Abstract
The Western Sahara dispute, now in its fourth decade, appears to be a forgotten and frozen conflict. In reality, the conflict and its perpetual irresolution are central to the ways in which USA hegemony was reconstituted in the late Cold War and the processes through which Washington has been able to reproduce its global dominance since then. At the same time, the irresolution of the Western Sahara conflict—a perpetual crisis at the heart of the Moroccan state—also helps reproduce the monarchical regime that has successfully governed Morocco since it seized the territory from Spain in 1975. While the Western Saharan nationalist movement has deployed an array of strategies aimed at confronting and accommodating North Atlantic dominance, none of these efforts have been able to disrupt the dynamics that necessarily maintain the Western Sahara impasse.
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Mundy, J. (2017). The Geopolitical Functions of the Western Sahara Conflict: US Hegemony, Moroccan Stability and Sahrawi Strategies of Resistance. 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_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95035-5_3
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