page_title: Irredentism
section_title: Somalia
hierarchical_section_title: Irredentism / Historic, theoretical and minor irredentistic claims / Africa / East Africa / Somalia
context_page_description: Irredentism describes various political and popular movements that claim, reclaim, and seek to occupy territory that the movement's members consider to be a "lost" territory, based on history or even legend. The breadth of this definition’s scope—sometimes despite unclarities of the historical bounds of the putative nations or peoples—is subject to terminological disputes about any underlying claims of expansionism.
context_section_description: Greater Somalia refers to the region in the Horn of Africa in which ethnic Somalis are and have historically represented the predominant population. The territory encompasses The Republic of Somalia, the Ogaden region in Ethiopia, the North Eastern Province in Kenya and southern and eastern Djibouti. Ogaden in eastern Ethiopia has seen military and civic movements seeking to make it part of Somalia. This culminated in the 1977–78 Ogaden War between the two neighbours where the Somali military offensive between July 1977 and March 1978 over the disputed Ethiopian region Ogaden ended when the Somali Armed Forces retreated back across the border and a truce was declared. The Kenyan Northern Frontier District also saw conflict during the Shifta War (1963–1967) when a secessionist conflict in which ethnic Somalis in the Lamu, Garissa, Wajir and Mandera counties (all except Lamu formed part of the former North Eastern Province, abolished in 2013), attempted to join with their fellow Somalis in a "Greater Somalia". There has been no similar conflicts in Djibouti, which was previously known as the "French Somaliland" during colonisation. Here the apparent struggles for unification manifested itself in political strife that ended when in a referendum to join France as opposed to the Somali Republic succeeded among rumours of widespread vote rigging. and the subsequent death of Somali nationalist Mahmoud Harbi, Vice President of the Government Council, who was killed in a plane crash two years later under suspicious circumstances.
  Some sources say that Somalia has also laid a claim to the Socotra archipelago, which is currently governed by Yemen.
caption: Estimated ethnic Somali territory in relation to neighbouring countries.The area is roughly coextensive with Greater Somalia.
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