Abstract
Motivation
How do people living in an insecure borderland beset by civil war and insurgency solve social problems and improve life when they are targeted by counterinsurgency forces, taxed by insurgents, and their villages are too insecure to get state or NGO services? Understanding their everyday governance helps reorient approaches to development in areas in or emerging from war.
Purpose
The article presents insights from residents of rural areas on either side of the national border between Somalia and Kenya, where protracted and violent conflict has been ongoing for over 30 years. It focuses on practices of everyday governance from a grounded perspective. What do residents’ solutions look like? Who do they engage with and how? What norms and connections do they privilege?
Methods and approach
Resident-led reflection began in early 2024 and continued for six months with 50 diverse borderland residents formed into small cross-border groups. Facilitators invited them to reflect on their daily lives using a storytelling method.
Findings
People and their organizations are consistently negotiating security, managing social relations, and forging cross-community collaborations. In these borderlands, where economic, military, and geopolitical interfaces are hardened by military and political frontiers, the role of the individual and their communities in solving governance problems is especially salient.
Policy implications
These findings challenge some core assumptions of contemporary governance interventions in areas of limited statehood that suggest that state building should begin from the top and concentrate on government. Governments and NGOs should stress-test their proposed and ongoing policies and programmes by asking how well they enhance the three processes that citizens are already working on: negotiations over security, the organization of community relations, and the networks of interconnected problem solving.