Somalia’s institutions are being rebuilt faster than the trust between those institutions and the citizens they serve. This article argues that civil society, understood broadly enough to include customary and religious authority alongside registered organisations, is one of the principal ways to close that trust gap. Its role is to thicken the channels connecting government to citizens, not to replace government itself. This edition grounds the argument in the academic literature on state-building and Somali governance, including the ‘mediated state’ and ‘hybrid political order’ scholarship that complicates any simple transplant of liberal state-building models onto Somalia. It also names the institutions already doing this work in Somalia today, among them Somalia Non-State Actors (SONSA), the Puntland Non-State Actors Association (PUNSAA) and the Somaliland Non-State Actors Forum (SONSAF), and sets out honestly where the argument runs into difficulty: clan alignment within civil society, donor dependency, and a civil-society voice that is still more coordinated on paper than in practice.