When Israel recognized Somaliland, it wasn’t adapting to a changing security environment; it was enacting what Marx predicted a century and a half ago: the phase in which accumulation is no longer content with expropriating the producer, but must reconfigure the very form of the state to continue expanding. International law didn’t die. It was murdered. And the weapon was the need to reproduce capital on a planet where every space has already been commodified.
For more than thirty years, Somaliland existed as a functional state without recognition, a silent heresy on a continent saturated with formally sovereign but materially tutelary failed states. It had institutions, elections, currency, and territorial control—something neither Somalia nor many other recognized states could boast. Yet it remained invisible. Not because it violated international law, but because it did not yet serve the dominant strategic interests . The dogma of the inviolability of colonial borders—defended with almost liturgical zeal by the African Union and tolerated by the major powers—was never a moral principle, but a mechanism for historical stasis. It was the African version of the Yalta order: stability in exchange for immobility, formal peace in exchange for structural dependence. Just as in Cold War Europe, where amputated states and limited sovereignties were accepted as long as they did not alter the balance between blocs, Africa was condemned to a cartography inherited from the imperial partition of Berlin in 1885.
The self-styled Republic of Somaliland is not a national liberation movement, but an investment opportunity that matured over three decades into a profitable asset. The executors of this geopolitical IPO are not peoples, but consortiums: the State of Israel as the armed wing of its logistics oligopolies; the United Arab Emirates through DP World, transforming the port of Berbera into a blockchain hub for maritime trade; and the Pentagon, playing a wait-and-see game while its hawks calculate the return on investment for displacing Camp Lemonnier from Djibouti. The historical distinction between British and Italian Somaliland is not a legal argument, but a tally of colonial assets. The failed union of 1960 was a corporate merger that generated not synergies, but unproductive units: Siad Barre’s genocide against the Isaak clan was not an ethnic conflict, but the destruction of human capital that rendered the Somali subsidiary unviable. The 1991 declaration was not a restoration of sovereignty, it was a management buyout: the local administrators decided that by liquidating the parent company they could create a new entity with a better credit rating. And so they built the neoliberal dream: a constitution approved by referendum, their own currency, security forces, and most importantly: a portfolio of port concessions.
Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is neither a diplomatic anomaly nor an ideological eccentricity of a particular government; it is the stark expression of a historical truth that the international system has been trying to conceal for decades: the world order has never been based on law, but rather on the balance of power that guarantees the circulation of capital . When that circulation is threatened, norms are reinterpreted, borders are softened, and principles are shelved. This happened in Suez in 1956, when France, the United Kingdom, and Israel decided that Egyptian sovereignty was secondary to controlling a vital trade route; it happened in Vietnam, when the “defense of the free world” justified total war to prevent a peripheral territory from disrupting the strategic balance of global capitalism; it happened in Algeria, where the right to self-determination was denied for over a century until the political and military cost of maintaining the French empire became unsustainable. Somaliland fits into this same genealogy: not as a cause, but as a symptom.
But capitalism tolerates no dogma when its lifeblood is at stake. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait is today what the Panama Canal was to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, or what the Persian Gulf became after World War II: a point where geography is transformed into power. When the Houthis demonstrated their ability to disrupt maritime traffic and jeopardize the lines of communication for global trade, the message was unequivocal. History teaches that, in such moments, legality is subordinated to security. This is what happened when the United States overthrew the government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954 to protect the interests of the United Fruit Company; this is what happened in Iran in 1953, when Mossadegh’s nationalization of oil was met with a coup orchestrated to restore an order favorable to Western capital. Somaliland enters the scene when the market demands armed guarantees, not multilateral resolutions.
Israeli recognition is, in this sense, a classic exercise in imperial realism adapted to the 21st century. There is no invasion, no landings, no formal occupation. There is something more effective: selective legitimization. Berbera is not just another African port; it is a platform from which to monitor, deter, and project power over one of the most sensitive maritime routes on the planet. The alliance with the United Arab Emirates is reminiscent of the old colonial companies, from the British East India Company to the oil concessions in the Middle East during the interwar period: economic entities backed by military force that transformed infrastructure into domination. The actors change, but not the logic. Where the imperial flag once flew, today logistics consortiums and “technical” security agreements operate.
READ MORE: https://rebelion.org/somalilandia-la-muerte-del-derecho-internacional/
