Peace and justice are often spoken of as partners, placed side by side. But in countries emerging from conflict, they can sometimes feel like forces pulling in opposite directions. Peace asks a country to look forward while justice asks it to look back. Peace seeks silence after years of violence: to stop counting the dead and start rebuilding. Justice refuses to let that silence sit as it asks the harder, more uncomfortable questions: what happened, who suffered, who was responsible, and what must be done to repair the harm?

It is in that exact tension that Ibrahim’s Master of Laws (LL.M) research begins. His question is both simple and deeply unsettling: can a country still rebuilding from conflict pursue peace and reconciliation without quietly trading away justice in the process?

To answer it, Ibrahim turns to Somalia, not as a distant case study, but as a country whose wounds tell a much larger story about war, memory, accountability, and repair. Somalia’s conflict was not a short season of instability. It was a long unravelling marked by the collapse of state authority, civil war, weakened institutions, and the displacement of communities. The resulting vacuum created fertile ground for violent extremism, most notably Al-Shabaab, to take root.

What followed were violations that international law recognises as among its gravest: attacks on civilians, extrajudicial killings, sexual and gender-based violence, forced displacement, and the recruitment of child soldiers. But behind those legal terms are human beings. A mother who fled with her children and never returned home. A young person whose childhood was interrupted by violence. A community that learnt to live with fear as a daily reality. Families carrying grief without answers. Survivors are still waiting, not only for peace, but for recognition, remedy, and dignity. For millions of Somalis, the conflict did not end simply because the headlines moved on. Its effects remain in broken livelihoods, fragile institutions, trauma, displacement, and the heavy silence that follows when justice has not fully been done.

That is the heart of Ibrahim’s inquiry. How does a country heal without forgetting? How does it reconcile without erasing responsibility? How does it rebuild trust when victims still carry the weight of what happened?

But before we go further into research itself, it’s worth meeting the man who asked these questions in the first place.

Ibrahim Adan is an Advocate of the High Court, a husband, and a father of three. Through his law firm and years of legal practice, his journey has been shaped by a deep passion for human rights and a concern for people whose suffering often sits at the margins of legal and political conversations, spoken about in policy papers but rarely centered in the rooms where decisions are made.

For a man already years into a successful legal career, the decision to pursue an LL.M with a specialisation in International Criminal Justice, wasn’t a step taken lightly or out of obligation. It was a deliberate and conscious choice to deepen his understanding of the law and sharpen his ability to respond to some of society’s most painful and unresolved realities. And even with everything he already knew from years of practice, the programme still managed to open new intellectual doors for him. Classes on international criminal law, international humanitarian law, access to justice, and human rights sharpened the questions he had carried into the programme.

He speaks warmly of the people who guided that process. Dr. Claire Adionyi, who taught international criminal law, Dr. Japheth Biegon, a great lecturer who taught him international Humanitarian law and International criminal law. And Dr. Josephat Kilonzo, his supervisor, helped him engage more rigorously with the legal frameworks around accountability, crimes against humanity, gender-based violence, and justice in the aftermath of conflict. He also found particular value in units taught by Prof. George Mukundi, especially those that explored access to justice, an area closely connected to his own interests and professional calling. The programme also brought in external lecturers from Kenya and beyond, whose industry experience and real-world case studies helped connect doctrine to the messy, complicated realities it’s actually meant to govern.

None of it came easily. Late nights spent buried in reading became routine, and time away from his family was, by his own account, one of the hardest parts of the entire journey. Balancing a demanding legal practice with a rigorous academic programme meant there were seasons when something always had to give, and finding that balance became one of his proudest milestones precisely because it was so difficult to hold. But it was also, he says, through that same struggle that the concepts he was wrestling with truly settled into him, the kind of understanding that only comes from having to fight for the time to earn it. Now, standing near the end of that journey, his advice to anyone considering the same path is characteristically grounded: “Take your time before signing up for a master’s programme, and know what you want from it.

Closing the gap

That clarity of purpose is exactly what carried Ibrahim into his thesis: Accountability for International Crimes in the Context of the Transitional Justice Process in Somalia. At the centre sits a legal tension. Decades of armed conflict and the collapse of central state authority in Somalia have left behind widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights law — but the country’s response has leaned almost entirely toward reconciliation and stability, rather than prosecution. That creates a real tension: international law places binding obligations on states to ensure accountability for atrocities, yet Somalia’s current framework, Adan’s research finds, falls short of meeting those standards.

The gaps he identified are specific and structural. There’s no meaningful domestication of international crimes into Somali law, prosecutorial and judicial institutions remain weak, and reconciliation efforts operate largely outside any legally enforceable structure that could actually deliver accountability.

His thesis argues that to close that gap, Somalia must accept the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction and work toward acceding to the Rome Statute, strengthen local courts, clearly define the role of customary Xeer justice, and enact targeted legislation to bring the country’s framework in line with its international obligations. It’s not an argument against reconciliation. It’s an argument that reconciliation and accountability were never meant to compete for the same space and that a country can, if it chooses to build the right institutions, pursue both at once, rather than quietly sacrificing one to protect the other.

After two years of research and sacrifice, Ibrahim admits there’s something quietly satisfying about reaching this point. His hope now reaches beyond the pages of the thesis itself: that its findings travel further than an exam board, and genuinely contribute, in whatever small way research can, to a Somalia where peace and justice are no longer treated as rivals, but as two halves of the same unfinished work.

And this, it seems, is only one chapter. A Doctor of Laws may just be on the horizon. Time will tell. For now, it’s a pause to celebrate this great milestone!

Article written by: Jemmy M. Kamau