Improvising international representation: Somaliland diplomacy and consular services by one-person offices in Europe

Contested states vary in their legal claim, international recognition, bureaucratic capacity, and diplomatic networks, but they invariably struggle to work around the drawbacks of their contested status in international relations. This inhibits their diplomatic representation as ‘states’, but it also has adverse effects for their ‘citizens’ whose status too is in one way or another contested, curtailed, or denied. Yet this does not mean that they or not represented at all. As I explore in this paper, the ‘representative offices’ of the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland, for instance, seek to work around formal constraints of legal status in host countries to provide a degree of diplomatic representation and consular services. This improvisation of representation – often by single individuals acting on behalf of their ‘states’ – serves at least two different purposes: Performing foreign relations and statehood and helping citizens abroad, two goals that might align or conflict in different contexts. Drawing on the literatures on contested states, para-diplomacy, and legal anthropology, this paper considers the everyday work of some of Somaliland’s representative offices in Europe to better understand the opportunities and setbacks of improvising statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship abroad.