The Institute at 10 – Democracy New and Old: Averting an Electoral Crisis in Somalia’s Puntland State
30/04/2025
In 2024, on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the establishment of the European Institute of Peace, the Institute commissioned a series of articles about our work, interviewing staff members, senior advisors, and people who have worked with us in the past decade on conflict prevention and resolution in different areas of the world.
How best to communicate our work is not obvious. Discretion is often an essential ingredient to what we do, for example around dialogue and engagement with parties to conflict and their supporters. But we cannot afford not to communicate in an increasingly crowded media and public affairs environment, one in which political and public recognition is too low regarding the value and practical benefits of the work that we and our partners undertake. “What you are doing is great – why aren’t you telling more people about it?” is a typical reaction from partners that want to increase their support for us. Sharing these stories about the Institute’s work is of the ways in which we are responding to these requests.
When he’s not deployed on missions to the Horn of Africa, you can usually find Nuradin Dirie working at a quiet desk in one of the reading rooms upstairs in the British Library. It’s his ‘office away from the office’, as he likes to call it. It’s certainly a stark contrast to the arid plateaus and plains of Puntland in northern Somalia, where he’s most recently been active for the European Institute of Peace.
Nuradin has always had a keen interest in diplomacy, both in his native Somalia and in the UK, where he has lived for over thirty years. When the Indian Ocean tsunami hit the coasts of Somalia in 2004, he mobilised his network among the diaspora community in the UK to coordinate a response. Soon, he travelled to Somalia to play a role in the urgent humanitarian relief effort underway there. Working with the international disaster response in his native country, he saw the impact he could have working across cultures. After the disaster, he decided to continue working in Somalia, building a bridge between his country and the international community. Since then he has worked as a diplomat, humanitarian and a leader in local politics. Today, Nuradin Dirie is the European Institute of Peace’s Senior Advisor in the Horn of Africa, where his contacts and experience in the region are frequently called upon to help understand and mediate conflicts – many of which are deeply political in nature.
It’s a less partisan role than he has played in the past. Ideally, democracy blends new ideas with collective consensus, balancing individual choice with social harmony. However, disrupting traditional systems can be catastrophic, particularly following conflicts.
The Worst Form of Government, Except for all the Others
In Puntland in 2023, attempts to shift from a traditional, clan-based political system to direct elections threatened to spark civil war. Nuradin’s contributions, and the Institute’s role in navigating these tensions—drawing on local knowledge and international support—were crucial to ensuring peace in a moment of instability.
The Puntland region of Somalia is pastoral, and urban settlements are a relatively new development. Social systems that are sometimes thousands of years old had always been relatively stable, maintaining equitable power distribution among pastoral groups. Since Puntland’s establishment as an autonomous federal state in Somalia in 1998, elections had followed an “indirect” model based on those traditional systems: elders representing pastoral clans chose their own representatives in parliament, and these representatives had in turn chosen the President.
From an outside perspective, it could seem unfair that unelected, often dynastic clan elders should wield such political power. The system, deeply rooted in the specific community bonds and structures of nomadic herders, had evolved to foster stability, not individual choice.
In 2023, just months before the end of incumbent Puntland President’s Said Abdullahi Deni’s term, he presented new legislation to replace the traditional, clan-based system with direct elections — starting with that year’s vote. Outside observers saw Deni’s sudden push to establish universal suffrage as a move toward a better democracy.
Locals quickly understood it as a power grab. In Puntland, maintaining the balance of power between the many local clans and sub-clans is an extraordinarily delicate affair. Particular care is taken to ensure that the presidency is rotated among three main factions making up a dominant clan, called the Mohamoud. Under the unwritten agreement, which some analysts argue is the key to Puntland’s stability, President Deni, an Osman Mohamud from the Bari region, was supposed to be followed by a representative of a different sub clan, the Isse Mohamud. Under the proposed new suffrage scheme, the Isse Mohamud would have lost their traditional turn in office. Resistance to Deni’s attempts to bring in universal suffrage was strongest in a northern region of Puntland called Nugaal. The Isse hail mostly from a region called Nugaal.
To be sure, many residents of Puntland had grown tired of the traditional model, criticizing clan governance as corrupt and inefficient. But changing the existing system, and balance of power. required consultation and careful handling, in a society that has been governed along clan lines for thousands of years. Instead, the sudden attempt to push through a shift to direct elections, particularly by a President facing the end of his term, was not viewed as an effort to make Puntland more democratic. When voices that understood the local context criticized it as a calculated attempt to hold onto power, the proposal instead just stoked long-standing tensions.
In June, 2023, deadly clashes occurred between an opposition militia and government forces in the state capital Garowe. The fighting threatened to erupt into widescale violence. Though Puntland had escaped the worst of the Somalia civil war in the 1990s, inter-clan tensions were high. Insurgent groups and other militant non-state actors were also present in the region, and though they had no direct connection to the Presidential politics, they could exploit any instability for their own purposes, particularly if electoral tensions escalated.
To de-escalate the complex, fast-deepening crisis would require experience, local knowledge, and connections to civil society and the international community. Led by Nuradin, the Institute became active in Puntland, as part of the effort to prevent the conflict from spinning out of control.
Applying Pressure from Above
In addition to establishing a direct vote for representatives, Said Abdullahi Deni’s proposal for a direct vote would have shifted Puntland’s government from a longstanding parliamentary system toward a presidential one. Opponents said the change would place too much power in the executive. Dani’s government fired back that the opposition were trying to stall democratic progress.
As the situation escalated and the threat of widespread violence seemed ever more real, Nuradin and the European Institute of Peace conducted shuttle diplomacy between local communities, traditional authorities, political power brokers, armed groups, civil society organisations and the international organizations. The work took a multi-pronged approach: bottom-up through local networks, and top-down through high-level, to diffuse tensions, rebuild broken relationships, and persuade President Deni to retract his flawed reform plan.
Technical expertise was important to Nuradin’s efforts. But his intimate knowledge of how local politics worked in Puntland was even more critical. In 2009, he himself had been a presidential candidate in the state.
“I knew the motivation of the local politicians, I knew what they were playing at, because I had played the game myself. And now I played that same game not for politics, this time, but for peace.”
He also had reliable access to decision-makers in the international community.
“The kind of authority it gives you, it’s really valuable,” he says, “because local power holders see I’m representing the European Institute of Peace, they see that I’m regularly briefing the diplomatic community, that I’m able to generate pressure from the UN Special Representative, or from one of the Ambassadors – people make these associations, and they carry weight.”
Nuradin and the Institute were often vital links for the international community, briefing EU member states, plus the UK and US ambassadors on the evolving situation on the ground, and providing recommendations for how they could best target their interventions and support. Much of the investment in Puntland and support to the security sector comes from international donors, a source of significant influence over the government’s decision-making. The Institute was able to leverage its access at the right moment, a testimony to the importance of maintaining strong relationships and access to actors at the highest level.
Applying Pressure from Below
Diplomatic engagement was a critical component of the efforts to avert a crisis, but ultimately it was outreach to those in Puntland’s wider civil society which likely carried greater weight in the resolution of the situation. Were election tensions to transform into violence, it would be Somalis, not the international community who would be on the frontlines of that conflict.
Drawing on extensive local knowledge and networks, the Institute partnered with the Puntland Non-State Actors Association (PUNSAA) and the Puntland Development and Research Center (PDRC) to engage with a broad diversity of actors on the ground. Abdinasir Yusuf, the deputy director of the PDRC, knows himself what it means to live through violent conflict, having been forced to flee Mogadishu at just 12 years old. He worked with the European Institute of Peace and the PUNSAA tirelessly, day in, day out for nearly three months, to try and avert an outbreak of civil war in Puntland.
Abdirahman Abdirazak is the chairman of PUNSA and has been working with civil society in Puntland for twenty years. The platform comprises 120 groups including women, youth, traditional elders, national NGOs and the business community. Abdirahman says that without the push together with Nuradin and the Institute to reach out to civil society and calm tensions, he can’t imagine what would have happened.
“We tried all kinds of different approaches. Even when the president refused to meet with certain groups, we engaged in shuttle diplomacy and ran around between actors to try and build bridges. We met with armed groups, we listened to their grievances, then we would communicate these to the government. We relied heavily on the network of the EIP and Nuradin, it was really crucial for us.”
Through a vast network of contacts on the ground and a wealth of local experience, as well as access to international institutions, the Institute was able to work with local partners and avoid disaster. A month before the January elections, under considerable diplomatic and local pressure, President Said Abdullahi Deni agreed to maintain the clan-based indirect model, abandoning the shift to direct elections that had brought Puntland to the brink of civil war.
We will never know how things might have turned out had the plan gone ahead. A crisis averted rarely makes the headlines. But Nuradin and the Institute’s partners on the ground believe their work helped avoid bloodshed. He said:
“Without that kind of collective work, the partners providing the community side, us providing the political engagement and the diplomatic angle, I don’t think we would have had peaceful elections.”
It even worked out well for President Deni, who lost his reform plan, but managed to win re-elections, a first in Puntland’s recent political history, due in part to the inability of opposition groups to organise during the unrest. The question remains as to whether the President, and Puntland society at large, will now take this opportunity to reflect and re-organise to implement reform in a more sustainable way without reigniting tensions before 2029.
Being the Bridge
The European Institute of Peace’s work in Puntland shows just how critical it is for conflict resolution mediators to sensitively combine local knowledge with outside technical experience, cultural traditions with international norms. In Puntland, flexible, adaptive, locally grounded and internationally connected peacemaking organisations like the Institute complemented existing institutions, bridging not just factions and competing interests, but cultures and generations, and began the process of successfully navigating change together.
Modern culture has a tendency to think of ‘traditional’ systems as outdated, a quaint cultural heritage. But sometimes the solutions to our problems don’t just lie in the future. There is wisdom in tradition that the modern world often ignores. Somalis living in Puntland remember a thousand years of pastoral tradition. As Nuradin puts it,
“Before we learn our first word of the Qur’an, we learn about who we are, and that means who our ancestors were. Who we are is who we were.”
Their experience of ‘modernity’, by way of colonialism, is only about a hundred years, Nuradin notes.
“You can understand the reluctance of people to accept the modern system, because it’s like 10% of their being. And you want to ignore 90% of who they are.”
For Nuradin, any sustainable peace has to be rooted in the sustainable culture of communities.
“We are where we are, we’ve been living with this nomadic, pastoral system of governance for the past thousand years, we can’t change it like that, so what elements of it do we want to include, and what elements do we want to include from modernity to make sure everyone’s included?”