Templates, tales, and shrapnel of truth? Puzzling state making and the case of Somaliland

'State fragility', with its implications for national development and international security, is one of today’s most pressing global public policy challenges. With divergent state-making trajectories in Somalia and Somaliland providing the arena of my doctoral study, this research is largely concerned with the conundrums of why states falter, how they are reconstituted, and under what conditions war may be constitutive of state-making. The poster sketches out several divergences and tensions that exist between the archetypical neo-liberal approach to state-making as pursued by the 'international community', the common narrative of Somaliland’s allegedly unique and successful state trajectory, and some of my own research findings. Amongst others, I show that war was an integral part of Somaliland’s state-making process, which was, moreover, less democratic than autocratic in nature. The poster concludes by proposing that state trajectories can valuably be understood in terms of changing levels of institutional and socio-cognitive standardization.