Western Sahara: The Refugee Nation
The narrator’s first impression of Western Sahara comes from early-1980s TV news watched as a child. A report on war in a former Spanish territory—starkly unlike the green, rain-soaked valleys of northern Iberia—left a strong visual mark: guerrilla fighters in yellowish turbans, raising Kalashnikovs and riding defiantly to the front in old open Land Rovers, some improvised into assault vehicles with machine guns mounted on top. In the narrator’s memory the scenes are pale and blurred, as if washed out by desert sirocco and the grain of a black-and-white television.
The Legal Issues Involved In The Western Sahara Dispute
Three years ago, the United Nations Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York began examining the legal questions at the heart of the Western Sahara dispute, aiming to inform U.S. policy makers. In April 2011 it released a first report focused on whether Morocco may lawfully exploit natural resources in the part of Western Sahara it controls while sovereignty remains unresolved. The present report turns to the sovereignty question itself, assessing Western Sahara’s peoples’ right to self-determination and Morocco’s territorial claims under international law.
A history of false hope
Lori A. Allen’s A History of False Hope is a study of how Palestinians repeatedly engaged with international investigative commissions and other liberal institutions, only to see their hopes for justice deferred or denied. The book follows this pattern across the 20th
The Western Sahara Dispute: A Cautionary Tale for Peacebuilders
The UN and MINURSO have succeeded neither inconducting a referendum nor in fostering a negotiated solution to the problem. Indeed,the Secretariat and the Security Council missed two chances to suspend what has becomea self-perpetuating ‘peace process’; if they had taken advantage of these opportunitiesand suspended negotiations, the parties would have had to rethink their positions andperhaps entered into more serious negotiations aimed at reaching some sort of compromise.
Western Sahara as a Hybrid of a Parastate and a State-in-Exile: (Extra)territoriality and the Small Print of Sovereignty in a Context of Frozen Conflict
Within the liminal universe of parastates, what makes Western Sahara/SADR anomalous and unique is that it has not originated from secessionism but from foreign occupation in the context of a deviant or thwarted decolonization process.