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Determined diplomacy: land, law, and the strategic outreach of self-determination governments

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Abstract

How do self-determination groups and de facto states use diplomacy to advance their international legitimacy? Lacking diplomatic recognition, aspiring states still foster productive relationships with external actors-trading, allying, and partnering to pursue economic, diplomatic, and military objectives. They do this through ad hoc executive visits, participation in summits, and contact with party leaders, judicial bodies, and other actors. To explore these diplomatic relations and strategies behind them, I employ original data on twelve years of diplomatic visits of the representatives of the Polisario Front and Kurdish Regional Government, and I analyze the Polisario case through 11 interviews with foreign ministry representatives. I find: (1) these governments employ extensive resources to establish a constant presence in third-party states; (2) they employ their resources strategically based on the domestic characteristics and international positioning of these states; (3) their diplomatic reach depends on the kind of appeals they make to external parties.

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Notes

  1. Personal Interview, Sahrawi Camps 2019.

  2. Huang’s (2016) innovative analysis uses a binary variable that indicates that, over the course of the conflict, the rebel government opened at least one diplomatic office abroad, sent at least one representative on a political mission abroad, or created a political body to conduct foreign affairs. With no variation over time or across third-parties, it is unsuitable for testing the ideas presented here.

  3. Sahrawi foreign minister, January 2019.

  4. The favorability scores come from a net count of positive events (statements of support, favorable rulings, lobbying, aid, and creation of new diplomatic channels) and negative events (diplomatic freezes, opposition, and obstruction) in of each country’s government towards the Sahrawi government in this time period.

  5. The appendix shows the same model with logged distance.

  6. The Polisario Front is Western Sahara’s liberation movement, established in 1973; the Sahrawi Republic is the government established in 1976 in the refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria. These two entities share staff and resources, and depending on recognition status, third-parties interact with one or the other of these entities.

  7. Sahrawi foreign minister, December 2018.

  8. Sahrawi ambassador to Algeria, December 2018.

  9. Readers can get an excellent background and full timeline on this conflict from Zunes and Mundy (2022), and a detailed history of MINURSO in Besanyő et al. (2023).

  10. Sahrawi representative in France, December 2018.

  11. Sahrawi foreign minister, December 2018.

  12. Sahrawi representative in France, December 2018.

  13. Sahrawi foreign minister, December 2018.

  14. UN estimate as reported by Bensemra (2016).

  15. In 2014, Human Rights Watch produced a report (HRW 2014) that found most common allegations of human rights abuses in the camps to be unsubstantiated.

  16. Freedom House gives Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara a score of 4/100, one point ahead of North Korea and Eritrea and trailing far behind Venezuela, Russia, and Myanmar (Freedom-House 2023).

  17. Sahrawi ambassador to Algeria, December 2018.

  18. Sahrawi representative to MINURSO, January 2019.

  19. It must be noted that USA’s official recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the territory in 2020 during the Trump Administration’s final weeks has damaged the Sahrawi case by signaling that the USA has given up on upholding territorial sovereignty principles in this conflict.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, USA

    R. Joseph Huddleston

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Appendix

Appendix

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Table 4 Robust to using logged distance
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Huddleston, R.J. Determined diplomacy: land, law, and the strategic outreach of self-determination governments. Int Polit (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00492-2

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