilaalinayo isla-xisaabtanka Madaxweynaha iyo awoodda shacabka ee doorashada hoggaanka.

4. Qodobka 47aad – Nidaamka Xisbiyada Siyaasadeed

Nidaamka xisbiyadu waa tiir ka mid ah dimuqraadiyadda iyo siyaasadda loo dhan yahay. Tirtiridda qodob nidaaminaya beddelka xisbi burbura waxay keeni kartaa faaruq sharci haddii aan la caddayn shuruudaha aqoonsiga, sii-jiritaanka iyo kala-dirista xisbiyada.

Talo: In Qodobbada 46aad iyo 47aad la iswaafajiyo, lana xaqiijiyo tartan siyaasadeed oo caddaalad ah, shuruudo cad iyo xaqa racfaanka.

5. Qodobka 74aad – Qaab-dhismeedka Hay’adda Fulinta

Ku darista Wasiiru-dowlayaasha waxay caddayn kartaa qaab-dhismeedka Xukuumadda, balse magacaabista xilal dastuuri ah waa inay la socotaa qeexidda awoodaha, waajibaadka iyo masuuliyadda sharci ee xilalkaas.

Talo: In la caddeeyo shaqada Wasiiru-dowlayaasha, cidda ay hoos yimaadaan iyo habka lagula xisaabtamayo.

6. Qodobka 81aad – Buuxinta Jagada Madaxweyne Ku-xigeenka

In xisbiga aqlabiyadda leh loo wareejiyo awoodda soo magacaabista Madaxweyne Ku-xigeenka waxay beddelaysaa habkii Golaha Wakiilladu si toos ah ugu dooran jiray qofka buuxinaya jagada. Waxay sidoo kale dhalinaysaa su’aalo ku saabsan awoodda Baarlamaanka iyo xaaladaha aan xisbi keli ahi aqlabiyad haysan.

Talo: In la caddeeyo macnaha aqlabiyadda, xuquuqda Baarlamaanka ee diidmada musharraxa, xaaladaha isbahaysiga iyo habka looga hortagayo bannaanaansho daba dheeraada.

7. Qodobka 90aad – Madax-bannaanida Maxkamadda Sare

Madax-bannaanida Garsoorku waa dammaanadda sarreynta Dastuurka iyo ilaalinta xuquuqda muwaadiniinta. Muddo-xileedka shanta sano ah iyo suurtagalnimada dib-u-magacaabistu waxay dhalinayaan su’aasha ah in garsoorayaashu si madax-bannaan u go’aamin karaan dacwadaha khuseeya hay’adaha awoodda u leh magacaabistooda.

Talo: In la dejiyo dammaanado cad oo ku saabsan magacaabista, dib-u-magacaabista, xil-ka-qaadista iyo amniga muddo-xileedka garsoorayaasha, si looga hortago faragelin siyaasadeed.

8. Qodobka 113aad – Madax-bannaanida Guddiga Doorashooyinka

Doorasho xor iyo xalaal ahi waxay ku xirnaan kartaa kalsoonida lagu qabo hay’adda maamulaysa. Tartanka furan ee xubnaha Guddigu wuxuu kor u qaadi karaa hufnaanta, balse magaca tartan furan keligiis ma dammaanad qaadayo madax-bannaani.

Talo: In la caddeeyo cidda soo xulaysa guddiga xulista, shuruudaha musharraxiinta, habka qiimaynta, ka-hortagga danaha iska hor imanaya iyo awoodda Madaxweynaha iyo Baarlamaanka ee ansixinta.

9. Qodobka 126aad – Shuruudaha Xubnaha Golayaasha Deegaanka

Kor u qaadista heerka waxbarashada waxay la xiriiri kartaa tayada maamulka, balse xaqa muwaadinka ee isu-sharraxidda xil dadweyne waa xuquuq siyaasadeed. Shuruud waxbarasho oo adag waxay saamayn ku yeelan kartaa matalaadda bulshada, gaar ahaan deegaannada ay fursadaha waxbarashadu xaddidan yihiin.

Talo: In la qiimeeyo saamaynta shuruuddan, lana tixgeliyo aqoon u dhiganta, waayo-aragnimo iyo tababar, iyadoo la ilaalinayo sinnaanta fursadaha siyaasadeed.

Gunaanad: Dastuurka iyo Xadka Awoodda Wax-ka-beddelka

Mabaadi’da aasaasiga ah ee Dastuurka waxaa loogu talagalay inay sii jiraan marka ay isbeddelaan xukuumadaha iyo duruufaha siyaasadeed. Hase yeeshee, in mabda’ gaar ahi sharci ahaan yahay mid aan la beddeli karin waxay ku xiran tahay Dastuurka iyo xeerarka khuseeya.

Sidaas darteed, saddex su’aalood ayaa mudan in wadatashiga dadweynuhu ka jawaabo:

1. Wax-ka-beddelladu ma waafaqsan yihiin Dastuurka iyo habraaciisa wax-ka-beddelka?
2. Ma ilaalinayaan awoodda shacabka, kala-soocidda awoodaha, madax-bannaanida hay’adaha iyo xuquuqda muwaadiniinta?
3. Ma jiraan dammaanado iyo habraacyo cad oo ka hortagaya in isbeddelladu abuuraan muran dastuuri ah mustaqbalka?

Dastuurka Puntland waa inuu noqdaa saldhigga joogtada ah ee nidaamka dowladnimo, ee aanu noqon xeer lagu saleeyo oo keliya baahiyaha siyaasadeed ee xukuumad kasta.

Wadatashiga dadweynaha iyo go’aanka Golaha Wakiilladuba waa inay ku dhisnaadaan sharciyad, caddayn, dood furan iyo ilaalinta mabaadi’da aasaasiga ah ee Dastuurka.

Qore: Ismail H Warsame

Wax-ka-beddelka Dastuurka Puntland ma aha hawl degdeg lagu dhammeeyo ama go’aan siyaasadeed oo Xukuumadda iyo Baarlamaanku keliya ku koobi karaan. Dastuurku waa heshiiska aasaasiga ah ee shacabka Puntland, sidaas darteed wax-ka-beddelkiisu wuxuu u baahan yahay daraasad qoto dheer, wadatashi dadweyne oo ballaaran, iyo is-afgarad siyaasadeed iyo bulsho.

Waa in la dhisaa Guddi Dastuuri ah oo gaar ah, karti iyo aqoon u leh arrimaha dastuurka, kana kooban xubno Golaha Wakiillada ah, khubaro sharci iyo dastuur, iyo wakiillo madax-bannaan oo bulshada rayidka ah. Guddigan waa inuu leeyahay waajibaad cad oo ku saabsan abaabulka, qabashada, kormeerka iyo diiwaangelinta natiijooyinka wadatashiga dadweynaha, iyadoo la ilaalinayo awoodaha dastuuriga ah ee Golaha Wakiillada.

Waxaa muhiim ah in Puntland ka fiirsato muranka ka dhashay wax-ka-beddellada Dastuurka Federaalka Soomaaliya ee Madaxweyne Xasan Sheekh Maxamuud iyo taageerayaashiisa Baarlamaanka lagu dhaliilay inay ku dhaqaaqeen iyada oo aan la helin is-afgarad siyaasadeed oo ku filan. Taageerayaasha isbeddelladaas waxay ku doodayaan inay mareen habraacyada hay’adaha sharci-dejinta, halka dadka ka soo horjeeda ay su’aal geliyaan heerka wadatashiga iyo heshiiska siyaasadeed. Puntland waxay tusaalahan ka baran kartaa muhiimadda ay leedahay kala saaridda ansixinta sharciyeed iyo aqbalaadda ballaaran ee bulshada.

Laba Hab oo Wadatashiga Loo Qaban Karo

1. Shirweyne Dastuuri ah oo Kooban

In la qabto shirweyne wadatashi oo ay ka qaybgalaan Golaha Wakiillada, Xukuumadda, siyaasiyiinta, isimada dhaqanka, aqoonyahannada dastuurka, haweenka, dhallinyarada iyo ururrada bulshada rayidka ah.

Shirweynuhu wuxuu qodob kasta ka doodi karaa saamayntiisa, wuxuuna soo saari karaa talooyin iyo qodobbada la isku afgartay iyo kuwa weli lagu kala aragti duwan yahay.

2. Wadatashi Dadweyne oo Ballaaran oo Gobollada Puntland ah

In waqti ku filan loo qoondeeyo wadatashi ka dhaca gobollada iyo degmooyinka Puntland, si muwaadiniintu u helaan fursad ay ku fahmaan sagaalka qodob, uguna soo bandhigaan aragtidooda.

Guddiga gaarka ahi waa inuu ururiyaa, diiwaangeliyaa, kana diyaariyaa warbixin rasmi ah dhammaan talooyinka, ka hor inta aan Golaha Wakiilladu guda gelin go’aanka kama dambaysta ah.

Mawqifka Qoraaga

Waxaan qabaa in sharciyadda habraaca Baarlamaanku aanay keligeed beddeli karin baahida loo qabo wadatashi dadweyne iyo is-afgarad siyaasadeed, gaar ahaan marka la beddelayo qodobbada taabanaya doorashada Madaxweynaha, madax-bannaanida Garsoorka iyo Guddiga Doorashooyinka.

Labada hab ee kor ku xusan waa la isku dari karaa: shirweyne kooban oo lagu bilaabo doodda iyo wadatashi gobollada oo lagu ballaariyo ka-qaybgalka shacabka.

Dastuurka Puntland waa inuu noqdaa heshiis jiilasha u dhexeeya, ee aanu noqon go’aan siyaasadeed oo ku kooban muddada xukuumad ama Baarlamaan.

Before The State: Polity, Identity And Order In Precolonial Somalia – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/29102026-before-the-state-polity-identity-and-order-in-precolonial-somalia-oped/

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/puntland-a-president-cannot-report?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5b23go

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/ilhan-omar-wdm-investigation-alert-665

A State Cannot Be Held By A Port Alone: Lessons From Puntland’s First Crisis – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/20102026-a-state-cannot-be-held-by-a-port-alone-lessons-from-puntlands-first-crisis-oped/

WDM Editorial

A Somali voice in a global journal

GAROWE, Puntland, Somalia — The email from the editors of Environmental Policy and Governance arrived in October 2026. Ismail H. Warsame’s manuscript, “Environmental Governance and the Vocational Skills Deficit in Fragile States: A Comparative Policy Review of Somalia, Yemen and Liberia,” had been accepted. The journal is published by Wiley and edited by Andy Gouldson, and it has a long record of printing serious work on how societies look after their environments. Getting in is hard.

We think this acceptance is worth more than a line in a publication list. Most research on fragile states is still produced by people who study them from a distance. Warsame lives and works in Garowe. His article takes an argument formed here, in Puntland, and puts it in front of the people who shape environmental policy research worldwide.

The question he asks is one the field usually skips. A ministry drafts an environmental policy. A government adopts it. Then who goes out and does the work?

Policy without hands

His answer is that fragile states are not mainly short of rules. They tend to have plenty of laws, national strategies and donor frameworks. What they don’t have is enough trained people to enforce the rules, keep watch over forests, pastures and fishing grounds, repair the damage and earn a decent living from the land and sea without wrecking it.

The article started as a study of Somalia alone. That study followed four kinds of damage: plastic pollution, illegal fishing, worn-out rangelands and frankincense trees tapped beyond what they can bear. Warsame traced each one back to the same weak spot, the country’s technical and vocational education and training (TVET) system.

Put plainly, if there are no fisheries officers, no one patrols the coast. If there are no extension workers, damaged rangeland doesn’t recover. Untrained harvesters overtap frankincense trees, and without technicians, rubbish piles up. The gap in skills becomes a gap in protection, and the damage moves into it.

Three countries, one pattern

Was this a Somali problem, or something bigger? To find out, Warsame added Yemen and Liberia to the study. At first glance the three have little in common. They are in different regions, they have different histories and their crises are at different stages.

Somalia has lived through decades of state collapse, has a long coastline and depends on pastoral economies that are under heavy strain. Yemen is torn apart by a war that has not ended, and its fishing communities and already scarce water are both at risk. Liberia is about two decades past its civil wars and still rebuilding, with its forests and mineral wealth on the line.

That is why the comparison works. If the same shortage of skilled people shows up in all three places, it is hard to call it a local quirk. It looks more like part of what fragility is. It also gives readers well beyond Somali studies a reason to pay attention.

What the article adds

Two groups of researchers rarely read each other’s work. Environmental governance scholars write about institutions, regulations and money. Education and labor scholars write about jobs, employability and growth. Warsame brings the two together. In his account, vocational skills are part of the governance system itself, as necessary to making environmental policy work as any law or budget.

This has practical consequences. Aid programs that pay for strategies and plans but not for the people to carry them out will keep falling short where policy meets the ground. And vocational training could be built around environmental goals, instead of being treated only as a way to create jobs.

For fragile states, there is good news in this. Building skills does not have to wait for a strong central government. Regional administrations, universities and communities can start now, even while national politics remains unsettled.

Earned through review

The article did not reach its final form easily. It began as a single-country study, “Environmental Degradation and the Vocational Skills Deficit in Somalia.”

For Environmental Policy and Governance, Warsame widened it to three countries. In October 2026 the journal sent back a major-revisions decision and asked that the piece be considered as a review article. He rewrote it along those lines, and the revised version was accepted later that month under a new title that reflects its comparative and policy focus.

He had until January 2027 to submit the revision. He met the reviewers’ demands nearly three months early, which speaks to how solid the research was and how well he knew his material.

Why it matters for Somalia and Puntland

For Somali readers, and for the partners who work with Somali institutions, none of this is abstract. Puntland’s frankincense groves, fishing grounds and rangelands are part of the Somali case, and each one needs people trained to look after it.

Warsame knows this from experience, not only from research. He was Puntland’s first chief of Cabinet, from 1998 to 2004. He later worked with the joint U.N. and World Bank Secretariat on Somalia’s Reconstruction and Development Programme, then coordinated aid for the Transitional Federal Government with the European Union. In those years he saw firsthand how plans written in capitals and donor offices ran up against what local institutions could actually do.

So the article comes from someone who has been in the rooms where aid priorities are set. He has now checked what he saw there against evidence from three fragile states.

Conclusion

This acceptance is a real contribution to the field. The article puts vocational skills on the agenda of environmental governance research. It shows that Somalia, Yemen and Liberia share the same problem. And it brings a Horn of Africa scholar who has also worked as a practitioner into a conversation that too often talks about fragile states rather than with them.

The article is now in production at Wiley. Its message should hold long after the current round of policy debates: environmental protection in fragile states will work only when the people responsible for it have been trained to do the job.

A WDM Editorial
Warsame Digital Media — Commentary and Critical Analysis
Oct. 18, 2026
The federal investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar has taken a turn that deserves more careful attention than the headlines it is generating. According to a report by The New York Times published Oct. 16, federal investigators seized the cellphone of Omar’s sister, Sahra Noor, earlier this year, reviewed family text messages on it and used that information to help persuade a federal judge to authorize the Oct. 12 search of Omar’s Washington residence. The report rests on three people familiar with the investigation. The Justice Department has not confirmed the seizure, and Omar’s office declined to comment directly on it.
Much of the coverage has treated this as a revelation of guilt — the “explosive text” that “triggered the raid.” It is nothing of the sort, at least not yet. What it is, if accurate, is a window into how the government built its path to one of the most consequential searches ever carried out against a sitting member of Congress. That path deserves scrutiny on its own terms.

What is actually known
The outlines of the case are now reasonably clear from multiple reports. A federal grand jury is examining alleged fraud and false statements in immigration paperwork filed by Omar and relatives, reportedly dating to the 1990s. Investigators have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to Noor and at least one other family member. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), searched Omar’s home on Oct. 12 and reportedly removed her phone, passport, notebooks and computers. The White House border czar, Tom Homan, had confirmed a federal criminal investigation roughly a month earlier.
Omar’s lawyers have said the search was neither justified nor lawful. Omar herself has called the investigation part of a decade-long campaign of “baseless lies,” and she is on the ballot in a midterm election less than three weeks away.
What is not known is far more important. The text messages have not been disclosed. Their content, their authorship, their context and whether they say anything at all about the immigration filings at issue remain unknown to the public. No charge has been filed. No court has found wrongdoing. No denaturalization proceeding has been opened.
A federal judge signing a search warrant means the government persuaded that judge there was probable cause to believe evidence of a crime would be found at the location searched. That is a real threshold, and it should not be dismissed. But it is a low one by design, and it is reached in a one-sided proceeding in which the target has no voice. Warrant applications rely heavily on the government’s own characterization of its evidence — including, here, its characterization of private messages exchanged among family members.
Family text messages are an especially slippery foundation. They are written in shorthand, in-jokes and shared memory. In Somali families, they frequently move between Somali and English, rely on clan and kinship references outsiders misread, and reference events decades old through the lens of oral rather than documentary memory. A line that reads as an admission to an agent unfamiliar with that world may read as something entirely different to the people who wrote it. Whether the warrant application handled this material with care is precisely the kind of question that can only be answered if the application is eventually tested in open court.

The documentation problem at the heart of the case
Reports indicate the government’s theory may hinge on whether Omar, or her late father on her behalf, misstated her age or family relationships in refugee and immigration paperwork. Her father died in 2020, which complicates any effort to establish who said what, and why, more than 30 years ago.
This is where the case intersects with a history that Somali readers know intimately and American audiences often do not. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled the collapse of the state in 1991 into refugee camps in Kenya and beyond, many without birth certificates, identity documents or any civil registry to consult. Dates of birth were routinely estimated, assigned or rounded by camp officials and caseworkers. Family composition was reconstructed under conditions of displacement, death and separation. Inconsistencies in the paperwork of that generation are not unusual; they are close to universal.
That context does not settle whether any individual committed fraud. Deliberate false statements are a crime, and the law does not excuse them because circumstances were chaotic. But it does mean that discrepancies in 1990s refugee files are weak evidence of intent on their own, and that investigators reading family messages for signs of conscious deception carry a heavy burden of interpretation.

The legal bar for revoking citizenship
Much of the public commentary has leapt to the prospect of stripping Omar of her citizenship, which she obtained in 2000. That leap ignores the law. In Maslenjak v. United States (2017), the U.S. Supreme Court held unanimously that the government cannot revoke citizenship over just any false statement in the naturalization process; it must show that the illegal act played a meaningful role in the acquisition of citizenship. Civil denaturalization likewise requires proof that is clear, unequivocal and convincing.
In other words, even if investigators can show that some detail in decades-old paperwork was wrong, they would still have to prove it was material to the grant of citizenship — and, in a criminal case, prove intent beyond a reasonable doubt. A text message, however unflattering, is a long way from either standard.

The questions that matter
The most important issues raised by the Times report are not about Omar’s family but about the government’s conduct.
First, on what basis was Noor’s phone seized earlier this year, and what was the scope of the authority used to search it? Evidence gathered from one person’s device and then deployed against another raises legitimate questions about the reach of the original warrant or subpoena.
Second, did the warrant application for Omar’s home fairly represent the messages to the judge, including any innocent or ambiguous readings? Courts have long held that material omissions or misstatements in warrant affidavits can invalidate a search.
Third, why was an immigration-paperwork inquiry into a member of Congress escalated to an early-morning residential search in the final weeks of an election campaign? The Justice Department’s own long-standing practice counsels caution about overt investigative steps that could affect an election. Whether that practice was followed, waived or abandoned is a matter for congressional oversight.
Fourth, what of the speech or debate protections that shield legislative materials? Seizing a sitting member’s phone and computers inevitably sweeps in privileged congressional communications. How investigators are filtering that material should be disclosed to the appropriate oversight committees.

WDM assessment
The reported use of Sahra Noor’s phone is a meaningful development because it tells us, for the first time, something about the evidentiary route to the Oct. 12 warrant. It is not evidence of immigration fraud, and it is not evidence of a criminal conspiracy. It is evidence that the government has been building this case through Omar’s family for months.
For Somali communities in Minnesota and across the diaspora, the case carries a weight beyond one politician. Many of them carry the same imperfect paper trail from the same camps and the same years. How the government treats Omar’s file will be read, rightly or wrongly, as a signal of how it may treat theirs.
That is why the standard must be the same one that applies to anyone: allegations attributed, not asserted; evidence tested, not leaked; and conclusions drawn in court, not on cable news. WDM will continue to follow the sealed proceedings, congressional oversight and any court filings that bring the underlying evidence into the open.

By Andrew Bobby Tuley

O͏c͏t͏o͏b͏e͏r͏ ͏1͏6͏ ,

[Courtesy]

WHY BOTH PARTIES WANT REP. ILHAN OMAR GONE , AND WHY THEY CAN’T BEAT HER FAIRLY

By Andrew Bobby Tuley, Pan African, Philosopher, Theologian, Humanitarian, And Global Health Strategist.

The hatred for Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is the only true bipartisan consensus in Washington. Republicans and Democrats despise her for different reasons, but for the same root cause: she cannot be beaten intellectually or electorally, so she must be eliminated procedurally.

This is not about one statement. It is about what she represents — a Black, Muslim, refugee woman who refused to learn the unspoken rules of the House.

I. WHY THE ESTABLISHMENT HATES HER: SHE BROKE THE CARDINAL RULE

Every freshman in Congress is taught two taboos: Do not question the Pentagon’s budget, and do not question the blank-check military aid to Israel.

Omar broke the second taboo on day one.

Challenging the Foreign Policy Orthodoxy: For 50 years, Congress has treated $3.8 billion a year in military aid to Israel and the automatic U.S. veto at the UN Security Council as untouchable. Omar did what no one had done from inside the chamber — she asked, publicly, why an ally accused by the International Court of Justice of plausible violations of international law should receive unconditional weapons, and why America should veto every resolution holding that ally accountable.

Her supporters argue correctly that her primary offense was not anti-Semitism. It was normalizing a debate that the establishment has spent billions to keep abnormal. Once you allow a sitting member to say “let’s condition aid on human rights compliance” and survive, the entire consensus collapses. The ferocious institutional backlash — censure, removal from the Foreign Affairs Committee — was not about her tone. It was about protecting a foundational consensus from becoming a mainstream debate.

That is why both parties piled on. For Republicans, support for Israel is an evangelical and strategic litmus test. For Democratic leadership, AIPAC and related donor networks are a foundational fundraising pillar. Omar threatened the money and the consensus at the same time. In Washington, that is a capital offense.

II. THE HYPOCRISY THAT EXPOSES THE REAL MOTIVE: THE DOUBLE STANDARD ON LOYALTY

This is where the critical lens reveals the bigotry.

There are 100 members of Congress who openly describe themselves as pro-Israel and who fundraise on that identity. There are members who hold dual citizenships, who attend foreign government rallies, who say “I am an Irish-American first” or “I am a proud Zionist.” No one questions their loyalty. No one demands they be investigated for immigration fraud.

The Double Standard on Identity and Loyalty: When Omar says, “I am an American in Congress but I am a Somali girl, a girl with your lineage, your language, your religion,” she is criminalized for the same diaspora sentiment that every other ethnic politician expresses.

The difference is race, gender, and religion. A white congressman who says “I want to help Ireland prosper” is a statesman. A Black Muslim woman who says “I want Somalia to be stable” is a foreign agent. The accusation that she is anti-American for advocating for international law is only applied to her because her identity makes her an easy target for bad-faith patriotism tests. Her defense of Palestinians is reframed as hatred of America, while defending a foreign government’s bombing campaign is reframed as love of America.

That inversion is the tell. It is not about loyalty. It is about who is allowed to define loyalty.

III. WHY THEY CAN’T BEAT HER AT THE BALLOT BOX — AND WHAT THEY DO INSTEAD

This is the most damning fact for both parties: They have tried to defeat her democratically, and they have failed every time.

Frustration at her Electoral Resilience: In 2020, 2022, and 2024, pro-Israel PACs and party insiders poured over $10 million combined into Minnesota’s 5th District to primary her. Her opponents — Antone Melton-Meaux, Don Samuels — were massively outspent by outside money. She still won by double digits. In her district, which is one of the most progressive, young, and diverse in America, her anti-war, housing-first, student-debt message is not radical. It is popular.

Because she cannot be beaten at the ballot box by her own constituents, her enemies had to change the venue.

The Republican Method: Twist the Law. Unable to beat her in an election they don’t vote in, Republicans weaponized the legal system. They turned a mistranslated Somali homecoming speech into an accusation of divided loyalty, turned a 1991 refugee flight into an accusation of immigration fraud, and turned a father’s alleged military rank into hereditary guilt. The strategy is not to convict her in court — the legal standard for denaturalization under 8 U.S.C. 1451 is almost impossible to meet for a 26-year-old citizenship. The strategy is to keep her under permanent investigation, to force her to spend campaign funds on lawyers instead of organizing, and to feed the “go back to Somalia” narrative for Fox News.

The Democratic Method: Primary by Proxy. Democrats cannot say “go back to Somalia” because it would alienate their base. So they do it with money. Leadership quietly allows or encourages outside groups like DMFI and AIPAC to spend millions to primary her, while publicly saying “we support all incumbents.” It is a laundering operation: outsource the hit to a Super PAC, keep your hands clean, and if she loses, replace her with a compliant centrist who will never question the $3.8 billion.

Both methods have the same goal: If we cannot beat her ideas in debate, and we cannot beat her votes in her district, we will beat her by making her radioactive and exhausted.

IV. THE ESTABLISHMENT’S COVER STORY — AND WHY IT FAILS

Of course, the official story is different.

The opposing institutional perspective maintains that the hostility is not a conspiracy, but accountability.

The Line Between Policy and Rhetoric: They argue that it was not her defense of Palestinians that triggered backlash, but her rhetoric — “It’s all about the Benjamins,” and her questioning of colleagues’ “allegiance to a foreign country” — which mirrored centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish money controlling politics and dual loyalty. From this view, censure was necessary to enforce institutional standards against bigotry.

The Strategic Importance of the Alliance: For the majority in Washington, support for Israel is not just politics. It is seen as a vital geopolitical necessity for Middle East stability and a moral commitment to a democratic ally. In that framework, pushing to cut military aid during a war is not an intellectual critique; it is a dangerous policy that undermines national security.

This cover story collapses under its own logic.

If it was only about rhetoric, why was she removed from committees while members who promoted Great Replacement Theory stayed? If it is about strategic alliances, why is questioning aid to Israel treated as treason, while questioning aid to Ukraine or Egypt is treated as fiscal conservatism?

The answer is simple: The rhetoric argument is the pretext. The alliance argument is the excuse. The real reason is power.

Omar proved that a refugee with no money, no political family, and no permission could win a safe seat, refuse corporate PAC money, and still survive. That model — if replicated — would destroy the fundraising model of both parties.

And that is why, since they cannot beat her intellectually in debate, and since they cannot beat her electorally in Minneapolis, Republicans will keep trying to twist the law to deport her, and Democrats will keep trying to fund her primary opponent to replace her.

They don’t hate her because she is weak. They hate her because she is resilient.

·

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Healing At Home: What A Garowe Hospital Reveals About Somalia’s Governance Gap – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/18102026-healing-at-home-what-a-garowe-hospital-reveals-about-somalias-governance-gap-oped/

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/ilhan-omar-wdm-investigation-alert-87a?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5b23go

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/the-cure-was-at-home-all-along?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5b23go

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/bardaale-wdm-baidoa-security-alert?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5b23go

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/ilhan-omar-wdm-investigation-alert-b52

Ilhan Omar Investigation Watch — Oct. 14, 2026
Significant new developments have emerged in the federal investigation involving U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
According to an Oct. 13 investigation by The Washington Post:
Family members subpoenaed: Federal investigators have reportedly issued grand jury subpoenas to members of Omar’s family.
Investigation’s focus clarified: Authorities are examining allegations involving decades-old immigration documents, including questions about Omar’s recorded birth date and her father’s naturalization. Omar has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
Potential offenses identified: A person familiar with the search warrant reported that it listed conspiracy, immigration fraud and false statements. These are investigative allegations, not criminal charges or findings of guilt.
Separate financial inquiry: U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has publicly acknowledged another investigation concerning Omar’s financial disclosures.
The developments follow the Oct. 12 search of Omar’s Washington residence by Homeland Security Investigations agents.

WDM assessment: The reported family subpoenas and disclosure of the investigation’s scope represent a meaningful escalation. However, no criminal charges against Omar or judicial findings establishing misconduct have been verified.
The investigation’s proximity to the Nov. 3 congressional elections continues to raise serious questions about political neutrality and the appropriate use of federal investigative powers.
WDM will continue distinguishing verified legal developments from unproven accusations and political rhetoric.
(washingtonpost.com)

October 13, 2026
Major new development: Somalia’s federal government imposes terrorism-related financial sanctions on former South West State President Abdiaziz Laftagareen and nine others.
Somalia’s National Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Committee announced on Tuesday, October 13, that it had placed 10 individuals on its national financial sanctions list over alleged links to Al-Shabaab.
Those designated include Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen, former Custodial Corps commander Mahad Abdirahman Adan (Shub), and Hassan Abdi Mohamed (Ugaas Hassan).
The decision requires financial institutions to freeze their assets, prohibits transactions benefiting them, and mandates reporting relevant financial activity to Somalia’s Financial Reporting Center.
Shabelle Media
Verification and security implications
Confirmed: The sanctions announcement is independently reported by Anadolu Agency, Shabelle Media Network and Garowe Online.
Not independently established: The underlying allegations of Al-Shabaab involvement. The published decision does not disclose detailed evidence against each individual. The sanctions must therefore not be interpreted as proof of terrorist collaboration.
Shabelle Media +1
Security assessment: This represents a significant escalation in the federal government’s confrontation with Laftagareen’s political and military network following the recent fighting around Baidoa and Qansaxdheere.
The measures could affect the network’s financial operations, but their actual enforcement and military consequences remain uncertain.
I found no independently confirmed reports dated October 13 of renewed major fighting inside Baidoa, additional territorial changes, airport closures or senior-level arrests.

Sources: Shabelle Media Network — October 13; Garowe Online — October 13; Anadolu Agency reporting — October 13.

When Dissent Becomes Evidence: The Search Of Ilhan Omar’s Home – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/12102026-when-dissent-becomes-evidence-the-search-of-ilhan-omars-home-oped/

Homeland Security Must Not Become an Instrument of Political Intimidation

Warsame Digital Media condemns any attempt by the United States Department of Homeland Security to intimidate, threaten or politically target sitting Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

A democratically elected member of the United States Congress is not an enemy of the state merely because she challenges the administration, criticizes its policies or speaks on behalf of communities whose voices are often marginalized.
Political disagreement is not a security threat. Dissent is not disloyalty. And the machinery of homeland security must never become a weapon against political opponents.
Congresswoman Omar’s constitutional rights, her electoral mandate and her entitlement to equal protection under the law deserve the same respect afforded to every other member of Congress, regardless of political affiliation, religion, ethnicity or national origin.

Congresswoman Omar’s constitutional rights, her electoral mandate and her entitlement to equal protection under the law deserve the same respect afforded to every other member of Congress, regardless of political affiliation, religion, ethnicity or national origin.

WDM calls for congressional scrutiny, full public accountability consistent with the integrity of the investigation, and an unequivocal commitment that federal law enforcement will not be used to punish political dissent.

The United States cannot credibly champion democracy abroad while allowing legitimate concerns about political intimidation at home to go unanswered.
The issue is larger than Ilhan Omar. It concerns whether the world’s most powerful country can protect its own institutions from the temptation to confuse political opposition with criminality.

Warsame Digital Media — Oct. 12, 2026

The World Keeps Misfiling Somalia – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/11102026-the-world-keeps-misfiling-somalia-oped/

Ethiopia Must Not Be Allowed To Burn: The Horn Cannot Survive It – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/10102026-ethiopia-must-not-be-allowed-to-burn-the-horn-cannot-survive-it-oped/

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/from-hanleys-somali-nomads-to-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5b23go

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/the-president-who-needs-rescuing?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5b23go

https://www.eurasiareview.com/05102026-egypts-brotherhood-with-somalia-has-always-served-cairo-first-oped/

By Ismail H. Warsame

Mukhtar Ainashe is right to demand a coherent Somali foreign policy. In his recent essay on Substack, he argues that diplomacy conducted through disconnected visits, conflicting signals and short-term political arrangements cannot substitute for a national strategy. He is correct. But his description of Somalia and Egypt as brotherly nations bound by “unbreakable” ties deserves the same scrutiny he applies to relations with Ethiopia.

The history is real. Its meaning, however, must be tested against conduct, above all when Somalis faced catastrophe. Friendship is easy to proclaim at a presidential reception. Its practical value shows when people fleeing war arrive at a border.

Interests, not sentiment

Egypt’s engagement with Somalia has long been shaped by two concerns: the security of its Nile waters and its rivalry with Ethiopia. Brotherhood belongs to the diplomatic vocabulary. Strategic calculation explains much of the substance.

That pattern has not faded. In August 2024, as Mogadishu protested Ethiopia’s memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, Cairo signed a defense cooperation protocol with Somalia, shipped weapons to Mogadishu and offered troops for the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM). A 2024 analysis by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) found that Egypt’s conduct in the Horn can be explained by its long-standing Nile dispute with Ethiopia, and that Cairo began intervening in the Ethiopia-Somalia conflict partly to put pressure on Addis Ababa. Somalia had legitimate reasons to seek partners. But Egypt’s timing reflected its own dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam at least as much as any concern for Somali sovereignty. swp-berlin

The distinction matters. Egypt’s interest in containing Ethiopia does not automatically coincide with Somalia’s interest in peace, institutional recovery and stable relations with its neighbors. A country that becomes the front line of someone else’s rivalry pays costs its patron does not. Cooperation can serve both nations, but Somali leaders must establish where their interests converge and where they diverge.

Mediation with a thumb on the scale

Egypt’s record as a peacemaker in Somalia reflects the same calculation. Ethiopia, mandated by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to lead the peace process, hosted negotiations at Sodere in December 1996 and January 1997 that brought 26 factions together in the National Salvation Council. The Sodere group planned a national reconciliation conference in Bosaso for Nov. 1, 1997. Instead, Hussein Aidid and his supporters traveled to Cairo to meet Ali Mahdi and other leaders. The talks there began Nov. 12, and on Dec. 22, 1997, with Aidid and Ali Mahdi as co-chairs, the participants signed the Cairo Declaration. That sequence comes from the U.N. secretary-general’s August 1999 report on Somalia (S/1999/882). refworldun

The Cairo process divided Somalis rather than reconciling them. Col. Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and Gen. Aden Abdullahi Nur “Gabyow” refused to sign, and Ethiopia accused Egypt of hijacking the Sodere process. The national reconciliation conference that Cairo scheduled for Baidoa in February 1998 never took place. When it failed, Aidid, Ali Mahdi and Osman “Atto” returned to Mogadishu and set about building an administration for the Benadir region, with the backing of Egypt’s special envoy for Somalia. Cairo’s diplomacy, in other words, revolved around Mogadishu’s faction leaders. The northeast went the other way: in July 1998, a constitutional conference in Garowe elected Abdullahi Yusuf president of the newly declared Puntland State. S 1999 882 ES +2

The regional verdict on such competing initiatives was harsh. In March 1998, IGAD’s Council of Ministers attributed the lack of progress in Somalia partly to the proliferation of parallel initiatives. Djibouti’s then-president, Hassan Gouled Aptidon, called for an end to Somali leaders’ “political tourism,” in which they visited foreign capitals to sign documents they later ignored. un

The pattern continued after Arta. The Transitional National Government formed in Djibouti in 2000 saw its authority challenged by leaders in the south and by the northern administrations in Puntland and Somaliland. Arab capitals nonetheless rallied behind it, and the humanitarian news agency IRIN reported at the time that Libya, Egypt and Yemen were prepared to send forces to support interim president Abdiqassim Salad Hassan. unmissionsthenewhumanitarian

Ethiopia’s mediation was hardly disinterested either. But Cairo’s motive has been stated plainly by outside observers. David Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia, wrote in 2003 that Egypt supports Somali unity and a strong Somali state because such a state can counterbalance Ethiopia, noting that 86% of the water reaching Egypt’s Aswan Dam originates in Ethiopia. A mediator that consistently favors one center of power over the regions is not a neutral broker. Cairo’s preferred outcome has been a strong Mogadishu, not a negotiated settlement among Somalia’s constituent parts. globalsecurity

Refuge as the test

The refugee record demands an honest accounting. Egypt did host Somalis during the civil war; the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, counted about 3,500 at the start of 1998. It would be inaccurate to say Egypt admitted none. But a few thousand people across years of state collapse, while neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia absorbed hundreds of thousands, establishes presence, not open access or adequate protection.

Scholarship on Somalis in Cairo bears this out. Egypt is a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but by placing reservations on four of its articles, it withdrew significant rights from refugees on its territory: employment, permanent residence and access to state education. Mulki Al-Sharmani, who has studied Somali refugees in Cairo since the late 1990s, describes Egypt as “a host society that is both closed and open to refugees.” aucegyptaucegypt

I recall that at the height of the civil war, some Western governments advised their citizens of Somali origin against traveling to Egypt unless they held Western passports. I have not yet located the original advisories and offer this as personal recollection rather than established fact. If confirmed, it would expose a painful contradiction: Somali identity, supposedly a bond of brotherhood, offered less assurance at an Egyptian border than a Western passport.

Gaza offers a contemporary test of the gap between declared solidarity and the protection of people. Egypt has mediated ceasefire talks and admitted Palestinians escaping the war. Human Rights Watch reports that about 110,000 people left Gaza for Egypt between October 2023 and May 2024, when Israel seized and closed the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing. Any assessment of Rafah must account for Israeli control; Egypt cannot fairly be portrayed as having admitted nobody or as holding sole power to reopen the crossing.

Yet Cairo’s own conduct remains open to criticism. Amnesty International has documented the arrest of Egyptians who peacefully expressed solidarity with Palestinians, as well as the detention and deportation of foreign activists who tried to join the Global March to Gaza in June 2025. A government that invokes Palestinian brotherhood while suppressing peaceful solidarity invites questions about the substance of that commitment.

Egypt’s rejection of permanent Palestinian displacement rests on defensible ground: expulsion could cost Palestinians their homeland, and Palestinians themselves reject such proposals. Cairo also cites its own national security. But opposing permanent displacement does not settle the separate humanitarian question of voluntary temporary refuge, medical evacuation and enforceable guarantees of return.

Somali interests first

The lesson for Somalia is straightforward. Egypt pursues Egyptian interests. Ethiopia pursues Ethiopian interests. Somali diplomacy must begin with Somali interests, measured by sovereignty, public safety, institutional development and accountability to citizens.

Ainashe’s call for strategic direction is persuasive. His assumption of an unquestionable Egyptian partnership weakens it. Visiting both Cairo and Addis Ababa is not, by itself, evidence of incoherence. The decisive questions are what commitments were made, whether they are compatible and what they will cost Somalia.

Historical friendship deserves recognition. Dependable partnership requires evidence. Somalia cannot afford a foreign policy in which declarations of brotherhood replace scrutiny, or in which another country’s rivalry becomes its national agenda.

---

Works cited

Mulki Al-Sharmani, “African Refugees: Ambivalent Status and Diasporic Struggles in Cairo,” in Diane Singerman, ed., Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity (American University in Cairo Press, 2009).

Mulki Al-Sharmani, “Livelihood and Identity Constructions of Somali Refugees in Cairo,” Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Working Paper No. 2 (American University in Cairo, 2003).

David H. Shinn, “The Horn of Africa: How Does Somaliland Fit?” paper delivered March 2003.

Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, “Escalation Risks in the Horn of Africa: Threats from Egypt, Ethiopia, and Somalia Exacerbate Local Conflicts,” SWP Comment 2024/C 50.

United Nations Security Council, “Report of the Secretary-General on the Situation in Somalia,” S/1999/882, Aug. 16, 1999.

From E-Visas To NIRA: Mogadishu’s Bureaucratic War On Ordinary Travelers – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/03102026-from-e-visas-to-nira-mogadishus-bureaucratic-war-on-ordinary-travelers-oped/

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/from-e-visas-to-nira-mogadishus-bureaucratic

https://ismailwarsame.substack.com/p/grievance-is-not-a-mandate-puntland?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5b23go

  September 29, 2026

Baidoa remains tense but relatively calm following Monday’s heavy fighting. Federal and South West administration forces retain control of the city’s principal government institutions, while forces aligned with former South West State President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen remain active outside Baidoa.
The human cost remains uncertain. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported that Bay Regional Hospital received 69 people affected by the violence, including five children, and recorded three deaths. A healthcare worker was killed, a health facility was severely damaged and an ambulance was looted. Roads leading to hospitals were also blocked during the fighting.
South West authorities have issued substantially higher casualty figures for attacking forces, but those figures remain independently unverified.
The Federal Government and South West authorities also allege that Al-Shabaab participated alongside Laftagareen-aligned forces. Laftagareen’s side denies the allegation, and independent reporting has not established operational cooperation between the two forces.

Brief Political Context
The fighting stems from an unresolved power struggle over South West State following the removal of Laftagareen’s administration and the installation of a new regional leadership backed by the Federal Government. Laftagareen and his supporters rejected the new political order and retained armed forces outside Baidoa. The dispute has consequently evolved from a political confrontation into repeated armed clashes over control and authority in the regional capital.
The immediate battle has subsided, but the underlying political and military confrontation remains unresolved, leaving Baidoa’s security situation fragile and vulnerable to renewed fighting.

WAPMEN/WDM — Monitoring

MSF UK

​

28/09/2026

28 September 2026 – Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is deeply alarmed by the impact of the escalating violence in Baidoa, Somalia’s South West State, on civilians and their access to essential healthcare. MSF urgently calls on all parties to the conflict to protect civilians, patients, healthcare workers and medical facilities, and to ensure that people in need of medical care can reach hospitals safely and without obstruction.

On the morning of Monday, 28 September, fighting erupted in and around Baidoa town for the third time since 17 August. A health facility was reportedly severely damaged, and a healthcare worker was killed. An ambulance was looted, while civilian homes were also reportedly attacked. Two medical staff working alongside MSF teams were robbed, and one was injured.

“This is the third time in six weeks that fighting has erupted in Baidoa, with devastating consequences for civilians. It is unacceptable that civilians and healthcare are being caught up in violence. Injured people need immediate medical attention, but many cannot reach hospital. Without timely treatment, many can bleed to death,” says Dr. Elshafie Mohammed, MSF Country Representative in Somalia.

“Health facilities, healthcare workers and patients must never be targeted. We call on all parties to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure and to ensure that patients can reach healthcare facilities safely, without fear, delay or obstruction.”

So far, medical teams working with the Ministry of Health at Bay Regional Hospital have received 69 patients affected by the violence, including five children. Three deaths have been recorded.

Roads leading to hospitals in Baidoa have been blocked since the fighting began, severely restricting access to medical care. Only a small number of wounded patients have managed to reach Bay Regional Hospital. ​

MSF is concerned that many wounded people remain unable to access treatment and expect more patients to arrive at the hospital once access routes reopen. The disruption is affecting not only those wounded in the violence, but also people who need other urgent and essential medical care. ​

Armed clashes also erupted in and around Baidoa town on 17 August, when teams at Bay Regional Hospital received 94 wounded people, including 29 women and 20 children, five of whom were under the age of five. Four deaths were recorded, including that of a young woman. A new wave of clashes began on the morning of 3 September, when teams received 71 wounded people, including 15 women and 12 children. One death was also recorded. ​

At Bay Regional Hospital, MSF works in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, supporting the emergency, maternity, paediatrics, nutrition and outpatient departments. ​

-ENDS-

• media@london.msf.org
• +44 (0) 207 067 4236

Address: Level 5, Artesian, 9 Prescot Street, London E1 8AZ

Contact

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The Tent Before The Palace: What The Warnings About Amman And Riyadh Teach The Horn – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/27092026-the-tent-before-the-palace-what-the-warnings-about-amman-and-riyadh-teach-the-horn-oped/