Fez – If you are a keen observer of the decades-long Western Sahara dispute or just an occasional reader of developments in Morocco and the Maghreb, you have certainly repeatedly heard or read in the past few weeks that the latest UN resolution on the Sahara dispute, which the Security Council adopted on this past October 31, constitutes a decisive development and a watershed moment . I think this is true to a very large extent, especially in terms of this resolution’s implications for the future of the Western Sahara region in southern Morocco.

Yet, to more accurately make sense of it, my take is that the resolution is neither wholly unprecedented, nor was it particularly surprising. Instead, and I make this point in many sections of my latest book on the Sahara , which was published a year before the much-hailed UN resolution, it represents the inevitable culmination of a historical process with two origins. While is ane distant and the other one is more recent, these two origins shaped the political destiny of the region for the past five decades.

The Green March set the stage for everything that has taken shape since

The distant origin dates back to November 6, 1975, when the late King Hassan II orchestrated the Green March . Spain still administered the territory back then, while Algeria was starting to insert itself deeper into the dispute by supporting and hosting the separatist Polisario Front. And with the Cold War-shaped ideological contests of that era making the idea of “decolonization” particularly galvanizing across the Global South, Algeria knew that it had the ideological or philosophical upper hand it needed to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Morocco’s claim of historical sovereignty over that region.

Perhaps more troubling for Rabat, despite divergent interests (Madrid wanted to stay in the Sahara or at least leave behind a subservient local elite, while Algiers wanted to stage a “decolonization struggle” that would result in the emergence of a satellite state it could then use to freely access the Atlantic Ocean and undermine Morocco’s continental depth), Spain and Algeria were willing to align their positions around their shared objective of preventing Morocco from recovering its southern provinces.

Given this complex climate, it is no exaggeration to describe the Green March as a strategic epoch-making masterstroke by King Hassan II.