Somaliland’s fight for statehood takes center stage in Farah Bakaari’s essay, “Sovereignty’s End and Beginning,” exploring genocide, diaspora identity, nationalism, and the global politics of recognition
In the winter of 2025, when Israel formally recognized Somaliland as a sovereign state, celebrations erupted in parts of Hargeisa. Israeli flags illuminated downtown streets, young Somalilanders flooded social media with jubilant posts, and officials hailed the breakthrough as the culmination of a struggle spanning more than three decades.
But for Somaliland-born writer and academic Farah Bakaari, the moment represented something far more conflicted: the collision between a long-denied quest for statehood and the moral compromises that can accompany geopolitical survival.
In her sweeping essay, “Sovereignty’s End and Beginning,” published in Boston Review’s Spring 2026 issue, Bakaari traces Somaliland’s painful history—from genocide and civil war to diaspora identity and the burden of statelessness—while interrogating what happens when the pursuit of sovereignty overtakes the ideals that once justified it.
“The passport was both symbol and its negative,” Bakaari writes, recalling an encounter at the U.S. Embassy in Djibouti years earlier, when American officials refused to stamp her Somaliland passport directly because Somaliland lacked international recognition. “Its power cemented in the very moment it was declared moot.”
The essay arrives at a moment of heightened geopolitical attention on the Horn of Africa, where Somaliland’s strategic location along the Gulf of Aden and the Bab el-Mandab Strait has transformed the territory into an increasingly important player in Red Sea security politics.
Israel’s Recognition
Somaliland has operated as a de facto independent state since 1991, when it resorted its independence following the collapse of dictator Siad Barre’s military regime.
Though unrecognized internationally for decades, Somaliland built many of the institutions associated with statehood: democratic elections, a national currency, biometric passports, police and military forces, diplomatic liaison offices abroad, and a relatively stable political order in a region often defined by conflict.
Bakaari describes the project as both practical and existential.
“For Somaliland, sovereignty… hasn’t just been a practical matter but an existential one as well,” she writes.
Yet the recognition by Israel introduced a profound moral contradiction for many Somalilanders and members of the diaspora. In the essay, Bakaari argues that Somaliland’s embrace of Israel risks betraying the anti-colonial and internationalist ideals embedded in Somaliland’s own liberation struggle.
“Rather than coming from any of its neighbors or from another postcolonial nation,” she writes, “that recognition was handed down by an occupying genocidal state that has worked tirelessly to destroy another people’s right to self-determination.”
The recognition agreement reportedly included strategic and security cooperation linked to Red Sea maritime routes, where Israel has sought to counter threats posed by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi movement.
Somaliland’s geographic value has long attracted foreign powers. The territory’s 850-kilometer coastline faces one of the world’s most strategically important shipping corridors, connecting the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean through the Bab el-Mandab Strait and ultimately the Suez Canal.
Over the past decade, several regional and global powers have pursued interests there.
In 2016, DP World signed a major agreement to develop the Port of Berbera. In 2024, Somaliland entered into a controversial memorandum of understanding with Ethiopia granting sea access in exchange for prospective diplomatic recognition, though Addis Ababa later reaffirmed support for Somalia’s territorial integrity after international backlash.
The Weight of War
Much of Bakaari’s essay centers on the devastating violence that shaped Somaliland’s independence movement.
During the late 1980s, Siad Barre’s regime launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the Isaaq-majority north, where the Somali National Movement was fighting for liberation.
The campaign included aerial bombardments, mass executions, destruction of water infrastructure, and forced displacement on a massive scale. Bakaari references estimates that as many as 200,000 people were killed between 1987 and 1989.
“Barre had only one goal in mind: annihilation,” she writes.
She also points to Cold War geopolitics, arguing that the United States supported Barre’s regime with military aid in exchange for strategic access to Somali ports after Somalia’s split from the Soviet Union.
For many Somalilanders, the trauma of that period became inseparable from the demand for sovereignty itself.
Bakaari describes growing up among the physical ruins of war in Gabiley, a town west of Hargeisa, where destroyed buildings, landmine clearance operations, and untreated psychological trauma formed part of daily life.
Yet public conversation often focused less on the destruction than on what emerged afterward: Somaliland.
“The nation-state was not only a consolation prize for what we lost,” she writes, “but a metonym for an ongoing collective suffering that couldn’t be spoken.”
Poetry, Solidarity, and Political Identity
Central to the essay is Somaliland’s literary and revolutionary tradition, particularly the work of legendary Somali poets such as Abdillahi Suldaan Mohammed Timacadde and Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame Hadraawi.
Bakaari portrays Somali poetry not merely as artistic expression but as a political institution deeply tied to anti-colonial struggle, social justice, and international solidarity.
Timacadde condemned tribalism and imperialism in his poetry, while Hadraawi—who was imprisoned for anti-authoritarian writings before joining the armed resistance against Barre—later advocated reconciliation and broader Somali fraternity.
Hadraawi also wrote poems supporting Palestine and Vietnam, linking liberation struggles across continents.
“The Palestinian cause is the same as the Lebanese cause, the Somali cause, the Vietnamese cause,” Hadraawi once said, according to Bakaari. “They are all connected.”
For Bakaari, those traditions shaped her own political consciousness as a Somali in the diaspora. She writes of joining protests, signing petitions, organizing sit-ins, and imagining herself carrying forward a legacy of international solidarity inherited from Somaliland’s poets and revolutionaries.
That legacy, she argues, now feels compromised.
“This is the history and the responsibility that was so cheaply traded with that fawning phone call between Netanyahu and Irro,” she writes, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi.
The Cost of Recognition
Bakaari ultimately frames Somaliland’s diplomatic breakthrough not as a triumphant endpoint but as a warning about the consequences of equating freedom solely with state recognition.
“Somaliland has ceased to think of itself as part of and responsible to” the broader world community, she argues, describing how the urgency of recognition risks reducing history into a tool for geopolitical legitimacy.
The essay also reflects the broader frustrations faced by Somalilanders living abroad, many of whom continue to navigate visa complications and travel restrictions because Somaliland passports remain only partially accepted internationally.
Bakaari closes not with certainty but with unresolved tension: the tension between the ordinary freedoms denied to stateless people and the moral obligations inherited from histories of resistance.
“I could be in the world—I could feel free,” she writes, imagining the mobility a recognized passport might grant her. “But these are things to do… In that freedom’s absence, there remains the things to be.”
Her conclusion echoes the words of Hadraawi: to “keep count” of injustice, memory, and responsibility, even amid political contradiction.
