My project entitled, "Making Somaliland: Popular Culture, Identity and International Recognition" seeks to answer questions about the new imaginaries in Somaliland, an independent and international recognition seeking region of Somalia. Questions relate to histories, identities and futures constructed in the present time and history. The overall idea is to enter into the scholarship on new communities or imagined communities (Anderson, 1983; Chatterjee, 1994; Scott, 1999, 2004) after a violent past in a context of post-coloniality. Methodologically, the project uses a cultural studies approach, which enables historiography from the vantage point of the everyday people: It interrogates the festive, the escapist, the ignorable and informal (i.e., popular culture) as sites for cultural and political negotiation. Through thick description, textual analysis, ethnography of performance and studying "practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak," the project wades through source material to make sense of its research questions.