When Ethiopia aligned itself with the US in the global war on terror after 2001, top–down security interventions in the Ethiopia–Somalia borderlands led Somali secessionist conflict to spiral out of control. The protracted “state collapse” of neighboring Somalia spawned regional instability throughout the 1990s. In what is today Somali Regional State (SRS), the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) spearheaded Somali-led rebellion against the new Ethiopian federal government. Somali rebels massacred Chinese oil workers in 2007 and attempted to assassinate SRS’s president in Jigjiga in 2008. Why, then, did diaspora Somalis begin returning from stable lives in North America and Europe to invest in Jigjiga before these conflicts had even settled? This chapter addresses this question by tracing how SRS authorities sought to create alliances among the global Somali diaspora. Through an ethnographic analysis of the dramatic change in diaspora–homeland relations that unfolded after 2010, it argues that border securitization in the Horn of Africa is not just a matter of topography – of territorial control, walls and razor wire, and security patrols. It is also a matter of reorganizing a complex topology of transnational relationships.