Perspectives on Western Sahara: Myths, Nationalisms, and Geopolitics ed. by Anouar Boukhars, Jacques Roussellier (review)
2014; Middle East Institute; Volume: 68; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-3461
Autores Tópico(s)Animal Diversity and Health Studies
ResumoWESTERN SAHARA Perspectives on Western Sahara: Myths, Nationalisms, and Geopolitics, edited by Anouar Boukhars and Jacques Roussellier. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 354 pages. $75.Beware academic volumes that bear this disclaimer: views expressed are those of the authors alone. Perspectives on West- ern Sahara, edited by Anouar Boukhars and Jacques Roussellier, contains several chapters in which this caveat is made. And for good reason: Perspectives on Western Sahara is primarily a political text, one backed by well-researched, if sometimes problematic, accounts of the conflict's lo- cal, regional, and global dynamics. Most of the contributors have backgrounds in gov- ernment, consulting, and think tanks; the others have fonnal academic positions. Sev- eral are well known for their defense of Mo- rocco's position on Western Sahara; others seem to have been recruited or shanghaied into the cause with little to no research or publication background on the issue. One of the chapters, an analysis of United States foreign policy towards the conflict, is even authored by two fonner US Foreign Ser- vice Officers who now work as lobbyists for Morocco, Edward Gabriel and Robert Holley. Boukhars and Roussellier s collec- tion also serves as a pro-Moroccan response to Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution, which this reviewer coauthored with Stephen Zunes in 2010.The Western Sahara conflict itself began in 1975, when Morocco invaded the colony of Spanish Sahara just as Madrid was plan- ning to grant it independence. Local na- tionalist insurgents, supported by Algeria, fought Morocco in a desert war until the United Nations arrived in 1991 promising to end the dispute by holding a referendum. Given the high stakes involved in such a vote, the UN Security Council proved un- willing to force the issue. Soon after Mo- rocco's current ruler, King Muhammad VI, took power in 1999, he preferred to offer Western Sahara autonomy instead of a vote on independence. The United Nations has yet to find a compromise solution between Morocco's claim of sovereignty over West- ern Sahara and the native population's right to vote on independence.Despite a clear bias in Perspectives on Western Sahara, several of the chapters make honest and dispassionate efforts to explicate important aspects of the conflict. Histori- ans Osama Abi-Mershed and Adam Farrar (Chapter 1) provide a succinct and effective account of the conflict's origins; international relations scholar William Zartman (Chapter 3) offers a refreshingly candid evaluation of the interlocking nature of Morocco's domes- tic and foreign policies towards the Sahara; anthropologist Aomar Bourn (Chapter 12) critiques romanticized accounts of life in the Western Saharan refugee camps in Algeria; and analyst Khadidja Mohsen-Finan (chap- ter 13) superbly documents how the new and old regional forces - historical Moroccan- Algerian antagonisms, the oscillations of democracy witnessed in the Arab Spring, the destabilizing influence of al-Qa'ida affili- ates in the central Sahara desert - will keep the Western Sahara impasse in a state of sus- pended animation. …
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