The geopolitical importance of Somaliland

Saturday 24 January 2026

Somaliland is one of those places that, until something dramatic happens, most of the world treats as a footnote. Yet she sits beside one of the planet’s most important maritime corridors, offers a rare patch of relative political order in a violent neighbourhood and has become a chessboard square in rivalries that run from Addis Ababa to Abu Dhabi and from Ankara to Jerusalem. When Israel announced on 26 December 2025 that she recognised Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state, it was not merely a diplomatic curiosity. It was a deliberate geopolitical intervention. 

A short history of a long separation

To understand why Somaliland matters, one must begin with an unfashionable fact: Somaliland’s claim is not the same as a random province declaring itself a new country. The territory was administered separately under British rule as British Somaliland, with formal British control dating from the late nineteenth century. 

British Somaliland became independent on 26 June 1960. Five days later, Italian Somalia followed, and the two territories united on 1 July 1960 to form the Somali Republic. This voluntary union, celebrated at the time as a nationalist achievement, later soured as Somalia’s politics turned authoritarian and violent. In the late 1980s, the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre fought a brutal counterinsurgency in the north, helping to harden a northern conviction that the union had become a trap rather than a home.

When the Somali state collapsed into civil war in 1991, Somaliland declared that she was restoring the independence she had briefly held in 1960. Since then she has functioned as a de facto state with her own institutions, currency, security forces and repeated elections, even while lacking formal international recognition for decades. 

This record matters because it distinguishes Somaliland from many separatist projects: she has aimed, imperfectly but consistently, to present herself not as a militia fiefdom but as a state, seeking legitimacy through governance rather than conquest. That self-presentation has attracted investors and foreign attention precisely because stability is scarce in the Horn of Africa. 

Geography as destiny: why the coast matters

Somaliland’s coastline faces the Gulf of Aden, near the sea-lanes that connect the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. This is not abstract geography. It is the route through which an enormous volume of global trade passes. When shipping is disrupted there, insurance costs rise, freight is delayed and prices ripple far beyond the region.

That corridor has been under strain because the Iran-aligned Houthi movement in Yemen has attacked commercial and other ships in the Red Sea and has also fired missiles and drones towards Israel during the Gaza war. Somaliland lies less than 160 kilometres from Yemen. From a strategic perspective, that proximity turns her from a peripheral territory into a potential listening post, logistics node, or base for surveillance and deterrence. 

Ports are the practical expression of this geography. Berbera, Somaliland’s principal port, has drawn international interest as an alternative to Djibouti, the heavily militarised neighbour that hosts major foreign bases, including American and Chinese facilities. Investors and militaries are drawn to options: redundancy in ports means resilience in war and in crisis. 

This helps explain why Gulf states have pushed into the area. The UAE, through DP World, has been central to upgrading Berbera, and Somaliland’s parliament approved a UAE base arrangement in the Berbera area during the last decade.  Regional competition amongst Gulf monarchies, and their differing relationships with Somalia’s federal government, has made Somaliland part of a broader struggle for influence across the Red Sea littoral. 

The Ethiopian dimension: a landlocked giant looking for a door

If the Red Sea corridor is Somaliland’s global relevance, Ethiopia is her immediate leverage. Ethiopia is a large, landlocked country whose dependence on external ports is a strategic vulnerability. In January 2024 Ethiopia and Somaliland signed a memorandum of understanding that reportedly offered Ethiopia coastal access in exchange for future recognition, setting off a regional storm and sharpening the question of whether Somaliland’s independence might be normalised through transactional diplomacy. 

The dispute illustrated two realities at once: first, that Somaliland’s coast is valuable enough for a major state to bargain over; and secondly, that Somalia and many external actors still treat Somaliland’s status as inseparable from Somalia’s sovereignty, with the African Union generally aligned to the principle of preserving inherited borders. 

Why Israel recognised Somaliland

Israel’s recognition should be read as a bundle of motives rather than a single reason.

1. A Red Sea security calculation

   
   

   Israel has immediate security reasons to care about the waters off Yemen. Analysts quoted in international reporting have been blunt: even a small footprint in Somaliland could provide outsized utility for watching, deterring or disrupting Houthi maritime activity. Recognition is, in this sense, a legal and political precondition to deeper security cooperation, because it turns quiet contact into state-to-state engagement.

   
   

2. Diplomacy by extension of the Abraham Accords logic

   
   

   Reuters reported that Israel framed the mutual recognition declaration as being “in the spirit of the Abraham Accords”, the diplomatic architecture through which Israel has sought to widen her regional acceptance. Somaliland’s leadership, for its part, said she intended to join the Abraham Accords framework. For Israel, this offers a narrative of expanding partnerships with Muslim-majority societies beyond the traditional Arab heartlands, while for Somaliland it offers an entry ticket into a club that carries economic and political symbolism.

   
   

3. A strategic partnership with a state seeking patrons

   
   

   Somaliland has long feared being squeezed by larger powers aligned with Mogadishu, including Turkey and China, and she has looked for external protectors and legitimators. That creates a classic patron-client dynamic: Israel gains influence in a strategic corridor, while Somaliland gains a breakthrough in recognition and the promise of cooperation in trade, investment and state capacity. 

   
   

4. Domestic and international signalling

   
   

   Recognising Somaliland also signals that Israel is willing to buck prevailing diplomatic consensus when she believes her security or strategic position demands it. Reuters and AP both describe the move as one likely to reshape regional dynamics and to test Somalia’s longstanding opposition to secession. 

Why this decision is dangerous as well as consequential

Recognition comes with costs, some immediate.

Somalia condemned Israel’s move as unlawful and an attack on her sovereignty, promising diplomatic, political and legal pushback. Regional states, and the African Union, voiced opposition grounded in the principle of territorial integrity. In other words Israel has not merely recognised Somaliland. She has forced other actors to choose between the neatness of legal orthodoxy and the messier logic of strategic convenience.

There is also a security risk for Somaliland itself. AP reports warnings that Islamist militants, including al-Shabab, could use Somaliland’s new relationship with Israel as propaganda and justification for violence, potentially importing a wider regional conflict into what Somaliland has prided itself on being: an oasis of relative calm. 

Finally, Somaliland risks becoming a venue for proxy competition. The Horn of Africa already hosts overlapping rivalries: Gulf states vying for ports, Turkey projecting influence through Somalia, China defending her interests around Djibouti and great powers watching shipping routes that underpin their economies. Adding Israel openly to this mix increases the chance that local disputes, including over ports and borders, become internationalised.

Somaliland’s geopolitical importance, in one sentence

Somaliland matters because she sits astride a strategic maritime corridor at a moment when sea-lanes are being weaponised, and because her relative internal order and usable coastline make her an attractive partner for states seeking influence, access, or leverage in the Horn of Africa. 

Israel’s recognition is therefore best understood not as charity and not as romantic attachment to a small would-be country, but as an attempt to convert geography into strategic advantage, while offering Somaliland the most valuable currency she has lacked since 1991: formal legitimacy.