In October 2025, a group of powerful states attempted to do in a few days what fifty years of occupation, war and repression had failed to achieve: close the file of Western Sahara in Morocco’s favour at the UN Security Council.
Using diplomatic blitzkrieg tactics, Morocco’s allies pushed a strongly pro-Moroccan “zero draft” resolution that they hoped to pass as a fait accompli. Had it gone through unchanged, Western Sahara would have been pushed closer toward erasure as a decolonisation question and recast as an internal Moroccan matter.
Instead, on 31 October 2025, the Council adopted Resolution 2797. Far from rubber-stamping Morocco’s claims, the final text reaffirmed every previous Security Council resolution on Western Sahara and restated an essential truth: any political solution must be just, mutually acceptable and consistent with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, including the right of the Sahrawi people to self-determination.
Several Council members pushed back against the original US-circulated draft, which had aligned closely with Morocco’s position. Their amendments restored the text to the legal framework that has governed this issue for decades. The result is not perfect, but it is unmistakable: Western Sahara remains an unfinished decolonisation process. It is not a settled dispute, and it is not Morocco’s to absorb.
Had the Council endorsed the early draft, it would have risked becoming a 21st-century version of the Berlin Conference, a chamber where great powers redraw Africa’s map without Africans present. In 1884–85, European states divided a continent in ways that still shape its borders. The danger today is subtler but no less serious: that the future of Western Sahara might once again be written in foreign ink, this time on UN letterhead.
Western Sahara in International Law: An Unfinished decolonisation
Legally, Western Sahara’s status is unambiguous. It remains listed by the UN as a Non-Self-Governing Territory, one of the last awaiting decolonisation. International law recognises the Sahrawi people as possessing an inalienable right to self-determination and independence.
When Spain withdrew in 1975, it failed to organise the required act of self-determination. Instead, it divided the territory between Morocco and Mauritania. Mauritania later withdrew; Morocco did not. Its military occupation sparked a long war with the Sahrawi liberation movement, the Frente Polisario.
The 1991 UN-brokered ceasefire created MINURSO, the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara. The mission’s very name is a reminder of the international commitment made: a referendum in which Sahrawis would choose between independence and integration with Morocco. That referendum has never taken place.
Today, around 200,000 Sahrawis remain in refugee camps near Tindouf, Algeria, waiting in harsh conditions for the vote they were promised. In the occupied territory, Sahrawis face systematic repression and severe constraints on political expression. Yet they remain the only people with no seat at the table where their future is being debated.
Autonomy and the Logic of Conquest
The current situation cannot be understood without the US administration’s 2020 recognition of “Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory” in exchange for Morocco’s normalisation with Israel. This reversed decades of US adherence to UN-led self-determination and signalled that territorial questions could once again be traded as diplomatic currency.
Support for Morocco’s autonomy proposal is the political expression of that bargain. Marketed as a pragmatic compromise, it is predicated on accepting Moroccan sovereignty upfront, removing independence from consideration and redefining self-determination as ratification of annexation. A solution that excludes independence is not self-determination. It is the formalisation of conquest.
Those who insist that independence is “unrealistic” are elevating raw power above law. As scholars such as Stephen Zunes have warned, accepting autonomy as the final settlement would mark an unprecedented moment: the international community would be endorsing the expansion of a state’s territory by force after 1945. Every aspiring land-grabber on the planet would take note.
This argument that diplomacy must conform to power rather than principle dresses surrender up as pragmatism. “Realism” that ignores law and rights is not realism; it is complicity. The entire post-1945 legal order was built to end the idea that war and annexation are acceptable methods of drawing borders. Undermining that norm in Western Sahara does not make the world safer; it normalises the very behaviour many of these same states claim to oppose elsewhere.
A proposal is not a peace plan. A “solution” written by one side and handed to the other as the only acceptable outcome is not a negotiation — it is an ultimatum for surrender.
A Call to President Trump: A chance to stand on the Right Side of History
There is still time, and still a path, for the United States to reclaim a constructive role in resolving this conflict. For President Donald Trump in particular, the question of Western Sahara offers a rare opportunity to stand on the right side of history, to uphold the very Wilsonian principle of self-determination that the United States once championed, and to return American policy to its long-standing position of neutrality and respect for international law.
For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike supported a UN-led process and recognised Western Sahara as a decolonisation question, not as a bargaining chip. Restoring that principled approach would not only correct the 2020 departure from US tradition, but would reaffirm the American commitment to a world where borders cannot be changed by force and where the rights of small nations are protected from the ambitions of larger ones.
If President Trump were to bring the United States back to its historical role, supporting a fair, just and lasting solution rooted in genuine self-determination, he would achieve something that eluded every administration before him. He would be remembered not as a participant in a geopolitical trade, but as the president who helped resolve one of the world’s longest-running and most clear-cut decolonisation cases. He would be remembered as the leader who chose law over expediency, principle over pressure, David over Goliath.
There is a rare chance here: to correct a historic wrong, to end a conflict that has defeated presidents, prime ministers and UN Secretaries-General, and to bring justice to a small, peaceful and long-suffering people. Standing with the Sahrawi right to self-determination is not only the moral choice; it is the choice that aligns the United States with its own ideals and its own stated values and ultimately its interests.
Anything else, any endorsement of the logic of conquest or any attempt to force a people to accept subjugation as “autonomy”, would be a political act that history will not forget, and the Sahrawi people will not forgive.
Call for International Solidarity
Behind every debate in New York are people living under occupation, in refugee camps and in exile, waiting for a vote they were promised decades ago. The Sahrawi people are not seeking special treatment. They are asking for the same right that helped dismantle colonial rule from Asia to Africa: the right of a people to freely determine their political future.
What was right for Timor and Namibia is right for Western Sahara.
History offers many examples of colonial powers that looked immovable until, suddenly, they were not. East Timor, Namibia, Eritrea, all show that no amount of repression or diplomatic engineering can extinguish a people’s demand for freedom. In each case, global civil society, more than great powers, ultimately helped shift the balance.
The Sahrawi people are determined to reclaim their homeland. Determination alone, however, cannot overcome tanks, drones, a 2,700-kilometre sand berm, prisons and diplomatic horse-trading. Stronger international solidarity is urgently needed—not only in support of a just cause, but in defence of the international system itself. The Sahrawi struggle today stands at the frontline of protecting both the right to self-determination and the principles on which the United Nations was built.
To stand with Western Sahara is to defend the rule that borders cannot be changed by force and that colonialism cannot be rebranded as “autonomy”. States that champion a “rules-based international order” should match their rhetoric with action: refuse to recognise Moroccan sovereignty; support a free and fair act of self-determination that includes independence; and ensure that UN resolutions are implemented rather than endlessly recycled.
Civil society and solidarity networks also have important roles to play, from advocacy to material support for Sahrawi institutions and refugee communities.
The Final Question
The UN Security Council is not mandated to rubber-stamp an illegal occupation and baptise it as decolonisation. Doing so would violate the UN Charter, particularly Article 24. Under the Charter and decolonisation law, the Council’s room for manoeuvre is constrained by the peremptory right of self-determination. It cannot lawfully override that foundational right. Article 24(2) requires the Council to act in accordance with the purposes of the Charter—including self-determination—and its decisions cannot derogate from jus cogens norms.
Decolonisation remains the only lawful path to ending this conflict. The core question is simple: does the international community still believe that peoples, especially colonised peoples, have the right to choose their own future? If the answer is yes, then sovereignty in Western Sahara remains, in law and in principle, with the Sahrawi people.
The map of Africa was once drawn in imperial ink. Whether Western Sahara remains the last stain of that era or becomes part of a different future depends on whether the world insists that decolonisation means what it says.