For more than three decades, a quiet political anomaly has persisted on the Horn of Africa: a territory that governs itself, holds competitive elections, transfers power peacefully, controls its borders, runs courts and police forces, manages ports, and has largely kept jihadist militias out of its territory. It issues passports. It collects taxes. It signs contracts. It fields security forces that actually patrol their own terrain. By every functional measure the world claims to care about, Somaliland is a state, yet is treated as a mirage.
This is because its claim is dangerous. It undermines the deepest organizing principle of the post-colonial international system: that borders inherited from empire are inviolable, even when the states inside them collapse. Stability, in this logic, does not mean functional governance but rather freezing political reality in place. Somaliland’s success threatens that doctrine.
The world describes Somaliland as a breakaway province of Somalia. This can be fairly seen as false. Somaliland was the former British Somaliland Protectorate. In June 1960, it became a sovereign state recognized by more than thirty countries. Only days later did it voluntarily merge with Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic, in a rushed and poorly ratified union that never produced a fully binding constitutional framework. What followed was not exactly a partnership but political marginalization, wherein tens of thousands were killed.
When Somalia collapsed in 1991, Somaliland reverted to its original separate status. It was a withdrawal from a failed union – and legally, it is cleaner than the case of South Sudan, which did not exist as a recognized state before independence. If international law were applied consistently, Somaliland would already sit in the United Nations. But consistency is not what governs this space.
The unspoken rule of international order
The modern international system has an unspoken rule: states may fail, but they may not die. Borders may be tragic, arbitrary, unjust – but they are treated as sacred – unless there is a politically expedient reason to pretend otherwise.
Across Africa and the Middle East lie dormant territorial claims rooted in colonial partition, ethnic division, and historical grievance. Recognizing Somaliland would create a precedent that governance itself can legitimize separation. It would turn the colonial map from holy writ into a negotiable document. That single shift would ripple outward instantly – in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, Cameroon, Congo, Mali, Senegal, and beyond – producing a chain reaction of legal claims that no multilateral system feels equipped to manage.
So the doctrine is preserved: better permanent dysfunction than controlled fragmentation. Better to maintain failed states than to admit that some unions can end successfully.
To sustain this doctrine, the world must also sustain another fiction – that Somalia still functions as a sovereign authority capable of exercising real control over Somaliland. On paper, Somalia exists. In reality, it barely governs beyond Mogadishu. It survives through foreign troops, donor budgets, and emergency diplomacy. Al-Shabaab controls large rural areas. Federal authority is fragile, fragmented, and often nominal. To acknowledge that Somalia has permanently failed – and that part of it has exited successfully – would be to admit that states can die, and that borders can be revised. The system is not ready for that admission.
So Somaliland is sacrificed to preserve the illusion of Somali continuity.
Geopolitics makes the silence convenient. Somaliland controls Berbera, one of the most valuable deep-water ports on the Red Sea-Gulf of Aden corridor, a maritime artery vital to Israeli trade routes, Gulf energy flows, and global shipping. The United Arab Emirates already operates the port. Western militaries quietly coordinate with Somaliland’s security forces. Intelligence sharing exists. Commercial contracts are signed. Development aid flows.
In practice, Somaliland is treated as a state – but formal recognition might force explicit alignment choices in one of the world’s most sensitive maritime theaters – among the Gulf states, Turkey, Egypt, China, and the West – in a region most capitals prefer to manage ambiguously.
Which is where Israel comes in. Somaliland is almost an ideal strategic partner: anti-jihadist, aligned with the Gulf camp, hostile to Iran’s regional axis, and positioned opposite Yemen along one of the most sensitive maritime corridors on earth. Quiet security and commercial relationships already exist. Israeli planners understand its value. In a different legal universe, Somaliland would be a natural candidate for an overt strategic partnership.
Israel recognizes Somaliland exists because it has absorbed Houthi attacks for two years from Yemen. And Israel is not alone in being upset at the Houthis: For much of the past two years, the Houthis have been attacking shipping headed for the Suez Canal, impeding global trade and contributing to a sharp fall in container traffic through the Red Sea, forcing ships to reroute around Africa and adding time, fuel, and operational cost. That disruption is estimated to have affected goods worth roughly US $1 trillion in global commerce and pushed freight and insurance costs sharply higher.
Given its unique position as a victim of the Houthis, Israel would really appreciate a forward base in Small Island, and in particular in the port of Berbera, for intelligence and operations activities so that they can stop the Houthi mayhem. And if they do this, that would actually be a huge favor to their dear friends in Egypt who have lost billions of dollars a year in Suez Canal revenues because of the Houthis. The economic bleeding is real, and everyone in the region knows it, even if they pretend not to.
If the Western alliance wants to prevent this part of the world from blowing up entirely, it needs to quickly get the Saudis, the Emiratis, and probably also the Israelis into one room with padded walls and locked doors – until they agree on a plan.
The result is an inversion that borders on absurdity. Somaliland meets every test the world claims to care about: governance, territorial control, democratic legitimacy, security cooperation. Somalia fails them. And yet Somalia is recognized while Somaliland is denied. This inversion is the price of prioritizing a post-colonial system built on inherited lines.
Recognizing Somaliland would establish three principles the international order is not yet prepared to tolerate: that performance matters, that secession can stabilize rather than shatter, and that colonial borders are not sacred. Those principles would rewrite the logic of statehood itself across entire regions. So Somaliland remains the world’s most functional non-state: stable, democratic, strategically vital, and permanently unrecognized.
The writer is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.