About the SRP
The Somaliland Recognition Project (SRP) is a digitally native public diplomacy and research institution — a permanently maintained, professionally edited, openly accessible portal dedicated to advancing the international legitimacy of the Republic of Somaliland through the consolidation, curation and dissemination of the legal, democratic, security, economic and geopolitical case for its recognition.
We are a research institution, not a campaign. Every editorial decision is made in the service of analytical credibility. We engage counterarguments directly. We include critical and sceptical material in our library. We do not take editorial instructions from the Government of Somaliland. We publish our funding sources and our editorial policy in full.
Our standard is the highest available: every empirical claim is sourced; every argument is made in its strongest available form; every correction is published openly. The platform is modelled on the research institutions that set the global standard — Chatham House, Carnegie, Crisis Group, Lowy Institute — and built for the same audience: the serious reader who is not yet persuaded.
What we are notWe are not a news aggregator, a social media presence, a lobbying operation, or a diaspora community portal. We are not funded by the Government of Somaliland and we do not accept funding from any government with a direct stake in the recognition question. We do not publish anonymous material.
Our independence is not a claim — it is a structural commitment, enforced through our editorial policy, our funding policy, and our governance structure. These documents are public.
Editorial BoardProf. Sarah Chen
Editor-in-Chief · Oxford Faculty of Law
Prof. Chen is an internationally recognised scholar of international law and self-determination. She has published extensively on post-colonial statehood, the law of recognition, and the Horn of Africa. She has testified before the UK Foreign Affairs Committee and the European Parliament.
Dr. James Okafor
Deputy Editor · University of Edinburgh
Dr. Okafor specialises in African Union institutional law and post-conflict governance. He has conducted fieldwork in Somaliland, Somalia, and South Sudan, and previously served as a policy adviser to the IGAD Secretariat.
Ambassador (ret.) Robert Walsh
Editorial Board · Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
Ambassador Walsh served in the US Foreign Service for 28 years, with postings across Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. He is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a frequent contributor on Horn of Africa policy.
Dr. Amina Hassan
Editorial Board · London School of Economics
Dr. Hassan is a Somaliland-born scholar of international relations and diaspora politics. Her doctoral thesis examined the role of diaspora communities in unrecognised state diplomacy. She is a founding board member of the SRP.
Prof. Elena Kovacs
Editorial Board · Central European University
Prof. Kovacs is a comparativist whose work focuses on the recognition of new states in post-communist and post-colonial contexts. She has published major studies on Kosovo, South Sudan and Western Sahara.