Published in The Journal of North African Studies , 2010
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. Read more
Published in Transcontinentales, 2015
Saharawi refugees from Western Sahara have been leading a social revolution from the desert refugee camps in Algeria, where they have been living since the partial annexation of Western Sahara by Morocco in 1975. Read more
Published in Paideuma, 2015
Saharawi refugees from Western Sahara have been leading a social revolution from the desert refugee camps in Algeria, where they have been living since the partial annexation of Western Sahara by Morocco in 1975. Read more
Published in Social Analysis, 2015
Revisiting ‘the margins’ as an illuminating conceptual space analogous to, yet distinct from, the exception, this article explores the Arab Spring from its margins to highlight ‘silencing effects’ that, if they underpin the problematic notions of the Arab Spring and Arab exceptionalism, assume spectacular dimensions at the margins… Read more
Published in Nomadic Peoples, 2015
This article explores sedentarisation as a process of inherent tension between the rupture and preservation of values associated with mobility. Read more
Published in Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2015
This article argues that distinctions made by local actors between different legal and normative orders within a broad field of custom should receive greater analytical attention. Read more
Published in Geoforum, 2015
While scholars agree that political legitimacy, or the legitimacy to rule, is sought by governing authorities, the concept itself is often considered to be problematically vague. This article explores how the very ambiguity of the concept of legitimacy may make it ‘good to think with’. Read more
Published in Geoforum, 2015
This special issue explores the production of political legitimacy, approached from the angle of the legitimacy claims of the governing authorities of anomalous geopolitical spaces. Read more
Published in Middle East Research and Information Project, 2016
This short article examines how an electoral league in Salalah, Oman, disrupted power relations at the local and national level during elections for Oman’s Consultative Council between 2003 and 2015. Read more
Published in Middle East Research and Information Project, 2016
This short article examines how Sahrawi refugees in Algeria seek visibility for their struggle for self-determination, both in exile and in post-exile migratory movements. Read more
Published in Ethnos, 2016
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. Read more
Published in American Ethnologist, 2017
How do ongoing histories of physical mobility in economic and political life affect rival state authorities’ claims over a disputed territory? In the conflict over Western Sahara, wide-ranging strategies of mobility challenge familiar tropes of migration scholarship, in which states constrain people’s movements while subjects seek to escape such control. Read more
Published in Government and Opposition, 2018
Armed insurgents seeking to seize the state often aim to transform the nature of state power. Yet for insurgents who become ruling authorities, how do radical visions of state power influence governance after the urgency of war? Read more
Published in Conflict and Society, 2019
Those who have participated in organized political violence often develop distinctive identities as veteran combatants. But what possibilities exist to produce a veteran identity for “invisible” veterans denied public recognition or mention, such as politically repressed defeated insurgents? .. Read more
Published in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2019
Although early anthropology rarely addressed such movements or programmes for change directly, in recent years longstanding anthropological insights have helped shape an emerging field of the anthropology of revolution.. Read more
Published in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020
Critical reinterpretations of kinship studies questioned earlier ideas that kinship relations reflect and reproduce a dominant social order. ‘New’ kinship studies have nevertheless shown. Read more
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This paper considers how conjunctions of crisis and migration are productive in a Foucauldian sense. Read more
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This chapter examines the forms and stakes of elections in the Sahrawi refugee camps (French). Read more
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The case for decolonization in Western Sahara hinges upon the right of the people of the territory to self-determination. Yet during four decades of Morocco and Western Sahara’s liberation movement vying for sovereignty over the territory, and two decades of UN attempts at conflict resolution, a political stalemate has taken hold which has left the people of Western Sahara all too often overlooked in their own conflict. Read more
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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. Read more
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Revolutions create exceptional contexts of liminality during which militants undertake extraordinary actions in the pursuit of social, political and economic transformations. Read more
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Revolutions create exceptional contexts of liminality during which militants undertake extraordinary actions in the pursuit of social, political and economic transformations. Read more
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Corced migration often leads to refugees’ dispossession, and thus to refugees’ pursuit of various strategies to try and gain access to property, from home or in the new living space. Read more
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How does an armed liberation movement cultivate support from different actors over changing historical contexts? Read more
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Understandings of sovereignty have shifted from notions of supreme rule over territory to sovereignty as a social relation. To interrogate this shift… Read more
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This book explores sovereignty and state power through the case of a liberation movement that set out to make itself into a state. Read more
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What survives of revolution after military defeat and repression? This book considers the “social afterlives” of revolutionary values and networks among former militants. Read more
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Anthropological studies of land tenure in Muslim settings. Les Programmes du Centre Jacques Berque, no 2, pp 1-18. Read more
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Review of Elyachar, J. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo. Cambridge Anthropology 27 (1), pp. 96-98. Read more
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Review of Finnstroem, S. “Living with bad surroundings. War, history and everyday moments in Northern Uganda.” Cambridge Anthropology 29 (3), pp. 95-97. Read more
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Review of San Martín, P. “Western Sahara: the refugee nation” , The Journal of North African Studies, DOI:10.1080/13629387.2012.702016 Read more
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Democratic Experiments in Exile. Pambazuka. Read more
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From Revolutions to Elections. When Tribes Transform State Power. LSE Middle East Studies Centre blog. Read more
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Co-authored Jacob Mundy and Alice Wilson. Business as Usual in Western Sahara? Middle East Research and Information Project. Read more
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Double Disappearance after Oman’s Dhufar war Allegra. Read more
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Trump enables occupation and threatens peace prospects in Western Sahara Democracy in Africa. Read more
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Revolutionary Values Survive Military Defeat. LSE Middle East Studies Centre blog. Read more