Issue No. 927

Fourteen Years After London: The Unfinished State

Next Monday, 23 February, marks the 14th anniversary of the London Conference on Somalia, a seminal moment in Somalia's afflicted state-building history. Led by then-British PM David Cameron, dozens of governments and organisations gathered in London to chart the end of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and recognition of the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) later that year. With Al-Shabaab ousted from Mogadishu in mid-2011, international partners were buoyant about the opportunities ahead, eager to seize the moment and help usher in a new era for Somalia after over two decades of stubborn instability.

Looking back, the politics of 2012 feel almost quaint today. The geopolitical tremors of Donald Trump's election to the White House were still four years out, and while multilateralism had taken a stumble, the heyday of liberal developmentalism had not yet waned. At chilly Lancaster House, the 'traditional' international community was still calling the shots, steering the TFG toward full sovereign recognition for the first time since the collapse of the Siyaad Barre regime in the early 1990s.

The UN and the African Union took centre stage, with the earlier iteration of the peacekeeping mission —AMISOM —intended to underwrite security. And alongside the dozens of foreign officials participating came the authorities in Mogadishu, the presidents of Puntland, Galmudug, Somaliland and representatives from Ahlu Sunnah wal Jamaah (ASWJ), the moderate Sufi paramilitary force in central Somalia. Al-Shabaab was not invited, describing the conference in a statement at the time as one "aimed at bolstering the invading African forces that are prolonging the instability in Somalia."

The London Conference in 2012 was far from the first attempt to midwife the Somali state, with episodic interventions, be it military, humanitarian, or political in nature, having pockmarked the preceding two decades. But the scale of the proposed foreign scaffolding and its broad range set it apart from its predecessors. Seven areas of focus were laid out on the advent of the conference, namely sourcing sustainable funding for AMISOM, delivering an agreement over the succession to Mogadishu's transitional architecture, agreeing a package to support Somalia's regions, pledging a renewed commitment to tackle Al-Shabaab, busting the piracy epidemic, tackling the humanitarian emergency, and all underpinned by greater international cooperation. Though delegates acknowledged progress would be gradual, they hoped the summit would catalyse Somalia's politicians into moving beyond two decades of state collapse

Yet, barring piracy, it is difficult to argue that any of these has been 'solved' in the intervening years. Indeed, many of the conference notes on the need for power-sharing and sustainable security forces could be directly transplanted to today. Although Al-Shabaab was expelled from Mogadishu and Kismaayo in the early 2010s, the militant group has transformed and evolved —today the wealthiest and best-armed Al-Qaeda affiliate, holding much of south-central Somalia under its control. In the decade and a half since recognition, the jihadists have been true to their word, confronting "by any means possible" the outcomes of the London Conference. Today, Somalia remains gripped, too, by another grim episodic humanitarian crisis, with hunger currently surging and 1.85 million children under 5 projected to suffer acute malnutrition. But it is Somali politics that is at its lowest ebb in years, with the latest centralising attempts by Villa Somalia pushing the political settlement to near breaking point with just a couple of months to go before the May 2026 elections.

Much of the culpability for Somalia's cyclical political crises can arguably be traced to London, particularly the conferring of juridical sovereignty on the TFG. At its heart, it mistakenly prioritised juridical sovereignty over negotiated political settlement and substituted institution-building for political bargaining. Delivering nascent sovereignty in Mogadishu without the requisite domestic political scaffolding has proven disastrous, handing federal officials their weapon of choice in all disputes, foreign and domestic. Under both the presidencies of Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, barely a week has gone by without 'sovereignty' tripping off their tongues, more often than not being used to bat away any external criticism or scrutiny. "Not one inch" has been the slogan that has justified much of the worst centralising inclinations of the government, and particularly the underhand deals with Doha and Ankara. 

And in the years since 2012, the infusion of billions of dollars in external funding, hand in hand with sovereign recognition, has artifically elevated Mogadishu above its counterparts in Jubaland, Puntland, and Somaliland. Rather than being imbued with domestic legitimacy, these twin external elements have empowered successive central governments' attempts to rapaciously monopolise authority and Somalia's political space to the detriment of the country's peripheries. That has taken the form of everything from hogging livestock export rights to withholding budgetary support to overruling the devolved national security architecture. And in turn, the tasks of finalising the 2012 Provisional Constitution, completing the federal system, and developing a multi-party democracy have all fallen prey to this dynamic; all issues that remain gaping sores on the Somali body politic today.

Recognition in 2012 also signalled an abdication of deeper political negotiation — a squeamishness that persists among parts of the international community. Abandoning the 'primacy of politics' has been the cardinal sin of the international community, falling into the belief that if enough civil servants are trained or judicial workshops are held, the radically decentralised nature of politics might somehow fall into place. Not only has this proven naive, but it has further accentuated the rifts within the political settlement by driving funding and legitimacy through Mogadishu's government. 

The failures of the London Conference do not end there. While it was agreed that sovereignty would be restored to the TFG, it nevertheless cemented the externalisation of security and budgetary support-- crystallising a dynamic of an outside-backed government for years to come. The Somali political elite have been able to allow the political settlement to atrophy, with Mogadishu broadly secure and money flowing in. Since 2012, eyewatering sums have been poured in, fuelling the narrative of 'Mogadishu Rising' and the glittering skyscrapers that have been erected in the Somali capital. Technocratic workshops, technical committees, roadmaps, and the language of development pervaded the creation of the new state's architecture, a lexicon wholeheartedly adopted by the experts in Halane today. 

For too long, the focus has been on state capacity rather than the thornier realities of Somali politics. And empirical sovereignty —the actual ability of the state to exercise control over territory and population —remains constrained essentially to Mogadishu and a handful of satellite towns. Beyond these confines, Villa Somalia and the state must 'mediate' its access, in the term coined by Ken Menkhaus in the 2000s. Successive iterations of the African Union peacekeeping missions may have kept the federal government afloat, but the question of militarily 'defeating' Al-Shabaab stalled long ago. And while the injections of shiny Turkish weaponry grab the headlines, the Somali National Army remains a morass of clan-based vying militias without strategic direction.

Finally, one might also draw a direct line between the destructive limbo of Hargeisa and Mogadishu relations today and the 2012 recognition of the TFG that followed the London Conference. Until this point, the administrations had been treated as sovereign equals, with Somaliland subsequently persuaded to engage in talks as an analogous partner—a context that was radically changed upon the recognition of Somalia's federal government. In turn, successive rounds of largely fruitless negotiations would follow, with Mogadishu repeatedly seizing on its newly awarded juridical sovereignty to hammer home its new advantages over Somaliland. 

There is no doubt that there has been evolution, and the Somali state is not what it was 14 years ago. But one might also argue that, with the retrenchment of the international community, the federal government is being transformed from the ward of 'traditional' powers and multilaterals from 2012 into a choice morsel of bilateral conquest —be it Ankara, Cairo, or Doha. London delivered sovereignty; it did not deliver settlement, and what it entrenched was an administration in Mogadishu that continues to cajole and bargain for legitimacy beyond its walls.

The Somali Wire Team