Promise not kept: The UN Security Council resolved to ensure self-determination for Western Sahara but seem incapable to see it through to fruition. Photo: UN Photo/Kim Haughton
In late October 2025, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2797, renewing the mandate of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO).
On paper, it is a continuation of peacekeeping, while in practice, it signals a profound shift for the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination, which has been subordinated to geopolitics, regional alliances and economic interests.
MINURSO was originally established in 1991 as not only a peacekeeping force, but a UN mission to oversee and organise a referendum enabling the Saharawi people to choose between independence and integration with Morocco.
That referendum, the instrument through which the Saharawi believed they could finally realise full decolonisation, is now extinguished.
Ahead of the vote on the Resolution, Personal Envoy of the UN Secretary-General, Staffan de Mistura, consulted with Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco, and the Polisario Front, in addition to other Security Council members.
He reported to the Council that Morocco reaffirmed that its autonomy plan should serve as the basis of negotiations on a permanent solution, while the Polisario Front maintained that the Settlement
Plan jointly proposed by the UN and the then Organisation for African Unity (OAU), which calls for self-determination through a referendum, should serve as the sole reference framework for talks. Resolution 2797 however, endorsed Morocco’s 2007 plan that tables a proposal for a form of autonomy for the region, while asserting that the region remains an integral part of Morocco. The plan is reinforced by the United States’ “peace plan”, which guarantees limited
self-rule under Moroccan sovereignty but excludes independence.
MINURSO’s function is reduced to a ceasefire monitor, presiding over a stalemate, while its core mandate of enabling genuine self-determination has been hollowed out.
In response to the passing of the Resolution, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI announced that Morocco will “update and expand” the autonomy plan, marking what he described as “the decisive phase” of the UN-led process.
A fractured peace and a continuing war
Although the 1991 ceasefire nominally ended hostilities, the Polisario Front declared an end to the truce in November 2020, citing Moroccan “provocations” after Moroccan incursions into the Geurgeurat buffer zone.
Since then, the conflict has simmered as a low-intensity war, with intermittent skirmishes, including missile exchanges near Mahbes in 2024, attacks near Agouint in 2025 and rocket fire around Esmara in July 2025.
The incidents underscore that the Saharawi struggle remains active and that “peace” under the UN framework is fragile and largely symbolic. The Saharawi response to Resolution 2797 has been unmistakable. Refugee camps in Tindouf (Algeria) and the occupied territories have witnessed wide protests, especially by women.
The Polisario Front’s communique following the vote denounced the resolution as a “dangerous deviation from international legality” and reaffirmed the Saharawi people’s “irreversible right to independence.” Algeria boycotted the vote, while Russia, China and Pakistan abstained, signalling fractures in global consensus and deep discomfort with the US-Moroccan narrative of “autonomy.”
Morocco, Israel, and the replication of colonial blueprints
Resolution 2797 must also be contextualised within broader regional alliances and normalisation efforts. Morocco’s strategic role in the Abraham Accords, the US-brokered normalisation pact with Israel, has reconfigured the political map of North Africa. Morocco’s diplomatic and security ties with Israel bolster surveillance, weapons-proliferation, intelligence-sharing and perceived international legitimacy.
In exchange for formal recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, Rabat normalised relations with Israel, opening the door to intelligence cooperation, arms trade, drone technology exchanges and joint economic ventures.
These alliances, combined with ongoing occupation, demographic engineering via settler migration, and economic integration of Western Sahara’s resources, mirror a classic colonial playbook: surveillance, occupation, economic exploitation and demographic displacement.
As in Palestine, the colonised are framed as obstacles to peace; a discursive inversion that legitimised dispossession under the guise of security. Both cases expose the selective moral geography of international law: while the same powers condemn Russian annexation of Crimea, they remain silent on Moroccan annexation of Western Sahara and Israeli settlement expansion in Palestine. This legal inconsistency erodes the very foundation of the post-1945 international order and undermines the UN Charter’s commitment to self-determination.
African-Decolonial thought and the betrayal of the liberation project
Across the continent, voices within the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU) and the African Union (AU) have reaffirmed solidarity with the Saharawi cause, viewing it as fundamental to Africa’s unfinished liberation. The OATUU’s communique condemned the economic exploitation of Saharawi resources and the use of African labour to sustain occupation economies.
The AU’s Peace and Security Council has reiterated that Western Sahara remains a Non-Self-Governing Territory, warning against “external compacts that legitimise colonial control.” The AU has repeatedly urged renewed efforts to resolve the conflict, comply with decolonisation norms, and ensure that the voices of the Saharawi people are heard. In 2016, the AU commission declared that “Africa will not be free until the last of its colonies, Western Sahara, is liberated, free and independent.”
This statement came at a time of Morocco’s suspension from the AU and its bid to reclaim its seat, amidst opposition led largely by South Africa and Algeria.
These positions draw directly from the intellectual tradition of African decolonial thought – from Nkrumah’s warning against “neocolonialism in its modern garb” to Cabral’s insistence that liberation is political and material. The Western Sahara impasse exposes how the decolonisation agenda has been co-opted by neoliberal multilateralism, where the language of peace masks the persistence of empire.
The erosion of international law
By extending MINURSO’s mandate without advancing its referendum, the UN risks legitimising occupation as status quo. International law, once the moral shield of the weak, is being scuppered by selective enforcement.
The International Court of Justice’s 1975 advisory opinion affirmed that no ties of sovereignty existed between Morocco and Western Sahara, yet 50 years later, the UN’s actions contradict that judgement through procedural diplomacy.
Resolution 2797 thus joins a growing list of international instruments, from the Oslo Accords to the Abraham Accords, that replace justice with containment. The price of “stability” is the normalisation of colonialism.
The future of decolonisation
The Saharawi question is not merely a North African issue; it is a mirror for the global south’s contemporary struggle for justice in a world where the decolonisation project has stalled. If the UN cannot enforce its own legal principles in Western Sahara, what remains of the international legal order?
Resolution 2797 sustains a fragile quiet that masks systemic injustice, the peace of submission, not of liberation. In the end, the Saharawi people’s struggle echoes that of Palestine, both standing as enduring testaments to the unfulfilled covenant of international law and Africa’s deferred dream of complete decolonisation.