About the author(s):
Experienced consultant specializing in research, accountability, and program implementation in Somalia, Kenya, and the Horn of Africa. Deep understanding of working in conflict-affected communities, with expertise in community-based protection and participatory research methodologies. Passionate about fostering security, peace, and governance through community engagement.
Ashley Jackson
Dr. Ashley Jackson is the author of “Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan” (Hurst & Co./OUP, 2021), co-director of the Centre for the Study of Armed Groups and an Associate Researcher with the Conflict, Security and Development Research Group at King's College London. Her research focuses on engagement with armed groups, and she has written on these and related issues for Foreign Policy, NY Times, Washington Post, and others. She holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
This post forms part of phase two of the Beyond Compliance Symposium: How to Prevent Harm and Need in Conflict, hosted by the Armed Groups and International Law blog. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium invites reflection on the conceptualisation of negative everyday lived experiences of armed conflict, and legal and extra-legal strategies that can effectively address both civilian harm and humanitarian need.
In the absence of effective external or government protection, Somali communities have developed sophisticated self-protection systems. As part of the Beyond Compliance Consortium, the Centre on Armed Groups and Elman Peace have been conducting research on how civilians understand, experience, and respond to harm + need in Somalia. This post is based on qualitative research conducted in Somalia (Mogadishu and Wanlaweyn) in early 2025 engaging 74 people, including displaced people, members of host communities and armed actors, in interviews and group discussions. This blog focuses on one aspect of this research, which aimed to gather insights from civilian-led initiatives to inform more effective protection strategies.
Patterns of harm + need in Somalia
In Somalia’s conflict, now in its fourth decade, power has been fragmented among clan authorities, militias, and political elites, with the federal government exercising only partial control over key cities and some rural areas. Clan militias are both a source of protection and a threat, and formal state security forces remain unevenly trained and not always accountable to the rules or any central authority. Beyond urban centers, Al Shabaab governs vast territories in central and southern Somalia, collecting taxes, enforcing its own justice system, and regulating commerce. Operating a shadow state, it provides a degree of order even as it perpetrates coercion and violence. Cycles of drought and displacement, climate change and external military forces have further eroded institutional legitimacy and deepened civilian vulnerability.
Understandings of civilian harm in Somalia tend to focus on the most visible harms that people experience: death, bodily injury and displacement. In the current phase of the conflict, the most immediate threats the people we spoke with talked about, were indeed related to physical safety. But it is important to recognise that Somalis face a spectrum of violence, from organised, predatory raids by Al-Shabaab and undisciplined government soldiers to the pervasive, low-level crime fueled by sheer economic desperation. With soldiers earning less than $200, many turn to theft to survive. One community member noted that soldiers “claiming to conduct searches will gather families and steal valuables.” This is compounded by rampant drug use among youth, who make up the majority of the armed forces. An elder in Wanlaweyn linked this growing problem to “a recent incident where a drunk soldier opened fire in a market, killing four people.”
But especially in protracted conflict contexts like Somalia, harm + need are multilayered and more complex than just physical threats. Experiences of conflict are also heavily shaped by geography. Families may have some members in government areas and others in areas controlled by Al Shabaab or where there is fragmented clan control. Some children may serve with the Somali national army and their siblings with Al Shabaab. Individuals and communities have suffered repeated loss of loved ones, displacement, forced recruitment, abuse and trauma. Uncertainty and psychological trauma, residual from previous violence or reinforced by ongoing fighting and its effects, add another, less apparent layer of harm.
Beyond physical threats and psychological harm, the conflict has “shattered community bonds, replacing trust with suspicion and hatred,” as one elder lamented. Without a functioning justice system, minor disputes over land or water can spiral into full-scale clan conflicts rooted in notions of retribution – “an eye for an eye.” This breakdown of social trust is exploited by groups like Al-Shabaab, which systematically recruits children, leaving them stigmatised and at constant risk of retaliation if they ever manage to escape.
Embedded protection mechanisms
Conventional approaches to protection in armed conflict, including compliance strategies within humanitarian and peacebuilding frameworks, often depict civilians as vulnerable and in need of external assistance, inadvertently obscuring the complex, situated strategies that civilians themselves develop to survive and resist violence. In Somalia, formal systems of protection are largely absent, corrupt, or – as illustrated in the examples of Somali forces’ abusing the population above – the source of harm themselves. In response, people have largely had to build their own systems and techniques of protection. The ways that people have sought to navigate or prevent harm and address need has also evolved, in response to years of shifting patterns of violence, overlapping experiences of harm and persistent uncertainty. These infrastructures of protection are socially embedded ecosystems of community-led security, justice, and social support, which also means they are often invisible to outsiders and international actors.
In response, communities in areas under governmental or contested control have developed multi-layered defences. Some Mogadishu communities have created early warning networks. Women selling tea along the major roads leading to the villages are often some of the first to encounter groups like youth gangs or police officers heading toward their settlements. They use this transaction as an opportunity to gather information on why they are there. These women then call others in their neighbourhoods, using coded phrases like, “There is a wedding today,” or they might explain more openly if they feel safe doing so and have enough airtime. The rest of the women will then each call a few other community members, and so on. Within a few minutes, the village is prepared: valuable items are hidden, and those at risk of being harassed go into hiding.
We also discovered strategies of community self-protection through “incentivised inclusion”. Based on a Somali proverb, communities identify disruptive, armed individuals and offer them salaried positions as neighbourhood security. In one instance, youth joining gangs was driven by economic desperation and social neglect. The elders in two neighbourhoods in Mogadishu came up with a plan to give the youths roles in protecting the neighbourhood. They were paid a small stipend resourced by household contributions. As such, they went from terrorising the community to protecting it.
Communities have also generated their own solutions to community violence, rooted in traditional authority. Where formal justice fails, local committees of elders mediate disputes, forging peace agreements between warring clans and imposing social consequences—like exclusion—on harmful actors. Such informal mechanisms embody a form of social accountability that often carries greater legitimacy than state or legal institutions.
While these community-driven protection systems operate independently of formal actors, our collaboration with Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre, a Somali-founded, women-led national organisation with over three decades of experience in peacebuilding, protection, and reintegration across Somalia, allowed us to examine how a national organisation can strengthen and systematise these responses.Together we explored to what degree these responses are effective, and what factors enable some communities to more effectively protect themselves than others? To what degree are they scalable (without being co-opted or distorted)? And what role can community-based organisations or more ‘traditional’ external protection actors play to support and bolster local responses?
Bridging protection and encouraging restraint
Teaming up with Elman Peace to conduct the research has allowed us to more comprehensively understand harm + need from the community perspective, given Elman Peace’s long-standing relationships with communities and the trust they have built. It has also allowed us to explore the role of community-based organisations in bolstering local protection responses for mitigating harm + need and encouraging restraint from violence and abuse by armed and other actors. It has given us, as researchers, a unique level of access and referred trust to be able to explore sensitive issues. Together, we have drawn on our respective experiences to navigate the ethics of such research, and been able to do so in a way that is grounded in Elman Peace’s ongoing relationships of care with those we have interviewed (see also these pieces of work).
Perhaps most importantly, it has also underscored how organisations rooted in communities can act as connectors between local protection systems and international frameworks. Civil society organisations like Elman Peace occupy a unique space between communities and external actors. Their proximity to the ground, and the trust they’ve built over years, allows them to see and strengthen the protective systems that outsiders often miss. Rather than introducing new structures, Elman works through what already exists (e.g., clan networks, elders, women’s groups) helping them function more effectively, sustainably and safely.
The organisation’s community-based reintegration of youth forcibly recruited into Al Shabaab, for instance, shows how an NGO can lend incentives, structure, documentation, and sustained follow-up to an informal but legitimate community mechanism. Young people who leave or escape Al Shabaab face enormous challenges. Many cannot return home due to retaliation or stigma. Without support, they risk exclusion, suspicion, or re-recruitment. Elman Peace’s community-based reintegration programme is a deliberately structured initiative, developed over time and rooted in local relationships. One element of this work allows clan elders or other guarantors to vouch for a young person once they have received care and training at Elman’s Centres. This approach is grounded in years of system-building, with procedural steps and safeguards that reflect Elman Peace’s long-standing investment in community-led accountability.
These guarantors assume personal responsibility for their future conduct, enabling the youth to integrate back into society. This carries considerable personal risk. As one elder explained: “We can be easily targeted and killed by the same child we supported… These children are radicalised, and they completely lose humanity sometimes.” But guarantors describe acting according to moral duty, in which they use their status to confer legitimacy, provide protection, and open doors that formal institutions cannot. In this way, Elman plays an indispensable bridging role between the state, who has little capacity to deal with at risk youth, and communities who cannot offer sufficient protection on their own.
Elman Peace’s work on gender-based violence, specifically female genital mutilation (FGM), similarly draws on social capital and moral authority to incentivise behavioural change. While not strictly a product of the conflict, we know that FGM is often worsened in situations of protracted violence. Elman Peace supports young female FGM survivors to advocate to elders and health workers around the harms of the practice, tuning generational and social taboos on their head. The programme illustrates how Elman Peace engages with deeply rooted social practices through sustained community-based programming, designed to evolve with shifting social norms. It works because it addresses FGM from multiple angles: religious authority, social norms, health consequences, and generational change. It works through cultural frameworks that communities already respect rather than imposing external values.
Implications for policy and practice
Supporting such actors requires moving beyond the compliance mindset that so often dominates external thinking to one that values relational accountability, moral legitimacy, and practical restraint. In contexts like Somalia where authority is fragmented, practical accountability is not so much legal but relational. While we are only beginning to explore the policy and programmatic implications for restraint arising from this work, some are already apparent. External interventions should resource, amplify, and support community mechanisms rather than create parallel systems. This means mapping existing protection infrastructure before designing interventions. Protracted conflict requires interventions that can sustain over years and adapt as contexts evolve – not 18 month projects seeking to produce ‘quick results’. Elman Peace’s work has been built on decades of engagement with the same communities.