Somaliland: the long road to recognition

ASelf-proclaimed independent since 1991, Somaliland, located in northern Somalia between Djibouti and Ethiopia, has established itself as a relatively stable actor in a region marked by crises. Although it is not officially recognised by the international community, the territory has for years maintained relations with several foreign actors through cooperation projects and economic partnerships. In December 2025, its recognition by Israel revived attention towards the territory. While this decision may appear to represent an important step for Somaliland’s legitimacy, it forms part of a regional context marked by long-standing tensions, rivalries between states and a reshaping of balances in the Horn of Africa. To what extent does Israel’s recognition of Somaliland constitute a genuine change for the territory? What repercussions could it have in an already unstable region? An overview with Géraldine Pinauldt, associate researcher at IRIS and specialist in the Horn of Africa.

To what extent does Israel’s recognition of Somaliland constitute a diplomatic turning point for the territory?

The announcement of the full and reciprocal recognition of Somaliland by Israel on 26 December last year triggered a global diplomatic and media crisis (not without the precedent of January 2024) and thrust Somaliland back onto the world stage. Nevertheless, despite the transition from a de facto state to a recognised state, it is difficult to describe this recognition as a diplomatic rupture, insofar as there had in practice been no presence of Somali institutions in Somaliland since 1991. Moreover, a great many international partners already had representations, offices or activities there. Indeed, in addition to the liaison offices of neighbouring states – Ethiopia for the past 25 years, whose representative holds ambassadorial rank, and Djibouti – Hargeisa has for around fifteen years hosted a number of European, German, British and Danish cooperation projects. French cooperation, which arrived later, is also conducting a heritage enhancement project there, though it should be recalled that France was the first state to assist the emerging Somaliland army in the early 1990s by occasionally supplying food and uniforms. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), of which Somalia is a founding member and which opposes Somaliland’s recognition, nevertheless carries out projects there within the framework of regional integration, and Somaliland hosts a regional veterinary school displaying both its own flag and that of IGAD. A number of United Nations institutions also maintain offices and activities in Somaliland, admittedly often through projects of “national” scope, that is to say at the scale of Somalia, which has at times led Somaliland to suspend them.

More than de facto, it is perhaps the term status quo that best characterises the preceding period, particularly with regard to two dates: 2010 and 2012. In 2010, the United States authorised direct funding for the “Somali regions”, thereby allowing the World Bank to finance projects through the budget of the Republic of Somaliland. In 2012, Somalia’s transition from a transitional government to a federal government left room for interpretation regarding the term “Somaliland”, rapidly “recognised” by Mogadishu as one of the federal states, thereby entrenching a status quo in which everyone could view Somaliland as they wished. From Hargeisa, however, Mogadishu felt very far away.

Although these foreign presences do not constitute recognition, and benefited from the possible ambiguity, their gradual arrival from the mid-2000s onwards represented successive validations of the significant progress made by the Republic of Somaliland over 35 years. Thirty-five years means that a first generation of children born as Somalilanders is now fully engaged in positions of responsibility, closely followed by a second generation. One may therefore say that recognition has, for the time being, had no direct impact on the daily lives of Somalilanders. The only concrete consequence has concerned relations between Djibouti and Somaliland, with the severing of diplomatic ties and the suspension of the air connection between the two capitals. Relations between the two neighbours have, however, since the opening of reciprocal representations, been characterised by episodes of rupture and rapprochement, and phases of opening and closure of their common border. Ethiopia, which has had formal bilateral agreements with Somaliland since the early 2000s and has remained a constant partner ever since, has remained silent regarding this recognition.

To what extent could this recognition disrupt geopolitical balances in the Horn of Africa?

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is both a major geopolitical event and, in itself, a non-event for the geopolitics of the Horn of Africa. The broadly accepted analysis tending to denounce the Republic of Somaliland as being, through its recognition, the cause of the deterioration in security across the Horn of Africa appears to stem from a successful communication strategy that nonetheless struggles to withstand scrutiny of the facts. It should therefore be recalled that an unnamed war has been raging in Sudan since 2023 and is now spilling beyond its borders, that South Sudan has been in civil war since its independence in 2011, that Ethiopia has multiplied conflicts across all parts of its territory since 2015, and that southern Somalia, whose conflict has changed appearance according to international priorities, is now entering its 37th year of civil war. The Horn of Africa is unstable because profound processes are under way affecting the territorial national constructions of all its states, and because these processes are aggravated by the corridorisation of the region, accentuating rent-seeking dynamics and worsening territorial imbalances while compensation mechanisms are only rarely implemented.

In response to current commentary, it is therefore important to consider present events with a historical depth extending somewhat beyond December 2025 or January 2024, and to observe the gradual hardening of Somalia, which has seen Somaliland’s activism for international recognition revive from 2017 onwards and challenge the status quo, admittedly uncomfortable for everyone, yet relatively functional since 1991.

International observers are questioning Israel’s motives for this recognition, even though they are quite obvious (the presence of the Houthis in Yemen, proximity to Iran, control of the Red Sea and the process initiated by the Abraham Accords). Yet the real question, in my view, concerns much more the reasons why Somaliland, at this precise moment, could accept recognition by Israel. Israel, represented in Ethiopia and having initiated a number of investments there, notably agricultural ones in Ethiopia’s Somali Regional State, demonstrated an interest in Somaliland as soon as it regained independence. In the early 2000s, a form of health diplomacy was put in place through the medical evacuation to Israel of Somaliland children suffering from cardiac diseases. Since then, numerous attempts at high-level rapprochement have taken place.

At the beginning of the 2020s, Abiy Ahmed failed to establish an “arabico-aethiopica pax” across a greater Horn of Africa that he had hoped to unify. Faced with the accelerating upheaval of the international order, each of the two states, Somalia and Somaliland, on the margins of talks that have failed to take root, has used the regional and global cards available to it and its respective strategic assets in order to achieve its objective: recognition for Somaliland and territorial integrity for Somalia, which, even before reaching the Somaliland question, is struggling to make a central government coexist with federal states that do not recognise it, in a context where a vast part of the territory is administered by Al-Shabaab, an Islamist terrorist movement against which African Union troops, the Turkish army and United States special forces support the Somali state.

Somaliland signed an initial tripartite partnership with Ethiopia and DP World in 2016 concerning the use and management of the port of Berbera and its corridor. The young state, whose strategy for seeking recognition had seemed timid for several years, established from 2017 onwards a committee tasked with working towards recognition and establishing new diplomatic relations, notably through a tour of African countries. Relations with Taiwan, initiated in 2009, led in 2019 to their affirmation and in 2020 to the exchange of representatives and ambassadors, while China had reopened an embassy in Mogadishu in 2013. Against a backdrop of maritime border disputes and a khat war with Somalia, Kenya moved closer to Somaliland in 2019, which opened an official representation in Nairobi in 2024. From 2022 onwards, the United States carried out several visits to Berbera.

Faced with this activism disrupting the course of history, Somalia equipped itself with unprecedented and offensive tools: bilateral military agreements with Turkey in 2017 and then in 2024, and finally with Egypt in 2024 and 2025, digital tools, the implementation of an e-visa law requiring airlines not to recognise the Somaliland visa in September 2025, and the instrumentalisation of centripetal dynamics within Somaliland, despite the fact that the foundation of the Somaliland state rests upon the initial allegiance of clans to the national project.

As the deep political crisis between Somaliland and Somalia has intensified over several years, in the context of a Horn of Africa in motion, it became urgent for Somaliland to protect itself against a heavily supported Somali state.

It would therefore be more accurate to say that it was the upheaval of geopolitical balances in the Horn of Africa and globally since 2015 that led to Israel’s recognition of Somaliland.

Is this the “wrong recognition”?

Since the adoption of its Constitution in 2001, the Republic of Somaliland had relied upon the undeniable recognition of its democratic progress in order to obtain a recognition it believed it deserved. Furthermore, by invoking its independence from the British protectorate of 26 June 1960, and therefore compliance with the Charter of the African Union attached to the inviolability of borders inherited from colonisation, as well as the non-ratification of the Act of Union with Somalia and Mogadishu’s failure to respect the principles of the Union between 1960 and 1991, Somaliland considered its pursuit of independence sufficiently legitimate under international law to be recognised. It quickly became evident that being a model pupil would not suffice to obtain recognition from the United Nations, which was awaiting recognition from the regional organisations of which Somalia is a member: IGAD and the Arab League. For reasons linked to their internal geopolitics and the broader regional game, no IGAD member state, particularly the much-anticipated Ethiopia, was going to recognise it. For reasons linked to relations between Egypt and Ethiopia, the Arab League positioned itself from the 1990s onwards in favour of a reunified and strong Somalia vis-à-vis Ethiopia. Consequently, recognition could only come from an international power pursuing its own interests. And such recognition could only occur within a context of international crisis, such as tensions surrounding the Red Sea. In this configuration, any recognition would necessarily have occurred “for the wrong reasons”, that is to say for the reasons of the other party and within a geopolitical game already under way in the region.

One should be wary of reasoning in terms of “international axes”: Somalilanders possess a profound sense of sovereignty and the conviction that they control their own destiny, and that an alliance is never an allegiance. This is a conception of sovereignty widely shared across the Horn of Africa, where alliances with blocs have always been opportunistic rather than ideological, and where other states have managed to maintain contradictory alliances, while succeeding in preserving relations with both Somalia and Somaliland.

Thus, in the current configuration of the Horn of Africa and its alliances, did Somaliland truly have an alternative to this recognition?