The Afterlives of Segmentary Lineage: (Post-)Structural Theory and Postcolonial Politics in the Horn of Africa

Abstract

Segmentary lineage theory fell out of favor in cultural anthropology during the 1980s. However, the core ideas of segmentary lineage have continued to shape political mobilization as well as political analysis in Africa long after the theory’s supposed death. This article analyzes how and why the framework of segmentary lineage has endured as a potent means of describing and experiencing politics in the Somali-inhabited Horn of Africa. It theorizes Somali clanship, a classic example of a “pure” segmentary lineage structure, as a framework for managing the near-term future rather than as an objective description of existing social structures. We show how segmentary lineage has been politicized during the colonial and postcolonial eras as a tool for pre-emptive action by governments. We link this broader dynamic of politicization to the functions of clanship in everyday life as a mode of anticipating other people’s likely behavior based on clan-framed narratives about the past. Based on archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and analysis of media and social media, we argue that Somali clanship operates in politics less as a network of shared interests or mobilization based on anticipated collective gains, and more as a framework for anticipating and attempting to pre-empt other people’s likely behavior.

1. Segmentary Lineage and Conflict: Two Moments

Consider two events that took shape simultaneously in 2016–2017.

One: Prominent economists write up the results from a regression discontinuity model run through computers in Cambridge and Chicago. The analysis finds that African ethnic groups characterized by “segmentary lineage organization” are more prone to escalating and long-duration conflicts than non-segmentary societies. In 2020, these results are published in Econometrica, a top economics journal. The authors trace their hypothesis to “the anthropological literature” on segmentary lineage. For these economists, anthropologists seem to have largely disappeared after the 1980s post-structural turn; the paper’s literature review synthesizes anthropological work published between 1940 and 1985, while referencing only one study written by a researcher who received an anthropology PhD after 1980 (Moscona et al., 2020, pp. 2001–2003). By turning to the structural functionalism of anthropologists like Laura Bohannan, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and I. M. Lewis, the economists resurrect a way of thinking that anthropologists of more post-structural persuasion have declared to be debunked and dead.

Two: Leaders of the Somali Reer Isaaq lineage meet for a three-day summit in Nairobi, Kenya, to contest claims that they are instigating conflict in Ethiopia. Somalis are a classic case of a segmentary lineage society. Somali kinship is primarily organized around a unilineal descent system in which individuals identify with patrilineal clans. Segments of the broader lineage take a corporate form that affects administrative functions and leadership positions. In this case, the Reer Isaaq fall within the broader Ogaden clan confederation that inhabits much of eastern Ethiopia as well as southern Somalia and northeastern Kenya. (As an Ogaden clan, they are distinct from the Isaaq clan that predominates in the self-declared Somaliland Republic). Ethiopian government elites accuse the Reer Isaaq of driving the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) insurgency in Ethiopia, going as far as the one-to-one generalization that “The Reer Isaaq are [ONLF].”1 There are echoes in these government discourses of a sentiment expressed by anthropologist Lewis (2002, p. 10): “Somali political allegiances are determined by descent in the male line… it is their lineage genealogies which direct the lines of political allegiance and division.” Reer Isaaq figures in Nairobi contested such representations, declaring that while Reer Isaaq individuals might support rebellion, “the Reer Isahaaq2 communities are not and have never been at war with the Ethiopian Government.”3

The visceral struggle between Ethiopian government elites and Reer Isaaq leaders to define the who of political conflict in eastern Ethiopia should give pause to analysts of political struggle in societies where kinship plays an important role in public life. Academic resurrections of segmentary lineage theory have serious potential repercussions: descriptions of conflict in terms of identity groups always pose a potential to feed back into the conflicts as political actors take up the discursive categories of kin and ethnic groups to impose blame and inflict collective punishment. Analysts of conflicts mobilized around identity categories are faced with a major problem. On the one hand, the description of conflicts in terms of identity groups is often necessary: because identities are often important to people involved in such struggles, people’s commitments and decisions about whom to support and whom to resist are unintelligible without referencing them. On the other hand, as the Reer Isaaq leaders emphasized, identity categories including kinship groupings are insufficient to describe, analyze, and predict who is actually involved in political struggle.

In this article, we analyze a critical feedback process between segmentary lineage as a mode of description or discourse about politics and the existence of segmentary lineage as a principle for behavior. We argue that in the Horn of Africa, descriptions of lineage (segmentary lineage as theory) have been repeatedly mobilized by political authorities and everyday people as both an anachronism and a framework for pre-emptive punitive action. The interplay of the backward-looking and anticipatory aspects of lineage politics reveals clanship not only as a social structure or set of principles for behavior, but as a way of working on time. We suggest that this temporal work of clanship serves to reproduce political clanship as lived experience and strategy amid conflict (segmentary lineage as practice). A potent example, described in more detail below, is the anticipatory labeling and targeting of individuals and kin groups on the logic that they are likely to rebel against government authorities because one of their prominent ancestors was a rebel leader. Such pre-emptive actions tend to incentivize lineage groups to close ranks and even to engage in their own forms of pre-emption. In short, a crucial link between segmentary lineage as description and as political reality is the way people use descriptive identity categories to manage time by anticipating and pre-empting near-term possibilities and risks. While we substantiate this argument with evidence from the Somali Horn (focusing on Somalia as well as the Somali-inhabited territories of eastern Ethiopia and northeastern Kenya), we draw parallels with other contexts, and the implications of our argument extend to thinking about the temporal dimensions of identity-oriented politics more generally.

This article proceeds as follows. In Section 2, we situate our argument in relation to current thinking on segmentary lineage in the Horn and provide background on our methods and approach: this article results from a combination of distinct academic studies by two authors, as well as a wealth of observational information from the third author (a community leader among the UK Somali diaspora). Section 3, Section 4, Section 5 and Section 6 then lay out examples of what we call four “afterlives” of segmentary lineage theory. These are segmentary lineage as ancestral legacy (Section 3); segmentary lineage as a feedback loop structured by colonial practices of pre-emptive punishment (Section 4); segmentary lineage as an afterlife of state violence and state collapse (Section 5); and segmentary lineage as a short-term strategy for dealing with uncertainty in contexts of mistrust (Section 6). The conclusion summarizes our analysis and points to areas where additional research and theorization are needed.

2. Background and Framework: The Deaths and Afterlives of Segmentary Lineage

Our argument—that the use of segmentary lineage thinking as a framework guiding pre-emptive action has worked to reproduce Somali political clanship as lived reality—begins from two observations about how we observe Somalis utilizing clanship to mark and manage time in daily life. First, clanship is commonly described as an uncomfortable anachronism: “We are 1000 years behind the rest of the world” due to clannish mentality, as one middle-aged man who has spent most of his life in the US put a commonly-expressed sentiment (field notes, 3 May 2025). Second, clanship is often leveraged to predict and pre-empt other people’s behavior, both in the political arena and in low-stakes daily interactions with other Somalis who fall outside the categories of kin and friends. In other words, even as Somalis often work to distance themselves from the “backward” mentality of clanship, interactions are often guided by anticipations that other Somalis are likely to act according to principles of segmentary lineage. We suggest that the interplay of these temporal dimensions of clanship is indelibly marked by the entanglement of analytical theories of segmentary lineage with lived political uncertainty in the postcolonial Somali Horn of Africa. The concept of segmentary lineage’s “afterlives” provides a framework for tracing the feedback loops between segmentary lineage as theory and as practice in the postcolonial conjuncture. The concept also highlights an irony: theoretical and practical debates about segmentary lineage in the Horn today occur in the shadow of the alleged death of segmentary lineage as practice and as theory during the 1970s–1980s.

2.1. The Entanglement of Theory and Politics in the Somali Horn

In 1971, Somalia’s president, Moḥamed Siyad Barre, declared a national “Day when Clannishness was Buried” (Maalintii Qabyaalada la Aasay) in which effigies of Somalia’s clans were “ritually cremated and interred” while politicians looked on (Omolesky, 2017). Voicing socialist principles and a future horizon of nation-building, Barre’s early state-building efforts after his 1969 rise to power were marked by the construction of predictable “rule frameworks” to replace the institutional plurality that had characterized indirect rule through clan under the colonial order (Balthasar, 2018, pp. 148–149). Yet, within seven years, opposition grew among Muslim clerics and clan leaders. This, combined with the fallout of the Somali military’s failed invasion of Ethiopia in 1977, forced Barre himself to rely increasingly on collective punishment along clan lines to secure his rule. Thus, even as public discourse disparaged clan-thinking as anachronistic, it was apparent to many Somalis that clannishness pervaded Somalia’s halls of state power and contributed to escalating fragmentation and violence throughout the 1980s. Somalia’s gradual fragmentation led to the famous collapse of Barre’s government in January 1991 and Somalia’s descent into factionalism.

Among the foremost interpreters of Somali politics leading up to the collapse and in its aftermath was the Oxford-trained anthropologist I.M. Lewis, who had begun his career conducting fieldwork in the British Somaliland Protectorate during the 1950s. Lewis was not the first anthropologist to interpret politics and conflict in terms of segmentary lineage; he built on the framework applied to African politics by other anthropologists (e.g., Fortes & Evans-Pritchard, 1940), which itself drew on older anthropological conceptions of social evolution (Kuper, 1982; Sneath, 2007). Yet the significance of Lewis’s writing, for our purposes, is that his descriptions of clan politics continue to provide a reference point for political analysis and popular debate. Lewis’s view of Somali segmentary lineage as the core of Somali politics reportedly annoyed Siyad Barre amid Somalia’s nation-building efforts (Haakonsen, 2014, p. 4). Lewis saw his theory as vindicated when Siyad himself turned to collective punishment along clan lines to shore up his power during the 1980s. “In the present Somali vortex,” Lewis wrote in 1989 as Barre was waging all-out war on the Somali National Movement in northern Somalia, “clan and lineage ties are definitely born-again. In fact, of course, they never died despite all the rhetoric,” leaving the Somali nation “deeply divided along traditional lines” (Lewis, 1989, pp. 577–578).

Numerous Somalis and academic analysts have contested the so-called Lewisian paradigm, but the language of segmentary clanship remains central to narrating and interpreting Somali politics. For three decades, observers have debated whether Somali clanship should be seen as something primordial and inseparable from Somali culture, as Lewis saw it, or as something strategic, manipulable, and subject to change. After the collapse of Somalia’s government, Lewis continued advancing an exceptionalist interpretation of anachronistic clannishness as the driver of Somali politics. “The first thing to understand about Somalis,” he wrote in his 1992 editorial “In the Land of the Living Dead,” “is that they are not as other men… The basis of political allegiance is blood kinship, or genealogy” (Lewis, 1992). Other analysts contested Lewis’s argument that the conflict in Somalia after 1991 was indeed a return or reversion to precolonial lineage politics. Revered rhetorician Aw Jaamaʿ ʿUmar ʿIse declared of the chaos, “Kinship is dead, humanness is dead, barbarism is here” (quoted in Samatar, 1992, p. 639). Since at least the 1990s, a general consensus has emerged that conflicts mobilized through clan narratives should not be interpreted as a resurgence of “primordial” clan units that characterized precolonial Somali society (Samatar, 1992). Instead, analysts argue convincingly that conflict and uncertainty have re-created Somali clans as collective political units, which is a significant departure from Lewis’ framework that centers clanship as the unchanging foundation of politics (Kapteijns, 2012; Thompson & Matshanda, 2023).

Nevertheless, ideas about clannishness—and Lewis’s own descriptions of Somali clanship—continue to frame political discourse in the Horn. “In the past, I rebelled against what some scholars called ‘the I.M. Lewis School of Thought,’” a Somali public intellectual recently posted on social media, referring to Lewis’s approach that “centered the clan in the politics of the Somali nation.” The post then describes a change of mind: “Lately, I have been giving a close read of our own society and seem to think I.M. Lewis’ approach is inescapable.”4 In a parallel vein, an academic analyst of the Horn of Africa suggests that Somalis are “reverting to a pre-colonial realm” in which clan is the end-all be-all of political mobilization (Ingiriis, 2018, pp. 55–56). The paradox of such an impending precolonial future highlights the ways in which lineage-based politics are experienced as a past that continues to haunt the postcolonial present.

In our view, the question is not whether Lewis was right or wrong to see Somali clanship as the foundation of politics. Instead, it is how the description of segmentary lineage as the fundamental reality of Somali politics has participated in creating the realities of political clanship as practice. We recognize that Somali clanship has important dimensions outside of the political realm, including transnational economies of mutual support and deep connections among family members framed in terms of mutual patrilineal descent. Bracketing those aspects for the sake of focus, we are concerned with the political dimensions of clanship, and specifically, on Somali clanship as a mode of time management that links a specific way of framing and interpreting the past to the constant practice of predicting and adjusting to the anticipated short-term future.

2.2. The Death of Segmentary Lineage Theory?

By the 1980s, Lewis’s insistence that Somali social structure be understood primarily in terms of the segmentary lineage paradigm placed him firmly on the outs in cultural anthropology. Kuper’s (1982) examination of the “stubborn half-life of lineage theory” was among the clearest post-structuralist critiques. Kuper offers two reasons for discarding the paradigm: “First, the model does not represent folk models which actors anywhere have of their own societies. Secondly, there do not appear to be any societies in which vital political or economic activities are organized by a repetitive series of descent groups” (Kuper, 1982, p. 92). Other anthropologists built on this critique, showing that so-called “segmentary lineage societies” have in no observed cases been solely structured around lineage (Godelier, 2009). Critical analyses have repeatedly called the segmentary lineage framework into question, showing that orienting analysis around lineage ignores the messiness of lineage relations as well as other social processes that cross-cut kinship (Hutchinson, 1996; Kapteijns & Ali, 1999; McKinnon, 2000; Munson, 1989). On a more general level, the concept of segmentary lineage fell out of favor in anthropology during the 1980s as social constructivism and ideas such as “the invention of tradition” (Ranger, 1983) came into their own.

However, post-1980s scholarship on the Somali Horn has tended to reject the excessively rigid Lewisian segmentary lineage paradigm without fully rejecting the importance of segmentary lineage as a model for behavior. Contra Kuper’s first point about the distance between segmentary lineage theory and “folk models,” researchers have found that the basic principles of segmentary lineage do constitute a popular folk model among many Somalis (Hoehne, 2011; Thompson & Matshanda, 2023). To be sure, while such “emic” folk models are entangled with “etic” academic descriptions, they have a life of their own: clanship “means” and works in different ways for different individuals (Luling, 2006). Additionally, it coexists with other models for behavior, including aspirations for a unified Somali nation (Aidid, 2020) and egalitarian or “nonhegemonic” principles that are sometimes exercised within clan groups and sometimes among individuals who lack lineage ties (Thompson, 2025a). Even those who are critical of the ways in which the language of segmentary lineage “flattens” reality tend to find themselves in the uncomfortable position of describing political developments in terms of collective clan actors (“The Ogaadeen,” “The Abgaal,” “The Sa’ad Muse,” etc.), while offering the caveat that such language is overly simplistic (e.g., Hagmann, 2014, 26ff). The descriptive language of clan reflects local conventions for narrating events and is a convenient short-cut for thinking about the general lines of political differentiation, even though within each group there are bound to be differences.

Moreover, there is substantial evidence that it is not clans per se, but patronage networks legitimized in the name of clan that often dominate the Horn’s political space (de Waal, 2020; Thompson, 2025a, pp. 38–39). However, contra Kuper’s second point, on a theoretical level, it is insufficient to show that segmentary lineage models fail to match observed behavior (Galaty, 1981). To take the example from our introduction, it would be insufficient to demonstrate that all Reer Isaaq did not, in fact, support the ONLF (this has been illustrated already—see Thompson & Matshanda, 2023). Everyone knows there are exceptions to the “rules” associated with lineage politics. The challenge is to explain how segmentary lineage as a primary model for narrating and explaining behavior persists, even as analysts and participants recognize its insufficiency. Kuper’s (1982) idea of a half-life implies that segmentary lineage theory is in decline but surviving marginally on some fringe. We use the notion of “afterlives”5 to point not to a decline, but to an enduring presence and proliferation. In the contemporary Horn of Africa, political conflicts are clearly transnational, backed by foreign states, and intertwined with the post-2001 global war on terror. And yet the structural-functionalist tenets of segmentary lineage theory, rejected as a coherent framework for anthropological analysis and “put to death” by state-builders, live on as a dominant way of narrating and experiencing these struggles.

2.3. Our Intervention and Its Implications

Our argument links the theory and lived reality of segmentary lineage politics in the Somali case by analyzing the work that clanship does in and on time (cf. Bear, 2014). It is notable how assumptions of temporal dis/continuity pervade analyses: In descriptions discussed above, analysts label clanship as “traditional,” “buried,” “born-again,” and never having died. Kuper sees segmentary lineage theory as subsisting in a “half-life.” We suggest that the notion of afterlives is more apt. Segmentary lineage as a mode of thinking about conflict in societies where kinship plays a prominent public role is not surviving marginally on some fringe, however much some academics might wish it were; it continues to frame conversations about politics and thereby affect political mobilization and intervention. Our aim is to treat the temporal dimension of lineage thinking as a core aspect that links theory and practice. Segmentary lineage is not only a way of conceptualizing a static social structure; it is a mode of linking individuals and groups to narrations of the past and predictions about the future. Tracing the links between clan-narrated pasts and envisioned futures ties together the two logics that Schlee (2004, p. 136) identifies at the core of thinking about the “who” of political conflict: the logic of concepts/categories and the logic of cost/benefit calculation regarding advantages and disadvantages of taking sides. In the Horn of Africa, describing past and present conflicts in terms of clan identities is unavoidable, even if analysts rightfully offer significant caveats about the actual disunity of clans and the messiness of clan-based generalizations. Our point is that people are constantly working to manage time by using lineage-oriented framings of past events and relationships (involving other people, living or ancestral) to anticipate near-term possibilities and risks.

Our analysis emerges from dialogical discussions among three authors from different backgrounds. We draw on data collected over years of observation and participation in community life in the Horn of Africa and among the Somali diaspora. Two of us are academics: one an anthropologist who has conducted research on trade and urbanization in Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State (SRS) since 2015 as well as among Somali diaspora businesspeople in South Africa and the US; the other a specialist in politics who has likewise conducted in-depth research on liberation politics in SRS and the political economy of governance and resource extraction since 2019. The third author is a public intellectual who regularly analyzes political events for Somali-language media. Part of our dialogic approach was to test our theoretical claims about Somali clanship based on academic research against the third author’s encyclopedic knowledge of political events and personalities. In leveraging specific examples, we seek to build our empirical case. We are not interested in laying blame, but rather in interrogating the shared modes of thinking in which we, as part of our own backgrounds and relationships, also inescapably take part.

Our analysis has three implications. First, our approach cuts against the tendency to pathologize Somali clannishness. It does so by treating clanship as a structurally conditioned way of dealing with the universal human experience of making decisions in the face of uncertainty. As humans, our historical narratives provide a primary means of positioning ourselves for the future. Specifically, interpretations of the past provide information on whom to (mis)trust. We conceptualize trust as a future-oriented temporal resource: it is “belief in a shared future that provides confidence for present interactions involving uncertainty” (Thompson, 2025b, p. 417; drawing on Shipton, 2007). We show that clanship functions as a negative heuristic device for individuals deciding whom to mistrust in conditions of uncertainty, akin to the uses of ethnicity or racial profiling in other contexts (Adida et al., 2017; Posner, 2005). This is not to say that trust and mistrust in the Somali context are direct functions of shared lineage; close relatives may be deemed untrustworthy, and friends from other lineages are often deeply trusted. Nevertheless, two aspects of segmentary lineage set its temporal dimensions apart from the predictive work carried out by categories like ethnicity and race in other contexts. For one thing, among Somalis, the idea of blood descent at the core of the patrilineal lineage paradigm generates a common tendency to describe specific behaviors—including political dispositions—as passed down through generations. This was evident in the racialized thinking of European colonists in the Somali Horn (Thompson, 2020, pp. 752–753), but we show that this idea persists and has both positive and negative aspects for Somali senses of identity. For another thing, the rejection of segmentary lineage as a basis for Somali politics and for analytic interpretations of Somali politics gives the temporal politics of lineage a unique sense of “backwardness” among many Somalis in a way that debates about ethnicity and other identity categories do not.

The second implication is that re-envisioning segmentary lineage as a mode of working in and on time offers a nuanced view of agency in the postcolonial world. It does so not by claiming that segmentary lineage is irrelevant to individual behavior, nor that segmentary kinship determines behavior, but instead by showing how models of lineage organization enable people to generate meaning and a degree of stability amid severe constraints. Third, given that at least some aspects of “clannishness” are viewed even by their participants as having negative social effects, we seek to create space to challenge the segmentary model’s grip on Somali politics.

In the following sections, we turn to four “afterlives” of segmentary lineage thinking. We begin with an exploration of how colonial governments utilized the logic of clanship as an anachronism to justify their rule, and how they deployed the logic of segmentary lineage as a pre-emptive tool to manage their short-term future through collective punishment.

3. The Afterlife of “Precolonial Anarchy”

One thread of clan politics’ current condition can be traced to the temporal work of conflict suppression under colonial rule. In this section, we describe the instrumentalization of clanship through imperial practices of collective punishment as a technique for preventing anticipated disorder on a short time horizon. We suggest that the temporal orientation of colonial rule in the Horn—the short-term anticipatory maintenance of order (or the appearance of order)—must be taken into account to understand the qualitative structural changes wrought on the meanings and uses of Somali kinship networks. Kapteijns (2010, p. 8) describes a “colonial consensus” in which rulers and their Somali subjects developed colonial-era institutions on the assumption that patrilineal clanship was the fundamental guiding principle of Somali society. What we add here is to analyze the “temporal work” of this colonial consensus: the ways colonial authorities mobilized understandings of time in their efforts at rule, and the ways in which the anticipatory maintenance of order undermined the incentive structures of precolonial rules and norms that constituted clans as part of a broader interrelated fabric of Somali society.

In June 1901, Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Swayne wrote to J. Hayes Sadler, Consul-General of the British Somaliland Protectorate, that he was on his way “to punish the Aligheri [Ali Geri] tribe of the Dolbahanta [Dhulbahante].” This was the clan of Sayyid Moḥammed ʿAbdille Ḥassan’s in-laws and perceived to be his principal supporters. Sayyid Moḥammed had launched his anticolonial rebellion against British and Ethiopian imperial forces in 1899, and British officials were intent on reasserting a forced peace at minimum cost. En route to the Ali Geri, Swayne’s force went out of their way to attack the nomadic settlements of two other clans, including surprising the Ararsama Dhulbahante at dawn on June 20th. In those raids, they reportedly captured 3009 camels, 20,000 sheep, and 620 cattle. “[T]he sheep were all given back to the women who remained behind with the karias [household encampments].” Swayne entrusted the large stock to “the Habr Toljaala” (Habr Jecelo, Isaaq), who were to take them to the British outpost at Burco. These raids were punishment for a recent attack on a British encampment, in which the bodies of individual Somali attackers who were killed or wounded served as evidence to the British that these clans were implicated. Among Swayne’s objectives was “[t]o compel the tribes to enter into agreements with us assuring their good conduct in the future…”6

The war between Sayyid Moḥammed and the colonial powers in the northern Horn was part of a series of major changes in the ways clanship operated as a mechanism of power. On the British side, a fundamental legitimation of what Lewis (1994, p. 3) approvingly calls a “parental” regime with a “light, sympathetic touch” was a specific rendering of the past: the clans had supposedly been “in a chronic state of feud from time immemorial.”7 In this Hobbesian view, disputes between individuals were constant, arising “suddenly and unaccountably” and virtually impossible to prevent. The core challenge of paternalistic governance, in the eyes of British Somaliland’s leaders, was to “prevent a tribal quarrel from developing into a serious blood-feud.”8 British intervention was oriented around shared pre-theoretical conceptions about patriliny as a framework for understanding the short-term future: the basic notion that individuals were defined by their membership in a clan, and that disputes between individuals would inevitably scale up into a durable conflict between clans unless pre-emptive actions were taken. Kapteijns (2010, p. 6) argues that one of Lewis’ key achievements was congealing a half-century of British administrative knowledge. What we add here is that the theory of Somali segmentary lineage that emerged as the so-called Lewisian paradigm “freezes” not only colonial ethnological knowledge, but also an administrative way of anticipating the lines of conflict that kinship relations were likely to generate. To be sure, the basic idea of segmentary lineage was useful because it provided a framework for an administrative hierarchy based on basic principles of indirect rule, but it likely became more entrenched in colonial thought because it provided a framework for predicting conflicts and inflicting collective punishments to prevent them. Arguably, such pre-emptive collective punishment works to create the reality it perceives by forcing kinship groups to band together against punitive interventions.

This colonial consensus inverted key aspects of clanship’s previous role in sanctioning behavior. Fundamental to the constitution of precolonial clanship was a corpus of Somali rules and norms, sometimes referred to as a “social contract” known as xeer. Xeer was by no means the basis of some idyllic precolonial peace. However, it had been built up over generations of interaction—including violent conflicts—and provided a widely agreed-upon set of rules for resolving disputes among several categories of “others”—including agnates, affines, and neighboring clan and ethnic groups. For our analysis, three characteristics of xeer are important. First, xeer prioritized group cohesion over individual interests. To be sure, violent feuds sometimes erupted based on retribution toward clans for individuals’ actions. Nevertheless, the logic of xeer is to pre-empt such feuds by constraining individual action and, in cases of violence, taking active collective responsibility for rectification. Second, although xeer tended to develop at the level of clan groups (for example, Xeer Ciise or Xeer Jaarso), xeer is not coterminous with clan. Rather, it takes shape through, and regulates, interactions between specific identity groups based on their histories of interaction. Third, there is a temporal tendency in xeer to codify specific past events into prescriptive precedent for future possibilities, meaning that many prescriptions of the xeer can be traced to a specific historical event, and present circumstances can be compared to that event to discern the resemblance between past and present. Among the prominent examples are conflicts that were resolved not through paying blood compensation in livestock, but through giving the injured group a bride from the aggressors’ group: creating new kinship bonds was a consistent mechanism for resolving conflict.

Amid the British efforts to quell Sayyid Moḥammed’s uprising and deal with its aftermath, we see a specific suite of changes to the political constitution of clanship through pre-emptive and punitive action. First, Swayne’s confiscation of livestock from Dhulbahante encampments is illustrative of a broader logic. Even though British records clearly illustrate that Somaliland’s administrators knew that clans were, in practice, often intensely fragmented in their loyalties, collective punishment was normalized. Second, British efforts to impose order through a colonial court system selectively institutionalized specific aspects of xeer that were convenient to enforce and based primarily on the notion of keeping short-term order. An example is the fine of 100 camels per man and 50 camels for women to be paid by a clan as “blood money” (mag or diya) to prevent violence from further scaling up into inter-clan feuding. Glossed by the 1920s as “Somalis’ law,” there is evidence that this aspect of xeer was not only selectively institutionalized but also selectively weaponized by British administrators to assert control over their Somali proteges against eastern Ethiopia’s imperial administrators and Somali clans under Ethiopian control (Thompson, 2020). Third, this imaginary of clans as warring groups and the relatively transactional approach to paying livestock as compensation incentivized a short-term approach to maintaining stability in the 1890s–1920s amid an intense period of upheaval, unprecedented levels of livestock raiding (which in itself suggested that mag payment was not a stable solution to conflicts), and ecological degradation due to limited herd movements that drove overgrazing in the northern Horn’s rangelands (Mohamed, 2004). Importantly, the colonial state was not the only agent of pre-emptive and punitive action: Somali leaders including Sayyid Moḥammed himself participated in labeling clans and inflicting collective punishment, a widespread tendency to which we return in the next section.

The outcome of these conflicts was, by the 1930s–1940s, to hollow out the power of xeer to regulate inter-group conflict. The colonial state became the key mediator and, because colonial administrators consistently supported clans they perceived as loyal, a locus of competition by which clan leaders could gain power. As with late-colonial indirect rule over “tribes” elsewhere on the continent, Somali elders tread a careful balance between competing for state recognition and maintaining independence to secure legitimacy among their constituencies. And, as with so-called “traditional” authority across Africa (Mamdani, 1996, p. 22), customary authority was reinvented even as it was rendered an anachronistic leftover from the precolonial past. In many ways, this parallels the dynamics of rule elsewhere on the continent, in that it incentivized patrilineal clans (parallel to ethnic groups elsewhere) to engage as exclusive units with the colonial state in a politics that was more oriented toward the short-term maintenance of stability than toward the longer horizons of state- and nation-building. However, a unique aspect of the pre-theoretical conception of what later coalesced as “segmentary lineage theory” was how it modeled what was likely to happen. The colonial consensus in the Horn was not only a tacit agreement about the importance of Somali patrilineal clanship, but it was also a consensus about supposedly inevitable futures. It was not just a convenient framework for administration; it was a framework for predicting how blood feuds would unfold without pre-emptive intervention. Whether elements of the anticipatory aspect of Somali clan politics predate European colonialism is beyond our scope, but in the next section, we connect it to logics of prediction and pre-emption observed in ethnographic fieldwork among Somalis in the present.

4. The Afterlife of Ancestral Legacies

In everyday life, one most important effects of clanship as an “emic” model in everyday life is the way it grounds people’s present senses of self in an ancestral legacy. In a sense, the legacies and personalities of Somali ancestors “live on” in their descendants today. This is often positive and productive for people: clanship is a useful means by which to lay claim to qualities and actions of ancestors to position oneself in the present. But a key aspect of this legacy’s politicization is how it shapes anticipations about what a group is likely to do in the future, which reconstitutes the clan as a locus of political thinking and intervention in everyday life.

In some sense, this link to ancestry is built into the patrilineal naming convention in which Somali children bear not a permanent surname, but the name of their father and grandfather—and can often trace back several more names in the line of descent. This readily lends itself to people identifying themselves or being identified by others in close connection with near ancestors, for example, as “son of [ina] so-and-so.” Links to ancestry through naming are not only part of the formal naming system, but also of nicknames (naaneys). Nicknames are frequently given based on an individual’s characteristics, but prominent nicknames can also attach themselves to descendants. An example is the two most recent SRS presidents, ʿAbdi Iley Moḥamoud ʿUmar (Iley referencing his father’s handicapped sight) and Mustafa ʿAgjar Muḥumed ʿUmar (ʿAgjar referring to his father’s handicapped leg). Honorific titles readily travel across multiple generations: male descendants of a prominent ugaas (clan-leader) may embrace such a title even if the official role of ugaas has passed to another of their relatives. There are direct descendants of Sayyid Moḥammed ʿAbdille Ḥassan from the Bah Geri Ogaden who go by the nickname “Sayyid” in recognition of this ancestry. The qualities captured in nicknames (often of personality or appearance) partake in a broader universe of claims on ancestry. When such claims are avowed, or voiced by descendants themselves, they tend to be selective and generally focused on positive qualities. For example, one young man hailing from the Bah Geri lineage encountered by one of the authors in Jigjiga in 2018 was a poet, and claimed that his poetic abilities came directly from Sayyid Moḥammed.

Yet claims on ancestry can also be ascribed, or assigned by others. Interpreting an individual’s actions in relation to those of their ancestors tends not to be a neutral activity, but rather selectively draws on ancestral precedent to de-emphasize individual agency in favor of supposedly inherent characteristics of a lineage. This is especially used to define people as troublemakers. One prominent example is the Ethiopian government’s discourses about the Reer Isaaq cited in our introduction. Another is that, during the political transition in SRS during 2017–2018, the opposition figure ʿAbdirashid ʿAli Shuʿaa was frequently labeled by older supporters of ʿAbdi Iley’s incumbent government as “ina ʿAli Shuʿaa,” downplaying ʿAbdirashid’s activism and political vision as simply a reflection of his elderly father’s persistent opposition to Ethiopia (and perceived ethnocentrism).

More recently, during Ethiopia’s 2021 national elections, Jigjiga’s hotels and cafés buzzed with election talk. Among a group of diaspora returnees discussing the elections, a Facebook post caught one friend’s attention. The post’s author had sharply criticized the election, stating that genuine electoral freedom was foreign to Ethiopia and that this election would be no exception. While his criticisms echoed those of many observers, one friend joked, “Careful now, the next step for him is the bush.” Another chimed in, adding, “It’s easy for them (Reer Haaruun) to be triggered; he might just take up arms.” The group laughed.9

This “joke” summons the legacy of Mohamed Omar Osman, chairman of the ONLF (1998–2018), and Makhtal Daahir, a Somali elder in eastern Ethiopia in the mid-20th century, and presentifies this legacy as part of the current moment. In 1949, Makhtal, an anticolonial activist and leader among the Reer Isaaq Ogaden, led a revolt in Jigjiga and then spent a decade as a political prisoner. After Emperor Haile Selassie granted him a pardon, he became an official for a brief period before defecting again in 1963 in response to Ethiopia’s top-down control and heavy-handed taxes. Makhtal’s Ogaden Liberation Front rebellion mobilized widespread support across the Ogaden plains. The simmering discontent contributed to the formation of the Western Somali Liberation Front in 1976, which coordinated with Somalia’s military in an effort to liberate what is today SRS during the 1977–1978 Ethio-Somali War.

The group in the café found humor in linking the man’s frustration to the Reer Haaruun’s historical role in insurgencies against the Ethiopian state. Such claims about typical behavior among clans based on their ancestors’ actions are common, in our observation. Such claims are often shrugged off as joking (waa kaftan), especially when an observer seems uncomfortable with the generalization. What our theoretical approach foregrounds is that the joke provides a means of engaging with near-future political uncertainty. In this case, some Reer Haaruun individuals’ historical legacy of resistance against Ethiopian governance is leveraged specifically to anticipate another person’s future behavior.

Here again, as with tendencies in colonial governance described above, the lineage system provides a heuristic framework for prediction: it is often easier to take the shortcut—to anticipate an individual’s potential future trajectories based on an assertion about the collective behavior of a clan in the past—than to engage with an individual’s complex personalized concerns and political commitments. Arguably, part of the reason why this mode of short-term anticipation has continued in politics is its legitimacy as a way of thinking among broader Somali populations. When tied to the punitive power of the state, the afterlives of ancestral actions can become deadly. Makhtal Daahir’s grandson, Bashir Ahmed Makhtal, a Canadian citizen, was arrested on the Kenya–Somalia border in 2006 and illegally extradited to Ethiopia, where he faced charges of terrorism. In the absence of evidence linking Bashir to rebellion, Bashir attributed his arrest to his grandfather’s role in Ethiopian politics. He spent 11 years in prison and was only released after Ethiopia’s EPRDF regime collapsed in 2018.

In their analysis of historical clan narratives in SRS, Thompson and Matshanda (2023) highlight how ancestral legacies are subject to ongoing processes of historical refashioning and a degree of creative invention. This occurs not only among political elites but also in everyday life as people “viscerally relive and re-narrate their histories, collapsing time as they work to construct shared understandings of how the past relates to their present loyalties” (Thompson & Matshanda, 2023, p. 137). In this and the previous section, we have demonstrated that an important dimension of this temporal work carried out by clanship is how the projection of these ancestral lineages into the near future also plays an important role in constituting the present. People’s processes of identification with reference to the past provide an orientation toward anticipating likely future scenarios based on precedents. In the following section, we argue that this feedback process has intensified amid the turbulence of the postcolonial Horn.

5. The Afterlife of National Disintegration

“What Afwayne is still teaching us Somali zombies so well

From the grave…”

—Mohamud Siyad Togane

The controversial poet Mohamud Siyad Togane describes in the 2003 poem “Afwayne’s Swansong,” how Siyad Barre—called by the popular nickname Afwayne (“Big Mouth” or “Mighty Mouth”)—used the waning years of his administration to advance a poisonous brand of clan politics. The poem persistently foregrounds afterlife imagery as a means of making sense of Somalia’s collapse: Allah hauls Somalis to Hell in a streetcar called Qurun iyo Qabiil (Decay and Clan), driven by the deceased Siyad himself. Siyad is portrayed as still teaching “Somali zombies” clannishness from the grave, and Togane describes Mogadishu in the terms of Dante’s inferno, inscribed with the warning: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” The poem ends with a question about the future: “Is there really no more hope?” (quoted in Kapteijns, 2012, pp. 66–68).

The question echoes a persistent set of concerns in everyday life among Somalis after 1991. One might just as readily ask: “Is there really no more trust?”, for two reasons. First, hope and trust are closely related, as forward-looking temporal resources. In our conceptualization, trust rests on the belief in a shared future that provides confidence for present interactions. Hope is the capacity to believe that present conditions can change in ways that make this shared future better than the present. Both trust and hope reference the past to make sense of the future, meaning that narration of past events plays an important role in shaping how people anticipate possible scenarios (including hopeful ones) and a degree of confidence about which such scenarios are likely. Second, the lack of hope Togane discerns is, we argue, premised on the ways in which clan-thinking undermines the potential for shared trust among Somalis by dominating public discourses through which the past (e.g., the actions of individuals from other clans in recent history) inhabits the experience of the present and anticipation of the future.

5.1. Somalia’s Former Futures

The past is not a flat terrain of collective experience. It is, as Koselleck (2004) argues, inhabited by a series of “former futures”—possible alternative series of anticipated events that have been bypassed in favor of the actual present that came about. These former futures may be resurrected as still-possible futures toward which people continue to aspire. Perhaps the most powerful former future in the Somali Horn’s postcolonial politics is the aspiration to reunite Somali-speaking people across colonial boundaries, a vision known as “Greater Somalia” or Soomaali-Weyn (Aidid, 2020). This future-oriented project provided a foil for the lineage structure and, in a sense, demanded the “death” of clanship that was ceremonialized in 1971. Since Somalia’s collapse, the failure of this former future is a constant reference point for the alleged return to the precolonial anachronism of clanship. Ingiriis (2018, p. 59) identifies the idea of a unitary Somali nation-state with “Siyad Barre’s ghost”—a past possibility that haunts the present.

The very act of narrating the rise and fall of the Greater Somalia project in light of its aftermath is shot through with mistrust: mistrust, especially, that leaders pushing Somali nationalism have always been motivated by secret clannish agendas. A popular story about Siyad Barre’s regime is telling: In the early 1970s, during a public meeting following Siyad Barre’s announcement that qabyaalad had been “buried” under the principles of the revolutionary regime, a mid-level military official from the Reer Isaaq clan is reported to have whispered to Barre: “Qabyaalad should be eradicated, but not for you and I.” While seemingly tongue-in-cheek, the officer’s remark reveals a deeper and widely understood reality among Somalis: the public condemnation of clannishness may be a machination to conceal its continued influence in private and personal spheres. This contradiction is further embodied by the officer, who was a member of the national army, a longstanding symbol of national unity (cf. de Waal, 2020, p. 566). As suggested by the officer, clannishness, though officially denounced, persisted as an instrument of governance. This story and others give continued life to the Lewisian paradigm: whatever politicians may say publicly, the fundamental basis of their actions is suspected to be clanship.

Yet it is hard to disentangle this narrative of Siyad’s secret clannishness with a post-hoc projection of clan politics backwards in time. Having failed to reunite the Somali nation across the colonially drawn borders, Siyad faced rising opposition and turned increasingly—like colonial governments—to clanship as a tool of pre-emptive punishment to maintain his grip on power. As we suggested regarding the colonial era, this anticipatory collective punishment tends to create the reality it perceives. If people expect that they and their families may be punished based on the actions of one of their fellow clan members, a logical response is to close ranks—especially if it is suspected that the government itself is shot through with secret clan loyalties. A crucial qualitative transformation in the meaning of segmentary lineage from the precolonial to postcolonial moment is this shift from a relatively more reactive mobilization of lineage ties (either to raid other groups in response to scarcity or in mutual self-defense following a more localized conflict) to the anticipatory mobilization of lineage to pre-emptively protect oneself from anticipated state-sanctioned violence. Galaty (1981) convincingly shows that reactive mobilization of segmentary groups following conflict between individuals may remain a latent possibility rather than an actual scaling up of conflict into higher levels. However, when the stakes are the perceived potential for a group to be eradicated as a group—what Kapteijns (2012) calls “clan cleansing”—then segmentary lineage mobilization takes on a pressing urgency.

The implications of this argument are that groups mobilized along clan lines should not be seen as cohesive and pre-existing (“primordial”) units vying against each other for power. Politics in the aftermath of the 1977–1978 Ethio-Somali war—and even more so after Somalia’s 1991 collapse—have been oriented significantly around mistrust based on other people’s suspected clan loyalties, rather than shared political objectives or trust within cohesive clan units. This means that whatever cohesion exists within a group does not primarily emerge from the “positive” elements of kinship-based reciprocity or trust, but rather from mistrust grounded in anticipations that other clans might take power and inflict collective punishment based on clan identity.

5.2. A Present-Day Example

A recent example is illustrative. A 2024 presentation hosted by Oxford University’s Northeast Africa Forum described the politics of Jubbaland, southern Somalia, in terms of the broad lineage level of Ogaden mobilization against Hawiye dominance at the federal level in Mogadishu (Majid & Abdirahman, 2024). The presenters carefully explained that none of these clans were unified in their political commitments but maintained an etic framework of clan mobilization to explain the unfolding politics. We suggest that a closer examination of this process foregrounds a quite different story than one of pre-existing kinship groups in conflict. In contrast, it reveals how segmentary lineage mobilization operates through pre-emptively labeling perceived enemies in clan terms despite the more complex realities of geopolitical struggle and inter-clan fragmentation.

In the lead-up to the formation of Jubbaland as one of Somalia’s federal regions between 2009 and 2013, two main camps emerged in the struggle for power, both of which sought to mobilize supporters through constructions of lineage. The figureheads of the Ras Kamboni Group were Ahmed Madobe, hailing from Reer Warfaa (a subclan of Reer ‘Abdille from the Mohamed Zubeer Ogaden branch), and Maʿallin Mohamed, hailing from the ʿAwlyahaan Reer Afgaab, which is outside of the Mohamed Zubeer branch. Meanwhile, a parallel coalition between Mohamed Zubeer and non-Mohamed Zubeer Ogaden clans constituted the Azania Group, led by Professor Gaandi, who hails from the Ogaden Tolomoge, as well as elites from the Reer Isaaq (segmentary “cousins” of the Reer ‘Abdille as part of the Mohamed Zubeer), Bah Geri, and Maqaabul Ogaden.

Segmentary lineage thinking would predict: (1) that the Reer ʿAbdille and Reer Isaaq would unite against threats external to their shared Maxamed Zubeer lineage; and (2) the broader group of Ogaden clans would be relatively unified against federal leaders such as Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (who hails from the Hawiye) or Mohamed Abdullahi “Farmaajo” (Mareḥaan, though sharing Daarood lineage with Ogaden) as well as against overly zealous political influence from Ethiopia or Kenya. Instead, the Jubbaland situation is characterized by creative constructions of shared lineage as a source of legitimation for alliances despite the well-known lack of cohesion within lineages. Notably, there are major political fissures even within the Reer Warfaa subsection of the Reer ‘Abdille. For example, Hassan Turki (Reer Warfaa) opposed both the Ras Kamboni group and the Azania group based on their secularism and instead prioritized his religious and ideological interests over clan loyalties. This evades the logic of segmentary lineage (and also points to the importance of religion as a force that can cut against segmentary lineage logics, though this is beyond our scope).

Most notably, it is the pre-emptive negative labeling of these groups by one another and by their allies that supports our argument that clanship indexes a way to conceptualize and control the near future. The Ras Kamboni group received support from across the border in Ethiopia, where SRS president ‘Abdi Moḥamoud ʿUmar (‘Abdi Iley) was openly working to revise history and politicize the construct of “Reer ʿAbdille” as a political group opposed to the “Reer Isaaq” whom he labeled as ONLF supporters (Thompson & Matshanda, 2023). The self-conscious effort to promote and politicize Reer ‘Abdille identity hardly emerged from the grassroots clan-membership; Ethiopia’s ruling EPRDF coalition was also using ‘Abdi Iley’s support for Ras Kamboni to advance their goal of weakening Somalia’s unification efforts. The Azania group referred to Ras Kamboni as “Kamboni DDSI,” referring to the alliance with ‘Abdi Iley’s SRS government.

On the other side, the Azania group mobilized a different lineage construct: since the Reer Isaq and Reer ‘Abdille could hardly oppose each other within the logic of the lineage structure, the coalition named themselves “Baha Ogaadeen,” meaning a lineage group united by maternal descent from Ogaden mothers as well as Ogaden fathers. Meanwhile, Ras Kamboni supporters dismissed Azania as “Azania ONLF,” implicitly mobilizing the derogatory labeling of Reer Isaaq (and Tolomoge) as persistent rebels and “refusers of peace” (nabad-diid). The reference to the ONLF also alluded to the Kenyan government’s support for the Azania group. In sum, both open and more allusive clan-talk is a dominant way of conceptualizing the conflict, but this language disguises a broader political universe shaping the conflict.

This example suggests an important point regarding the link between the logic of concepts/categories and of cost/benefit calculation identified by Schlee (2004, p. 136). The ascribed clan categories imposed by critics of political movements highlight the risk that allowing leaders from other clans to take power might result in exclusion or harm to one’s own group. For the majority of Somalis who frame their political commitments in terms of clan, the practices of colonial and postcolonial statecraft have rendered political clanship more about the potential costs of being excluded from power rather than the anticipated benefits of having one’s own clan in power. Clan labels are frequently deprecating generalizations based on the identity of leaders, and oriented toward mobilizing a negative anticipation among people who are not members of the leaders’ clan or subclan. It is hardly surprising that members of clans thus derided often jump to the defense of their lineage’s prestige. If a person hears criticism of a leader from their own clan, the tendency is to defend this leader by labeling the accusers themselves as being clannish. However, we rarely observe widespread anticipation among clan members that there will be any direct benefit to promoting leaders of their own clan (though close kin of an aspiring leader might anticipate some direct benefits).10 A prime example of this is the deprecating label of ʿAbdi Iley’s SRS government from 2010 to 2018 as a “Reer ʿAbdille government,” even as prominent members of Reer ʿAbdille subclans were not only excluded from government benefits, but even directly targeted by the regime. A similar argument applies to the current administration, which has been labeled as a Reer Isaaq government, despite parallel grievances among Reer Isaaq regarding their exclusion, loss of political power, and the underdevelopment of their home districts.

For most people who support politicians based on shared clanship, it is simply less risky than supporting a leader from a different clan who is suspected of being secretly clannish. People know that elite politicians are playing on clan narratives to shore up their own power, often at the public’s expense. They also know that political alliances, even if legitimized by revisionist interpretations of history through a segmentary lineage lens, tend to be strategic and temporary. Nevertheless, a potent afterlife of the way political clanship was selectively institutionalized and secretly manipulated during earlier eras is that mistrust of other clans incentivizes support for an individual’s own clan as the least-worst option. This mistrust is further compounded by the formalization of the segmentary lineage model in Somalia’s “4.5 system” of power sharing among clans, which eclipses other options for political organization (including more national-oriented processes of reconciliation as well as maternal lineages structures, foregrounded in the principle of bah and the rise of the “sixth clan” led by women who were ultimately excluded from Somalia’s Arta peace process). If we are correct that the “negative” anticipatory labeling of political adversaries as clannish is a more fundamental feature of contemporary political clanship than the “positive” mobilization of kin to support a shared political goal, this should reorient the political conversation toward more careful thinking and analytic language about the incentives and groups involved.

6. The Afterlives of Unpredictability and Displacement

“Fiqi tolkii ka ma janno tago”—[Even] an Islamic scholar will not enter paradise, on account of his clan. (Somali proverb)

One of the most active spaces of debating clan issues is Somali cyberspace. In this section, we turn to several discussions on the Reddit r/Somalia forum about clan issues to link our arguments back to everyday life among Somalis in the Horn and in diaspora. We selected the r/Somalia or “Bulshada Soomaaliyeed” (Somali society) forum to search for discussions of clan issues because of the vibrancy of its discussions and our observation that the forum brings together Somalis from numerous nationalities and clan backgrounds. While posters have usernames that do not reveal their individual identity, regularly reading forum threads suggests that prominent members of various lineages in the Horn of Africa and among the Somali diaspora actively participate, with members in the Horn often contextualizing and clarifying what is actually going on in the Horn for a broader diaspora audience of forum readers. Searching the forum for specific discussions of clan issues, we selected from among hundreds of discussion threads to focus on three Reddit discussions that occurred during 2023–2024 that specifically sought to understand Somalis’ experiences of clan. Each of these provoked responses about clans’ temporality that support aspects of our argument and corroborate our observation and ethnographic research among Somali communities in the Horn and in diaspora.

• Discussion 1: Is there any Somali qabiil11 that has achieved anything through qabyalad [clannishness] since independence?
• Discussion 2: Has your qabil/tribe benefited you in any way?
• Discussion 3: Have you ever gone against your clan?

All three of these questions provoked reflection and debate on the intersections between collective (mis)trust and the temporal nature of clanship. In response to the first and second questions, there was a degree of consensus that clanship sometimes benefits individuals or small family groups, but not clans in general. “Qabiils don’t achieve things,” wrote the initial responder, “it’s individuals who promote qabil to achieve their interests whether it’s politics, wealth or other things. There [are] a lot of individuals [who] benefit from qabilism not general qabil.” Alongside similar criticisms, multiple posters were quick to lament the anachronistic feeling they had about clanship, echoing the Somali man in Minneapolis quoted earlier in our analysis. “It’s a feudal society in a modern world,” reflected one commenter in Discussion 1. “Except worse. The damages for Somalia are worse than the benefits it gets for its respective clan.” The next poster likewise placed clanship as an anachronism, reflecting on Somali diaspora positions: “thankfully most of us actually live in countries where they’ve moved past clan systems 100s if not 1000s or years ago…” In response to Discussion 2, one poster simply lamented: “It’s 2024, and people are asking for qabil. We are Somali that’s it,” followed by crying emojis and a skull emoji.

The third discussion, asking for instances in which users had “gone against their clan,” provoked the most detailed discussion of the links between (mis)trust and the capacity to envision a shared future among Somalis. The original poster framed the question in terms of trust, echoing the argument which we had come to separately through our academic analysis: “We always suspect people are hiding their qabyaalad behind what they express. This means qabyaalad is more important to us and that is why we have these suspicions.”12 Responses on the forum were overwhelmingly negative in their descriptions of clanship. Several users boasted about times they had rejected lineage-based demands. Responses oriented toward “going against one’s clan” highlighted the perceived negative effects of two aspects of the clan system.

The first aspect is the practice of collective support and indemnity. In the Reddit discussion, some posters highlighted the extreme example of collective responsibility: collective payment for crimes committed by a fellow clan member. “I refused to pay Mag once,” one user replied. “I ain’t payin for a [expletive] to conduct murders and then depend on hard working family in the states to bail him out [sic].” “Same,” replied another user, “my family got mad at me when I told them hala dilo wasaqa [let the filth be killed].” These discussions of mag’s role as collective indemnity in murder cases foreground the enduring relevance of precisely the issues with which colonial authorities and Lewis’s colonial-era ethnography were concerned. Lewis’s treatment of segmentary lineage focused significantly on the mag-paying jilib unit, or what he termed the “dia-paying group.” “It is only through membership of a dia-paying group that one has political and jural status,” he argued in A Pastoral Democracy (Lewis, 1961, p. 170). He continued by suggesting that “the fundamental criterion of political and jural viability is the power to discharge blood-debts without impoverishing the joint resources of a group” (Lewis, 1961, p. 171). While the Reddit posts illustrate how mag continues to operate as a function of clanship, they also reveal how this dimension of clan participation is being contested and reframed, both in the wake of the overwhelming violence of Somalia’s state collapse and amid the massive displacement that followed. The discussion highlights how practices of collective indemnity for murder cases reproduce the feeling of clanship as a relic from precolonial chaos.

The second theme is the link between these collective support mechanisms and the future horizons of Somali reunification versus the existing tendency toward emerging clan fiefdoms discerned by analysts including Ingiriis (2018) and Hoehne (2016). “Clans are dumb,” another responder posted in Discussion 3, and posed an imaginary monologue on the effects of clanship:

Hey, I’m going to f*** over my entire country so that my tiny patch of land that contains a fraction of my population can have the illusion that we’re doing better than anyone else when really we’re directly contributing to the demise of our nation and inadvertently sabotaging our own chances for greater prosperity.

Here we see the importance of clanship as a claim to land, and thereby a degree of stability, amid the vortex of Somalis’ transnational mobility since the 1990s. This is conjoined with the criticism that this dimension of clanship is sabotaging the shared future. It is in this regard that we see perhaps most potently clanship as a practice of time management. More accurately, and in ways that deserve further analysis, clanship can be seen as a practice of managing time and space or social space-time, as intertwined conditions of human existence. Clan groupings both reflect and reinforce claims to homelands (and pride in these homelands) as a space to carve out a shared future, at least for a small group and in the short term, amid ongoing instability and mistrust. In doing so, they orient clan members toward the short-term horizon of survival and relative stability within that clan, rather than toward the broader possibilities of rebuilding a shared life and trust across a broader segment of Somali society. In the process, the feeling of being stuck in the past, of orienting life around precolonial homelands and clan-units, is constantly reproduced as the only foreseeable future.

7. Conclusions

We have argued for a new understanding of the intersections between segmentary lineage organization and political conflict, drawing on evidence from the Somali Horn of Africa—a classic example of a “segmentary lineage” society. As manifest in the Horn of Africa, segmentary lineage theory has never been simply a framework for describing existing structures of kinship. It has also functioned as a means of anticipating likely pathways of conflict and working to pre-empt them through collective punishment. This raises serious concerns about the resurrection of the segmentary paradigm to explain conflict dynamics. As Kuper (1982, pp. 81–86) convincingly explains, the mid-century anthropologists whose models provide the explanatory basis for Moscona et al. (2020) often recognized that their models failed to reflect actual behavior (though this is less clearly the case with Lewis’s explanation of Somali social structure). Moscona et al. (2020) posit that the mechanisms of conflict in segmentary societies are responsibilities and allegiances to kin groups, which drive mobilization. A more convincing explanation is that political conflict tends to calcify and politicize existing identity groups (Harrison, 1993; Thompson & Matshanda, 2023), with the advent of colonial state-sanctioned collective punishment under indirect rule as a key inflection point in this process. Our concept of segmentary lineage’s “afterlives” foregrounds how historical practices of pre-emptive collective punishment based on the idea of segmentary lineage mobilization continue to feed back into political conflict as people use clan-framed descriptions of history in their efforts to anticipate risks and discern who not to trust.

Our argument yields one key insight for academic and political analysis, as well as three more general implications. The insight for analysis is that supposedly “detached” analysis can participate in the conceptual framing of conflicts by attributing blame to identity groups and thereby potentially legitimizing (at least in state officials’ eyes) state-sanctioned collective punishment or exclusion. There is a longstanding idea of which analysts should be especially wary: the idea that if we just understand the “real” history or structure of clan groups, we can also understand and anticipate likely alliances and fractures. We regard this idea as a legacy of the way clan knowledge was created during late colonialism to advance the strategic objective of pre-empting blood feuds. In contrast, we believe that while clan institutions and leaders play a key role in mediating contemporary politics, one important dimension of their operation is the reinterpretation and selective analysis of history through the segmentary lineage paradigm to legitimize present-day political positions and to create narratives about near-future risks. Those with deep knowledge of Somali lineages and history can almost always provide a precedent by which to discern likely future scenarios. Resurrecting clan-framed pasts to navigate the future is a means of constantly reproducing political clanship in the present. This focus on segmentary lineage as a narrative framework also highlights the need for differentiating carefully between collective action by a clan and elite politics done in the name of clan, and how these dimensions of political clanship mutually shape each other.

Our argument also has three broader implications. The first, as explained in Section 2 above, is that Somali clanship—and segmentary lineage organization more generally—should not be treated as exceptional. Political clanship is a historically conditioned mechanism for addressing the universal human experience of uncertainty about the future, albeit a mechanism that emerged from a particular history of turbulence and violence. This militates against Lewis’s assertion that Somalis are not like other people. It is also an argument against the sense of anachronism—that Somalis are hundreds or thousands of years behind the rest of the world. Political clanship continues for many of the same reasons that politicized ethnicity and excessive party loyalty entrench themselves in other contexts: the frameworks humans use to think and talk about the world shape the terrain of anticipation and identity categories by which they decide whom to (mis)trust amid uncertainty.

Second, our focus on the feedback processes that have reproduced political clanship provides scope for analysts to move beyond clan-based explanations and explore the role of agency among individuals in webs of kinship and friendship that are not coterminous with clan identities. Decisions about whom to support and whom to oppose are framed in the idiom of clan and may link to affective dimensions of kinship and mutual support, but political clanship should be analyzed as a means of agentive positioning for the future rather than as an inherent tendency among Somalis. In this regard, it is also important to disentangle political clanship from the dimensions of mutual support and shared affinity among extended families. We have argued that political clanship on the scale it appears today is better explained in terms of negative labeling and pre-emptive anticipations of risk than in terms of mutual obligation and support.

Finally, our analysis opens a practical question of how to address the political conundrum that clanship has become in the Somali Horn of Africa. The first step is to challenge the assumption that clanship is the automatic and most meaningful basis for “positive” political engagement among Somalis. Political clanship is grounded more in mistrust between lineage constituencies than in shared trust within them. If a system of representation drives mistrust and incentivizes collective blaming and even pre-emptive collective punishment (whether through violence or through exclusion based on clan), then alternatives are needed that can work to rebuild trust and re-establish both the practice and perception of equal justice.