An argument for increased focus on indigenous institutions.Brian Doherty writing in Reason:
More here...Ken Menkhaus, a Somalia scholar at Davison University and no partisan for anarchy, astutely noted in a 2007 article in International Security that at worst, "anarchist" Somalia has emulated existing international anarchy, developing bottom-up systems of "protection and access to resources...through a combination of blood payment groups (diya), customary law (xeer), negotiation (shir), and the threat of force-mirroring in intriguing ways the practices of collective security, international regimes, diplomacy, and recourse to war, which are the principal tools of statecraft that modern states use to manage their own anarchic environment." But, he says, "these extensive and intensive mechanisms for both managing conflict and providing a modest level of security in a context of state collapse are virtually invisible to external observers, whose sole preoccupation is often with the one structure that actually provides the least amount of rule of law to Somalis-the central state."
via Wikipedia A guurti (court) is traditionally formed beneath an acacia tree, where judges arbitrate a dispute until both parties are satisfied. This process can sometimes lead to several days' worth of discussions.
