Development as Domination: Settler Tourism in Western Sahara and the Commodification of Occupied Territories in Trumpist International Law

[Andrea Maria Pelliconi is a Lecturer in Human Rights Law & Global Justice at the University of Southampton, where she researches demographic engineering, displacement, and international law. She is currently undertaking a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project on the Western Sahara dispute with Dr. Victor Kattan (University of Nottingham).]

“Dakhla is essentially a military camp”, wrote (former) British diplomat Simon Pease in his report to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office about his visit to occupied Western Sahara in October 1989. Today, by contrast, the city presents a markedly different image to the eye of the visitor. Increasingly marketed as a low-cost tourist destination, the official website of the Moroccan National Tourism Office (MNTO) describes it as “the pearl of southern Morocco”, “a small part of paradise”, and “one of the most beautiful [shores] in Morocco”. The airlines Royal Air Maroc, Binter Canarias, and Transavia operate regular scheduled and charter flights to Dakhla Airport and Ryanair has opened a new route from Dakhla to Madrid and Lanzarote in January 2025. Yet, this growing appeal to holidaymakers conceals a deeper reality: that these resorts and beaches lie on occupied land, within a territory marked by ongoing military hostilities. 

Western Sahara – a former Spanish colony listed as a Non-Self-Governing Territory since 1963 – has been the subject of competing claims by Morocco and Mauritania, who were largely motivated by its phosphate wealth, and the Algeria-backed national liberation movement “Polisario Front”. On 16 October 1975, the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s Advisory Opinion on Western Sahara determined that the status of Western Sahara should be decided through the self-determination of the Indigenous Sahrawi people. In response, on 6 November 1975, Morocco launched the so-called “Green March”, during which 350,000 Moroccan civilian settlers entered the region, escorted by the military. Under the coercive pressure of the Green March, Spain signed the Madrid Accords on 14 November 1975, dividing the territory of Western Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania and giving them administrative control – rather than sovereignty – with responsibility to organize a referendum on self-determination. Following the bloodless coup d’état of 10 July 1978, Mauritania signed an agreement with the Polisario Front and withdrew from occupied Western Sahara, but Morocco assumed control of the former Mauritanian portion, entrenching its occupation over approximately 80% of Western Sahara. 

During these years, between 70,000 and 100,000 Sahrawi sought asylum in Algerian refugee camps, where the Polisario Front established its base. At the same time, increasing numbers of Moroccan nationals have settled in vacated Sahrawi lands, prompted by tax and financial incentives and large-scale investments and development projects promoted by Morocco’s King Hassan II. Dakhla has grown from an estimated population of 6,692 according to the 1974 Spanish census to over 167,000 in 2024. Today, Sahrawis constitute a minority in their own homeland, estimated to comprise only one-quarter of the 600,000 people in occupied Western Sahara. The efforts to organize a referendum on self-determination under the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara have been indefinitely postponed, primarily due to disputes over voter eligibility, with Morocco attempting to include Moroccan settlers and exclude Sahrawis displaced abroad. In 2020, amid growing frustration over the failure of the referendum process, the Polisario Front and Morocco broke the ceasefire that had been in place since 1991, revitalizing the armed conflict.

In a series of decisions culminating in the judgments of 4 October 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled against the inclusion of products originating from occupied Western Sahara in EU-Morocco trade and fisheries agreements, citing the lack of consent from the Indigenous Sahrawi population in violation of their right to self-determination. In November 2018, the CJEU had also clarified that the Euro-Mediterranean Aviation Agreement cannot legally apply to Western Sahara, because the latter is not part of Morocco’s territory under international law. This was reiterated in December 2024 by the European Commission in its response to a question raised by Irish Sinn Féin Member of the European Parliament Lynn Boylan on Ryanair’s international and EU law obligations resulting from operating within an occupied territory after the Dublin-based company announced the new route in November 2024. 

Despite this, Ryanair started flying to Dakhla in January 2025 and other European airlines – the Spanish Binter Canarias and the Dutch Transavia, part of the Air France–KLM group – continue to operate their flights. While Western Sahara’s airspace is formally included in the Canary Islands Flight Information Region (FIR), assigned to Spain by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), Spain does not maintain operational control towers in the territory so Morocco de facto operates the existing infrastructure without an official transfer of competencies. Negotiations regarding airspace management were referenced in the Spanish-Moroccan Joint Declaration of 7 April 2022, which set a roadmap for renewed bilateral cooperation. According to the Spanish government, no formal agreement on the transfer of airspace authority has been reached. In practice, however, airlines coordinate with Moroccan aviation authorities and in partnership with the Moroccan National Tourist Office, effectively treating Morocco as if it was the acting sovereign power. Moroccan police was also able to expel a journalist and two activists from Spain as they landed in Dakhla with the first Ryanair flight. 

This situation risks further entrenching Moroccan authority and undermining the distinct legal status of the territory, against the duty of non-recognition of any situation arising from a serious breach of international law (Article 41(2) of the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts), particularly where it entails the denial of the right to self-determination, the unlawful use of force, or the violation of the prohibition of territorial annexation. This has been recently reaffirmed by the ICJ in its Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which concluded that the Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank constitutes a breach of international law, confirming the prohibition of territorial annexation and settlements in occupied territories. The ICJ reiterated that all states and international organizations alike must neither recognize nor assist in maintaining the illegal situation resulting from such policies and must cooperate to bring the situation to an end. This applies, too, to Morocco’s annexation and settlement policies. 

A striking parallel can be drawn between Morocco’s tactics in Western Sahara and Israel’s development of tourism infrastructure in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Despite their internationally recognised status as part of Syria, Israel has pursued policies of integration and economic exploitation, including settlement expansion and the promotion of real estate and tourism, which, like the forgotten conflict in Western Sahara, has largely gone unnoticed by the mainstream international media. Developments projects are routinely accompanied by rebranding efforts that obscure the occupied status of the territory, presenting it as a legitimate and attractive domestic destination. Examples include ski resorts in Mount Hermon, the settlement of “Trump Heights”, named in gratitude to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the area, and, since April 2025, military-organized civilian hiking tours in Mount Hermon, the Ruqqad river valley, Shebaa Farms, and remnants of the Ottoman Hejaz railway. 

Early in 2025, President Trump has also proposed the “re-development” of the Gaza Strip, currently under a genocidal and annexational assault by Israel, into a luxury waterfront resort zone (a “Riviera of the Middle East”), predicated on the forced permanent expulsion of its Palestinian population. While grotesque and seemingly absurd in its bluntness, this proposal merely renders manifest a logic already at work in numerous occupied territories around the world. Trump elevates “property developer mentality” to geopolitical strategism, openly disregards fundamental principles such as the right to self-determination, and proposes “a complete jettisoning not just of a vestigial ‘rules-based international order’ but of the very idea of sovereignty claims binding together states, territories, and populations.” But these norms have long been systematically undermined by practices that long predate Trump’s latest shenanigans. The re-framing of occupied lands and collective spaces as commodified apolitical sites for private investment, real estate projects, and consumer leisure under the label of economic and “civilisational” development represents not just a violation of international law, but its deliberate normalisation. This profit-oriented repurposing of land usurpation is embedded within broader strategies to entrench occupation, alter demographic realities, and establish “facts on the ground” aimed at securing acquiescence of illegal territorial claims, in direct defiance of peremptory norms of international law and the rights of Indigenous or occupied populations.

As critical legal scholars have long argued, these are not anomalies but rather expressions of international law’s foundational complicity with empire, extraction, racialized dispossession and appropriation, a system of “civitas civitati lupus” (to paraphrase Hobbes’ celebre phrase “homo homini lupus”) which masks as order its core logic of conquest and domination. Trump’s dystopian visions (from Greenland to Panama, from Eastern Ukraine to Palestine), constrained less by common values and normative commitments than by realpolitik considerations, do not so much disrupt the international order as they lay bare the underlying architecture that has long sustained it. As such, Morocco’s intensifying integration of Western Sahara into its economy, premised on landgrab and segregation and facilitated by European complicity and rhetorical appeals to “development”, reflects international law’s systemic inability to restrain the normalisation of territorial conquest as governance. 

Photo attribution: “Western Sahara Landscape” by UN Photo/Martine Perret is licenced under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0