How do authoritarian African regimes make use of the security resources offered by the international system to survive? The relationship between authoritarianism and international politics remains under-theorised while authoritarian politics have been a key feature of political science studies. This paper engages with the issue through the external-internal nexus and its impact on regime stability and survival and shows that Djibouti is a productive laboratory for researchers in International Relations. It explores Djibouti’s policy for the management of international competition on its territory and argues that the policy has much more to do with Ismaïl Omar Guelleh's (IOG) regime survival than with developing a "safe heaven" for the international system and an economic, logistic, and financial hub for regional development – its official justification. In doing so IOG's strategy has broadly allowed him to avoid international pressures in areas of traditional Western concern such as governance, thereby achieving a considerable concentration of power. Thus, we seek to show that African authoritarianism in international politics is pertinent not only for area specialists but also constitutes a remarkable ground for fieldwork and theory-testing of both old and new approaches.