THE FOREIGN POLICY OBJECTIVES OF THE SAHRAWI ARAB DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL CONDITIONS IN THE MAGHREB REGION The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), founded in February ...1976 in the territory of the former Spanish Sahara, belongs today to the so-called unrecognised states category that do not meet all the criteria of the statehood. In the case of the SADR, it enjoys the recognition of several dozen UN members, as well as the most important international regional organisation on the continent – the African Union, however, the Sahrawi government controls only about 20% of the territory it claims rights for. Therefore, the axis of the SADR foreign policy is the constant struggle for international recognition, together with the attempts to exert indirect pressure on Morocco, which could persuade it to adopt the Sahrawi resolution to the protracted conflict over Western Sahara. Both of these goals seem increasingly distant, due to the events of the last three years: the Guerguerat crisis that ended the ceasefire between the POLISARIO Front and Moroccan forces, the decision of the administration of President Donald Trump to open a US consulate in the city of Dakhla in the Moroccan-controlled territory contested by the SADR, and the change in the position of the Spanish government – currently expressing support for the Moroccan plan for Western Sahara autonomy. The article is an attempt to analyse the foreign policy of an unrecognised state such as the SahrawiArab Democratic Republic in the context of international conditions in the region (in this case Maghreb), challenges it faces and the possibility of achieving its goals. The paper is largely based on qualitative data collected during field research over the years 2016-2023 conducted during study visits to Algeria and Spain.
The colonial encounter between France and Morocco took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, ...French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise,Medicine and the Saintstraces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956.
Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor's murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.
This book analyses recent developments concerning the application of the international legal doctrines of recognition and self-determination in relation to the Western Sahara Question. It ...investigates the emergent shift in favour of Morocco’s sovereignty claim to Western Sahara as apparent from the positions adopted by an increasing number of third States in the United Nations and the recent spate of third States establishing consulates in Western Sahara, with Morocco’s encouragement. It reflects on what the functioning of the doctrines of recognition and self-determination in this situation reveals about contemporary international law in practice more generally. The work will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students as well as practitioners of public international law who have a particular interest in decolonisation, self-determination disputes, and/or conflicts about natural resource entitlements. It will also appeal to readers with an interest in the work of International Organisations, including the United Nations, the European Union, and the African Union, and to specialists in international relations and regional politics.
Post-colonial theory recognizes that European and American scholars have traditionally defined the themes that are of interest in literary criticism; in Moroccan studies, these themes have tended ...toward questions of migration, identity, secularism, and religious fanaticism typically questions regarding Morocco in its relationships with colonizing nations. This book intends to re-define the themes of interest in Moroccan studies, looking toward more local themes and movements and relationships of sub-cultures and languages within Morocco. Questions in this volume regard concepts of the self, conflicting discourses, intersections of self-identity and community, and Moroccan reclamation of identity in the post-colonial sphere.
How have states in the Middle East and North Africa responded to the War on Terror? While much scholarship has focused on terrorism in the region, there is need for critical studies of Middle Eastern ...states' counter-terrorism policies. This book addresses that need by investigating Morocco's unique approach to counter-terrorism: the bureaucratization of religion. Morocco's strategy is unique in the degree to which it relies on reforms that seek to make the country's religious institutions into tools for rewarding loyalty and discouraging dissent from religious elites. Through these measures they have limited opposition through an enduring form of institutional control, accommodating some of the country's most virulent critics. This book will be of great use to researchers and scholars of Middle Eastern politics, and it will also appeal to those policymakers interested in security studies and counter-terrorism policies.
Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, "Moroccan Islam." However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early ...twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity. This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.
Learning in Morocco offers a rare look inside public education in the Middle East. While policymakers see a crisis in education based on demographics and financing, Moroccan high school students ...point to the effects of a highly politicized Arabization policy that has never been implemented coherently. In recent years, national policies to promote the use of Arabic have come into conflict with the demands of a neoliberal job market in which competence in French is still a prerequisite for advancement. Based on long-term research inside and outside classrooms, Charis Boutieri describes how students and teachers work within, or try to circumvent, the system, whose contradictory demands ultimately lead to disengagement and, on occasion, to students taking to the streets in protest.
In the mid-nineteenth century, as European navies learned to neutralize piracy, new patterns of circulation and settlement became possible in the western Mediterranean.The Deepest Border tells the ...story of how a borderland society formed around the Strait of Gibraltar, bringing historical perspective to one of the contemporary world's critical border zones.
Drawing on primary and secondary research from Spain, France, Gibraltar, and Morocco-including military intelligence files, public health reports, consular correspondence, and travel diaries-Sasha D. Pack draws out parallels and connections often invisible to national and mono-imperial histories. In conceptualizing the Strait of Gibraltar region as a borderland, Pack reconsiders a number of the region's major tensions and conflicts, including the Rif Rebellion, the Spanish Civil War, the European phase of World War II, the colonization and decolonization of Morocco, and the ongoing controversies over the exclaves of Gibraltar, Ceuta, and Melilla. Integrating these threads into a long history of the region,The Deepest Border speaks to broad questions about how sovereignty operates on the "periphery," how borders are constructed and maintained, and the enduring legacies of imperialism and colonialism.