The Decolonisation That Never Was

On 31 October 2025, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted Resolution 2797 endorsing Morocco’s autonomy proposal for Western Sahara as “a realistic, serious and credible basis” for resolving the conflict. For the first time, the Council’s language in the US-backed Resolution positioned autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty and not independence through referendum, as the most “feasible” path forward. The adoption of the Resolution reflects a broader doctrinal contraction, where the right to self-determination, which was once the highlight of post-colonial international law, is now increasingly mediated and watered down through managerial vocabularies which prioritize governance expediency over justice. This commentary contends that Resolution 2797 represents a critical doctrinal shift in the international legal framework of self-determination, and invites reflection through decolonial, TWAIL and indigenous-rights lenses. It contends that Resolution 2797 signals a paradigmatic narrowing of the decolonization regime through the continual refusal of international law to explicitly recognize expansive non-western forms of sovereignty such as indigenous sovereignty. By transforming a question of liberation into one of administration, the Council reproduces the very colonial logic it claims to have transcended. The predicament of the Western Sahara conflict and Resolution 2797 clearly mirror International Law’s selective empathy for dispossessed peoples, as well as its structural alignment with extractive sovereignty.

From Self-Determination to “Autonomy”

Western Sahara, a desert territory, has remained contested since Spain’s colonial retreat in 1975 after which Morocco immediately annexed it, marking the beginning of Africa’s longest unresolved decolonization struggle. It has been listed under the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories since 1963. The 1975 ICJ Advisory Opinion affirmed the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination, rejecting Moroccan sovereignty through pre-colonial linkages, as well as the more recent judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) confirm this right. Despite these and plenty more affirmations of the Saharawi peoples self-determination by the UNSC itself as well as the General Assembly, the Resolution notably omits the specific option of independence via referendum. By doing so, it effectively robs the Saharawi people of their voice since it represented the possibility to effectively exercise this fundamental principle.

The African Union’s position on Western Sahara also underscores the shifting political terrain on the matter. The OAU formally recognised the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) as a member state in 1984, which affirmed Western Sahara’s self-determination and confirmed the dispute as a decolonisation question rather than a territorial one. Its predecessor, the AU has also over the years supported the facilitation of a free and fair referendum for the peoples of Western Sahara. Morocco’s contested readmission to the AU in 2017, despite the unresolved status of the territory, already reflected the start of the organisation´s  recalibration as political reintegration was prioritised over the decolonial principle of self-determination that once anchored the OAU’s solidarity with the Sahrawi struggle. Consequently the latest AU Assembly Resolutions have remained rather silent of the matter of the referendum, thus illustrating a continental posture that increasingly mirrors the global trend which supports external self-determination reinterpreted as internal autonomy.

The Resolution marks more than a shift in diplomatic positions by states: it signals a doctrinal recalibration of the international legal architecture surrounding the right to self-determination. By endorsing the Resolution granting Western Sahara “autonomy” but only under the sovereignty of Morocco, it defines the terms and conditions under which the territory is governed. This not only reframes, but also trivializes a long-term decolonization dispute into a matter of administrative integration and governability. It treats freedom and peace as operative criteria, while de jure decolonization succumbs to de facto incorporation. In essence, self-determination becomes a matter of local capacity rather than global justice. This doctrinal pivot should not be assessed only in terms of process and expediency but also in terms of ontological ordering. In this case, the international legal subjects who are the indigenous Saharawi people, become re-configured as the local citizens within a sovereign state, thus robbing them of their collective indigenous identity as a peoples who have been collectively asserting political independence. The logic of prioritising expedient governance arrangements under external supervision, while sidelining the right to self-determination is not unique to Western Sahara. It is equally evident in the UNSC’s recent approval of the Trump-backed plan for Gaza through the adoption of Resolution 2803 on 17 November 2025. Despite omitting any meaningful acknowledgment of Palestinian statehood or even explicit language affirming the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state, the Resolution, much like Resolution 2797 is being celebrated as a diplomatic breakthrough. The parallels between the two Resolutions are striking: in both cases, political expediency is elevated over self-determination, with the appearance of progress masking the foreclosure of genuine decolonisation.

The role and pressure placed by the USA and its allies in passing such Resolutions is emblematic as it demonstrates how diplomatic muscle becomes legality, and legality becomes a mechanism for colonial continuities. In doctrinal terms, this recasts the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination, which once encompassed the possibility of full independence, into a diluted form of internal self-administration under Moroccan sovereignty. This effectively hollows out one of international law’s most foundational decolonial principles, turning it into a toothless bulldog. Politically, this shift privileges effective control over legal entitlement, reproducing a familiar colonial logic through which domination was legitimized by demonstration of possession. The same reasoning underpinned the terra nullius doctrine, where colonial powers converted presence into ownership and occupation into sovereignty, asserting that control itself conferred title. In Western Sahara, as in earlier imperial encounters, law becomes an effective mechanism to transform conquest into governance, and legality is a vehicle for erasure. Morocco’s consolidation of authority since the 1991 ceasefire, its demographic engineering through settlement, and its integration of the territory into national infrastructure projects collectively transformed occupation into governance. Meanwhile, of the roughly 500,000 Saharawi, around half reside in refugee camps in Algeria, with most of the remainder split between Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara and dispersed communities abroad. By endorsing Saharawi peoples’ autonomy under the sovereignty of Morocco, the Council converts occupation’s permanence into legality thereby sealing off not merely the possibility, but the entire discursive space in which claims to external self-determination may even be meaningfully articulated. While autonomy is presented as a meaningful concession, independence is effectively removed from the realm of possibilities. International law here manifests its colonial architecture: the logic of governability is extended to peoples deemed not fit for full sovereignty, thereby reproducing continuities of global order under new lexes of autonomy.

Indigenous Rights without Indigenous Sovereignty

The Saharawi case exposes a core structural limitation in the international law of indigeneity. While the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) affirms cultural integrity, land rights, and participatory autonomy, it does so within a framework that presumes the permanence of existing state borders. International law, therefore, recognises indigenous identity but not indigenous sovereignty. The Saharawi sit squarely in this gap as they are historically autonomous and territorially rooted; they are recognised as a people for purposes of cultural protection, yet treated as a population to be managed within Moroccan territorial authority. Their over-politicised situation translates to them possessing heritage, but not jurisdiction. UNSC Resolution 2797 entrenches this structural paradox by reframing Saharawi self-determination as participation in Morocco’s internal governance arrangements. What appears as compromise is, in fact, a narrowing of the political horizon to forms of authority that mirror European, Westphalian statehood. Indigenous political orders that do not resemble this model are rendered illegible. This is not simply doctrinal; it is a colonial continuity as sovereignty remains reserved for those already positioned inside the confines of Eurocentric statehood. The result plays out in reality as recognition without power as the Saharawi are acknowledged only so long as they do not claim the right to govern themselves.

Law’s Colonial Continuum

To understand the deeper multidimensional colonial nuances of the Resolution, one must also comprehend the political and material economy which is revealed through its normative vocabulary and position. Western Sahara contains vast reserves of phosphates, fisheries, and untapped rare-earth minerals vital to the global green transition. This makes it attractive and a fertile ground for the new scramble for rare earth minerals. The Bou Craa mine alone exports millions of tons annually through infrastructure operated by Morocco’s state-owned OCP Group. European and Gulf investments in solar and wind projects across the territory further consolidate Morocco’s economic integration of Western Sahara, embedding the region within transnational energy corridors. Morocco’s strategic deployment of its resource wealth which include phosphates, fisheries, and renewable-energy potential, therefore serves a dual purpose: projecting regional hegemony while gaining leverage with external partners through the possibility of satisfying their energy and security imperatives. In simple terms, resources translate to territorial recognition and economic partnerships. This convergence of interests explains why France, the United States, and other Western powers have consistently portrayed Morocco as a ‘stabilizing’ ally in counter-terrorism, migration management, and renewable-energy supply chains. Their sponsorship of the autonomy plan thus reveals not mere diplomatic pragmatism but the deeper entanglement of legality, geopolitics, and capital. In this instance, the result is that strategic and economic gains become the currency through which international recognition and legitimation are mutually secured.

This pattern is not unique to Morocco; it is echoed in Israel’s pursuit of modernization/development projects in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and its strategic designs for the Gaza Strip. These initiatives are being advanced under the patronage of powerful states like the US, whose policy consistently prioritizes and normalizes Israeli sovereignty over occupied territories. Even though decolonization has historically often been delayed or distorted by economic and security calculations; what makes Western Sahara distinctive is the irony and the blatant dissonance between the established right of self-determination of the Saharawi peoples confirmed by the 1975 AO and how the Council has chosen to redefine it for implementation in practice. Essentially, a non-self-governing territory is being treated as sovereign by those charged with supervising its decolonization. As a result, the silence of not naming occupation becomes concretized as legality, thereby transforming the right to self-determination to a vehicle for continuing colonial patterns.

By endorsing Moroccan sovereignty de facto, Resolution 2797 questionably legitimizes an extractive regime that milks Saharawi resources without their political agency. When the legal structure shifts from occupation/decolonization to internal autonomy; contracts, concessions and investment frameworks gain legitimacy under Moroccan governance. This is when it comes to light that the terminologies of ‘development’, ‘modernity’ and ‘civilization’ all disguised as ‘sustainability’, ‘renewables’, and ‘green hydrogen’ mask the continuity of dispossession, thus illustrating how the global scramble for minerals now extends colonial logics into the green transition. By effectively normalizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, the Security Council also normalizes the exploitative background investment regimes. Moreover, international law’s silence on the legality of resource exploitation in occupied territories remains an enabling condition for perpetual, asymmetrical neo-extractivist systems that perpetuate global inequalities. When economic development discourse supersedes indigenous consent and economic benefit trumps self-determination; that is when the new scramble for minerals is expedited, not through conquest but through contracts legitimized through UNSC legality. From a critical Global South vantage point, this alignment of law and capital demonstrates the endurance of the colonial relationship between recognition and resource access. Western Sahara’s mineral wealth, far from peripheral, sits at the center of global ecological modernity, yet its people ironically remain peripheral to decision-making about it.

The Broader Decolonial Implications

Resolution 2797 is not an anomaly but a revealing instance of a longer pattern in international law’s treatment of decolonisation struggles. It demonstrates how one of the field’s most celebrated anti-colonial principles; self-determination, has been progressively recast from a right of peoples to constitute their own political worlds into an administrative technique for managing territorial disputes. In this reframing, autonomy becomes the upper limit of what is available to peoples whose claims threaten the existing state system. The deeper stakes are clear: international law continues to be selectively manipulated to operate within a conceptual architecture that protects territorial integrity and strategic security interests while masking the ongoing realities of dispossession, extraction, and racialised governance that underpin them.

The structural irony here is that the legal order that defines legitimacy through statehood cannot easily accommodate claims that arise from political formations that do not conform to the Westphalian ideal. As a result, indigenous and decolonial assertions of sovereignty, such as those advanced by the Saharawi, are read not as alternative world-making projects but as disruptions to international stability and therefore incompatible with Westphalian sovereignty. The contradiction does not necessarily lie in the implementation of self-determination but in the ontology of the system itself thus revealing what decolonial thinkers term “the coloniality of being”. International law has historically privileged forms of sovereignty that mirror European state forms while marginalising those grounded in relationality, mobility, communal authority, and land-based stewardship. For critical scholars, this moment reiterates the need to re-imagine sovereignty beyond its colonial genealogy. Decolonisation cannot be reduced to the symbolic transfer of administrative control from one capital to another; it requires a redistribution of epistemic and ontological authority, entailing the power to decide not only who rules but also what counts as political life and whose ways of living and governing are legible as law. Genuine decolonisation demands the dismantling of the structural continuities that have allowed colonial hierarchies to persist under the guise of international order and institutional neutrality. This entails embracing plural and expansive understandings of sovereignty, ones that center relational autonomy, collective stewardship, and coexistence rather than subordination and control. Until international law can recognize indigenous sovereignty as a legitimate and inclusive mode of world-making, rather than as a threat to be contained, it will continue to reproduce the very structures of domination it claims to transcend, sustaining hierarchy while speaking in the language of peace.

Conclusion

The 2025 UNSC Resolution 2797 on Western Sahara represents a quiet but consequential re-orientation of international law’s decolonization project. By elevating autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty while sidelining the potential for a referendum, the Council transforms a decolonial demand into a managerial problem. The Saharawi peoples’ claim to self-determination is displaced into bureaucratic language that legitimizes occupation, extraction and exploitation. Western Sahara and the Resolution therefore forces the discipline of international law to confront its own colonial blindness and paradoxes: a law that preaches equality while practicing hierarchy; a law that venerates sovereignty while policing who may hold it. The future of international law’s credibility may then well depend on whether it can transcend this contradiction; or whether, in the next resolution, autonomy will once again stand in for erasure.