Anticolonial irredentism

The Moroccan liberation army and decolonisation in the Sahara

Bibliographic Data

ID3978579
AuthorsMark Drury (0000-0002-7423-6935, Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume29
Issue2
Pages228-254
Publication date2024-03-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of North African Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1362-9387 • E-ISSN: 1743-9345
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13629387.2022.2056449
OpenAlexW4226169351
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited25

This paper presents an account of Jaysh al-Tahrir (Liberation Army) in the Sahara, an anticolonial insurgency from the late 1950s. Occurring after Moroccan independence, the Liberation Army’s aims were at once irredentist, in surpassing Morocco’s borders, and anticolonial, in attacking French and Spanish military outposts dotting colonial borders across the western Sahara. While histories of this movement have largely been coopted, erased, or marginalised by nationalist narratives and processes of Sahrawi, Moroccan, Mauritanian and Algerian state formation, the afterlives of the Liberation Army continue to haunt the region’s political present. This paper argues that the history of the Liberation Army reveals multiple dynamics of Maghrebi decolonisation. The first involves the complex relations of autonomy and dependence between Maghrebi and Saharan peoples that challenge the border-making processes of nation-state formation. The second shows the nonsynchronous dimension to decolonisation in the Maghreb and Sahara, raising questions about when decolonisation ended. With these insights, the MLA defies methodological nationalism and also complicates the global turn in decolonisation historiography

Ancient history · Colonialism · Decolonization · Ethnology · Historiography · Independence (probability theory · Liberation movement · Nationalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · African history and culture studies · African Studies and Geopolitics · Gender Studies · History · Law · North African History and Literature

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