Author Archive

What Should the United States Do in Western Sahara?

By Jacob Mundy | 13 October 2008

Autonomy is not the most realistic solution for Western Sahara because it will require an expensive international peacekeeping force to guarantee the safety of the population and mutual implementation of the agreement. Considering the lack of resources to stop genocide in Darfur, is there really enough international will for an even more robust intervention into Western Sahara? This, however, assumes Morocco and the Western Saharan independence movement can reach an agreement in the first place. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, at least there is the fundamental agreement on a two-state solution. In Western Sahara, there is no fundamental agreement.

How the ‘War on Terror’ Undermined Peace in Northwest Africa: The Western Sahara Conflict After 9/11

By Jacob Mundy | 1 August 2007

Whether we like it or not, the effects of September 11, 2001, can be witnessed in some of the remotest spaces of the Earth. In this essay, I will outline two ways in which post-9/11 U.S. policy has affected the Western Sahara conflict between the occupying power, Morocco, and the Polisario Front, a Sahrawi nationalist independence movement. The most obvious effect of the ‘War on Terror’ is rhetorical; a shift in the way Morocco now characterizes the conflict. Yet this mutation, as I will argue, is mere substitution. Moroccan efforts to securitize the discourse in its favour are an old trick that unfortunately works in Washington. Secondly, I will describe how and why the George W. Bush administration undermined the UN peace process in Western Sahara in the name of the ‘War on Terror’.