Beyond Legal Dualism: Rethinking Hybrid Order Through Somaliland’s Customary-Based Dispute Resolution

Abstract

This article challenges legal dualism — understood in Hooker’s (1975) sense as the formal separation of customary and state legal orders into distinct, non-interacting spheres — and argues that the framing obscures how hybrid governance actually operates in post-conflict contexts. Drawing on social transformation theory, hybrid political orders scholarship, Griffiths’s strong legal pluralism and Moore’s semi-autonomous social field, it examines Somaliland’s Xeer-based dispute resolution as a case of dynamic interaction between customary and formal institutions rather than of parallel coexistence. The analysis combines legal text analysis, process-tracing and systematic review of secondary empirical studies, applied to the Xeer–state interface. The December 2025 Xeer Ciise crisis in Awdal exposed violent centre-periphery tensions and inter-clan sovereignty disputes between the Ciise and the Gadabuursi. Elder mediation contained the violence, and the February 2026 ceasefire is classified, following Galtung (1969), as negative peace: the fighting stopped while the structural conditions that produced it — peripheralisation, jurisdictional ambiguity and the exclusion of women, minority clans and youth — remained unresolved. The article advances endogenous legal transformation as its principal conceptual contribution: internally driven normative change negotiated among elders, communities and practitioners rather than imposed through external legal transplant. It concludes that sustainable peace requires moving beyond dualistic frameworks towards deliberate institutional design, including joint state–elder judicial training, partial codification of Xeer precedents on terms that preserve its adaptive character, guaranteed participation for currently excluded groups, and institutionalised early-warning mechanisms.