The Founder’s Claim: Territorial Authorship and the Politics of Membership in Somalia’s Federal Order

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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The Founder’s Claim: Territorial Authorship and the Politics of Membership in Somalia’s Federal Order

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ARAGTIDA MUWAADINKA EE WAX-KA-BEDDELKA DASTUURKA PUNTLAND 2026

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 … Continue reading ARAGTIDA MUWAADINKA EE WAX-KA-BEDDELKA DASTUURKA PUNTLAND 2026 →

Wax-ka-beddelka Dastuurku Ma Aha Xal Degdeg ah: Baahida Wadatashi Dadweyne iyo Is-afgarad Siyaasadeed

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 … Continue reading Wax-ka-beddelka Dastuurku Ma Aha Xal Degdeg ah: Baahida Wadatashi Dadweyne iyo Is-afgarad Siyaasadeed →

warsame policy & media network (wapmen)

I write because Somalia deserves honest analysis, not comforting illusions. After serving as Chief of Staff at the Puntland State Presidency (1998–2004) and later with the UN and World Bank Joint Secretariat for Somalia's Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP), followed by service as National Aid Technical Coordinator (NATCO) with the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG) and the European Union, I chose an independent path: to analyse, question, document, and challenge those in power—regardless of political affiliation or clan. This blog is dedicated to critical analysis, historical perspective, and evidence-based commentary on Somalia's politics, governance, security, federalism, and state-building. I believe that sustainable peace and accountable government begin with informed public debate, intellectual honesty, and the courage to confront uncomfortable truths. I am the author of four books, including Talking Truth to Power in an Undemocratic Tribal Context. My writing reflects the WDM philosophy: fearless, independent journalism that places facts, history, and the public interest above personalities, propaganda, and tribal loyalties. I live and work in Toronto, Canada. Contact: ismailwarsame@gmail.com nattco.somalia@yahoo.ca @ismailwarsame

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Day: November 12, 2026

The Founder’s Claim: Territorial Authorship and the Politics of Membership in Somalia’s Federal Order

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