Just before the plane touched down in Galkayo, Somalia, I had a moment of worry: all I saw for miles and miles were scrubby bushes, goats and camels fleeing -- had the pilot missed the airstrip altogether? But then the wheels of the old Antonov hit dirt, and we bounced to a stop beside a building made of rocks and mud, smaller than most American garages, with a gaggle of men carrying Kalashnikovs lolling about: airport, Somali-style. Somalia hasn't had a central government for fifteen years. As I flew in, I was curious: what is daily life like when there is no government? And what is it that has prevented Somalis from forming a new one? I learned a lot from the place I ate at.

I took my meals at a restaurant across the street from my hotel. The proprietor, a woman named Zara, slumped languidly in a plastic chair inside the door and held out her hand in greeting. The only woman to run a restaurant in the town, she maintained an air of submissive competence, while still joking with her customers, all male except for me. Plastic tables -- sticky despite regular wiping down with a gray rag -- were set up beneath tin roofs for shade from the relentless desert sun. The menu varied little: fried goat liver for breakfast, roasted or fried goat for lunch and dinner, with a side of either soft bread or oily spaghetti. Occasionally, there would be camel, or a few greens.

I'd go to Zara's to write up my notes. I'd arrive in the late afternoon and sip sweet, spiced tea in the corner while the waiter-boys were cleaning and wafting burning frankincense to move the still air. Bit by bit, the big men in town would start to assemble, sauntering in and appraising who else was around, nodding in greeting or walking over for a proper handshake. My friend Abshir, a Somali Red Cross field director, would come in and sit with me, explaining that the tall man over there was very important (owner of one hundred camels!), and the man over there had been the Minister of Education back when Somalia had a government, and that other man in the corner was the senior elder in the city. He'd wonder aloud whether so-and-so had been there yet, or would come later. Usually, if you're looking for someone, you can find them at Zara's.

The men would eat their meals, slurping and sucking on the goat meat as noisily as they could. They would sit long after the last juices were soaked up, perhaps poking idly at their teeth with a toothpick, or else in a tete-a-tete with their neighbor, glasses of tea in hand. Zara's is a place to negotiate, discuss, make deals, check in with each other.

Eventually, after a glance at the beep-on-the-hour digital watch that seems a hallmark of Somali manhood, each would rise and saunter out. I never saw a check at Zara's; I never saw any money. Zara keeps a running tab for each customer in a logbook stored below the counter. Money is scarce, and people pay their tabs when they can get their hands on some bills. The old Somali shillings are still used, the crumpled brown bills mixed with the crisp new ones that are printed in Malaysia and back-dated to 1990, the government's final year.

That a trust-based system of accountability works in Somalia -- a place evoking images of anarchy and Kalashnikov-waving youth -- might seem surprising. But in many Somali communities, these local ties are what have restored peace. Somalia is a place where many people are known both personally and professionally by a teasing nickname rather than their given name. In the space of a few days, I met Shuke ("short and fat"), Ilkoasse ("rotten teeth") and Afloow ("missing front teeth"). Somalis make do by building networks of trusted relationships rather than relying on any written-down laws. In some towns, people have worked together to implement municipal water and sewerage services, supported by local taxes. Meanwhile, attempts to create a national government have been wholly unsuccessful, resulting only in more fighting as warlords-turned- parliamentarians vie for power.

A little history shows how this situation came about. Throughout the centuries, Somalis developed an intricate system of governance based on clans entering into what were essentially oral mutual codes of conduct with other clans, with clearly stipulated punishments for breaches. Somali society was quite egalitarian, except of course that women were subjugated in the manner the men deemed their Islamic faith to mandate. Fighting was common, but there were strict rules for warfare that were similar to the Geneva Conventions, a much more recent development. Eventually, British and Italian colonizers arrived and marked off the boundaries of their new colonies, a wedge-shape on the Red Sea coast of Africa. Along with independence came the rise of Siad Barre, a dictator who owed his survival to the shiploads of armaments accorded a Cold War pawn of his stature, courted first by the Soviets and then the Americans. Barre fell in 1991, and there has been no real government since. So Somalia's only experience of statehood was under a repressive system powered by the exploitation of the government's riches. Since the civil war died down, traditional ways of governing have had a resurgence, with elders playing the role of arbiters, bringing a measure of peace. But in other parts of the country, particularly around the former capital, Mogadishu, the strongmen who had witnessed the spoils Barre's tactics accorded him use their militias to intimidate their way toward power.

More than a dozen peace conferences have brought these warlords (a term coined specifically for the Somali circumstances) to the negotiating table, but each effort failed as the men pushed and shoved for the largest share of the government pie. The current attempt at a transitional government seems the most promising so far, but with each disagreement they dispatch their proxy fighters throughout the country to stir up fights. And even this latest bunch has earned a notorious reputation -- one meeting in March devolved into an all-out brawl, the 275 members throwing chairs and water glasses, whacking each other with walking sticks.

One morning I met with a tribal elder named Dahir Mohamed. He cemented his worth as an elder forty-six years ago (pre-independence) when he joined a delegation of elders who negotiated the return of a bunch of camels. "It was the elders who initiated peace and rebuilding here -- NOT the politicians," he emphasized. This distrust of politicians is widespread, I found -- Somalis view their transitional federal government with scorn, as it contains a spectrum of actors from the relatively legit to the Mogadishu warlords included solely because of their de facto power. That fact is not lost on the Somalis but is glossed over on the level of a diplomatic corps that accepts the prevailing paradigm that views state-building as a kind of transposable mathematic formula: transitional government + constitution + elections = democracy! rather than starting from the particular situation on the ground.

In an acknowledgment of the wisdom on the ground, the Red Cross recently printed date-books for the transitional ministers with traditional Somali proverbs printed on each page. The idea was to remind these men of their duty to the people they should be accountable to, to whom they seem to pay so little mind.

The tension between the slowly improving local outlooks and the machinations of the transitional national government is rarely far beneath the surface, and reminders of the thin line between peace and violence abound. Driving out of town one afternoon, I looked out the rolled-down window to see a young boy -- perhaps eight or ten -- grab a rock and coil back to hurl it. We were driving slowly to negotiate a speed bump and thus made perfect prey. The driver yelled at the boy to stop, and he reluctantly lowered his arm. But the expression on his face stayed with me: utter contempt, and the sense that inflicting pain meant nothing to him. He'd likely felt enough himself to be numb to anything but passing the feeling on to others. Not having a government in such an impoverished country, there are very few schools, and very little hope for the children.

In neighboring Nairobi, Kenya, I met with Abdirahman Raghe, the Somali director of the War-Torn Societies Project. He explained, "In Somalia, we are like the old European city-states. There is no shortcut of history. Those of us who have been educated in the West know that we are trapped between the modern" - the international organizations' attempts to build a nationally-based government -- "and the traditional" -- the way elders negotiate deals and compromises at Zara's. "We are being hit by both." Somalia shows that top-down state-building simply doesn't work, as mechanisms for accountability simply aren't in place, and the siren call of abusive power proves too strong for spoilers to resist.

One evening at Zara's, I asked Shuke, the director of a research institute, what he thought was the way to peace for his country. "It will be very hard," he replied, shaking his head. "It will take generations -- hundreds of years of Somali history have been erased by this fighting." He worked his toothpick. "I won't see it."

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