Sovereignty in translation: Western Sahara, international law, and translation as a decolonial strategy

This article reframes the Western Sahara dispute as a translational struggle over sovereignty rather than a primarily geopolitical or juridical conflict. It argues that sovereignty in this case is not a stable legal category awaiting recognition, but a concept produced and reconfigured as it travels across asymmetrical epistemic regimes—precolonial Maghrebi political practice, colonial administration, and the institutional language of international law. Drawing on postcolonial Translation Studies and critical international legal scholarship, the article shows how colonial translation regimes rendered Moroccan relational sovereignty—anchored in the bayʿa—legible only as symbolic loyalty, generating archival silences that later structured what could count as admissible evidence. It then analyzes the International Court of Justice’s 1975 Advisory Opinion as a translation regime that both acknowledged “legal ties” and neutralized their sovereign force by domesticating bayʿa as “allegiance”, privileging colonial documentation, and evaluating Saharan governance through Westphalian criteria. The article analyzes Morocco’s counter-hegemonic strategy of “counter-translation”, especially through narrative reframing and hybrid political texts such as the 2007 Autonomy Plan. The article concludes that translation is not merely implicated in colonial containment; it can also operate as a decolonial strategy—expanding the field of intelligibility, recovering silenced genealogies of authority, and enabling a pluriversal conception of sovereignty.