Nomads and Nation-Building is an intimate ethnographic portrait of the enigmatic Sahrawi nomads of the western Sahara Desert. Their extraordinary story is of a highly specialized desert society that has successfully survived the western Sahara Desert for at least three millennia. Scholarship on the Western Sahara conflict has puzzled over the ‘extraordinary leap’ made by Sahrawi tribes to the status of refugees and citizens of an exiled nation state. It has perceived this process as a modernizing and civilizing act of detribaliazation and applauded women’s recent political appearance within a sovereignty– solidarity discourse.
