Ma El-Ainin Deconstructs the Sahara Issue

Researcher Mohamed El-Ghaith Ma El-Ainin, Vice President of the Moroccan Center for Parallel Diplomacy and Dialogue of Civilizations, has published a new book titled "Autonomy in the Moroccan Sahara: Towards a Moroccan Model of Flexible Sovereignty." Through this work, he seeks to reorganize the discussion around the fabricated conflict concerning the southern provinces of the Kingdom, from the perspective of the evolution of the Moroccan state itself, including its management of its territorial domain.

This new work does not approach the Moroccan Sahara issue as a border dispute but rather as a highly complex historical and political file. According to the author, it redefines fundamental concepts such as legitimacy, identity, and sovereignty, based on a central hypothesis that "the conflict was not essentially a struggle over land but rather a struggle over legitimacy—that is, the legitimacy of history, decision, and the future."

In its introduction, the book addresses the overall transformations experienced by the Moroccan approach since the Kingdom regained its southern provinces in 1975, passing through the phase of managing the conflict at the United Nations level. It highlights the qualitative transition inaugurated by King Mohammed VI’s speech on November 6, 2005; the same speech that constituted "a decisive turning point in moving from the logic of conflict management to the horizon of a political solution, culminating in the formulation of the autonomy proposal in 2007, followed by constitutional, developmental, and institutional accumulations."

The author considers that "autonomy is not a sovereign concession but rather an innovative Moroccan formula to reorganize the exercise of sovereignty within a single state, under the leadership of the royal institution as the guarantor of state unity and the continuity of its strategic choices."

In a statement to the Hespress electronic newspaper, Mohamed El-Ghaith Ma El-Ainin, Vice President of the Moroccan Center for Parallel Diplomacy and Dialogue of Civilizations, said that "the book also distinguishes itself by its systemic methodology, combining historical, legal, conceptual, and practical analysis. It treats autonomy not as a technical solution to a conflict but as part of a broader project to rebuild territorial citizenship, develop advanced regionalization, and integrate cultural and social diversity into the state structure without compromising its unity."

Ma El-Ainin continued: "The author gives special importance to the issue of identity, highlighting that the failure of the UN identity determination process was not technical but rather a result of misunderstanding the political belonging structure in the Moroccan Sahara, where identity is founded on the bond of allegiance and historical loyalty, not on narrow ethnic or tribal criteria."

Furthermore, the book’s author considers that "the international discourse on the Moroccan Sahara issue underwent an important transformation after the recent UN Resolution 2797; this resolution does not necessarily represent a break with the past but rather reflects Morocco’s success in convincing the international community of a choice it has worked on internally and cumulatively." He pointed out that "the royal speech dated October 31 last year reframed this UN achievement within a comprehensive Moroccan vision for the post-international decision phase, as the Moroccan challenge today is no longer limited to consolidating the legitimacy of the proposal but to calmly considering the conditions for its implementation and its political and institutional design."

The book introduces the concept of "flexible sovereignty," which, according to the author, "is an analytical framework to understand this transformation—that is, sovereignty that does not relinquish its centrality or undermine the unity of decision but redistributes its functions within the national domain in a way that enhances effectiveness, accommodates diversity, and ensures territorial integration within the framework of a unified state."

The author framed these various transformations within their constitutional context, affirming that "this conception finds its support in the spirit of the 2011 Constitution and in the democratic interpretation of the constitution emphasized by the royal institution, as an open horizon for developing regionalization without compromising constants." He highlighted that his work "does not seem merely a contribution to the national debate on the Sahara file but rather an attempt to understand the profound transformation the Moroccan state is undergoing as it moves, under clear royal leadership, from the logic of conflict management to the logic of solution engineering, and from defending legitimacy to institutionalizing it in a new form."