On 12 June 2026 the representative office of the Republic of Somaliland in Taipei left the outlying district of Neihu for Tianmu, in Shilin, taking up quarters in the building that houses the embassies of most of Taiwan’s official allies. The move was a matter of logistics and no less a matter of protocol, that grammar in which an address states a rank and proximity amounts to a concession: by installing the Somaliland mission at the heart of its most official diplomatic geography, Taipei performed an act of classification. Ambassador Mahmoud Adam Jama Galaal carried the logic to its conclusion when he declared at the inauguration that the two missions operate with the vigour of two states maintaining the closest of diplomatic ties. Three days later, on 15 June, the president of Somaliland opened his country’s first embassy in Jerusalem. Within a single week, then, Hargeisa received protocolary proximity from an excluded peer and a full diplomatic establishment from a recognised state.
The scene condenses a paradox that leaves theory oddly disarmed. Taiwan retains a dozen formal diplomatic allies, eleven member states of the United Nations and the Holy See, remnants of a recognition once held by the majority and which Beijing labours to whittle down year by year; Somaliland, since 26 December 2025, holds the recognition of Israel, its first since the restoration of independence in 1991. What the two entities share is therefore not the absence of recognition but exclusion from a normalised and universal recognition, the one by erosion, the other for want of access. Upon that common marginality they have built, since 2020, a parallel diplomacy whose mainspring is not classical state legitimacy.
Let recognition by exclusion designate the relational mechanism by which two entities of structurally incomplete international recognition convert their respective marginality into a capacity for reciprocal validation, accumulate by that means certain attributes of diplomatic normality, and then seek to externalise the validation towards recognised third parties. The definition matters because it locates the object: what is at issue is not a new category of entity but a procedure for the production of recognition.
The vocabulary betrays, before the analysis has begun, an embarrassment of thought. English disposes of statehood, a noun in ordinary use that designates the quality of being a state and readily admits of degrees. French does possess étaticité, which the literature deploys in such formulations as limited statehood, but the term remains learned, scarcely available outside specialist circles, and ordinary usage falls back upon l’État itself, a full substance to which one either belongs or does not. The gap is not lexical alone. Where English lends itself more easily to the thought of a graduated statehood, measurable and susceptible of increase, French, heir to a tradition in which the state is a sovereign and indivisible legal person, offers that idea a narrower hospitality. The Somaliland case tests the resistance: it calls for a word that French holds without practising.
The pairing, for its part, had nothing self-evident about it, geographically or historically. Nine thousand kilometres, two civilisational areas, and two trajectories that diplomatic vocabulary improperly files under a single heading. Somaliland did not in 1991 detach itself from a whole to which it had always belonged: a sovereign state on 26 June 1960, recognised within five days by thirty-five governments, Israel’s among them, it had voluntarily carried its sovereignty into a union from which it withdrew thirty-one years later. Taiwan proceeds from an altogether different mechanism, and is no more a secession: the Republic of China, established nearly thirty-eight years before the People’s Republic that now claims the island, persisted after the civil war, and it was its international representation, not its existence, that was taken from it when the General Assembly transferred the Chinese seat to Beijing in 1971. The one withdrew from a union; the other was dispossessed of a representation. It is the dissimilarity of these trajectories that makes the comparison fruitful, for it forbids ascribing the rapprochement to any cultural or regional affinity.
The mainspring appears in the 2020 agreement establishing reciprocal offices under their true names, Taiwan and Somaliland, without the prudent circumlocutions that Beijing’s sensitivities impose elsewhere. A calculated transgression of nomenclature: where ordinary diplomacy euphemises in order to spare, this one names in order to exist. What followed showed the relationship to be more than an announcement. To the standard repertoire of development cooperation, agriculture, university scholarships, public health, energy, there was added on 24 July 2025 a coast guard agreement signed in Taipei by the director-general of the Taiwanese administration and the commander of the Somaliland coast guard, in the presence of Somaliland’s foreign minister and Taiwan’s minister of ocean affairs, on the very day President Lai Ching-te received the delegation. The agreement opens bilateral cooperation between coast guards, which Lai expressly placed under the headings of maritime security and the blue economy. He formulated that day a strategic aim whose bluntness deserves notice: to work, with like-minded partners, towards a Somaliland coastline that is not red.
Then the lock gave way, though in an order that bears exact restitution. Israeli recognition was formalised on 26 December 2025 by a joint declaration signed by Benjamin Netanyahu, Gideon Sa’ar and Somaliland’s president Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, establishing mutual recognition and full diplomatic relations; Sa’ar’s visit to Hargeisa on 6 January following was its execution and not its source. What the subsequent sequence establishes is worth more than a stroke of theatre: agrément for the Somaliland ambassador in February 2026, appointment of an Israeli ambassador in April, presentation of credentials in Jerusalem on 18 May, effective opening of the embassy on 15 June, at the close of the first state visit ever undertaken by a president of Somaliland. Recognition is not obtained; it installs itself, through the successive acquisition of protocolary gestures each of which sediments the one before. The Tianmu move belongs to the same grammar.
The trajectory does not unfold upon a neutral map. The Gulf of Aden commands access to Bab el-Mandeb and, beyond it, to the Red Sea–Suez corridor, which before the crisis concentrated a share of world maritime trade that estimates place at around fifteen per cent, and close to a third of container traffic. The Houthi campaign against shipping brought those volumes down spectacularly, daily transits of the strait falling from some seventy to a score at the height of the crisis. The strategic paradox lies precisely there: it is the collapse of traffic, not its abundance, that has given value to the African shore. A corridor grown dangerous calls for escorts, bases, coast guards, surveillance capacities; it turns a port into a security asset before it is a commercial one. Berbera, whose concession is operated by the Emirati group DP World, has gained in importance on that account. One will nonetheless guard against overstating the holdings: Ethiopia had negotiated in 2018 a nineteen per cent participation in the port’s capital, failed to meet the conditions within the prescribed time, and saw its shares redistributed between the operator and the Somaliland port authority.
The memorandum of understanding of 1 January 2024, by which Addis Ababa was to obtain for fifty years the use of some twenty kilometres of coastline, carried, according to Hargeisa, formal recognition of Somaliland in return; Ethiopia for its part spoke publicly only of an in-depth assessment with a view to taking a position on that recognition. The distance between the two formulations tells by itself the political price of the state title, too high to be promised aloud, too coveted to be set aside. Mogadishu’s reply then deserves more attention than it has received. The Ankara Declaration of 11 December 2024, obtained through Turkish mediation, did not merely freeze the affair: Ethiopia and Somalia there reaffirm Somali sovereignty and territorial integrity and undertake to negotiate Ethiopian access to the sea under Somali sovereignty. Compelled to answer an offer made by an excluded party, the recognised capital had to produce a counter-offer of sovereignty. This is a scarcely noticed consequence of the mechanism: pairing among the marginal alters not only the position of the marginal but obliges the recognised to outbid.
The pairing obeys a logic of its own, irreducible to opportunism as to solidarity among victims, and its first spring is a reversal of stigma. In the symbolic economy of Westphalia incomplete recognition disqualifies; it operates as a mark that excludes its bearer from ordinary commerce and condemns him to negotiate his presentation of self without respite. Yet it is because neither Taipei nor Hargeisa has anything to lose with Beijing or Mogadishu that each can offer the other what fully admitted states withhold: the name, the flag, the protocol, the ministerial presence. What the world takes for an infirmity becomes the condition of a recognition franker than the one certain partners extend to Taiwan through offices euphemistically styled.
Nothing guarantees, however, that such crossed validation reaches beyond the circle of its authors. One might readily imagine two outcasts conferring worthless titles upon one another, a zero-sum game played at the margin of the system. The objection falls before the test of fact: two entities of incomplete recognition conclude and execute sectoral agreements, maintain quasi-diplomatic missions, contribute to the maritime security of corridors whose usefulness far exceeds their bilateral interests. The demonstration carries beyond the dyad, since it establishes that recognition does not condition international effectiveness. Israeli recognition authorises a bolder hypothesis still, which it would be imprudent to present as established causation: five years of Somaliland–Taiwanese cooperation had helped to document with precision the properties on which a classical recognition may rely, contractual capacity, security reliability, institutional stability. Pairing among the excluded may thus serve as a vestibule.
The mechanism nonetheless calls to be distinguished from neighbouring figures whose appearance it borrows. The paradiplomacy of sub-state entities operates within a sovereignty it does not contest: Quebec and Catalonia deploy representations abroad without claiming to displace Ottawa or Madrid. Hargeisa and Taipei, by contrast, deploy in their mutual relation a diplomacy of full state pretension, with official names, permanent representations, intergovernmental agreements, protocol and cooperation in sovereign matters. The diplomacy of de facto states, such as one observes in Abkhazia or Northern Cyprus, remains for its part tributary to a recognised patron, Moscow in the one case, Ankara in the other, and Somaliland figures in that literature precisely as the exception without a guardian. To describe what these entities are says nothing, however, of what two of them may produce for one another, and it is this second question that is posed here. The object is not a status but a relation. We are equally far from earned sovereignty, that sovereignty merited by stages under international supervision, with its sequencing and its conditionalities, of which Kosovo remains the model: here no guardian issues the intermediate certificates, and validation comes from an equally marginal peer.
This self-production is not without an internal genealogy on the Somaliland side, and one better understands Hargeisa’s readiness to dispense with external unction by recalling the manner in which its state was made. Between 1991 and 1997 a series of clan conferences, that of Borama above all, gathered the elders in guurti and converted customary law, the xeer, into constitutional architecture, to the point of inscribing it in the upper chamber of parliament. A sovereignty negotiated from below, resting upon institutions that legal anthropology would recognise without difficulty and that Western political science struggles to code within its grids, extends naturally enough into a diplomacy that validates itself among peers rather than before the powers. The praise calls for a reservation: the guurti has never been renewed by suffrage, has prolonged its own mandate for decades, and the institution that founded the peace now passes for an obstacle to alternation in office. The procedure that produced the state today impedes its renewal, and thereby erodes the democratic quality of which Hargeisa makes abroad its principal argument.
African decolonisation had produced sovereignties endowed with every juridical attribute of statehood, a seat at the United Nations, universal recognition, immunities, without the corresponding empirical functions: a negative sovereignty, made of rights opposable to others far more than of capacities deployed at home, and such cases came to be called quasi-states. Somaliland offers the photographic negative of that configuration. It exercises a positive sovereignty that federal Somalia commands only intermittently, its own currency, an army, a police force, courts, contested elections and effective alternations of power, and is refused the negative sovereignty that Mogadishu retains intact. The Horn thus yields the two halves of one and the same untraceable state, distributed between two capitals of which one holds the title without the thing and the other the thing without the title.
That positive half has moreover been eroding at the very moment when the negative half was beginning to be acquired. The Las Anod rising of 2023 cost Hargeisa control of Sool and of part of Sanaag, to the benefit of an SSC-Khaatumo administration whose federal integration Mogadishu accelerated in the spring of 2025 and whose transformation was completed at the end of the following August, once the regional constitution had been adopted, the eighty-three-member assembly composed and the leaders of the new North-East State elected. It is therefore no longer accurate to speak of uncontested territorial control, but of effective control over the greater part of the claimed territory. The concession does not weaken the argument; it usefully complicates it: Somaliland gains segments of external recognition while losing segments of internal effectiveness, and nothing guarantees that the two movements offset one another.
The pairing would be a mere curiosity if the juridical categories supposed to govern access to statehood emerged from it unscathed. They do not emerge unscathed. The Montevideo Convention of 1933 sets out the criteria since become canonical, a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, the capacity to enter into relations with other states, and enshrines in its Article 3 the declaratory theory whereby the political existence of the state does not depend upon its recognition. Were that declaratory grid applied strictly, Somaliland would satisfy the criteria better than the federal Somalia that claims sovereignty over it, and Taiwan better than a good many members of the United Nations. But Montevideo is neither a universal constitution of the state nor the last word of doctrine, and international practice operates on a constitutive footing in fact, where admission to the circle of peers, not conformity to criteria, confers operative personality. The gap between proclaimed norm and effective practice has received its name, that of organised hypocrisy, and the vocabulary serves better here than a denunciation.
The fourth criterion harbours, moreover, a circularity that the dyad exploits and, in doing so, brings to light. If relational capacity attests statehood, but established states refuse the relation on the ground that they deny that quality, the criterion ceases to be a test and becomes a lock. The pairing forces that lock by a detour: the two entities validate for one another the capacity to enter into relations, each supplying the other with the piece its file lacked. The criterion is satisfied not from above but from the side.
The continental objection, according to which recognising Hargeisa would open the Pandora’s box of African secessions, rests upon a confusion between two juridically distinct operations: the secession of part of a pre-existing state, and the withdrawal of a sovereign state from a union to which it had consented. Somaliland belongs to the second figure. It was sovereign before the union, if only for five days, and did not therefore create in 1991 a sovereignty it had never possessed, but claimed the restoration of the one it had itself brought in 1960. The difference is not one of nuance. To leave a union one entered as a state belongs to a figure that international law knows without alarm: Syria left the United Arab Republic in September 1961, Senegal the Mali Federation after two months of existence, the Gambia the Senegambian confederation in 1989, Czechoslovakia dissolved itself in 1993, and no one saw in any of these the opening of a box of any kind. Withdrawal claims to undo what a consent had constituted; secession detaches a territory from the state order to which it belonged.
Hargeisa disposes, further, of an argument those precedents did not afford, for the union from which it withdrew was not regularly concluded. The northern assembly voted on 27 June 1960 a union law that Mogadishu did not adopt, confining itself to approving in principle a different text that was never converted into law; neither instrument, though both were drafted in the form of a bilateral agreement, was signed by representatives of the two territories. A retroactive act of union, promulgated on 31 January 1961 by the National Assembly of the new state, came to cover the void and repealed in passing the Somaliland law. The procedure was ill received in the north, where the constitutional referendum of June 1961 drew less than seventeen per cent participation and a hostile majority among those who voted, and where officers attempted a coup that December; their trial, in 1963, publicly exposed the absence of any instrument of union opposable in the northern provinces.
This qualification of withdrawal and restoration is evidently not Mogadishu’s, and part of the doctrine maintains that the act of January 1961, regularly voted by the National Assembly, retroactively purged the initial defect and juridically consolidated the union, the will to unite having in any case been expressed without ambiguity on both sides before July 1960. The debate deserves to be opened rather than settled by authority. It remains that the fact-finding mission despatched by the African Union in 2005 endorsed the finding of non-ratification, judged the Somaliland quest historically unique in African political history, and recommended setting aside the Pandora’s box argument in favour of a special procedure. Two decades later the organisation has done nothing with its own report, and the chairmanship of its commission warns against the dangerous precedent that recognition would constitute. One will read in this less an incoherence than an economy of silence: the African Union protects its most fragile members at the price of a denial that strikes the most solid of its non-members.
There is the further point that the withdrawal restores exactly the frontiers of the protectorate as they stood on 26 June 1960. Far from threatening the uti possidetis juris that the Cairo resolution of 1964 erected into continental dogma, the claim conforms to it scrupulously, since it is the colonial lines, and no others, that Hargeisa demands. The organisation that made inviolability its cardinal principle thus finds itself in the singular position of withholding recognition from that one of its neighbours which applies it most rigorously.
Vocabulary here does the work of argument. To call secession what is more exactly described as withdrawal is to settle the question of law by the choice of a word, and one meets again in the Somaliland case the mechanism noted earlier with respect to étaticité: language installs a category, the category imposes an ontology, qualification precedes examination. That Mogadishu, the African Union and a large part of international discourse continue to file the matter under the heading of secession is no neutral observation about the world. It is a performative act on the same footing as the opening of an office under one’s true name: it helps to stabilise in diplomatic language the political reality it purports merely to describe.
The Montevideo detour displaces the question itself. What if statehood were neither a fact, as the declaratory thesis will have it, nor a status conferred, as the constitutive thesis maintains, but a performance, a set of acts which, repeated and ratified by at least one other actor, produce the reality they enunciate? To open an office under the true name, to sign a coast guard agreement, to present credentials, to settle in the embassy quarter: so many performative utterances whose felicity depends less upon systemic authorisation than upon ratification by an interlocutor, contested though he may himself be. The proposition is sociological before it is juridical, and the two must not be confounded: that sovereignty is performed does not establish that state personality has been acquired, but that its fabrication proceeds by degrees rather than by the crossing of a threshold.
To recognise thereupon ceases to be an indivisible act. Recognition allows itself to be decomposed into a bundle of segments, nominal, functional, protocolary, security-related, which Somaliland has acquired separately, from different actors and along sequences of their own. International human rights law had in fact opened this breach well before the theory of international relations: since the advisory opinion of 1971 on Namibia, and more clearly still since the Strasbourg jurisprudence on Cyprus, the acts of an unrecognised administration produce legal effects where their invalidation would harm the populations they protect. Births, marriages, judgments, titles to property thus escape the nullity that non-recognition ought to entail, and the exception, devised to spare the inhabitants, has created a precedent that now serves as argument: the law knows how, when it wishes, to dissociate the validity of acts from the legitimacy of the sovereign.
Europe furnishes, at the other end of the spectrum, the symmetrical demonstration. The European Union concludes treaties, sits in international fora, incurs responsibility and possesses a legal personality expressly conferred upon it by the Treaty of Lisbon, without being a state or claiming to become one. Brussels has moreover elaborated, for the contested territories of its eastern neighbourhood, a practice of engagement without recognition that methodically organises dealings with authorities whose sovereign quality it denies. A non-state entity endowed with international capacity on the one side, a state entity deprived of that capacity on the other: the two figures attest together that international personality has ceased to be the exclusive preserve of the fully recognised state.
A juridical precision imposes itself here, too often neglected. The United Nations does not recognise states: states recognise states, and the Organisation admits members. There exists, therefore, no United Nations monopoly of certification whose erosion might be observed. What is observable is of another order, political rather than juridical: admission to the United Nations system exercises in practice a quasi-certifying function, it stands as the seal of normalisation, and that symbolic centrality finds itself challenged as soon as peripheral circuits produce tangible effects, maritime security, commercial flows, the Israeli precedent, without passing through New York.
More troubling still for the Westphalian intuition: exclusion proves generative. Rather than condemning to international non-existence, it releases the marginal from the constraints that discipline the admitted and opens to them diplomatic innovations inaccessible to ordinary states, naming without euphemism, cooperating between unrecognised parties on sovereign matters, addressing maritime security without a mandate. Apparent irresponsibility converts into freedom of manoeuvre.
The picture would be complacent were one to pass over what makes the model fragile. The internal asymmetry of the dyad is plain: Taiwan, the world’s twenty-first economy and a decisive link in the semiconductor chains, brings Somaliland resources out of all proportion to what it receives, an African partner, a diplomatic anchorage on the Gulf of Aden–Red Sea axis, a demonstrative argument. Recognition by exclusion does not abolish material hierarchies; it reconfigures them within the circle of the marginal. The dyad moves, besides, in a strategic environment ever less neutral: Washington deepens separately its security cooperation with Taipei, which the National Defense Authorization Act signed in December 2025 substantially reinforces, while Berbera gains in value within American calculations on the Red Sea and on Chinese presence in the Horn. Nothing establishes American sponsorship of the pairing, but the context is permissive, and on a realist reading the mechanism would reduce to an auxiliary instrument of Sino-American competition, tolerated because it serves the strategy of a recognised hegemon. The theoretical autonomy of the concept remains on this point a hypothesis.
The most corrosive paradox lies elsewhere. By bringing Somaliland into the antechamber of the club, Israeli recognition dissolves the founding symmetry: as Hargeisa accumulates classical recognitions, its relation with Taipei will change in nature and the pairing will become an asymmetrical relation between a near-recognised party and a durably excluded one, Taiwan remaining ineligible for the Somaliland trajectory for structural reasons bound up with the Chinese veto. The laboratory carries within it the principle of its own obsolescence, its success destroying the very conditions of the experiment. That is also what makes the concept refutable, and therefore usable.
One would readily relegate the Taipei–Hargeisa axis to the rank of diplomatic curiosity, folklore of the confines of the Westphalian system. Limit cases have nonetheless an epistemological function of their own, since it is at the margins that structures show themselves, there where they cease to go without saying. Recognition by exclusion brings to light what interstate routine conceals, that sovereignty is a labour rather than a state, and that its validation borrows circuits whose existence neither Montevideo nor the Charter had foreseen. It reminds us too, and those who practise languages will hear it, that our political categories sleep within our lexicon, and that a single word may suffice to efface for thirty-five years an essential distinction: the one that separates the secession of a territory wrested from a pre-existing state from the withdrawal of a state resuming the sovereignty it had voluntarily brought to a union.
The reach of the mechanism remains uncertain, and it would be imprudent to draw necessary conditions from a single dyad. Hypotheses to be tested elsewhere may be advanced instead. In the Taiwanese–Somaliland case, democratic quality functions as a currency of legitimation that partly compensates for the missing title; functional usefulness to recognised third parties, here the security of maritime routes, appears necessary to the conversion of the bilateral tie into a systemic effect; and the absence of an exclusive patron seems alone to permit the horizontality that distinguishes pairing from clientage. These three propositions require other cases before they can be validated or rejected. What may be said at present holds in few words: recognition by exclusion opens no road to all the relegated, but traces a strategy of the elite within relegation itself, that of the states the world refuses to name and which name one another while awaiting the world’s resolve.
A note on sources.
On the conditions of the 1960 union, the union law of 27 June 1960 and the act of union of 31 January 1961, retroactive to 1 July 1960, together with the documentary holdings of somalilandlaw.com; on the constitutional referendum of June 1961 and the trial of 1963, the concordant accounts of the historical literature. The report of the African Union fact-finding mission to Somaliland (30 April–4 May 2005) supplies the finding of non-ratification and the formula on the uniqueness of the case. On the coast guard agreement, the communiqué of Taiwan’s Ocean Affairs Council of 24 July 2025 and the account published by the Presidency of the Republic of China. On Israeli recognition, the joint declaration of 26 December 2025 and the communiqués of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; on the state visit of June 2026 and the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem, the concordant despatches of 15 June. On the memorandum of 1 January 2024, the communiqué of Somaliland’s Council of Ministers and the official Ethiopian statements, whose divergence is itself documented. On maritime flows, the data of the Energy Information Administration, the analyses of the International Monetary Fund on the Red Sea disruptions, and the report of the OECD International Transport Forum devoted to the crisis (2024). On Berbera, the DP World communiqués of 2018 and the statements of Somaliland’s Ministry of Finance concerning the lapse of the Ethiopian participation. On the formation of the North-East State, the communiqué of Somalia’s Ministry of the Interior of 31 August 2025 and the work of the Rift Valley Institute for the Somali Dialogue Platform. On the Ankara Declaration, the text published on 11 December 2024 by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On the categories mobilised, the Montevideo Convention (1933), the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on Namibia (1971) and the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Cyprus v. Turkey (2001).
