On 31 October 2025, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2797 on the Western Sahara dispute, extending the mandate of the long-standing UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). Unlike earlier initiatives that framed the conflict almost exclusively through the lens of the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination, the Resolution marks a significant recalibration of the Council’s approach. For the first time, it explicitly designates Morocco’s 2007 Autonomy Proposal as the preferred framework for moving negotiations forward and determining the territory’s final status.
This reorientation does not occur in isolation. Over the past decade, leading global and regional powers have increasingly characterised the Moroccan proposal as the “most credible, viable, and pragmatic” basis for a settlement, reflecting growing frustration with the perceived stagnation of a referendum-centred approach. Resolution 2797 thus aligns with a broader international trend: a movement away from a strict, outcome-open model of self-determination toward a more politically realist, autonomy-driven framework.
While this pragmatism may be understandable in light of the Council’s mandate to maintain international peace and security, it also underscores the need to ensure that political realism does not override core principles of international law. This article argues that Resolution 2797 neither settles the status of Western Sahara nor nullifies self-determination, but recasts it within an autonomy-centred framework whose legitimacy will depend on how far it incorporates meaningful, Sahrawi-driven consent.
The Uncertainty of Western Sahara: From Nomadism to Statehood
The Western Sahara dispute remains one of the most persistent and politically charged territorial conflicts on the international agenda, shaping debates in both international politics and international law. The territory—rich in phosphates, endowed with fertile fishing grounds, and strategically positioned along an extended Atlantic coastline—has long been inhabited by the nomadic Sahrawi people. However, following the end of Spanish colonial rule, Morocco began to assert that Western Sahara formed an integral part of its historical territory, gradually establishing administrative and military control over approximately 80 per cent of the region.
In this regard, over the decades, Rabat has implemented a series of policies and infrastructures aimed at consolidating its de facto authority over the region. These include major infrastructure initiatives such as the Dakhla Atlantic Port and a 1,055-kilometre motorway.
It must be noted that at least 90,000 people of Sahrawi-origin live in Moroccan-administered cities like Laayoune and Dakhla, while about 180,000 live in the Tindouf camps. The latter witnessed the establishment in 1976 of a Sahrawi nationalist movement, which then proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in the areas outside Moroccan control.
Owing to the dispute’s unresolved nature, the Sahara remains one of the largest “unfinished” decolonisation cases. Such conflicts do not emerge spontaneously, but evolve from layered historical, territorial, and identity-based drivers. Unlike purely ideological rivalries, territorial questions tend to endure because they touch upon sovereignty, identity, and national continuity. Their resolution is rarely immediate; it often requires structural changes in decision-making environments, shifts in diplomatic alignments, or recalibration of regional balances of power.
The Sahara conflict has sometimes been compared to “frozen conflicts” in the post-Soviet or post-colonial space. However, this analogy is incomplete. While similar conflicts are often sustained through external sponsorship and geopolitical inertia, the Sahara question retains a distinct history: it originated as an issue of territorial ownership following decolonisation, not one of secession from an existing nation-state. This historical framing is essential to understanding why the conflict persists and how Resolution 2797 alters its strategic trajectory.
The legal foundation of the dispute were set in the 1975 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Although Morocco argued before the Court that historical, cultural, and economic ties justified recognition of its sovereignty, the ICJ found these ties insufficient to establish a territorial title between Morocco and Western Sahara. Instead, the Court affirmed the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination. Following this, both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council endorsed this right in multiple resolutions and, in 1991, established MINURSO to facilitate a referendum allowing the Sahrawis to exercise it—an objective that remains unrealised more than three decades later.
Against this backdrop, the recent adoption of Resolution 2797 by the Security Council brings forth a critical dilemma: In disputes over contested territorial sovereignty, should absolute adherence to the right of self-determination, including the prospect of statehood, be maintained at the expense of resolution, or should pragmatic and problem-solving approaches be prioritised, thereby subordinating the mere application of this right to the pursuit of a durable settlement?
Resolution 2797 and the Right to Self-Determination
At this dilemma, understanding the essence of the right to self-determination becomes crucial. As one of the foundational principles of contemporary international law, self-determination embodies a people’s ability to determine their political status freely and to pursue their economic, social, and cultural development without external interference. Enshrined in the UN Charter, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, it is not merely a political aspiration but a binding legal entitlement with both procedural and substantive dimensions.
Substantively, the right guarantees that the people concerned can choose among a full spectrum of political options—ranging from independence and integration to free association or autonomy—through a process that reflects their genuine, uncoerced will. Procedurally, the exercise of this right requires safeguards for political agency: an environment free of demographic manipulation, political pressure, coercion, or unilateral actions by the administering or occupying power. Where these conditions are absent, the purported “choices” offered to a population cannot be considered valid under international law.
Crucially, international jurisprudence and UN practice affirm that self-determination must be people-driven, not state-imposed. A political arrangement, including autonomy, is compatible with the principle only if it emerges from the freely expressed will of the people concerned. A top-down model—however administratively detailed or externally endorsed—cannot substitute for a legitimate act of self-determination. In this respect, the legitimacy of any proposed settlement hinges not on its perceived pragmatism or geopolitical convenience but on whether it reflects the autonomous political choice of local people.
Balancing Pragmatism and Principle
Understanding these elements is essential to assessing the implications of Resolution 2797. By privileging an externally constructed autonomy framework over an open-ended process that allows for genuine political choice, the Resolution risks shifting the focus from enabling self-determination to circumscribing it—thereby raising fundamental questions about the compatibility of its approach with established international legal norms.
However, it must also be acknowledged that an absolutist insistence on a referendum-based, independence-oriented understanding of self-determination has, for decades, contributed to a persistent diplomatic stalemate. The rigid expectation that the conflict can be resolved only through the whole, unconditioned exercise of the right—interpreted narrowly as an immediate, binary choice between independence and continued integration—has often proven politically unworkable.
In this sense, a more pragmatic approach that seeks to integrate, rather than eliminate, the principle of self-determination may offer a more viable pathway forward. Viewed from this perspective, Resolution 2797 can be interpreted as an attempt—however imperfect—to move beyond an endless cycle of deadlock by embedding the notion of self-determination within a structured political process.
Recent geopolitical shifts, from the war in Ukraine to new alignments in the Indo-Pacific, have accelerated the recalibration of global diplomatic postures. Resolution 2797 should, therefore, also be read against this backdrop of shifting great-power priorities, in which unresolved disputes are increasingly evaluated not only in legal terms but in relation to energy corridors, connectivity projects, and broader regional security architectures.
In many post-colonial disputes, funding, aid, and diplomatic sponsorship have shaped negotiation flexibility: international assistance can either entrench maximalist positions or encourage compromise, depending on how it is structured. In this sense, the Sahara conflict has also been influenced by patterns of external support, not only symbolic political endorsements, but also military aid, financing channels, and development partnerships.
Resolution 2797 signals the exhaustion of approaches that sustain indefinite provisional arrangements. Instead, it reflects a shift toward solutions that prioritise stability, development, and institutional integration, marking a transition from aid-dependency narratives toward frameworks of regional economic participation.
Still, pragmatism cannot legitimately replace the core content of self-determination; it can only operate alongside it. The task, therefore, is not to dilute the right but to design a political framework that both acknowledges the complexities of the dispute and preserves the Sahrawi people’s ability to shape their own future in a meaningful way. Several steps could strengthen the Resolution’s alignment with international law while giving political negotiations renewed momentum:
1. Reintroducing Genuine Choice Into the Process:
An autonomy-based framework would be more consistent with the law of self-determination if it were complemented by an explicit commitment that its acceptance, modification, or rejection remains subject to the freely expressed will of the Sahrawi people. Embedding a consultative or phased referendum—once credible conditions are restored—would preserve the integrity of the right without freezing diplomacy.
2. Ensuring Sahrawi Participation in Designing Autonomy:
An autonomy arrangement gains legitimacy only when co-produced by the population concerned. Establishing a Sahrawi-led constitutional or institutional drafting body, supported but not directed by international mediators, would help transform autonomy from an externally imposed model into a negotiated political vision.
3. Guaranteeing Human Rights and Political Freedoms During the Interim:
For any political choice to be genuinely free, the Sahrawi population must be able to participate in public life without fear, coercion, or repression. A strengthened human rights monitoring mandate for MINURSO—or an independent parallel mechanism—would foster conditions that enable meaningful self-determination.
4. Preventing Contested Demographic Changes and Ensuring Voter Integrity:
The long-standing disputes over voter identification and demographic manipulation must be addressed through a transparent, internationally supervised mechanism. Without this, any political solution risks raising serious questions of fairness and legal robustness.
5. Anchoring Autonomy Within an Open-Ended Final Status Process:
Autonomy should not be treated as the predetermined final outcome but as one possible stage in a broader process leading to a definitive political settlement. Framing it as a provisional arrangement pending a later act of self-determination would reconcile pragmatic progress with legal principle.
Incorporating such safeguards would allow Resolution 2797 to function not as a substitute for self-determination but as a structured pathway toward its meaningful fulfilment. A political process that blends pragmatism with legal fidelity could generate the stability the Security Council seeks while ensuring that the Sahrawi people remain the authors—rather than the subjects—of their political future.
Indeed, there are historical precedents in which the right to self-determination was not abandoned but pragmatically reconciled with the political realities of complex territorial disputes. In Bougainville, the 2001 Peace Agreement established a robust autonomy arrangement as an interim framework, while leaving the territory’s final status to a future act of self-determination once credible conditions were restored—a model that both ended armed conflict and preserved the core of the right. Similarly, in New Caledonia, the Nouméa Accord introduced a long transitional period marked by the gradual transfer of powers and a series of self-determination referendums, ensuring that the population’s ultimate political choice remained central to the process. The Åland Islands provide yet another example: through extensive autonomy, institutional safeguards, and demilitarisation, a durable settlement was reached without an immediate independence referendum, while still securing the local population’s cultural and political self-governance. Taken together, these cases demonstrate that viable, stable, and legally sound solutions often emerge not from rigid insistence on a single interpretation of self-determination, but from hybrid arrangements that balance the principle’s normative core with pragmatic mechanisms of conflict management.
For Western Sahara, these precedents suggest that a phased autonomy-plus-referendum model, anchored in clear timelines and independent monitoring, may offer a more credible pathway than either immediate independence or indefinite autonomy without a revisable final status.
Ultimately, the challenge lies in charting a path that preserves the normative essence of the right to self-determination while recognising the geopolitical complexities that have long impeded progress. Such a path is possible only through a process in which the Sahrawi people are not passive recipients of externally crafted proposals but active participants in shaping the future governance of their territory. At the same time, Morocco’s security concerns and political interests must be engaged through a framework that ensures stability without predetermining the final outcome.
Striking this balance is not solely the responsibility of the parties but falls, in significant part, to the international community—above all, the UN Security Council and the institutions tasked with safeguarding international peace and legality. These bodies must ensure that political expediency does not override the fundamental requirements of international law, while also avoiding the paralysis that an absolutist approach to self-determination can produce. A reinvigorated, inclusive, and legally grounded diplomatic process—supported by credible monitoring mechanisms, transparent political guarantees, and a structured pathway for genuine public participation—offers the only realistic avenue for reconciling principle with practice.
The core question is not whether autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty ends the legal discourse of self-determination, but whether it redefines it within a contemporary constitutional paradigm. Autonomy, in this sense, does not negate identity; it embeds it within a functional model of local governance supported by national sovereignty and international recognition.
If implemented with robust procedural safeguards, including guaranteed representation, protected cultural expression, resource-sharing, and transparent democratic mechanisms, autonomy can fulfil the substantive requirements of self-determination more effectively than indefinite referenda or open-ended provisional mandates. In this regard, the Autonomy Plan offers not merely a Moroccan solution, but a pragmatic legal pathway to overcome paralysis, restore political agency to local communities, and facilitate broader regional cooperation.
Ultimately, the Sahara question may only progress toward resolution if pragmatism and principle are treated as complementary rather than competing imperatives. A political process that allows the Sahrawi population to shape institutional arrangements, while also accommodating Morocco’s sovereignty-related concerns and the interests of the wider regional security environment, offers a realistic foundation for moving forward. If the parties and the international community can support such a dual-track approach—one that tempers strategic imperatives with legal fidelity—Resolution 2797 may serve not as a departure from self-determination, but as a structured evolution of it, aligning stability with legitimacy in pursuit of a lasting political settlement.
