The enormous academic work concentrating on Western Sahara’s colonization is understandable considering that this form of modern slavery has persisted long after Africa’s decades of democratization (the 1950s and the 1960s). The objective of the paper is to contribute to the understanding of the challenges faced by Western Sahara. Victimized by colonialists from Europe (Spain) since the first “scramble for Africa” in the 19th century and recolonized by its neighboring North African nation-states (Morocco and Mauritania) since the 1970s, various stakeholders have raised their interests in the decolonization of Western Sahara for various reasons. The paper also presents the concept of geopolitics and geoeconomics of major natural resources and the neoliberal approach to international relations. It also indicates the strategies that nations and regional politicoeconomic organizations could follow to pressurize Morocco to move out of Western Sahara. A need for further understanding of the characteristics of entities that may be sympathetic to Western Sahara’s cause is also stressed.

There is enormous academic work on Western Sahara’s colonization and the number of publications arising from the effort is growing. The increasing scholarship is understandable considering that most of them deplore this form of modern slavery that has persisted long after Africa’s decades of democratization (the 1950s and the 1960s). The difficulties involved in the pursuit of development in Africa, like all underdeveloped regions (Latin America and Asia), within their economic, social and environmental sectors, constitute the major focal point of most of the discourses of the economic regions. Lenin, Nkrumah and Rodney, among others, have taken interest in imperialism and the way it contributed to underdevelopment of African countries. Some have examined the contribution of European countries to the process by partitioning of African nation-states in the previous centuries. For example, the latter, like other adversities, were enforced by Europeans through a series of adversities—unequal trade in commodities, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, colonialism, neocolonialism/imperialism1 and the ongoing neoliberalism. Since the 1970s,2 discourses have involved the concept of development as a means of tackling the challenges of specific and general regions.3 After the end of the Second World War and the formation of the United Nations (UN) in the 1950s, issues shifted towards a new concentration on the development of Africa and the rest of the less developed countries, i.e., compared to those developed countries that had achieved considerable economic growth, and by extension, high consumerist societies or affluence by what some claim to be the application of innovations in technical and social dimensions.4 This claim has been disputed by other scholars who point to the way the rapid economic growth was achieved by the so-called developed countries, resorting to criminal and inhuman use of slave labor in the USA. The criminal and inhuman nature of colonialism, like the earlier Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, led to an (informal?) agreement to stop those perpetrating colonialism from the practice. However, as has been informed and documented, European colonialists, slave traders, and their allies never relinquished these insidious practices. Instead, they reformulated colonialism into more insidious varieties (neocolonialism, postcolonialism and neoliberalism, among other forms of exploitation).

International Relations Journal, Accelerating, Decolonization, Nigeria’s Experience, Global Geopolitics, Geoeconomics, scramble for Africa, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Neoliberalism.