Paper short abstract:

Multidisciplinary presentation of an anthropological work in the Western Sahara - Laayoune and Dakhla - and its philosophical analysis, to think about the limits of international law using literature as a territorial definition to extractivist sovereignty.

Paper long abstract:

This work takes place through a transdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and philosophy. The starting point of our contribution is based in a four-month fieldwork research - as a preamble to a longer research - in Western Sahara, mainly around the regions of Dakhla and Laayoune. The empirical data of this ethnography is based on the observation of this "local" economy which is characterized by the colonial extraction of natural resources.

In this dynamic, it is the economical, politico-religious, and legal inscriptions that determine the prolongation of a colonial situation whose analysis must be made. In that sense, the clientelist relations and their resistances to the long time are one of the consequences of this post-colonial political order that we will analyze. We propose to think about the consequences of a delinking (Mignolo, 2007) from the economic, legal, and literary representations produced by europeo-centrism. In fact, taking this shift, allows us to analyze a "regime of historicity" (Hartog, 2003) alongside the colonial library (Mudimbe, 1988): manuscripts, architectural forms, economic and ideas circulations, oral histories, and invisible entities. The poems of Mohamed Salah Abdelfatah "Ebnu" or Limam Boisha offers an apprehension of extractivism and the logics of coloniality but also of the spaces of possible emancipations and recognitions that do not respond to the configurations of the jus publicum europeanum : the colonial/extractivistic matrix of international law.