Breaking the siege in the International Relations: international resistance from Palestine and Western Sahara

Abstract

Palestinian and Saharawi resistance to Israeli and Moroccan military occupation and colonization has taken creative forms, inevitably engaging internationally, while Palestinians and Sahrawis endeavor to disseminate their own narratives. For instance, alternative media and social networks are added to the means used to break both physical and informational siege, against editorial limitations or political alliances that dictate how news stories are framed or silenced and how struggles are legitimized or vilified, either they use violent tactics or not. This paper tackles Palestinian and Saharawi resistance as a dispute and expansion of spaces of international solidarity, and to address them it brings recent experiences. Such expansion happens especially through alternative means of communication, but also through growing political and academic engagement from various levels and disciplines, especially but not only from general social sciences, International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL). Moreover, state and international civil society actors get involved not only due to ethical concerns with human rights violations but also as a direct engagement in struggles for liberation. Hence, spaces in which Palestinian, Saharawi and international activists promote resistance are addressed here as an ongoing dispute for the international arena, drawing contributions from IR and IL.