Somaliland becomes the latest battleground in Eritrea’s selective sovereignty argument as Asmara’s stance on Somaliland, Somalia’s territorial integrity and Ethiopia exposes deeper Horn of Africa tensions
Eritrea’s latest defense of Somalia’s territorial integrity has opened a broader argument over sovereignty, historical memory and the political uses of international law — one that increasingly places Somaliland at the center of a wider struggle involving Eritrea and Ethiopia.
In a recent statement, Eritrea’s diplomatic mission invoked African sovereignty and territorial integrity in opposition to challenges to Somalia’s internationally recognized borders. But an essay by Eritrean writer Habtom Ghebrezghiabher argues that the position reflects a selective interpretation of sovereignty, particularly when viewed against President Isaias Afwerki’s long confrontation with Ethiopia and his government’s record of regional intervention.
At the heart of Ghebrezghiabher’s argument is the 2002 ruling of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission, or EEBC, which he says Eritrean officials have increasingly treated as if it were the foundation of Eritrea’s sovereignty.
That, he argues, reverses the chronology of Eritrea’s independence.
“The EEBC did not give Eritrea its sovereignty. Our martyrs did.”
The distinction matters because the boundary commission was established after Eritrea and Ethiopia were already internationally recognized states. Its “final and binding” decision addressed a territorial dispute between those states; it did not create Eritrea as a sovereign country.
Ghebrezghiabher contends that portraying the ruling as the source of Eritrea’s sovereignty diminishes the decades-long independence struggle that preceded it.
Somaliland enters a larger sovereignty dispute
The argument has particular significance for Somaliland, whose claim to restored independence has become increasingly entangled with competition over the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.
Somaliland declared independence from Britain in June 1960 before entering a union with the former Italian-administered territory of Somalia. Since the collapse of Somalia’s central government, Somaliland has maintained its own political institutions, security forces and currency while seeking international recognition as a sovereign state.
Mogadishu rejects the independence claim and maintains that Somaliland remains part of Somalia.
Eritrea has sided with the principle of Somalia’s territorial integrity, placing Asmara on the opposite side of Somaliland’s recognition campaign. That position has gained greater geopolitical importance since Ethiopia and Somaliland signed a memorandum of understanding in January 2024 that contemplated Ethiopian access to the Red Sea through Somaliland and was linked to the possibility of Ethiopian recognition.
The agreement transformed Somaliland from a longstanding diplomatic question into a more consequential issue in the regional balance of power.
For Eritrea, the development carries an additional strategic dimension. Ethiopia’s potential access to the Red Sea through Somaliland could alter the balance along a coastline that Eritrea has regarded as central to its national security since independence.
Ghebrezghiabher therefore sees Eritrea’s position on Somaliland not simply as a legal defense of Somalia’s borders but as part of a broader contest with Ethiopia.
The EEBC became a political instrument
The essay challenges the idea that the EEBC ruling has always been treated by Eritrea and Ethiopia as an overriding principle.
Following the 1998-2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war, the commission issued its delimitation decision in 2002. Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, subsequently resisted full implementation of the ruling, contributing to the prolonged “no peace, no war” period between the two countries.
Ghebrezghiabher argues that the frozen conflict served different purposes for the two principal adversaries.
For the TPLF, he writes, continued confrontation could weaken Eritrea economically and politically. For Afwerki, the enduring threat from Ethiopia provided justification for continued national mobilization and the concentration of political authority.
The two sides, despite their fundamentally different objectives, consequently had reasons to tolerate an unresolved confrontation.
That calculation changed after Abiy Ahmed became Ethiopia’s prime minister in 2018 and accepted the EEBC framework as the basis for normalization.
Ghebrezghiabher highlights what he regards as a crucial contradiction: If implementation of the boundary decision was indispensable to Eritrea’s sovereignty, why did Afwerki reportedly describe the matter as “not urgent” after Ethiopia accepted the ruling?
His conclusion is that the legal status of the EEBC decision did not change. Its political usefulness did.
From Ethiopia to Somaliland
That distinction helps explain why Somaliland has become such a sensitive issue for Asmara.
The Somaliland question is formally different from the Eritrea-Ethiopia boundary dispute. But both involve competing interpretations of sovereignty, territorial integrity and the legacy of borders inherited from colonial rule.
For Somaliland, the central argument is that its political status cannot be reduced to Somalia’s present internationally recognized borders. Somaliland supporters point to the territory’s separate colonial history, its brief independence in 1960 and the circumstances surrounding its subsequent union with Somalia.
Somalia, by contrast, argues that recognition of Somaliland would violate its territorial integrity and establish a destabilizing precedent for Africa.
Eritrea’s support for Somalia therefore places it squarely within the latter camp.
But Ghebrezghiabher argues that Eritrea’s own record complicates any claim that territorial integrity is an absolute principle.
He points to Eritrean military involvement in Ethiopia during the Tigray war and argues that Asmara cannot simultaneously invoke Ethiopia’s territorial integrity while defending its own actions inside Ethiopian territory.
The argument is especially pointed because Eritrea’s government has historically viewed Ethiopia’s political structure as a major strategic concern.
Eritrea’s long confrontation with Ethiopia
The dispute between Eritrea and Ethiopia has never been confined to a line on a map.
Afwerki opposed the political order established by the TPLF-led Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front after 1991, including Ethiopia’s federal system, which reorganized political power around regional states and linguistic and ethnic identities.
The 1998 war subsequently turned the political confrontation into a military one.
The federal system survived the conflict and remains embedded in Ethiopia’s constitutional order. The TPLF, meanwhile, eventually lost its dominant position in Ethiopian politics and suffered military defeat during the 2020-2022 Tigray war.
Ghebrezghiabher argues that this history exposes the limits of the original confrontation.
The TPLF failed to achieve its alleged objective of weakening Eritrea through prolonged confrontation. Afwerki, meanwhile, failed to dismantle Ethiopia’s federal system.
Yet the political alignments have shifted again.
Former enemies have found themselves on the same side of disputes with Abiy’s federal government, demonstrating how rapidly alliances in the Horn of Africa can change while the underlying competition for regional influence remains.
The Russia-Ukraine comparison
Ghebrezghiabher also extends his argument beyond the Horn of Africa, pointing to Eritrea’s position on Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Eritrea has maintained close diplomatic alignment with Moscow and was among the countries that opposed the 2022 United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For Ghebrezghiabher, the contrast illustrates what he sees as a recurring pattern: sovereignty and territorial integrity are treated as inviolable when they reinforce Eritrea’s strategic interests but less consistently when they conflict with those interests.
That criticism becomes particularly relevant to Somaliland.
If territorial integrity is treated as an absolute principle, the question is whether that principle should apply consistently across disputes — including Ukraine, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Somaliland.
If, instead, sovereignty is interpreted through historical circumstances, political consent and the rights of peoples, then the Somaliland question becomes considerably more complicated than a simple defense of Somalia’s existing borders.
A sovereignty argument with domestic consequences
Ghebrezghiabher’s sharpest criticism, however, is directed inward.
He argues that the political value of an enduring external threat has been central to Afwerki’s rule. Presenting Eritrea as a nation permanently surrounded by hostile powers can reinforce the government’s argument for political unity, security mobilization and centralized authority.
The EEBC ruling, in this interpretation, becomes more than a legal document. It becomes part of a national political narrative in which Eritrea’s survival remains permanently threatened.
Ghebrezghiabher argues that such a narrative obscures another dimension of sovereignty: the condition of the citizens who supposedly possess it.
“Sovereignty belongs to the people,” he writes, arguing that genuine sovereignty should encompass political dignity, functioning institutions, economic opportunity, security and basic public services.
That reframes the debate.
A country can possess internationally recognized sovereignty while its citizens experience political repression, economic stagnation or institutional weakness. Conversely, a government can invoke national sovereignty while limiting the political freedoms of the people in whose name that sovereignty is exercised.
For Somaliland, that distinction carries particular weight.
Somaliland’s campaign for recognition is fundamentally a campaign to persuade other states that its political status cannot be resolved solely by reference to Somalia’s territorial claims. Its supporters argue that sovereignty must also account for historical statehood, political realities and the expressed aspirations of the population.
Somaliland and the politics of selective sovereignty
The controversy therefore reaches beyond the question of whether Somaliland should be recognized.
It raises a larger issue confronting the Horn of Africa: Who gets to define sovereignty, and when?
Eritrea insists on the territorial integrity of Somalia. Ethiopia has pursued strategic access to the Red Sea through Somaliland. Somalia regards the Ethiopian-Somaliland agreement as a threat to its sovereignty. Somaliland argues that its own sovereignty has been denied for decades. And Eritrea views Ethiopia’s regional ambitions through the prism of its own history of conflict with Addis Ababa.
Each government invokes international law. Each interprets territorial integrity through its own strategic interests.
That makes Somaliland an increasingly important test of whether the region’s states will treat sovereignty as a consistent legal principle or as a diplomatic instrument.
Ghebrezghiabher’s central criticism is not that the EEBC ruling lacks legal force. He explicitly acknowledges that the decision was “final and binding.”
His objection is to turning that ruling into the origin story of Eritrean sovereignty.
The boundary commission did not create Eritrea. Eritrea’s independence struggle did.
And if the same principle is applied to Somaliland, the debate cannot end with a reference to Somalia’s territorial integrity. It must also confront Somaliland’s distinct historical trajectory, its political institutions and the question of whether the preservation of inherited borders should permanently outweigh competing claims to self-determination.
The dispute over Somaliland is therefore becoming part of something larger: a struggle over whose version of sovereignty will define the next political order of the Horn of Africa.
For Eritrea, that struggle is inseparable from its confrontation with Ethiopia. For Somalia, it is a defense of territorial unity. For Ethiopia, Somaliland represents a potential strategic gateway to the Red Sea. And for Somaliland, recognition remains the culmination of a political project rooted in its own history of statehood.
The result is a regional contest in which the language of international law is shared by nearly every actor — but its meaning is increasingly contested.
