Somalia has become known as both a prime example of state failure and as a case in which sub-national and localized actors have demonstrated remarkable capacity to craft alternative ‘hybrid’ and ‘mediated’ governance and security arrangements. International actors have in recent years shown increasing interest in engaging and incorporating such localized polities and actors into governance and security approaches. Focusing on the case of Somaliland, this paper analyses such decentered international security policies in terms of what I conceptualize a re-scaling of sovereignty. The paper shows how a post-Westphalian re-scaling and reframing of sovereignty, legitimized through ‘bottom up’ state building discourse, offers opportunities for both international and transnational actors creating new local entry points for pursuing their key security agendas, and for selected local actors enhancing their power positions and coercive resources. In drawing upon data and interviews, the analysis highlights the interconnection between extractive political economy, law as power, and the transfers from military to policing in post-Westphalian strategies of international security governance. Through this analysis the paper demonstrates how the Somaliland context is one in which international actors selectively find and create local partners and institutions resembling ‘sovereign counter parts’, while it is at the same time a largely legally unconstrained context for testing and implementing trans- and international security approaches and interests. This entails new patterns of local-international-transnational co-production of ‘hybrid’ (in)security orders and ‘sovereigns’. The paper argues that while Somaliland constitutes an impressive example of self-reliant peace-building and representative politics without strong state institutions these achievements may likely be difficult to sustain in the context of increasingly securitized external interventions– which purportedly, and somewhat ironically, aim to precisely “build on local successes.”
