Disentangling Legitimacy: Everyday Experiences in and with al-Shabaab’s Insurgency State

Research on war and statebuilding in Somalia is mainly concerned with actors of violence and the modalities and forms of authority these actors have been establishing since the collapse of the state in 1991 – among them the localized rule of warlords, the de-facto state order of al-Shabaab or the central and regional states in the making, which are supported by a broad range of international actors. The paper turns this perspective around and looks at authority from the opposite angle, thus from the perspective of those who are governed and ruled. It thereby foregrounds subjective knowledge and places its focus on voices that are usually overheard. Grounded in the everyday and building on theories of legitimacy, the paper focuses on the Insurgency State established by al-Shabaab between 2008 and 2012. It asks how al-Shabaab’s authority and their practices of rule were experienced, talked about, and felt about by the governed; and compares these experiences with those on preceding and succeeding forms of rule. The paper outlines commonalities and differences and presents common features in the exercise and rationalization of authority that people recognize as legitimate (or illegitimate), how they justify this recognition and the strategies they employ if they consider the prevailing authority (or aspects of it) as illegitimate. A particular focus of the paper is on everyday aspects and practices of security, a topic that people regularly refer to while describing their relation to authorities. The paper shows first, that legitimacy is not a ‘state’ that can be reached, but rather a continuous process in which rulers establish claims and practices which need to be recognized by the ruled. Second, the paper outlines that this recognition depends to a lesser extent on the ideology (religious or not) of the ruler, but on its ability to achieve order which allows the ruled to develop routines, to predict the outcomes of their actions, and thus to indeed establish an everyday - even if this everyday is established in the midst of crisis and war.