Anticolonial irredentism: the Moroccan liberation army and decolonisation in the Sahara

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.