The Right to Resistance and the Western Sahara: A Twail Analysis of the International Legal Order and Its Constraints on Decolonization

The Right to Resistance and the Western Sahara: A Twail Analysis of the International Legal Order and Its Constraints on Decolonization

Christina Wrapp argues that the international legal order built by the UN and Western powers holds back the Sahrawi struggle against colonial rule and so keeps colonial power imbalances in place. Writing in the tradition of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), she looks at the conflict through the rules that govern it, not through the actions of individual states.

She first shows how the UN, when it set up MINURSO to oversee a ceasefire and referendum, pushed aside Sahrawi legal institutions such as the precolonial tribal councils and the Djemaa, even though the ICJ had recognised the local legal order. She then examines the ban on the use of force. Because self-defence is only allowed after an armed attack, she argues, the Sahrawis have almost no lawful way to answer colonial violence, and arguments that Spain’s settlement policies were themselves a form of violence, or that self-determination can justify force, were largely rejected by Western states. Finally she shows how the legal order lets powerful states decide which peoples count for self-determination, and how terrorism concerns have narrowed Polisario’s options.

Wrapp concludes that the international legal order is not neutral. By stifling the Sahrawi right to resistance, she writes, it extends colonial hierarchies.

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