The ideology of recognition: sovereignty and illusion in the Somali Horn

I begin this essay with the misfortune of having to recall a clip I came across on X/Twitter of a man in Hargeisa standing proudly before a camera, in an interview conducted by a reporter affiliated with an aggressively Zionist and Islamophobic media outlet (a phenomenon that urgently demands its own exploration, namely how such hostile and detestable forces gain easy access to everyday social spaces in the Somali Horn). The conversation centred unsurprisingly on depicting ‘Somaliland’ in contrast to the irredeemable other ‘Somalia’, through which an opportunity then arose for the man to recount his educational achievements with palpable dignity. As he listed his qualifications, including his ability to speak English of course, the ‘reporter’ interrupted with a smirk invoking the racially charged Minnesota fraud scandal asking whether he received such qualifications from the ‘learing centre’. The man chuckled not realising he was being mocked mistakenly believing himself to be different and enlightened vis-à-vis the wretched ‘other’, unaware tragically that the political project whose recognition he seemed to seek would never see him as an equal. What this clip ultimately condensed for me were the layers of misrecognition particularly around the question of ‘sovereignty’ animating political discourse in the Horn today.

It is now approaching a few months since the ethno-supremacist, people-erasing and apartheid state of Israel recognised Somaliland. The announcement was met with scenes of frenzied celebration amongst segments of Somaliland supporters across the globe hailed as a historic watershed. Questions rightly followed pertaining to how one could ground a political project in the moral legitimacy of a people’s right to self-determination, while celebrating recognition from a state globally associated with occupation and genocide. When challenged, proponents often retreated to a familiar refrain questioning if other Muslim or Arab states have normalised relations why shouldn’t Somaliland, and besides the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) did it too!

It goes without saying this ultimately relies on a couple of flawed rhetorical moves. Firstly, it is quite the overreach attempting to cloak the maneuverings of Somaliland’s state class in the mantle of divinely inspired Prophetic moral authority. Secondly, it perpetuates a crude and misleading equivocation between the Jewish tribes of the Prophet’s (PBUH) era and the settler-colonial state that Israel represents today as materially sustained by, and embedded within the global dominance of US imperialism. To suggest that the dynamics of small historical communities operating under limited power can be meaningfully compared to a modern super-powered state engaged in occupation and genocide is indicative of an ideology so self-referential it rarely apprehends the depth of its own contradictions, and in this case the historical distortions it produces.

Nonetheless, it remains remarkable how a movement that stakes its symbolic triumph on validation from a pariah power embedded within western, white-supremacist imperialist strategy could imagine such recognition as the culmination of an emancipatory future.

At the same time, there must be a serious attempt made towards distinguishing between the heterogeneous social groups that support Somaliland’s cause for different and often contradictory reasons. Once the interests of the various dispossessed classes whose aspirations may be grounded in concrete historical experiences of marginalisation and the search for political stability are analytically separated from those of a narrow, west-toxified elite, whose political horizon is entirely structured through validation from the western/white gaze, the contradictions embedded in the celebratory embrace of Israel’s ambition become even more pronounced. What appears at the level of discourse as a unified political aspiration thus conceals sharply divergent social interests and horizons of expectation.

Yet this ideological misrecognition is by no means confined to Somaliland’s supporters. Paradoxically the opposing camp mirrored this misrecognition by rallying to defend ‘Somalia’s territorial integrity’ drafting letters to western heads of state beseeching the ‘international community’ to uphold its ‘sovereignty’. Here Fanon’s critique of the national bourgeoisie resonates with haunting clarity:

‘It is not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labour; it is completely canalised into activities of the intermediary type. Its innermost vocation seems to be to keep in the running and to be part of the racket’

Invoking ‘territorial integrity’ in a state whose sovereign architecture has been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal restructuring and external penetration has become something of a theatre. This retaliatory appeal to ‘legalism’ grounded in a misled faith in the neutrality of the liberal state and the sanctity of international law operates within the same discursive horizon as the celebratory embrace of Israeli recognition among Somaliland supporters. The obscuring of the forces that materially determine sovereignty in the Somali Horn by the two camps which posture as adversaries no doubt represent a deep ideological convergence as political projects which legitimise a global order in which the Somali state remains deprived of the substantive means to reclaim its productive potential.

This essay briefly explores how the ideological eclipse over material power in Somalia manifest within these two seemingly contrasting discursive projects, which ultimately converge in their displacement of the terrain of struggle to that of abstract legality and symbolic recognition, severed from questions pertaining to the reconstruction of a national popular project capable of grounding sovereignty in lived social transformation.

Ideology and the imaginary of sovereignty - Somaliland

It was Louis Althusser who insisted ‘ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’, a mediation that allows the subject to recognise themselves and their circumstances, while simultaneously misrecognising the structures which produced those circumstances. Any serious engagement with the political theatre surrounding Somaliland’s recognition must begin by unravelling the ideological form through which this moment has been apprehended, which in this instance, is the remarkable consensus over how the problem itself is being posed: a dispute over ‘legality’, ‘moral entitlement’, Somaliland's ‘democratic credentials’ etc., without interrogating what these terms mean from the perspective of what actually makes a state sovereign. That is, a thorough exploration over the social and economic relations through which political authority is actually exercised and sustained - the material conditions constituting the possibility of political autonomy in the Horn. With these questions obscured the political field is reorganised around abstractions that appear self-evident and neutral (Somaliland’s ‘right’ to self-determine), while the material relations of power that actually structure the Somali Horn are rendered peripheral if not entirely invisible.

What is striking then is the widespread failure to interrogate the material conditions that recognition would inaugurate, in a region where sovereignty itself has long operated as a tradable political asset managed by a narrow comprador class whose authority depends on its capacity to capture and redistribute external rents. Although this is a regional analysis, the structural features strongly suggest elites in Somaliland are likely to behave in similar ways (if they haven’t done so already), given how capital has already structured the domestic settlement to concentrate wealth and political authority among a narrow elite, and the repeated public overtures by officials signalling willingness to grant mineral concessions and infrastructural control to external actors in exchange for diplomatic recognition, indicating the emerging architecture of dependency likely to underpin this project. What forms of concessionary regimes will underpin this ‘partnership’ and who will capture the rents generated by mineral extraction and hydrocarbons?

With recognition itself treated as though it were a generative act capable of conjuring sovereignty, the mere symbolic marking of it comes to stand in for the material capacities that recognition historically presupposed. When these actors internalise the symbolic hierarchies of the world-system treating recognition from existing imperialist powers as the ultimate validation of sovereignty, the tokenistic act of recognition invites peripheral political entities in the global south to assume the positions of sovereign subjects within an already constituted uneven world order. The successful ‘interpellation’ as it were of ‘individuals as subjects’, a process through which individuals come to recognise themselves as autonomous political agents precisely by accepting the terms through which power addresses them, is what secures ideology’s grip in this context.

The hollowing out of sovereignty and political economy

The logic of symbolic affirmation without structural transformation finds its parallel as aforementioned in the appeals to legalism and ‘protection of Somalia’s territorial integrity’, as well as in the ongoing federal political disputes in Mogadishu. One would be hard pressed to find commentaries situating current tensions over electoral clauses and constitutional technicalities as manifestations of a material and class-structured conflict. Instead, what dominates is an obsession with the performative theatre of governance (fixation on procedural legality, symbolic legitimacy etc.,) which reflects the liberalised spectacle of Somali statecraft but also the broader crisis of mainstream western journalism wherein commentators too often become unwitting instruments of elite power. This culture has in my view consolidated itself acutely into the ‘professionalised’ sections of mainstream Somali political commentary, dovetailing with the total NGOisation of state and civil society where civic engagement more broadly has become increasingly mediated through donor driven agendas, producing a discourse in which the performance of governance appear more consequential than the material conditions sustaining authority.

It is within this context that one must confront the political economy of the Somali state. If it is accepted that the current Somali state has long primarily functioned as a site of elite accommodation in which control over state power and capital has been captured by a narrow bureaucratic-mercantile class, spearheading a contradictory trajectory of disconnection from the progressive development of productive forces while remaining deeply embedded in circuits of external dependency, then the question must be posed directly: what is sovereignty in such a context?

There is a profound contradiction here at the heart of the Somali political economy where on the one hand sovereignty is invoked incessantly in times where the territorial control/unity is under overt threat, and on the other the productive forces that historically grounded sovereignty have been progressively eroded, a reality largely unaddressed. The domestic economy remains extremely ‘disarticulated’ characterised by a weak productive sector while the reproduction of political authority is disproportionately dependent on external rents. In this instance the state functions primarily as an administrative interface through which these external resources are mediated. With no robust domestic system of production anchoring it, it is unsurprising that struggles over power in Somalia tend to revolve less around competing developmental visions, and more around access to the distributive mechanisms (which the state facilitates) through which externally generated rents are allocated. So ‘a constitutional crisis’ is rather the surface or the first terrain through which deeper contests over accumulation are often refracted, and within this configuration questions pertaining to sovereignty are entirely reduced to its most attenuated form, a mere juridical shell detached from the material capacities that once endowed it with substance.

Reclaiming sovereignty as a material project

In hopefully a longer series of sustained critical discourse over the current political impasse, what this preliminary critique ultimately sought to unravel is the manner in which debate has been structured around a false opposition between two camps ostensibly safeguarding competing sovereign political projects. In both instances sovereignty is reduced to its most superficial register and what disappears in the process is sovereignty in its substantive, emancipatory sense.

In sum, sovereignty must be regrounded in the organisation of material life. It is to be understood as the collective capacity of a community to shape the conditions of its own reproduction and its proper institutionalisation via the state. Adjudicating ‘Somalia/Somaliland debates’ without fundamentally bringing to the fore questions of how sovereignty is materially constructed, and the reconstitution of a national-popular bloc capable of anchoring political authority in social forces beyond the narrow circuits of elite accommodation and bargaining, without such a transformation these debates will continue to revolve around the mere symbols of sovereignty leaving its substance conspicuously absent. Only through such a radical confrontation with the historical uprooting of sovereignty from its anti-colonial roots can the political horizon be reopened. It is precisely in the recovering of sovereignty as a project of collective material transformation that the possibility of an emancipatory future for the peoples of the Somali Horn can begin to emerge.