Imagine a place where your family name is more important than your ideas. This is Somalia, where clan loyalty is more powerful than any law. The current voting system is like a dance everyone knows. It survived a civil war but now faces a big challenge.

On the evening of April 26, the Egyptian merchant vessel Sward was hijacked by armed men a few miles off the Somali coast. It was steered towards an anchorage near the port of Garacad in Puntland, a semi-autonomous state in north-eastern Somalia.

The warring factions that have devastated Somalia have signed their latest, fourteenth peace agreement in neighbouring Kenya. A clear-eyed observer of his country s affairs asks if it can open a space for normal life and politics. Somalia is justly ...