A new legal study argues Somaliland meets the core criteria for statehood and that its 1991 independence is better understood as restoration after the collapse of a failed union with Somalia
HARGEISA — For more than three decades, Somaliland has operated as a de facto state without broad international recognition. Its claim to sovereignty has generally been framed by opponents as an attempt at unilateral secession from Somalia.
A June 2026 study by legal scholar and senior prosecutor Ali Oday advances a different interpretation: that Somaliland’s strongest case rests on decolonization, state continuity and the dissolution of a failed union between two formerly independent territories.
The research argues that Somaliland satisfies the classical Montevideo criteria for statehood, has demonstrated a sustained exercise of self-determination, and bases its territorial claim on the borders of the former British Somaliland Protectorate.
It also examines African Union practice, the Badinter Commission’s jurisprudence on state dissolution, the International Court of Justice’s Kosovo and Western Sahara opinions, and possible diplomatic and institutional routes toward recognition.
The study concludes that Somaliland’s principal obstacle may be political rather than substantive legal incapacity.
A Statehood Question Reframed
The most consequential question surrounding Somaliland may not be whether it declared independence in 1991, but what, precisely, it was restoring.
For more than three decades, Somaliland has existed in the uneasy space between political reality and international recognition. It has its own government, legislature, courts, security forces, elections and foreign relationships. Yet for most of the international system, it remains formally part of Somalia.
That tension has produced a familiar description: Somaliland is a breakaway territory seeking to secede.
But a June 2026 legal study published in Laas Geel International Relations Journal (LGIRJ), an annual academic journal, challenges that framing at its foundation.
Written by Ali Oday, a deputy attorney general and university lecturer specializing in public international law and related fields, the research argues that Somaliland’s claim is better understood through the concepts of decolonization, state continuity and the dissolution of a failed political union.
The distinction is not merely semantic.
If Somaliland is treated as a territory attempting to separate from an existing sovereign state, its case collides directly with the powerful international norm of territorial integrity. If, however, it is understood as a previously independent state that entered a voluntary union and later restored its sovereignty after that union and the Somali state collapsed, the legal analysis becomes substantially different.
The paper does not claim that this interpretation automatically produces recognition. International recognition remains, in practice, a political decision taken by individual states. Instead, it argues that the legal foundations of Somaliland’s statehood claim are considerably stronger than the conventional secession narrative suggests.
That argument begins with a date that remains central to Somaliland’s political identity: June 26, 1960.
On that day, British Somaliland became independent.
For a brief period, there was a sovereign State of Somaliland.
The study says contemporary historical records indicate that more than 30 states recognized Somaliland during that period, before it entered into union with the former Italian-administered territory on July 1, 1960.
Three decades later, after the collapse of the Somali government, Somaliland declared the restoration of its independence.
The central legal question, therefore, becomes whether 1991 should be understood as the creation of a new state — or the restoration of an old one.
The Montevideo Test
International law does not provide a single treaty that determines exactly when a political entity becomes a state. But one of the best-known reference points is the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States.
Its four classical requirements are familiar to international lawyers: a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
The study argues that Somaliland meets all four.
It points first to territory. Somaliland claims the boundaries of the former British Somaliland Protectorate, an entity that existed as a distinct colonial territory before independence in 1960. Its constitution defines the territorial extent of the republic, while the research notes that international law does not require every border dispute to be settled before a state can qualify as a state.
Many internationally recognized states have faced unresolved territorial disputes while continuing to exercise statehood. On this view, the existence of contested border areas does not automatically defeat Somaliland’s territorial claim.
The second requirement is a permanent population.
The paper cites an estimated population of about 6.2 million and argues that international law establishes no minimum population threshold. What matters is the existence of a stable population connected to a particular territory.
The third requirement — effective government — is perhaps the most visible in daily life.
Since 1991, Somaliland has constructed institutions that include an executive branch, a bicameral legislature, a judiciary and security forces. The study emphasizes that these institutions exercise effective authority over most of the territory claimed by Somaliland.
The fourth requirement is the capacity to conduct external relations.
Here, Somaliland’s record is more difficult to reconcile with the conventional image of an isolated political entity. Although it lacks broad de jure recognition, it has maintained representative offices abroad, cultivated relationships with foreign governments and international organizations, concluded commercial arrangements and participated in security cooperation.
The study cites, among other examples, the agreement with DP World concerning the development and management of the Port of Berbera, an arrangement involving hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. It also points to cooperation involving the United States, European partners and other international actors on maritime security, counter-piracy and counterterrorism.
The legal conclusion advanced by the paper is straightforward: Somaliland appears to satisfy the substantive requirements associated with statehood even though many states have not formally recognized it.
That distinction between statehood and recognition is fundamental.
Under the declaratory theory associated with the Montevideo framework, recognition does not create a state; it acknowledges a state that already possesses the necessary attributes. The competing constitutive theory places greater weight on recognition by existing states.
The research argues that the international system operates somewhere between legal doctrine and political reality: the criteria of statehood may be assessed in legal terms, while recognition remains heavily shaped by diplomatic, strategic and political considerations.
Self-Determination and the 1991 Choice
Somaliland’s argument does not rest solely on the mechanics of statehood.
It also invokes one of the foundational principles of the postwar international order: self-determination.
The United Nations Charter recognizes the principle of self-determination in Articles 1 and 55. It was reinforced during the decolonization era by General Assembly Resolution 1514 and later incorporated into the two major international human rights covenants through their common Article 1.
The legal principle is not simply historical. It remains embedded in the international legal architecture governing peoples and political status.
The study links that principle to Somaliland’s history in two distinct moments.
The first was independence from Britain in 1960.
The second was the decision taken after the collapse of the Somali state.
Following the civil war and the collapse of the Siad Barre government, Somaliland’s political leaders and traditional authorities convened the Burao Grand Conference in 1991 and decided to restore sovereignty. That decision was later reinforced by a constitutional referendum in 2001, in which the study says approximately 97 percent of voters backed independence, with more than one million participants.
The argument made by the research is that this represents more than a single declaration made by political elites.
It describes a continuing expression of popular will.
That distinction matters because international legal debates over self-determination increasingly pay attention not only to the historical status of a territory but also to the democratic expression of the people living there.
The International Court of Justice’s 1975 Western Sahara advisory opinion is particularly important in this respect. The court emphasized the need for the “free and genuine expression” of the will of the people concerned in determining political status.
Somaliland’s supporters argue that its history presents precisely such a pattern: independence in 1960, restoration in 1991 and constitutional reaffirmation through referendum.
The African Border Question
For Somaliland, perhaps no legal principle is more consequential than uti possidetis juris — the doctrine under which newly independent states generally inherit the administrative boundaries they possessed at independence.
The principle became particularly important in Africa, where the Organization of African Unity and later the African Union sought to prevent the continent’s colonial boundaries from becoming a permanent source of interstate warfare.
Article 4(b) of the African Union’s Constitutive Act affirms respect for borders existing at the time of independence.
Somaliland’s argument fits neatly into that framework, at least as presented in the study.
It does not claim an arbitrary new territory.
It claims the territory of the former British Somaliland Protectorate.
That distinction has previously attracted attention from the African Union itself.
An AU fact-finding mission in 2005 observed that Somaliland’s state-building process was based substantially on the restoration of the boundaries of the former British Somaliland Protectorate. The study quotes the mission as describing Somaliland’s situation as “unique and self-justified in African political history.”
For Somaliland advocates, the significance is profound.
The conventional concern in Africa is that recognition of separatist movements could encourage borders to be redrawn across the continent. Somaliland’s response is that it is not asking Africa to redraw its colonial borders at all.
It is asking Africa to recognize them.
That is the heart of one of the paper’s strongest legal arguments.
Secession or Restoration?
The distinction between secession and restoration is where the study becomes most ambitious.
The term “secession” assumes that a territory is leaving an existing sovereign state.
The term “restoration,” by contrast, assumes that a previously sovereign entity has re-emerged after the political structure that absorbed it has ceased to function.
The international legal history of Europe provides examples of restoration and dissolution that the study uses as comparative material.
The breakup of Yugoslavia is particularly significant. The Badinter Arbitration Commission concluded that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in the process of dissolving, rather than simply losing one province through unilateral secession. Independent states consequently emerged from the breakdown of the federal system.
The Soviet Union’s collapse provides another example of constituent republics emerging as independent states.
Somaliland’s argument is that Somalia’s own experience after 1991 should be evaluated against this broader legal history.
The study points to the collapse of central government institutions, prolonged civil war, competing armed factions and years of international efforts to rebuild Somali state authority. In its interpretation, the disappearance of the former political order created the circumstances in which Somaliland could restore the sovereignty it had possessed before the union.
This is not universally accepted.
Somalia’s position has traditionally been that Somaliland is part of the Somali state and that its declaration constitutes an attempt to break apart Somalia’s territorial integrity.
The paper acknowledges that opposing interpretation directly.
Its response rests on history: Somaliland and the territory formerly administered by Italy were separate colonial entities, and Somaliland became independent before the union of July 1960.
That historical fact changes the legal question from “Can part of Somalia secede?” to “What was the legal character of the union, and what happened when the political order underpinning it collapsed?”
The 1960 Union and the Legal Fault Line
The study devotes significant attention to the legal mechanics of the 1960 union.
According to its reconstruction, Somaliland’s legislature adopted the Union of Somaliland and Somalia Law on June 27, 1960. The legislature of the Trust Territory of Somalia later approved a different instrument, known as the Atto di Unione.
The study argues that the texts differed materially and that the legal steps necessary to reconcile and ratify them were never properly completed.
It cites the International Crisis Group’s earlier observation that “no single legal document actually bound the two territories together.”
The research also discusses the Somali constitutional and judicial developments surrounding the attempted retroactive legalization of the union in 1961 and points to the northern rejection of the constitutional referendum that year.
For Somaliland’s legal advocates, these events are not historical curiosities.
They are evidence for a much larger proposition: that the union itself was legally defective or insufficiently perfected, weakening the argument that Somaliland today is merely a secessionist region within an unquestionably continuous Somali state.
The paper is careful to present this as an argument advanced by Somaliland rather than as an uncontested conclusion of international law.
That distinction is essential.
The legal case for restoration is substantial enough to be debated, but the existence of a legal argument is not the same thing as universal judicial acceptance of that argument.
What Territorial Integrity Does — and Does Not — Mean
Another obstacle is the principle of territorial integrity.
Under Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, states are prohibited from threatening or using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of other states.
The study argues, however, that territorial integrity is principally a rule governing relations between states and does not establish a blanket prohibition on declarations of independence.
That distinction featured prominently in the ICJ’s 2010 Kosovo advisory opinion, in which the Court concluded that international law contains no general prohibition on declarations of independence.
For Somaliland, the implication is significant.
If its 1991 declaration is treated as an ordinary secessionist claim, territorial integrity becomes a powerful argument against recognition.
If it is treated as the restoration of a previously independent state following the collapse of a union, the legal picture changes.
The research therefore describes the restoration theory as stronger than a conventional unilateral-secession argument.
It also notes that recognition itself does not necessarily violate Somalia’s territorial integrity, because recognition is ordinarily a sovereign act by an individual state rather than an act of territorial conquest or forcible annexation.
Israel and the Recognition Question
The study places particular significance on December 2025, when it records that Israel recognized Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state.
That recognition represents an important change in the diplomatic landscape analyzed by the paper.
For years, Somaliland had sought international recognition while maintaining a network of practical relationships with foreign governments and international institutions. Formal recognition by a state gives that campaign a different political dimension, even though a single recognition does not settle the broader international status of Somaliland.
The study notes that the language used to describe Somaliland itself is part of the legal contest.
Calling Somaliland a “self-declared state” emphasizes secession.
Describing its emergence as a “re-assertion” of sovereignty emphasizes restoration.
Those competing words encode competing theories of statehood.
In international diplomacy, terminology is rarely accidental.
The Missing Element: Recognition
For all the strength of the legal case advanced by the paper, there remains a fundamental obstacle.
International recognition is not automatic.
A political entity can satisfy many of the practical attributes of statehood and still remain outside the formal diplomatic system.
The research therefore distinguishes between de facto statehood and de jure recognition.
Somaliland, it argues, possesses the principal characteristics of a de facto state: territorial control, a permanent population, functioning institutions and a substantial capacity for independent external engagement. The more difficult question is why states have not translated those facts into widespread formal recognition.
The study’s answer is blunt: politics matters.
Recognition decisions can reflect strategic interests, regional alliances, concerns about precedent, relations with Somalia and broader diplomatic calculations.
In other words, the legal threshold and the political threshold are not necessarily the same thing.
That may explain why Somaliland’s institutional reality has not produced a corresponding diplomatic status.
A Possible Route Through the African Union
The paper proposes several pathways for Somaliland to move from legal argument to diplomatic progress.
The first is Africa.
Because Somaliland’s territorial claim is explicitly anchored in the former British Somaliland boundaries, the African Union is arguably the most important institution in which the legal argument could be tested.
The study proposes that Somaliland seek a formal AU legal review focused on whether its claim represents restoration rather than fragmentation.
It also points to the AU’s membership framework, under which an African state may apply for membership and member states then consider the application.
The strategy would seek to move the debate away from generalized political opposition to a more precise question about the historical and legal character of Somaliland’s statehood claim.
Could the International Court of Justice Clarify the Union?
The paper’s most ambitious proposal is legal rather than diplomatic.
It suggests that Somaliland could seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice through the United Nations General Assembly.
The proposed legal question would revolve around whether a union between two previously independent entities can remain binding when the underlying treaty or constitutional arrangements were not duly concluded or ratified, and whether the collapse of central authority could permit the restoration of a previously existing sovereign entity.
An advisory opinion would not necessarily produce recognition.
But it could change the debate.
A judicial assessment addressing the legality of the union, state continuity, self-determination and the consequences of governmental collapse could provide states with a more concrete legal framework for evaluating Somaliland’s position.
The political importance of such an opinion could ultimately be greater than its formal legal effect.
Observer Status Before Full Membership?
The study also proposes an incremental path through the United Nations.
Instead of immediately seeking full UN membership, which requires Security Council recommendation and therefore remains vulnerable to a veto by any permanent member, Somaliland could pursue Non-Member Observer State status through the General Assembly.
The paper identifies Palestine as the most relevant example of how observer status can expand diplomatic and international legal space without immediately resolving the question of full UN membership.
That approach would not answer the sovereignty dispute once and for all.
But it could institutionalize Somaliland’s international presence.
Recognition, One Capital at a Time
The final element of the strategy is bilateral diplomacy.
The study recommends concentrating on strategically important states with existing economic, security or diplomatic relationships with Somaliland, particularly the United States and United Kingdom.
Rather than treating recognition as a single dramatic event, the research envisions a cumulative process: representative offices, bilateral agreements, economic cooperation, security partnerships and eventually formal recognition.
The theory is simple.
Every additional recognition can strengthen the perception that Somaliland is not an isolated anomaly but a functioning political entity gradually acquiring wider international acceptance.
The final battlefield, however, may not be diplomatic at all.
It may be intellectual.
The study calls for greater engagement by Somaliland in international law conferences, academic journals, policy institutions and scholarly debates. The goal is to recast the international discussion from one centered almost exclusively on unilateral secession toward a broader legal framework encompassing decolonization, state continuity and restoration.
The Larger Question
The Somaliland dispute ultimately raises a question that reaches beyond the Horn of Africa.
When does a state cease to exist?
Can a political union survive indefinitely after its constitutional foundations have collapsed?
Can a territory that was once an internationally recognized state later restore that status?
And how much should international recognition depend on legal criteria, historical continuity, democratic legitimacy or the strategic calculations of existing states?
There are no easy answers.
The international system has repeatedly produced states through different pathways: decolonization, negotiated independence, dissolution of federations, consensual separation and, in more controversial circumstances, unilateral declarations of independence.
Somaliland argues that it belongs primarily to one of the less familiar categories: restoration.
That argument does not eliminate the political objections to recognition. Nor does it guarantee that governments, the African Union or the United Nations will adopt Somaliland’s interpretation.
But it does challenge the assumption that the legal case can be reduced to a conventional secession dispute.
The June 2026 research reaches a carefully framed conclusion: Somaliland appears to satisfy the traditional substantive criteria of statehood and possesses a sustained record of self-government, while its claim is reinforced by the history of decolonization, the principle of self-determination and the African doctrine of inherited colonial borders.
The unresolved issue, therefore, is less whether Somaliland has the attributes of a state than whether the international system is prepared to treat those attributes as sufficient.
For Somaliland, the next phase of the struggle may depend on persuading governments that recognition would not create an entirely new precedent for the fragmentation of African states.
Instead, its argument is that recognition would acknowledge an old one.
A state that became independent on June 26, 1960.
A union that Somaliland contends was never fully perfected in law.
A Somali political order that collapsed in 1991.
And a territory that, for 35 years, has governed itself while waiting for the international system to decide whether what it calls independence is better understood as separation — or restoration.
That may ultimately be Somaliland’s most consequential legal argument: it is not asking the world to create a state, but to recognize one it believes never lawfully ceased to exist.
