Alice Wilson

Democratising elections without parties: reflections on the case of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic

Like many liberation movements, the Polisario Front has long aspired to the practice of democracy. In recent years, however, some observers of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) have come to question the absence of multiple parties in elections and political life. The Polisario Front and many Sahrawi hold that a multi-party system can only be introduced after an act of self-determination and that in the meantime, the SADR enjoys participatory democracy. This paper argues that the gap between scepticism about and confidence in the SADRs democracy arises from different interpretations of democracy, and that the SADR is a suggestive reminder of how the principles of democracy can be pursued through multiple interpretations. Yet the gap between the two positions also reflects a process of ongoing democratisation in the SADR, a recent phase of which can be observed in the 2008 legislative elections.

Gifts that Recalibrate Relationships: Marriage Prestations in an Arab Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT Enduring scholarly interest in the social relations of gift exchange has, following Mauss, emphasised how gifts make relationships. Where gifts break relationships, their ethnographic distinctiveness has reinforced the wider notion that gifts are good at making relations. This article examines gifts which, without the empirical distinctiveness of gifts that break relationships, both make and break relationships. Speakers of the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic in north-west Africa give post-marital gifts from the bride’s to groom’s party; these gifts became highlighted amongst Sahrawi refugees in Algeria, on whom the article focuses. In addition to performing reciprocity, boosting the giver’s honour and making new affinal relations, these post-marital gifts also break the relationship between the bride’s family and the bride. The article argues that gifts’ potential to recalibrate relationships through both making and breaking relationships can be helpfully incorporated into wider thinking about gifts, alongside other distinctions amongst gifts and gift relations.

“For Us, Parliament Is a Tool for Liberation”: Elections as an Opportunity for a Transterritorial Sahrawi Population

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.

Western Sahara. The Refugee Nation

Western Sahara. The refugee nation, Iberian and Latin American studies, by Pablo San Martin, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2010, 226 p., US

On the Margins Of the arab spring

35 (paper), ISBN 978-0708323809 The history of nati...