Month: December 2011

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Jacob Mundy quoted in BBC article on Sahrawi resistance in occupied Western Sahara

“Compared with the desperate efforts to give South Sudan independence, the French and the US are very comfortable,” says Jacob Mundy, a Western Sahara expert and assistant professor at Colgate University in the US. He says that for there to be a solution, “there would have to be a significant change in the basic dynamics of the conflict… whether it was the collapse of the Moroccan regime, the collapse of the Algerian regime or the collapse of the Polisario”.

Read the full article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16186928

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London Review of Books: Gaddafi and Western Sahara

In his critique of the Nato intervention in Libya, Hugh Roberts spares a few moments for Gaddafi’s role in the politics of the Maghreb. I find it astonishing that he never mentions the disputed territory of the Western Sahara. Gaddafi was an early, erratic supporter of the Western Saharan liberation movement, Polisario, for reasons of his own, before Algeria backed their cause in 1975. Three decades later, Western Sahara is still a major obstacle to good relations between Rabat and Algiers. But Roberts circumvents the issue by asserting that Moroccan-Algerian relations have been hamstrung by territorial rivalry over neighbouring Mauritania. The gravel wastes of northern Mauritania, briefly contested in the 1970s, have little to do with the destructive conflict over a botched decolonisation of Western Sahara. Independence remains the key issue in this former Spanish colony, overrun by Morocco in 1975. Passionate in his opposition to the Nato assault on Gaddafi’s regime, Roberts is a stickler for international law. On Western Sahara, he has taken a realpolitik stance since the 1980s, unimpressed by the legitimacy of the Saharans’ case in the face of force majeure. So which is it to be, international law or realpolitik?

Jacob Mundy
Colgate University, Hamilton, New York

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Review in African Studies Review

Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution has been very positively reviewed in the flagship journal of the African Studies Association, African Studies Review. The reviewer, Gregory White, Professor of Government at Smith College, calls it “the definitive book on the Western Sahara.” He goes on to note,

Theirs is a contribution that prompts a wide array of adjectives: provocative, insightful, exhaustive, encyclopedic. The collaboration brings together their respective strengths as scholars, and their work displays a robust interdisciplinarity in its use of methods and insights from geography, cartography, diplomatic history, political science, anthropology, and postcolonial studies.

He also notes that our book is as much about the fate of post-colonial Morocco as it is about the undetermined status of Western Sahara:

One of the most valuable aspects of the volume is the light it sheds on independent Morocco. In focusing on Western Sahara, the authors end up telling Morocco’s modern story in a decidedly different and refreshing way. […] Thus, while the subject of the book is the Western Sahara, the story in many ways is really about Morocco.

Smith concludes, “The book makes arguments with which others may disagree, but it is
not a polemic. The authors’ lines of reasoning are posed in a careful, rigorous
fashion,” adding, “Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution will
prove invaluable to students, scholars and, one hopes, decision-makers for
years to come.”