Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Sahrawi refugees and the Sahrawi state‐in‐exile have sought to assert their claims to Western Sahara, Africa's last colony, while exiled in refugee camps in Algeria. Through an examination of the Sahrawi state's use of deferred natural resource contracts, this article explores Sahrawi political action prior to – and in anticipation of – the referendum on self‐determination. I suggest that Sahrawi‐led natural resource contracts operate as a technical financial device that constructs property and enables political action in the anticipation of sovereignty. Through these contracts, the state works to simultaneously produce both itself and its sovereignty. This article explores the new political and economic forms generated by these contracts, which subsequently create a political terrain by which otherwise inaccessible, seemingly off‐limits, resources become productive spaces of opportunity for the development and exercise of sovereignty in the present.
Author: Randi Irwin
Institution: University of Newcastle Australia
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,120
Award: G5270737256
OpenAlex ID: W4402528681