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Introduction
If the nature of parastates makes them all unfit for Westphalian models due to the contested nature of their declarative and constitutive statehood (Rossi in this special issue), Western Sahara (the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, SADR) might possibly be the least fit. None of the terms that have been put forward to refer to those liminal polities (Mälksoo 2012; McConnell 2017; Corcuff 2012) that claim statehood but lack full sovereignty in either internal/operational or external/recognitional terms do justice to this case with full accuracy. The SADR certainly fulfills four of Scott Pegg’s (1998, 26) six essential definitional elements of what he calls “de facto states:” organized political leadership with some popular support, capacity to provide governance or governmental services to a given population, self-assigned capacity to enter into relations with other states, and the search for widespread international recognition of its sovereignty (see also Berg and Toomla 2009; Florea 2017). However, what is distinctly missing here is, first and foremost, an effective control of the territory at stake for an extended period of time. Secondly, it cannot be absolutely claimed that the SADR has been “unable to achieve any degree of substantive recognition and therefore remains illegitimate in the eyes of international society” (Pegg 1998, 26) as, partial as it might be, its degree of international recognition is not close to zero or limited to just a handful of states. The SADR currently maintains diplomatic relations with around 40 sovereign states.
The same issues apply to the criteria for a political entity to qualify as a “quasi-state” set by Pål Kolstø (2006, 725–726; see also Jackson 1993), as well as to Nina Caspersen’s (2012, 11) definition of “unrecognized states”—territories/entities that have “achieved de facto independence” and whose “leadership is seeking to build further state institutions and demonstrate its own legitimacy” but have failed to gain international recognition as independent states (see also Caspersen and Stansfield 2011, 1–2). Kolstø considers Western Sahara as a “borderline case” mainly because its leadership is not “in control of (most of) the territory it claims” (2006, 725–726), while Caspersen, though acknowledging “a number of similarities with the unrecognized states,” outright excludes the SADR from this category for failure to meet the “requirement for de facto independence and territorial control