Abstract
Elections are important tools not only of governance but also of nation-building and international diplomacy. This chapter examines how elections can be adapted for such goals in the absence of a conventional nation-state setting. The Polisario Front liberation movement for Western Sahara organizes elections in which Sahrawi refugees in Algeria, as well as Sahrawis living in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara and the Sahrawi diaspora, can vote to elect a range of officers. Drawing on anthropological approaches to elections as cultural and moral events, this chapter examines some wider effects of these elections. Sahrawi voters imagine themselves and act as a transterritorial community of nationalists. The structuring of electoral constituencies projects an idealized vision of the Sahrawi body politic. Holding elections facilitates connections with local, national and international audiences. Finally, Sahrawis’ frequent rehearsals of their existence as a national electorate may reinforce their expectations of popular consultation in any solution to the conflict.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Allan, J. (2010). Imagining Saharawi women: The question of gender in POLISARIO discourse. The Journal of North African Studies, 15(2), 189–202.
Allan, J. (forthcoming). Gender and resistance in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea. PhD dissertation, Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University of Leeds.
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
Banerjee, M. (2011). Elections as communitas. Social Research, 78(1), 75–98.
Banerjee, M. (2014). Why India votes? New Delhi: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1962). The Algerians (trans: Ross, A. C. M.). Boston: Beacon Press.
Caratini, S. (1989). Les Rgaybāt (1610–1934). Des chameliers à la conquête d’un territoire (Vol. 1). Paris: Harmattan.
Caro Baroja, J. (1955). Estudios Saharianos. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto de Estudios Africanos.
Clarke, K. (2006). Polisario: Resistance and identity. L’Ouest saharien, 6, 129–140.
Comaroff, J. L., & Comaroff, J. (1997). Postcolonial politics and discourses of democracy in southern Africa: An anthropological reflection on African political modernities. Journal of Anthropological Research, 53(2), 123–146.
Deubel, T. (2012). Poetics of diaspora: Sahrawi poets and postcolonial transformations of a trans-saharan genre in northwest Africa. The Journal of North African Studies, 16(4), 295–314.
Elden, S. (2013). The birth of territory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2014). The ideal refugees: gender, Islam and the Sahrawi politics of survival. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Gómez Martín, C. (2011). La migración saharaui en España. Estrategias de visibilidad en el tercer tiempo del exilio. Saarbrücken: Editorial Académica Española.
Hodges, T. (1983). Western Sahara: Roots of a desert war. Beckenham: Croom Helm.
Human Rights Watch. (2012). Morocco and Western Sahara. New York: Human Rights Watch.
Isidoros, K. (2015). The silencing of unifying tribes: The colonial construction of tribe and its ‘extraordinary leap’ to nascent nation-state formation in Western Sahara. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, 7(2), 168–190.
Jensen, E. (2005). Western Sahara: Anatomy of a stalemate. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Lavie, S., & Swedenburg, T. (1996). Introduction: Displacement, diaspora, and geographies of identities. InDisplacement, diaspora and geographies of identity (pp. 1–25). Durham: Duke University Press.
López Bargados, A. (2003). Arenas Coloniales. Los Awlad Dalím Ante La Colonización Franco-española Del Sáhara. Barcelona: Bellaterra.
Lydon, G. (2009). On trans-Saharan trails. Islamic law, trade networks, and cross-cultural exchange in nineteenth century Western Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McConnell, F. (2016). Rehearsing the state: The governance practices of the exile Tibetan government. Oxford: John Wiley.
Messari, N. (2001). National security, the political space, and citizenship. The case of Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Journal of North African Studies, 6(4), 47–63.
Molina Campuzano, M. (1954). Contribución al estudio del censo de población del Sáhara Español. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.
Mundy, J. (2007). Performing the nation, pre-figuring the state: The Western Saharan refugees thirty years later. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 45(2), 275–297.
Omar, S. M. (2012). National identity formation in transnational spaces: The case of the Sahrawis of Western Sahara. In A. P. Ortega & B. Schrottner (Eds.), Transnational spaces and regional localization. Social networks, border regions and local-global relations (pp. 145–153). Münster: Waxman.
Ottaway, M. (2011). The new Moroccan constitution: Real change or more of the same?. http://carnegieendowment.org/2011/06/20/new-moroccan-constitution-real-change-or-more-of-same-pub-44731. Accessed 27 Oct 2016.
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. (2015). Western Sahara: Human rights violations reported between January 1, 2015 and June 30, 2015. http://rfkcenter.org/news/news/latest-robert-f-kennedy-human-rights-report-highlights-abuses-against-sahrawi-people-western-sahara/. Accessed 7 Sept 2015.
Rossetti, S. (2008). Formal and informal gender quotas in state-building: The case of the Sahara Arab democratic republic. Faculty of Arts Papers, University of Wollongong.
Rossetti, S. (2012). Saharawi women and their voices as political representatives abroad. The Journal of North African Studies, 17(2), 337–353.
Sahara Español Gobierno General de la Provincia. (1975). Censo 1974. El Ayun: Editorial Gráficas Saharianas.
Sahara Press Service. (2015). El Consejo Nacional Saharaui celebra su Cuadragésimo Aniversario. http://www.spsrasd.info/es/content/el-consejo-nacional-saharaui-celebra-su-cuadrag%C3%A9simo-aniversario. Accessed 15 Jan 2016.
San Martín, P. (2010). Western Sahara: The refugee nation. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Sassen, S. (1996). Losing control? Sovereignty in an age of globalization. New York: Columbia University Press.
Spencer, J. (2014). Foreward. In M. Banerjee (Ed.), Why India votes (pp. xvii–xxix). New Delhi: Routledge.
Theofilopoulou, A. (2006). The United Nations and Western Sahara: A never-ending affair. United States Institute of Peace.
United Nations Security Council. (2012). Report of the secretary general on the situation concerning Western Sahara. http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2012/197. Accessed 15 Nov 2012.
Vandewalle, D. J. (Ed.). (1995). Qadhafi’s Libya, 1969–1994. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Whitehead, L. (2002). Democratization: Theory and experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willis, J., & el Battahani, A. (2010). ‘We changed the laws’: Electoral practice and malpractice in Sudan since 1953. African Affairs, 109(435), 191–212.
Wilson, A. (2014). Cycles of crisis, migration and the formation of new political identities in Western Sahara. In M. A. Pérouse de Montclos, V. Petit, & N. Robin (Eds.), Crises et migrations dans les pays du sud (pp. 79–105). Paris: L’Harmattan.
Wilson, A. (2016). Sovereignty in exile: A Saharan liberation movement governs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Zunes, S., & Mundy, J. (2010). Western Sahara: War, nationalism and conflict irresolution. New York: Syracuse University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wilson, A. (2017). “For Us, Parliament Is a Tool for Liberation”: Elections as an Opportunity for a Transterritorial Sahrawi Population. In: Ojeda-Garcia, R., Fernández-Molina, I., Veguilla, V. (eds) Global, Regional and Local Dimensions of Western Sahara’s Protracted Decolonization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95035-5_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95035-5_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95034-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-95035-5
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)