This article considers the recent recognition by the United States of Morocco's territorial sovereignty over Western Sahara. After a review of certain aspects of the history of the dispute over Western Sahara, it focuses on the interaction of arguments based on the recognition and non-recognition of territorial sovereignty with those prioritising the right of self-determination of the Sahrawi people. It concludes that, in as much as the population of Western Sahara has a right to decide its own future, US recognition of Morocco's sovereignty over Western Sahara has undermined key principles of international law.

In Spain's last colony, Western Sahara, both efforts by the colonial power to stimulate development and the negative impacts of colonisation intensified between the end of the Ifni-Sahara War (1957–58) and the Spanish withdrawal in 1975. Spanish economical and geopolitical interests triggered an important industrial and urban development of the territory. Cities such as Laayoune, Villa Cisneros, Smara, and the Bou Craa phosphate deposits were to showcase Spanish modernising colonial policies.

However, the effects of war, the control of colonial frontiers, and severe droughts during the 1960s strongly affected Sahrawi society. In this context, the Spanish colonial state developed new forms of control over the Sahrawi population, which included the progressive (forced) settling of nomadic people around military posts and Spanish cities, bringing about the adoption of new economic paradigms. Not only did the Francoist government distribute subsidies, both money and goods; it furthermore implemented policies aimed at controlling the Sahrawi way of life, particularly in the areas of hygiene, education, and gender relations. The essay analyses these “carrot-and-stick” strategies at the intersection of colonial control and forced sedentarisation with regard to the implementation of a market-oriented economy in Western Sahara.

In two recent cases before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the General Court (at first instance), the High Court of Justice of England and Wales and the Grand Chamber of the CJEU found that a trade agreement and a fisheries agreement between Morocco and the European Union cannot be applied to occupied Western Sahara without the consent of its people. In spite of the fact that it is the general view that Western Sahara is under belligerent occupation, none of the three courts invoked the law of occupation but based themselves instead on the principle of self-determination and the law governing the administration of non-self-governing territories, including the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources. A possible implication of these judgments is that that law and the law of occupation are converging in certain respects, in particular as regards long-term occupation. This pertains not only to the substantive rules on the exercise of authority, which seem to require that the people are heard, but also to the basis for the establishment of that authority, namely bare control.

This article proposes a typology of causal mechanisms whereby transnational relations of recognition constitute conflict actors in frozen conflicts. While the agency of an emerging conflict actor manifests itself in ‘struggles for recognition’ motivated by experiences of ‘disrespect’, responses from different significant others vary in terms of motivations and pathways (mechanisms of recognition). Adapting Honneth’s tripartite division, the typology distinguishes between four forms of recognition: thin cognitive recognition, ‘respect’/rights, ‘esteem’/difference, and ‘love’/empathy. Three transnational corrections are made in order to include transnational relations of recognition, non-state actors, and unstructured social-relational forms of international/transnational recognition. The typology is applied to the conflict of Western Sahara, which has been reshaped by the rise of internal Sahrawi pro-independence groups (based inside the territory annexed by Morocco) as an increasingly relevant conflict actor, with their identity shifting from victims to human rights activists to activists involved in an unsolved conflict. This identity and social-status formation has been the product of transnational recognition from three significant others: the annexing state (Morocco), the contested state-in-exile (SADR), and the international community. The overall effect of intermingling recognition processes, including various instrumental initiatives deprived of mutuality, has been increased struggle and conflict complexity rather than ‘recognitional peace’.

Armed insurgents seeking to seize the state often aim to transform the nature of state power. Yet for insurgents who become ruling authorities, how do radical visions of state power influence governance after the urgency of war? This article examines state-building in the liberation movement for Western Sahara, a partially recognized state which has ruled an exiled civilian Sahrawi population in Algeria from wartime through to a prolonged ceasefire. Drawing on in-depth qualitative fieldwork, and engaging with theories of radicalism, post-war sociopolitical reconstruction and anomalous forms of state power, the article traces how post-ceasefire international and domestic contexts created conflicting pressures and opportunities for both the moderation, and the continuation, of Sahrawi refugees’ wartime radical governance. This case of insurgents-turned-rulers suggests how radicalism and moderation are overlapping processes, how moderation is not necessarily an ‘undoing’ of radicalism, and how radical ideas matter for leadership and grassroots militants in different ways.

In early 2018, the Polisario Front and the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) obtained a favourable ruling from the South African Courts, granting the SADR ownership over a cargo of phosphate aboard the NM Cherry Blossom originating from a mine in the Moroccan-controlled part of the Western Sahara. Although hitherto largely unnoticed in legal circles, the Cherry Blossom case raises important questions concerning the outer bounds of State immunity and the scope of the act of State doctrine. In addition, the case holds potentially far-reaching ramifications for the international legal order if other domestic courts were to follow suit.

In the 1970s a large proportion of the people of Western Sahara went into exile, settling as refugees in camps in Tindouf, Algeria. They took with them their traditional pastoralist way of life and their breeds of small ruminants, which formed the main part of their diet. Almost three decades later, these breeds, having endured the war and the exodus, are in danger of extinction, firstly because of their situation, and secondly because of scientific ignorance about them. In the present paper, we develop a genetic characterization of the Sidaun and Kerrian breeds of sheep and the Buzguender breed of goats in the Saharawi refugee camps. The results indicate that all the breeds studied still have a high level of genetic differentiation and are not showing signs of recent exotic gene migrations. This is encouraging, for it indicates that we are in time to conserve these genotypes of high ecological value for their capacity to survive in the desert.

Western Sahara has one of the last remaining unexplored prehistories on the planet. The new research reported here reveals a sequence of Holocene occupation beginning in a humid period around 9000 bp, superceded around 5000 bp by an arid phase in which the land was mainly given over to pastoralism and monumental burial. The authors summarise the flint and pottery assemblage and classify the monuments, looking to neighbouring cultures in Niger, Libya and Sudan.

Pupping seasonality, annual pup production, reproductive rate and sex ratio at birth were determined for the Mediterranean monk seal Monachus monachus colony at Cabo Blanco, the only surviving population of the species which still shows a colony structure. Data were collected by means of a monitoring programme that operated continuously in the main reproductive areas of the population during the period March 1993–May 1997. Most (84%) of the pups observed were born in two caves separated by a short distance. Although both caves were used by females to bear the pups, preferences greatly fluctuated from season to season with no apparent trend. Reproduction occurred throughout the year with a small peak of births in October. This unusual lack of seasonality is associated with the low latitudinal location of the colony and the effect of the upwelling that provides constant food throughout the year. The neonatal sex ratio did not differ significantly from 1:1 and the estimated annual productivity ranged from 44–58 pups. Taking into account population numbers, the annual birth rates were estimated to range from 0.3 to 0.43 pups per reproductive female, an extremely low rate when compared to other pinniped populations, particularly those of a similar size. Such low rates may be either an evolutionary determined characteristic of the species or a demographic consequence of the low population density over the last few centuries. Coupled with high pup mortality rates, this may account for the observed non-recovery of the population.