The Security Case

Most cases for recognition can be made in the register of principle — consent, legality, historical restoration. The security case cannot, because security is not a principle that Somaliland is asking to be credited with; it is a condition that the rest of the world is already, quietly, relying on. Somaliland sits on the southern shore of one of the three or four waterways on which the entire structure of global trade depends, immediately next to a state that has not controlled the whole of its own territory in over three decades. What follows is not an appeal to sympathy. It is an argument that the current arrangement — treating a stable, self-governing, cooperative territory as a legal appendage of a state that cannot secure its own capital's outskirts — is not merely unjust but strategically incoherent, at country, regional and global levels alike.

I. Country Level: Development and Security as a Single Problem

Somaliland's leadership has long treated security and development as one problem rather than two, and the sequencing shows it. The Berbera Corridor — the road and port investment linking Ethiopia's landlocked economy to a modernised deep-water port — is simultaneously an economic project and a security one: a functioning, revenue-generating port with a trained coast guard and a paying merchant clientele is a port with every incentive to keep pirates, smugglers and militants off its own coastline, and every capability, once the DP World-backed upgrade is complete, to do so. This is not a theoretical linkage. Somaliland's Coast Guard, headquartered in Berbera since 1995 and rebuilt with Norwegian, British, Swedish and EU support after 2006, funds much of its operational credibility from the same port traffic its patrols protect — a virtuous circuit that Somalia's federal south, where port revenue and militia payrolls have too often been the same thing, has struggled for decades to replicate.

Counter-piracy: a record, not a claim. Somaliland's counter-piracy record is documented rather than asserted. Following a 2006 contract with the Norwegian firm Nordic Crisis Management to secure the port of Berbera, and sustained capacity-building from the EU's EUCAP Somalia mission and UNODC through the following decade — including boat donations, a purpose-built command centre in Berbera, and joint training with EU naval forces — Somaliland's coast guard has kept its own coastline free of successful hijackings through the years when Puntland's coast, a few hundred kilometres east, was the world's most notorious piracy hotspot. Somaliland officials have been explicit that they regard this as a point of comparative advantage: piracy, in the territory's own telling, is something imported by outsiders and intercepted at the coastline, not something incubated within it.

Counter-terrorism: no territorial foothold. Al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgency that controls substantial rural territory across south-central Somalia and has spent 2025 and 2026 contesting Lower Shabelle, Hiiraan and Middle Juba against a strained AUSSOM force, has never held ground inside Somaliland. That is a security fact with direct bearing on Western threat assessment, not merely a domestic talking point: it is the reason successive AFRICOM commanders have found it worth the flight to Hargeisa.

Sool, Sanaag and the honest exception. A credible security case does not omit the one episode that complicates it. In February 2023, protests in Las Anod against Somaliland's administration escalated into open conflict with the SSC-Khatumo movement, a Dhulbahante-clan administration seeking reunification with the Federal Government of Somalia; by August 2023, after months of costly fighting and a still-contested ceasefire, Somaliland's forces had withdrawn from most of the Dhulbahante-inhabited areas of Sool, Sanaag and Cayn, and low-intensity clashes recurred as recently as the Buhodle skirmishes of October 2024. This is not a resolved dispute, and this document does not pretend otherwise. What can honestly be said is narrower: Somaliland's broader record on internal clan mediation — the Boorama and Sheekh reconciliation conferences of the early 1990s that built the Guurti's customary authority into the constitutional settlement described in the Democratic Case — remains the institutional mechanism through which Somaliland has resolved every other major clan dispute since 1991 without the state itself collapsing, which is precisely the capability the Somali federal government has lacked since 1991 and still lacks today.

II. Regional Level: The Red Sea Corridor Somaliland Sits Astride

Zoom out from Berbera and the stakes change register entirely. The Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the chokepoint separating the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aden, carried a large share of the world's containerised trade and a significant share of its seaborne oil before late 2023; Houthi attacks on commercial shipping, launched from Yemen in the context of the Gaza war, cut oil flows through the strait by more than half within a year, forcing much of the world's shipping onto the far longer Cape of Good Hope route. Attacks resumed in 2025, and as of this writing the Houthis have declared a full naval blockade of Saudi Arabia, opening what regional analysts are already calling a second global chokepoint crisis alongside the Strait of Hormuz. Whatever the coming weeks bring, the structural lesson is durable: a low-cost, asymmetric threat from Yemen's coast can now hold a share of the global economy hostage from a few hundred kilometres of shoreline, and the response requires bases, surveillance and coastal partners on the strait's southern approach, not just naval task forces passing through it.

Somaliland's coastline runs along exactly this approach, and Berbera's runway — built to Soviet military specification and one of the longest in Africa — sits within easy operating range of the strait. This is the geography, not the politics, that has driven a stream of AFRICOM visits to Hargeisa and Berbera roughly every two months since late 2025, and that in April 2026 saw reporting that Somaliland had raised the prospect of hosting U.S. assets, including Tomahawk-capable platforms, as a direct response to the reopened Bab-el-Mandeb threat. Ethiopia's own January 2024 memorandum of understanding for a leased naval facility near Lughaya, though its ratification remains unresolved amid Somali objections and an Ethiopian election cycle, reflects the same regional logic from a landlocked neighbour's perspective: a stable Somaliland coastline is a strategic asset the wider Horn of Africa, not just Somaliland itself, has an interest in securing.

Set against this, the perennial security problem on the other side of the un-demarcated frontier is not a passing news cycle. Al-Shabaab has fought the Somali National Army and AUSSOM to a standstill for over three years, regrouping in Lower Shabelle even as African Union-Somali offensives claim territorial gains; the transition from ATMIS to AUSSOM in January 2025 has not resolved the underlying problem of a security force whose funding, mandate and troop contributions remain contested year to year, most visibly in the year-long diplomatic dispute between Ethiopia and Mogadishu over Ethiopian troop numbers in the mission. A regional security architecture that funnels resources into stabilising a fragmented south while declining even to formally engage the one part of the former Somali Republic that has not needed stabilising in over three decades is not a neutral policy. It is a standing inefficiency.

III. Global Level: A Pragmatic Partnership, Not a Political Favour

The case at the global level is the simplest of the three, because it does not require resolving any of Somaliland's legal or diplomatic status questions first. It requires only that partners treat Somaliland's demonstrated security cooperation as what it already functions as: a working relationship, not a favour extended in anticipation of recognition. The U.S. State Department's own June 2026 report to Congress — while explicitly reaffirming that Somaliland remains, for now, part of Somalia in Washington's formal position — nonetheless documented that AFRICOM maintains regular engagement with Somaliland authorities and is actively exploring further cooperation, language that amounts to an official acknowledgment that practical security cooperation and formal recognition are, in Washington's own current practice, already two separate tracks. Somaliland's Washington representative has argued the territory could offer the United States exclusive access to the port at Berbera outright; whatever view one takes of that specific proposal, the fact that it is being discussed at all, by serving AFRICOM commanders rather than advocacy groups, is itself evidence that the pragmatic security relationship the diplomatic status quo supposedly forecloses is already under construction in practice.

The same logic extends to Somaliland's other security-relevant partnerships: EU capacity-building for the coast guard, continued information-sharing with EUNAVFOR Atalanta and the Combined Maritime Forces through platforms such as IORIS, and reported cooperation with Israeli counterparts on intelligence and training, which Somaliland officials have linked publicly to the prospect of eventually joining the Abraham Accords framework. None of this cooperation has waited for a UN General Assembly vote, because none of it needed to. What formal non-recognition actually costs the international system is not Somaliland's cooperation, which continues regardless; it is the absence of the status, budget lines, legal certainty and interoperability that would let that cooperation be planned rather than improvised, and acknowledged rather than conducted at arm's length through congressional footnotes and unannounced delegations.

IV. Meeting the Counter-Case Honestly

The transactionalism objection. A fair critic will note that framing recognition around base access, mineral rights and Tomahawk storage risks making Somaliland's case sound like a rental listing rather than a claim of right, and that great-power competition over Berbera — American, Israeli, Emirati, Turkish and Egyptian interests are all now active in the same small port town — could as easily destabilise Somaliland as secure it, entangling a small territory in rivalries considerably larger than itself. This is a real risk, not a rhetorical one, and it is precisely why the security case is presented here as a complement to the legal and democratic cases rather than a substitute for them: a partnership built solely on strategic convenience is exactly as durable as the convenience, and Somaliland's advocates who oversell the transaction do their own case no favours.

The consistency objection. A second fair objection is that Somaliland's own recent security record is not spotless, and Las Anod is the proof: a government that used force against protesters and then lost control of a significant part of its claimed territory to a clan-based counter-administration is not simply a story of stability exported to the world. That is fair. The narrower claim that survives scrutiny is comparative rather than absolute: even accounting for Sool and Sanaag, Somaliland's worst internal security failure in thirty-five years remains smaller in scale and shorter in duration than a single ordinary year of al-Shabaab's war against the state it is nominally part of.

V. Conclusion

None of this argument requires the international community to resolve, in the same breath, the legal or democratic questions treated elsewhere on this portal. It requires only an honest audit of where security cooperation already happens, where it visibly does not, and why. The Red Sea's newest crisis is being managed, in practice, with the help of a coastline the international system still refuses to deal with directly. The perennial security failure a few hundred kilometres south continues to absorb billions of dollars, thousands of troops and three decades of international patience with results that remain, at best, contested. A pragmatic partnership with Somaliland is not a reward for good behaviour or a concession to sentiment. It is the policy that already exists in practice, waiting for the diplomatic architecture to catch up with it.