The Self-Determination Delusion

Why has the UN failed in finding a lasting solution to the Western Sahara dispute, despite four decades of confidence-building diplomacy? What is to be done from now on to end this territorial dispute and ensure a future of stability, security and prosperity for the local population and the region as a whole? These are the rather unwieldy, interrelated questions that Samir Bennis raises in this timely and urgent examination of the latest and some of the most edifying historical developments in the Western Sahara case.

In response, the author offers a sweeping and meticulously researched account of how the Sahara story got to where it is today, and how it might eventually be led to a mutually acceptable endpoint. Bennis thus takes his readers deep into the troubled waters of Algeria's historical obsession with Morocco, Spain's multifarious role in the dispute, France's inherent duplicity in North African geopolitics, Africa's shifting grounds on the Sahara conundrum, America's noncommittal commitment to preserving the sovereignty of its Moroccan ally, and the UN's growing awakening to the fundamental impossibility and danger of a brand new "republic" in the fragile Sahel-Saharan corridor.

Indeed, the book covers so much ground in 14 chapters, each more meticulously and richly researched than the last, that summarizing it is an almost impossible task. Suffice it to say, perhaps, that the beating heart of Bennis's analysis is that the dominant (or mainstream) journalistic and scholarly discourse on Western Sahara has midwifed the emergence of an intellectual climate in which passionate and moralizing narrative trumps historical facts and objective analysis.

But while Bennis offers a powerful critique of the intellectual hijacking of the Western Sahara case, his book is not a cheap pro-Morocco polemic. Instead, it is a balanced case for intellectual sobriety and nuance in making sense of the Sahara tragedy. His goal -- and hope -- is not to score points. Instead, he seeks to objectively explain the reasons for the prolongation of this tragic story and to outline a realistic way forward. The central achievement of Bennis's book is its forceful argument that the fundamental problem with do-gooding diplomacy and White saviorcomplex-riddled Western journalism is that they have almost always ended up making life harder and more unbearable for the downtrodden they claimed to have wanted to help in the first place.