ABSTRACT
Notions of “legitimacy” are generally associated with conceptions of the international nation-state and state-society relations, with the state being judged to be legitimate, or not, in the eyes of the citizens of that state. Yet notions of legitimacy in Somaliland (as well as in other regions occupied by Somali populations) derive from three different sources – traditional (or customary) Somali, Islamic, and Western political and juridical systems. This paper examines how Somaliland deployed hybrid sources of legitimacy during peacebuilding and statebuilding processes, and how it has been challenged by different combinations of hybridity and different sources of legitimacy in its borderlands.
