Diaspora Advocacy
City-level circles engaging local councils, parliamentarians, and media, equipped with a shared briefing pack that is updated and consistent everywhere.
03
Citizen Diplomacy
A nation's best ambassadors don't always carry a diplomatic passport.
Overview
Equipping the diaspora, students, businesses, and civil society to advocate for Somaliland — credibly, consistently, and at scale.
Somaliland's global diaspora runs businesses, hospitals, universities, and city councils across the world. Every one of them is a potential envoy. Citizen diplomacy treats that network as national infrastructure: organized, informed, and connected to a shared message.
We design the toolkits, briefing materials, and convening platforms that turn goodwill into advocacy — so that a founder in London, a professor in Minneapolis, and a student leader in Kuala Lumpur can each make Somaliland's case with the same facts and the same confidence.
Why It Matters
The one instrument no rival can replicate
Budgets can be matched and embassies can be outnumbered, but no competitor can manufacture hundreds of thousands of people who carry Somaliland's story into their own parliaments, universities, and newsrooms. Organizing that network is the highest-return investment available in Somaliland's foreign policy.
Inside This Area
The strands of our work
Academic & Professional Exchange
University partnerships, research collaborations, and professional associations — the institutional links that quietly normalize engagement with Somaliland.
Public Diplomacy & Narrative
How Somaliland's story is told internationally: the framing, the evidence, and the discipline required to keep the message coherent across thousands of voices.
Youth & the Next Generation
Connecting second-generation Somalilanders to the country through study visits, fellowships, and structured volunteering — building advocates for the decades ahead.
Key Questions
What we're trying to answer
01
What structures turn a large, willing diaspora into a coordinated advocacy network?
02
Which host-country venues — councils, campuses, professional bodies — most reliably shift national policy over time?
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How does Somaliland maintain one coherent narrative across many independent voices?
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What keeps second and third generations engaged with a country they may have never lived in?
Workstreams
What we're working on
Diaspora advocacy networks with shared briefing packs and talking points
Sister-city, university, and professional exchange pipelines
Public diplomacy campaigns that tell Somaliland's story to the world
Publications
Published work in this area
Survey36 pp
The Diaspora Engagement Survey: Advocacy Capacity in Six Countries
A stakeholder survey of Somalilander diaspora communities across six host countries, examining willingness to advocate, current levels of organization, access to reliable information about the national case, and the practical barriers that stop goodwill from becoming coordinated action.
20 May 2026Citizen Diplomacy
Policy Paper33 pp
The Citizen Diplomacy Playbook: Turning a Diaspora into a Network
A practical framework for organizing diaspora advocacy: the briefing infrastructure, city-level structures, professional chapters, and youth pipeline required to convert widespread goodwill into consistent, credible engagement with host-country institutions.
22 January 2026Citizen Diplomacy
Insights
Analysis from this area
Citizen Diplomacy
Citizen Diplomacy: The Diaspora as Somaliland's Global Network
Somaliland has embassies it has never commissioned — hundreds of thousands of citizens abroad. Organizing that network is the cheapest foreign-policy upgrade available.
2 June 2026 · 5 min read
Working on citizen diplomacy?
MAAN partners with researchers, institutions, and governments across all five focus areas.