The campaign for the international recognition of Somaliland remains one of the major effects of the Somali state collapse and continued violence since 1990. But what is this campaign about? Using popular culture, I examine the histories and imagined futures in Somaliland's campaign for international recognition. The study blends notions of performance (Bauman, 1977; Askew, 2002; Kapteijns, 1999) and historiography (Foucault, 1975; Scott, 1999) to build a narrative that seeks to examine notions of imagined communities – not as "deep, horizontal comradeship" as Anderson (1983: 7) would put it, but as vertically imagined social, cultural, political and economic futures (Scott, 1999, 2004). Based in Hargeisa, Somaliland's political and cultural capital, it asks, what futures are being imagined by the campaign? What histories are mobilised? What community is being imagined? How is popular culture exploited in the campaign?