Nation-building from below and de facto statehood: a study of online communities in the Somalia-Somaliland dyad

Abstract

Building upon literature on de facto states and nationalism studies, this study uses a bottom-up approach to the study of nation-building in contexts marked by contested statehood. Focusing less on the nature and content of nation-building projects, this study aims to bring ordinary people back into the picture by focusing on the ways they engage with such policies. For that purpose, the study utilises the Somalia-Somaliland dyad as a single case study. This thesis is embedded in everyday nationalism and everyday nationhood, which allows ordinary people to display a sense of agency in their interactions with the nation. Fox and Miller-Idriss’s (2008) framework, centred around practices of nationhood, is utilised to determine how grassroots communities within the dyad engage with nation-building. The study benefits from textual and visual materials collected by the author within online communities on the following platforms: Reddit, Discord, Facebook and TikTok. Members of these communities were found to be engaging with nation-building projects, discursively engaging with their content and reproducing it by disseminating national symbols.