Somaliland and the African border dilemma

With Israel’s decision on 26 December to formally recognise Somaliland, a question that has lingered for decades has abruptly become immediate again. Other states — including Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and possibly the United States — are now being mentioned as potential followers.

If further recognition does occur, it will not simply be a diplomatic sequence. It will reopen one of the most enduring and unresolved questions in African politics:

When, if ever, should colonial borders give way to political reality?

For more than 60 years, African regional diplomacy has lived with a structural tension — not due to confusion but by deliberate design. Over time, through its founding charter and key resolutions, the OAU — and later the African Union — committed itself to three powerful ideas: the sovereignty of states, the stability of inherited colonial borders and the principle of self-determination. None of these emerged accidentally. Each was a response to trauma.

Sovereignty and non-interference were intended to shield newly independent states from external manipulation and regime destabilisation. Having endured colonial rule, African leaders feared that interference would simply continue under new names. But experience — especially the moral catastrophe of Rwanda — revealed the limits of absolute sovereignty. This is why the AU Constitutive Act later created an unprecedented clause allowing intervention in cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

Sovereignty mattered, but human life mattered more.

The commitment to colonial borders arose from a different anxiety. In 1964, the OAU resolved to respect the boundaries inherited at independence. Leaders believed that reopening maps would reopen history. With overlapping identities across the continent, they feared that redrawing borders would trigger endless conflict. Border stability therefore became the default position, even if it froze lines that had never been designed to function as nations.

Self-determination, meanwhile, acknowledged the moral basis of anti-colonial struggle — the right of peoples to decide their future. Yet it remained deliberately under-defined. In practice, it was interpreted primarily as inclusion and participation within existing states, rather than as an automatic right to create new ones. 

It became the most contested and least operationalised of the three ideas.

Taken together, these commitments do not form a tidy doctrine. They form a permanent tension. Each has exceptions. Each has costs. And Africa has never fully resolved where the balance should lie.

Somaliland’s case brings the dilemma back to the surface. This is a territory that has governed itself — largely peacefully and with relative institutional coherence — for more than three decades. 

It has developed its own political order, security apparatus and external relationships. At the same time, it exists inside a continental system built on the presumption that borders remain stable and that recognition is the rare, carefully managed exception rather than the rule.

The problem is not the principle. The problem is where, on the continuum, we place the exception.

Do exceptions arise only after total state collapse?

After a prolonged war?

After sustained governance failure and loss of legitimacy?

Or after an alternative order has demonstrated stability and consent over time?

There is no agreed threshold — and perhaps there cannot be.

International law offers guidance but not simple answers. The Montevideo criteria speak about territory, population, effective government and capacity for international relations. Yet recognition remains, ultimately, political. It reflects economic interests, strategic alignments, regional security calculations and great-power rivalries. 

Principles are invoked; interests usually decide.

In practice, recognition rarely happens overnight. It usually follows quiet diplomacy: exploratory contacts, technical fact-finding, legal reviews and careful consultation with regional partners.

 States often wait to see whether recognition will stabilise or destabilise the region before moving. When they finally act, the language is almost always framed in terms of “regional security,” “realities on the ground,” and “the will of the people,” even when strategic interests are clearly in play.

This is also why African leaders worry about precedent. The continent does not host merely a few isolated disputes. It contains scores of organised secessionist movements, some historical, some re-emerging, others still latent. Many exist in states already struggling socially, politically and economically. A perception that borders are negotiable could embolden similar impulses elsewhere, while drawing in outside powers eager to shape outcomes in their favour.

But insisting that borders are absolutely sacred under all circumstances brings its own dangers. It can lock communities into political arrangements that no longer function and where legitimacy repeatedly collapses. Sovereignty can become a shield behind which chronic failure continues indefinitely.

Both extremes are dangerous. Stability must remain the default. Change must remain the exception. But exceptions need clearer thinking than silence and improvisation.

If Somaliland’s recognition gathers pace, the wiser response may not be panic — nor celebration — but quiet, honest reflection inside the AU and among African policymakers. Not about abandoning territorial integrity but about developing transparent principles for those rare situations where the exception is judged less destabilising than the status quo.

That kind of conversation is difficult precisely because it forces us to admit that our doctrines are neither perfect nor permanent. Yet refusing the conversation does not avoid change — it merely ensures that when change arrives, it will come through crisis rather than careful design.

Because change will come, in one form or another. And if Africa does not decide how such transitions should be approached, others will.

Borders exist to serve people — not the other way around. Remembering that may be the most difficult – and most necessary, lesson of all. 

Dr Joan Swart is a forensic psychologist and independent security analyst who writes on governance, sovereignty and geopolitical developments affecting Africa. Her work has appeared in BizNews, PoliticsWeb, DefenceWeb and Nongqai.