Leverage without Legitimacy: Revenue Nodes, Interclan Compacts, and the Sustainability of Political Order in Puntland and the Horn of Africa

Abstract

Across the Horn of Africa, ports, airports, capital cities, and customs points are repeatedly treated as prizes whose capture is expected to deliver political authority. This paper asks why such captures so often fail to produce durable rule and what that failure implies for the sustainability of political orders in fragile, resource-dependent settings. It develops the argument through a theory-building case study of the 2001–2002 armed challenge to the founding administration of Puntland State of Somalia, written by an author who served in that administration, and a structured comparison with the 2026 federal takeover of Baidoa in South West State and with Mogadishu’s claim to national authority by possession of the capital, with further parallels from Somaliland, Jubaland, Ethiopia, Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and three within-country comparisons: Puntland and South West State in Somalia, Tigray and Amhara in Ethiopia, and the Somali-majority counties of northeastern Kenya. Drawing on literature on point resources and gatekeeper states, political settlements, hybrid political orders, and social-ecological resilience, the paper distinguishes leverage, which flows from control of concentrated revenue nodes, from legitimacy, which in post-collapse Somali polities rests on interclan compacts ratified and renewed through consent. The paper introduces a vocabulary for such node-centered contests: the node fallacy, the equation of a revenue node with the polity, and its national form, the capital fallacy; compact breach, the unilateral revision of a negotiated founding settlement by one of its parties; the lineage trap, whereby framing a contest over a compact-based polity as a sub-lineage quarrel triggers cross-lineage compact defense; the hinterland deficit, the shortfall of consent collected in the territory beyond a captured node; and the umpire gap, the absence of accepted non-military arbiters of constitutional disputes. Combining compact depth with the strategy of the actor seeking authority, it proposes a typology of four outcomes: compact defense, fragmented dual authority, consolidation, and incremental consent-building. Specifying a governance-to-environment pathway, the paper argues that governance durability is itself a sustainability variable: node-centered contests divert revenue to coercion, erode the institutions on which rangeland, fisheries, and drought governance depend, and interrupt humanitarian systems in climate-stressed regions. It concludes with implications for Sustainable Development Goal 16, environmental peacebuilding, and the design of dispute-resolution institutions in federal and quasi-federal systems.