Economist story on Somaliland's relative stability as evidenced by recent elections. Somaliland is "pushing for international recognition and has been building a democratic state." Prez election in 2002 and parliamentary one in 2005.
Pet theme of mine: wherever US troops are pulled into intervening in the post-Cold War world, there usually arises multiple states--sort of a reverse of e pluribus unum that reads, "out of one, many."
We went to Yugoslavia and there's now a cluster of states. We went to Iraq and there's now a Kurdish mini-state to the north coexisting with the Shia-dominated Arab south. We went to Afghanistan and that country too is well on its way to de facto partition between the north and south.
Finally (albeit almost two decades ago), we went to Somalia and now there's Somaliland, Puntland, the rump in the middle, and what Al Shabaab (successor to the Islamic Courts Union) owns in the south. Somalia isn't so much a failed state as a series of mini-states being born, with varying levels of success/acceptance.
Some "empire." We really just play midwife to globalization's remapping dynamic, which is itself a correction of the fake-states created by European colonialists in the first great iteration of globalization more than a century ago.