Towards a Decolonial Worldmaking in the Western Sahara

In this text, Inma Naïma Zanoguera offers a series of questions pertaining to the ways we, around the world, may address the Sahrawi liberation struggle against Moroccan occupation. One question strikes us in particular for its potential: what if the Sahrawi fight redefines the way we frame decolonization and interdependence outside of the nation-state paradigm?

The Western Sahara is a “non-self-governing territory” colonized by Morocco since 1975. While the United Nations denies the legitimacy of Morocco’s occupation, the referendum for independence that the UN promised Sahrawis in 1991 is yet to take place. This is why, today, the Western Sahara is almost unanimously considered a geopolitical “stalemate.” Inadvertently (and erroneously), this “stalemate” narrative assumes Sahrawis’ resignation in the face of the UN’s unfulfilled promise. Yet, after almost three decades witnessing one failed attempt at peaceful resolution after another, the end of the Morocco-Sahrawi ceasefire in November of 2020 bespeaks Sahrawis’ ceaseless commitment to anti-colonial resistance. Far from romanticizing the need for armed conflict, the fact that there currently exists a decolonial war on African territory should alert us to the urgency of analyzing the Western Sahara’s unique struggle for decolonization.

An exhaustive analysis would have to include a plethora of moving targets: in particular Spain’s colonial history and how it bears upon its diplomatic relations with Morocco; the latter’s ties to the United States, Israel, and France; and the key issue of Europe’s deadly “Frontera Sur” and its immigration policies, many of which get negotiated under Morocco’s supervision. In the context of this text, I want to focus on the fact that, because of its fundamental differences with other nations’ decolonial processes in the past, we have largely failed to tell the story of Saharawis’ plight for independence on its own terms. And this failure has consequences: international recognition becomes an uphill battle when this complex of historical and geopolitical elements continues to be misunderstood as a seemingly irresolvable “stalemate.” Thus, a close examination of the narratives we use to make sense of the Western Sahara’s role in these geopolitical schemes is of vital importance. Key questions arise: is the nomenclature used to conceptualize the current situation aptly reflective of the historical and geopolitical agents at play? Are our framings sufficiently attuned to the interconnectedness of Sahrawis’ decolonial struggle with other nations’ struggles and interests?

Part of the problem is that the terms used with the intention to appeal to the international community often reduce the Western Sahara’s historical and sociopolitical entanglements to unhelpful ends. For example, to call the Western Sahara the last colony in Africa—a very popularized term—is misleading at best. It assumes the continued validity of an outdated idea of decolonization that was forged in the 1960s and which frequently replicated a European idea of progress. Plus, it takes for granted a Western aggressor geographically apart from its annexed land, with the result that instances of South-South occupation tend to fall through the cracks of (mis)recognition. In truth, there exist multiple historical and contemporary examples of colonial/imperial efforts by non-European nations in the “post”-colonial era: Morocco’s colonization of the Western Sahara is one such instance. Given the unfinished status of the plight for a truly emancipated African continent, I believe that the fundamental misapprehensions surrounding the Sahrawi case could occasion, through examination and reinvention, novel and more radical avenues of decolonial thought writ large. What is needed is a genuine encounter with the reality on the ground: a decolonization process that attends to its own idiosyncrasies, unsettling widespread understandings of a “legitimate” colonial/decolonial situation and, meanwhile, opening up political horizons and new models for how we conceptualize and enact not only (de)colonization, but also citizenship, nation-statehood, and sovereignty.

After almost a century of Spanish colonization, in 1975, Morocco and Mauritania undertook the occupation of the Western Sahara after the secretive, illegal tripartite Madrid agreements, by which Spain granted the two African countries permission for invasion. Though the Polisario Front (the Sahrawi guerrilla resistance) quickly drove away the Mauritanian army, the fight with Morocco dragged on until 1991, when the United Nations promised that a referendum for independence would take place if the parties agreed to a ceasefire. This promise remains unfulfilled, while an estimated 173,600 Sahrawis live in refugee camps in Algeria, or in the diaspora (many as refugees) in Spain and France. As for the occupied territories, it is hard to tell. The estimated number of Sahrawis living there was 105,000 in 2014. What is clear, is that the Sahrawis who live on their rightful soil suffer from systemic discrimination and arbitrary assaults on individual rights at the hands of the Moroccan policing bodies. Furthermore, surveillance and everyday intimidatory acts are routinely deployed against Sahrawi activists to prevent the social reality from reaching international publics—to this day, discussing the Western Sahara in Morocco and even within the diaspora is heavily and violently suppressed. And while social subsidies from the Moroccan government make life more affordable in the occupied territories than in Morocco, this becomes yet another colonizing strategy as most of these welfare programs are designed to attract Moroccan citizens to immigrate to Western Sahara. As a result, Moroccans outnumber Sahrawis on their own land.

In 1976, the Polisario’s establishment of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was met with recognition by 80 countries, while it also became a full member state of the African Union. Despite this, the struggle to gather further international support for the Western Sahara has been a long and largely unsuccessful one. The end of the ceasefire gathered, back in 2020, a timid amount of international news coverage, which was nonetheless significant as it meant a breach in the normalized invisibility of Sahrawi civil society’s political demands. With notable exceptions, the international community’s response reflected a slow growth in the number of international bodies and civilian groups that publicly support Sahrawi self-governance. This, too, was significant. Far from autonomous and self-sustaining, the nation-state is fundamentally an interdependent entity, and the development of international alliances runs the risk of strengthening the coloniality of political alliances on a global scale. Thus, beyond gathering recognition from the outside, it is incumbent upon us to interrogate the potential colonial foundations of the transnational alliances we need to establish. On this contentious point, I personally have more questions than answers. Is it enough (or even necessary) to assume that recognition from hegemonic nation-states will ultimately liberate us? What other ways do we have to find common ground from positions that are both inside of, and marginal, to the state? What forms of recognition will allow us, in short, to relate to one another not in mutual recognition of our citizenship-based affiliations, but on the essential basis of our bare humanity?

To be clear, “decolonization is not a metaphor,” much less so for Sahrawis. Nor is it a sentimental pathway to liberation. The decolonization of the Western Sahara is, first and foremost, a claim of sovereignty over Sahrawi ancestral land.

As such, a worldmaking approach would prioritize an understanding of Moroccan colonialism in its entangled relation to larger dynamics of exploitation and domination existing along global axes of race, gender, and state interests—what Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) called in the context of Turtle Island, the “inherited background field” of colonialism (Red Skin, White Masks, 2014). If we fail to extirpate the liberalist discourse that has sedimented overtime upon the politics of recognition, says Coulthard, such politics will end up as replicas of “the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend.” The fact that the current international order was built upon the “inherited background field” of colonial power relations gives credence to why the Western Sahara’s decolonial process needs to first understand itself as a project of global dimensions in order to be successful. Its ambitions should not circumvent the issues that, while seemingly peripheral to Morocco’s illegal occupation, are actually central to it. I am referring, specially, to the humanitarian crisis at the European southern borders, which operates as Morocco’s bargaining chip with the European Union as it mediates the management of the Western Mediterranean and Western African immigration routes, as well as the walls that separate Moroccan territory from the Spanish colonial enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in the Rif. Though with varying success, anti-colonial nationalists of the 20th century like W.E.B. DuBois and Kwame Nkrumah fought for a novel conception of “self-determination” that included a critique of the then emerging imperialism, slavery, and the reproduction of racial hierarchies. I wonder what new modes of “decolonization” we could be enacting if we made it the first order of business to consider how a decolonized Western Sahara could provide a replicable model of African emancipation whose priority it would be to eradicate the African crisis of internal displacement. This would mean addressing the systematized violence engendered by Frontex and other border-reinforcing agencies as African migrants attempt to enter the E.U. due to such a crisis.

Though I can offer only provocations, I believe that it is this kind of worldmaking approach (in theory and in praxis) that has the power to destabilize “the very configurations of colonialist, racist, patriarchal state power” that a decolonial model based on the politics of recognition will otherwise reproduce ad infinitum. To return to my original questions: could the language of decolonization be of use in our strategies for liberation in the Western Sahara?
Do our terms and narratives aptly reflect the intricate connections that exist between multiple struggles, as well as their nuances and differences, in ways that frame Sahrawis—and Europeans, and Moroccans, for that matter—as people whose desires and demands, hopes, and appeals could ultimately benefit us all? The answers to these questions depend entirely on whether we can successfully link our efforts to remove Moroccan occupation to a larger struggle to attain liberation on a global scale.

If it means the opportunity to find better means for mutual recognition beyond the impositions of state bureaucracy; if it means the plight of a people who dare taking a hard look at themselves, understanding their positions as historical and geopolitical subjects, and working through those tensions toward freedom; if this can be accomplished, then decolonization will emerge anew, purged off its corrupted and pseudo-imperial iterations. The pan-African thinkers of the 20th century did not reject the ideals and principles that new nationalisms inherited from European discourse—they reinvented and gave them new meanings based on the specific political and social conditions they sought to address. The worldmaking/decolonial project I have in mind is something similar: decolonial political action as a destabilizing force for naturalized forms of political community, such that deadly border-crossing and exclusionary citizenship policies cease to be indispensable for the sustenance of a global order which is, at any rate, built on colonial-era structures of unequal integration. What the Western Sahara can mean for the political future of our planet can only be overlooked to our collective detriment. Indeed, the Sahrawi fight for independence can rescue decolonization from itself. ■