Somaliland has operated as a fully functional de facto state with defined territory, population and government since declaring independence from Somalia in 1991. But it lacks international recognition. This would allow it full participation in the global community, such as membership in the United Nations, as well as boosting its economic opportunities.

I am a scholar of peace and conflict resolution, constitutional design and constitutional law, with a regional focus on the Horn of Africa. My work includes examining regional peace and security.

Based on this deep knowledge of the region, I would argue that Tel Aviv’s decision is indeed consequential. But not because it resolves anything.

Its significance lies in the fact that it has elevated a question of legal status into a strategic contest unfolding within the world’s most volatile geopolitical corridor.

Over the last decade the Red Sea – which links the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean – has become the frontline of a new multipolar order. The region has been transformed into a dense arena of overlapping crises. These include state collapses in Sudan, Yemen and Somalia, and Ethiopia’s destabilising quest for maritime access. There is also the intensification of Gulf rivalry and great power competition, which includes China’s consolidation of a coastal arc of influence.

The Red Sea region now hosts the highest concentration of foreign military bases on earth. It also sits astride critical global trade routes.

Against this backdrop, Israel’s recognition unsettles an already fragile equilibrium. While the decision alters the board, it doesn’t end the game. It increases Somaliland’s strategic value while increasing its geopolitical toxicity in a region already under strain.

The African Union and the fear of precedent

The African Union viewed the Somaliland question as a dangerous exception that must not be entertained. Its position rests on a single overriding fear: that recognition would weaken the postcolonial settlement built on inherited borders.

Somaliland’s claim is that it merely reasserts the boundaries of the former British protectorate. But the AU’s doctrine is rigid by design. It does not distinguish between border revisionism and constitutional secession within colonial lines. For the AU, the precedent is intolerable.

If African politics were governed by doctrine alone, the matter would end there. But it doesn’t.

For Ethiopia, the Somaliland question is inseparable from the Red Sea itself. Landlocked, populous and strategically exposed, Ethiopia treats maritime access as a condition of state survival. Recognising Somaliland would not automatically grant Ethiopia access to the sea. But it would fundamentally change the bargaining structure through which such access could be secured. Recognition would convert what is currently an informal, reversible commercial arrangement into a sovereignty-linked exchange.

With nearly all its trade flowing through Djibouti at enormous cost, Addis Ababa’s anxiety is real – and destabilising.

Here the wider Red Sea crisis intrudes directly. Ethiopia’s quest for access unfolds amid collapsing neighbours, proliferating militias, drone warfare supplied by Gulf states and external powers, and an increasingly militarised coastline.

It is not yet clear which direction Ethiopia has decided to take in its relations with Somaliland. Last year, prime minister Abiy Ahmed quietly retreated from the memorandum of understanding signed in 2024 with Somaliland. This was after it became clear that the move would provoke severe African Union repercussions.

For the present, therefore, any meaningful external support for Somaliland recognition comes only from Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

What is emerging in the region is an increasingly polarised alignment. On one side are Egypt, the Sudanese Armed Forces, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia. On the other are the UAE, the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, Libya, Somaliland, Israel – and Ethiopia, despite its efforts to conceal the extent of its involvement.

Some states continue to hedge. South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya have sought to avoid choosing sides.

Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia

In Israel’s recognition announcement, the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, explicitly situated Somaliland within the logic of the Abraham Accords. Signed in 2020, the accords are a set of US-brokered agreements that normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states. They link diplomatic recognition to security cooperation, economic integration and regional realignment.

By invoking the accords, Netanyahu is seeking to pull Somaliland into the gravitational field of the Gulf. And, above all, to signal the influence of the United Arab Emirates. The UAE’s imprint in the Horn of Africa in recent years is evident in ports, bases, logistics corridors, and paramilitary finance across the region.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, therefore, is a strategic move that aligns it with the UAE’s economic and security architecture in the Red Sea. It is not that Israel has suddenly developed an interest in Somaliland’s legal merits, nor that it is simply acting at the UAE’s behest. Rather, recognition makes sense because Israel is choosing to embed itself within an Emirati-centred political economy of the Red Sea.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, condemned Israel’s decision on the grounds that it entrenched unilateral secession and violates international law. In doing so, it aligned itself with the African Union’s position while asserting independent leadership in the Red Sea arena.

China

Beijing’s resistance to Somaliland’s recognition is not about Africa alone. It is about precedent in a maritime corridor central to China’s global strategy to develop an unbroken arc of influence from the Horn to the Suez. It already has a military base in Djibouti and is expanding naval diplomacy along the African coast.

Recognition of Somaliland by major powers would validate a dangerous idea from Beijing’s perspective: that durable quasi-states can eventually overcome diplomatic isolation through persistence.

The outcome is ambiguity, but not necessarily failure

Seen whole, the Somaliland question is not a recognition cascade but a coordination failure unfolding in the world’s most dangerous maritime corridor. Multiple enforcers – the African Union, China, Saudi Arabia and others in the Middle East – raise the cost of recognition. Multiple bargainers – Ethiopia above all – demand compensation commensurate with those costs.

As a consequence, recognition has developed into a scarce and risky currency, spent only when the return justifies the danger.

History suggests that unresolved questions of sovereignty rarely disappear. They linger, reshaped by power and circumstance, until either violence settles them or institutions adapt. In the Red Sea today, institutions lag behind reality. What emerges is not resolution, but managed contradiction.

This may disappoint advocates of clarity. It should not surprise students of history. International order has never been sustained by justice alone. It endures through arrangements that most actors find tolerable and none find ideal. In the Red Sea – now the frontline of a new global order – ambiguity is not failure. It is the price paid for avoiding something worse.

In the absence of a power willing to bear the full costs of finality, ambiguity will persist – not as a failure of will, but as the international system’s preferred substitute for resolution.

Written by Alemayehu Weldemariam, Ph.D. Fellow, Center for Constitutional Democracy, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.