Western Sahara, Palestine, Chagos: The Crisis of Selective Legality

A rules-based order fails when rules bend for strategic convenience but remain rigid for the weak

International Relations

By Vijay Makhan

The issues of Western Sahara, Palestine and the Chagos Archipelago are no longer merely territorial disputes. Together, they have become revealing tests of whether international law, self-determination and decolonisation principles still retain meaning in an increasingly transactional world order. Hence my question: is this the quiet collapse of principle?

Last week, I raised the Western Sahara issue. This matter has been hanging fire since 1975 when, faced with a possible war with Morocco which had unleashed its Green March into the territory, Spain ordered its troops to step back and leave. It did not address the constitutional status of Western Sahara (formerly Spanish Sahara) and of its population. The Madrid Accords, never recognised by the UN, were surreptitiously signed, dividing the territory between Morocco and Mauritania despite the ICJ ruling of that year. Spain prioritised geopolitical alliances over decolonisation. The UN had advocated a referendum in that territory.

Rules-based order. Pic – South China Morning Post

My reflections on Western Sahara and the crisis of international legitimacy beg a broader and perhaps more uncomfortable question. Is the issue merely about one unresolved decolonisation dispute in North Africa, or does it instead reveal a deeper malaise affecting the international system itself?

Increasingly, one cannot avoid drawing parallels, albeit cautiously, between Western Sahara, Palestine and the Chagos Archipelago.

Each possesses its own historical specificity and legal complexity. Yet, all three reveal, in different ways, the widening gap between proclaimed international principles and geopolitical reality.

Palestine: The Erosion of Multilateral Credibility

In the case of Palestine, the contradiction has become especially stark. Decades of United Nations resolutions, repeated affirmations of Palestinian rights and mounting humanitarian concern have coexisted with a persistent inability and seeming unwillingness of the international community to enforce meaningful restraint or produce a durable political settlement.

Even after the ceasefire in Gaza, Israel has now directed its forces to consolidate control over roughly 70 per cent of the territory. The relatively muted and cautious reactions from major international actors have reinforced the perception, already deeply rooted across much of the Global South, that international legality and humanitarian principles are often subordinated to strategic alignments and geopolitical convenience.

One may or may not agree with that perception, but its political consequences are profound. The credibility of the multilateral order is under scrutiny. Is the international community applying its principles, legal texts and institutional declarations consistently?

Chagos: The same tension between law and power

The Chagos issue, though vastly different in context and scale, revealed another dimension of the same tension between law and power. Mauritius pursued its case through international legality and multilateral diplomacy, culminating in the 2019 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice and subsequent United Nations General Assembly resolutions affirming that the decolonisation of Mauritius had not been lawfully completed. Even after those landmark pronouncements, implementation itself has become subject to prolonged political negotiation shaped by strategic considerations on account of the Diego Garcia military base.

Once again, principle and geopolitical calculation appeared to evolve along parallel tracks.

Western Sahara: No diplomatic clarity

Western Sahara occupies a similarly uneasy space. The territory has remained on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories since 1963. The ICJ Advisory Opinion of 1975 affirmed that no ties of territorial sovereignty existed that could negate the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination. The admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic into the Organisation of African Unity in 1984, and its continuing membership within the African Union, reflect Africa’s own historical understanding of the issue as fundamentally one of decolonisation.

It is equally worth recalling that former United States Secretary of State James Baker III, acting as the Personal Envoy of the UN Secretary-General, had elaborated a detailed roadmap intended to break the impasse. The Baker Plan II proposed a transitional arrangement culminating in an act of self-determination. Significantly, the proposal, formally supported by the Security Council (Resolution 1495), was accepted by the Polisario Front but rejected by Morocco.

That moment remains historically important because it demonstrated that a serious UN-backed pathway had once genuinely existed. More recently, however, the adoption by the United Nations Security Council of Resolution 2797 (2025) has generated fresh ambiguity.

Morocco has naturally sought to present the resolution as a diplomatic vindication of its position because the text refers to the Moroccan autonomy initiative as a basis for negotiations. That interpretation remains contested.

Algeria, which abstained during the vote, has firmly reiterated that the conflict concerns two principal protagonists, Morocco and the Polisario Front, while Algeria and Mauritania should participate as observers rather than parties to the dispute.

Clearly there is no diplomatic clarity but rather increasing interpretative contestation. And therein lies the broader concern.

Multilateral legitimacy: A quiet erosion

The language of international diplomacy often evolves incrementally. A carefully inserted phrase, a subtly reformulated paragraph or a nuanced shift in terminology can gradually reshape the political framework surrounding a dispute. Is that pragmatic realism or the slow normalisation of a fait accompli?

This should concern not only Africa but all states that continue to place their trust in the integrity of the international system. For many countries of the Global South, faith in international law and decolonisation norms was never merely theoretical. It formed part of the very architecture through which post-colonial states sought protection, recognition and sovereign equality within an unequal international order.

That is why the parallels between Palestine, Western Sahara and Chagos resonate so deeply. Not because the situations are identical. They are not. But together, they illuminate a growing perception that international legality is becoming increasingly conditional, selective and vulnerable to geopolitical hierarchy. If that perception consolidates itself globally, the consequences for multilateral legitimacy will be far-reaching.

The world frequently invokes the language of a “rules-based international order.” However, rules cannot indefinitely retain authority if they are seen to bend according to strategic convenience while remaining rigid for the weak. Is that then the deeper unease confronting the contemporary international system?

Not simply that certain disputes remain unresolved, but that the world may gradually succumb to coexisting with the erosion of the very principles upon which post-colonial international legitimacy was originally constructed.

Once confidence in those principles begins to erode quietly, rebuilding it will certainly become more difficult than preserving it would once have been.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 5 June 2026