Description
This paper is part of my ongoing PhD project which seeks to explore how the return to armed resistance by the Polisario Front to liberate Western Sahara from Moroccan colonial occupation is affecting Western humanitarian aid. I do so through researching how the discursive representations of Sahrawi refugees as ideal and hence worthy of international support are unsettled by this return to armed resistance.
This paper, part of my theoretical framework, seeks to put forward a decolonial critique of the research on nonviolence in the context of Western Sahara and of the nonviolence literature in IR more broadly. Sahrawis’ unarmed resistance (between 1991 and 2020) has been a recurrent focus of Western discourses on Western Sahara within and beyond academia. I argue that these discourses, which are intimately entangled with discourses on gender, Islam and modernity, participate in constructing an image of Sahrawis as particularly worthy.
I aim to show how, enabled by methodological whiteness, much of this literature engages – more or less advertently – in (re)producing Orientalist/racist/Eurocentric tropes, and cultivates epistemologies of ignorance, immanence, innocence. My argument is that ultimately such discourses can only partake in sustaining colonialism for Sahrawis and White supremacy more broadly.
