The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival

By Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Refugee camps are typically perceived as militarized and patriarchal
spaces, and yet the Sahrawi refugee camps and their inhabitants
have consistently been represented as ideal in nature: uniquely
secular and democratic spaces, and characterized by gender
equality. Drawing on extensive research with and about Sahrawi
refugees in Algeria, Cuba, Spain, South Africa, and Syria, Fiddian-
Qasmiyeh explores how, why, and to what effect such idealized
depictions have been projected onto the international arena.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780815652366

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies and Co-Director of the Migration Research Unit at UCL, where she is also the Director of the Refuge in a Moving World research network. Her current interdisciplinary research, supported by the AHRC-ESRC, European Research Council and Leverhulme Trust, examines experiences of and responses to displacement in the Middle East. Her books include The Ideal Refugees (2014), The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (2014), South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development (2015), and The Handbook of South-South Relations (2018). She also co-edits the Migration and Society journal.

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3326-6 (cloth)978-0-8156-5236-6 (e-book)

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Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated with love to Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and Bissan-Maria Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and to my grandparents, Eric and Margery Fiddian.

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh is Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, and Junior Research Fellow in Refugee Studies at Lady Margaret Hall. Between 2010 and 2012, Elena was the Director of the International Summer School in Forced Migration at the University of Oxford.

Contents

List of Illustrations and Maps

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction: The Ideal Refugees

1.Engendering the Colonial Encounter

2.The Sahrawi Refugee Camps: International and Solidarity Networks

3.Emerging Discourse: Concealing Islam

4.Secular Sisters, Muslim Others, and the Politics of Survival

5.Discursive Silences, Ideal Women, and Directing Aid

6.Conclusion

Glossary

References

Index

Illustrations and Maps

Photographs and Images

1.Photograph taken during a parade held in Smara refugee camp

2.View of 27 February Camp in 2007

3.View of 27 February Camp in 2007

4.Aerial image of 27 February Camp

5.Female doctors and nurses

6.Women as producers of Sahrawi cultural artifacts

7.Woman leading a female military parade

8.The Fifth NUSW Conference’s plenary session

9.Women preparing for the elections during the Fifth NUSW Conference

10.Poster for the Fifth NUSW Conference

11.The 27 February Camp’s mosque

12.Sahrawi women demonstrating by gaws

13.Distribution of tents in the 27 February Camp

Maps

Map 1. Western Sahara

Map 2. Distribution of the Sahrawi refugee camps

Tables

1.Overview of students’ access to education in the Spanish Sahara

2.Total camp population distributed by age group

3.WFP estimates of the camp population and numbers

4.Percentage and number of children enrolled/not enrolled in each main camp’s schools

5.Summary of claims made regarding Sahrawi

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK is the outcome of a multisited research effort funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (2005–9). My analysis has benefited from consultations with and feedback from various audiences, including during seminars and conferences at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and the Council for British Research in the Levant. In particular, Dawn Chatty, Cathie Lloyd, and Michael Willis (all at the University of Oxford), in addition to Deniz Kandiyoti (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) provided helpful feedback on earlier versions of this book. I also thank my parents, Maria del Carmen Mendez Fernandez and Robin Fiddian, for reading all that I have presented before them. Emma Tobin, Bramble Coppins and Margaret Hauser provided invaluable editorial assistance, part of which was funded through an Oppenheimer Publication Grant awarded by the Oxford Department of International Development (University of Oxford). At Syracuse University Press, I am grateful to the series editors, Mary Selden Evans and Suzanne Guiod for supporting and commissioning this project; and to Marcia Hough, Lisa Renee Kuerbis, Victoria Lane, and Kay Steinmetz for all of their help over the past few years.

My most sincere gratitude is due to Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, for his patience, consistent support, and enduring friendship, especially in the wonderful months following Bissan-Maria’s arrival. Neither this book nor I would be half of what we are today without his encouragement and constant demands that I strive to improve both my work and myself.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Acronyms

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Ideal Refugees

THE UNIQUENESS and social superiority of Sahrawi refugees over other refugees have been systematically proclaimed by Western academics and representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGO) since the establishment of the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps in 1975 and 1976. Based on her 15-day visit to the camps in 1981, Harrell-Bond’s work on the Sahrawi (1981a/b, 1986, and 1999) has often been quoted and referenced in subsequent accounts of the camps. In Imposing Aid (1986), a seminal book that prompted a major shift in the way that refugees and refugee camps around the world are perceived and dealt with by aid providers and academics, she labels the Sahrawi camps a success story amid a failing humanitarian system that creates dependency syndrome among refugees (see also Voutira and Harrell-Bond 2000, 66). Further, under the heading The ‘ideal’ refugee in a 1999 chapter that relies on the same 1981 trip to the camps, Harrell-Bond writes:

I proceeded to tell them [the Sudanese refugee committee] about the good Saharawi who lived under much worse conditions than they did, but who were reluctant to complain. (1999, 151; my emphasis)

The notions of successful camps and of ideal and good refugees have continued to dominate mainstream accounts of the Sahrawi refugee context, with Brazier referring to the Sahrawi camps as the best run refugee camps in the world (1997, 14). Lippert (1987) and San-Martín (2005) also both cite a Red Cross field representative who described the Sahrawi in the 1980s as the most unusual refugees by virtue of their uncorrupt social organization, solidarity and coordination among themselves.

One major characteristic commonly invoked to substantiate claims that the Sahrawi are the ‘ideal’ refugees is their egalitarian approach to gender relations and the position of Sahrawi women in the camps. Hence, Harrell-Bond reports that Sahrawi refugees’ political representatives, the Polisario Front, built a twentieth-century democratic nation, women’s equality being one of the strongest features of their social organization (1999, 156), and that [w]omen’s equality was a most dominant theme of life in the Sahrawi camps (quoted in Indra 1999a, 44). Equally, Oxfam’s desk officer in the mid-1980s wrote that

[p]erhaps the most impressive thing about Sahrawi society is that it is the most fundamentally balanced society I have ever come across in terms of the relationships between men and women. (Mowles 1986, 9)

This book examines the protracted Sahrawi refugee context (1975 to the present) through an analysis of the motivations behind and implications of such widespread representations of Sahrawi refugee women as ideal, free, secular, and unique. Specifically, I examine how and why Sahrawi refugee women are portrayed by their political representatives (the Polisario) and its associated National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW) to different audiences, how the identity of the audience relates to the nature of the representation unveiled, and what the implications are of these representations both for the terms of engagement between the Polisario and camp inhabitants with different audiences and for those living in the camps themselves.

In essence, I argue that gendered images and concepts have been strategically mobilized by the Polisario to secure the humanitarian and political support of Western state and nonstate actors that ensure the continued survival of the camps and their inhabitants. Indeed—while refugees and their representatives are habitually under the critical gaze of foreign visitors and funders and aid is often conditional or tied to certain provisos (such as democratization or the usage of funds for specified purposes)—the case under consideration demonstrates the extent to which such observations are multidirectional (cf. Foucault 1979, 203).

Hence, I propose that the Polisario has recognized the extent to which being perceived to be ideal refugees, directly associated with being democratic, secular, and promoting women’s equality attracts the attention and support of Western academics, NGOs, and civil society and solidarity networks. They have in turn projected a specific image of the camps to ensure these actors’ continued support, just as other aid recipients have done elsewhere (cf. Conklin 1997; Bob 2005). In this respect, the Polisario transcends its enforced status as the observed (i.e., under international scrutiny) and rather simultaneously becomes an observer of its own observers (i.e., the West or the Middle East), and of its own observed (the inhabitants of the refugee camps).

The creation and representation of Sahrawi women and men as the ideal refugees, and more specifically of Sahrawi society as the most fundamentally balanced society . . . ever come across (op. cit.), thus emerges as an indispensable part of the foundation upon which the international solidarity network that maintains the camps is based. This transcends Gandolfi’s suggestion (1989) that the Polisario has internalized an image of Sahrawi women as strong and independent that is related more to a desire and an ideal projection than to something that existed during the colonial period (1884–1975) itself. More specifically, I hold that the hegemonic rhetoric vis-à-vis independent, strong, and secular Sahrawi women is part of the politics of survival developed by the Polisario and is indicative of power relations within and between different groups in the camps and other spheres.

Indeed, I maintain that the transnational political and humanitarian networks upon which the camps are based have a direct impact on the ways in which gendered identities and expectations are constructed and projected within the Sahrawi refugee camps and beyond. Specific representations of Sahrawi women developed and reproduced by the Polisario and non-Sahrawi observers thus reflect specific power dynamics between Sahrawi and non-Sahrawi men and women. In this sense, I aim to reveal the international nature of specific contemporary representations, idealizations, and manipulations of gender and imagined gender relations in the Sahrawi camps. Beyond local or national power dynamics and interplays between different groups in the camps, Sahrawi gender relations (both real and imagined) are also directly implicated in, affected by, and ensure the continuity of essential international solidarity and aid networks and power structures. In this way, Sahrawi gender relations are constructed not only in light of interactions between men and women within a specific refugee camp, but are also derived from social, political and humanitarian interactions on an international scale. Viewing the protracted Sahrawi refugee situation through a gendered lens therefore allows us both to situate the positions of Sahrawi men, women, and children in the camps and to identify the ways in which ideas about gender mediate connections on/between local and international levels.

Representations of Gender and Gendered Representations

Through their role of bearers of cultural values, carriers of traditions, and symbols of the community, Moghadam argues that

the representation of women assumes political significance, and certain images of women define and demarcate political groups, cultural projects, or ethnic communities. Women’s behaviour and appearance . . . come to be defined by, and are frequently the subject of political or cultural objectives of political movements, states and leaderships. (1994, 2)

As Moghadam suggests, the representation of gendered identities or characteristics is based upon an interpretive process throughout which [s]ome manipulation or transformation is unavoidable (Bonner and Goodman 1992, 2). Far from reflecting reality, the precise terms with which individuals and groups are described and portrayed will not only depend upon the interpretive processes of those who produce representations and purport to speak for Others but also on the identity of the particular audience(s) being addressed. Hence, the weakened, dependent, and victimized womenandchildren (Enloe 1990 and 1991) who populate mainstream accounts of complex emergencies and forced displacement (Malkki 1995a, 11; Nordstrom 1999, 65) are central to NGO campaigns designed to obtain political and humanitarian support from civil societies and states for different causes in contexts of complex emergencies (Ng 1997, 155; Nordstrom 1999, 65).

In the regional context of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the symbolic significance given to Muslim women in times of war and peace has in particular been explored by analysts in relation to a variety of colonial and postcolonial contexts. Indeed, Muslim women are habitually the most readily identifiable representatives of Arab Muslim communities, and their symbolic roles become increasingly politicized in periods of conflict and displacement (Afshar et al. 2005; Bahramitash 2005; Zine 2006). Building upon Fanon’s work (in particular his seminal piece Algeria Unveiled (1965) first published in 1959) and Said’s Orientalism (1979), gendered postcolonial studies of the MENA region concentrate on various forms of and motivations for interconnected representations of the national and gendered Self and Other (Yeğenoğlu 1998; Lewis 1995; Abu-Lughod 1998a/b, 2001, 2002). Much of this work explores and critiques "the metonymic association between the Orient and its women, or more precisely the representation of woman as tradition and as the essence of the Orient" (Yeğenoğlu 1998, 99; my emphasis).

Fanon’s identification and analysis of French colonizers’ precise political doctrine to unveil Algerian women as a means of conquering the colonized society (Fanon 1965, 37–38) has been the foundation of postcolonial work that has examined Orientalist representations of the veil¹ and the extent to which unveiling women has frequently become a convenient instrument for signifying many issues at once, that is, the construction of modern [national] identity (Yeğenoğlu 1998, 132). In certain historical contexts,² the veil has carried connotations of Muslim backwardness both in the eyes of Western Orientalists and MENA nationalists (ibid.). Indeed, as stressed by Kandiyoti (1991) and Yeğenoğlu (1998, 135) with reference to Atatürk’s reforms in Turkey, processes of unveiling women as a means of demonstrating the marginalization or displacement of Islam have historically been central to the development of secular modern nationalist discourses.

While secularism is a much-debated concept and political project, it is crucial to note that secularism is not an absence of religion nor must it be antagonistic to religion (Warner 2007, 210). Rather, secularism is a specific cultural formation in its own right (ibid), with the processes of secularization altering the position of religious institutions and shifting the acceptable spaces available for religious practice and performance in a given sociopolitical landscape. Processes of secularization, understood here as the process of religion becoming and remaining a private matter (e.g., Asad 2001 and 2006, 494; also see Hann 2000), are often deeply intertwined with gendered representations and representations of gender that are in turn related to geopolitical dynamics. For instance, as international and national normative preferences for the development of a good and progressive Islam have been solidified throughout different periods of history, gender relations and symbols such as the veil have played a central role in defining the characteristics of good forms of secular Islam (see also Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011a). In addition to the aforementioned historical campaigns to unveil colonized Algerian women and Turkish women under Atatürk, contemporary cases, such as that of France, continue to reveal that

the qualities of secular Muslims were equated with peace, justice, liberty, laïcité, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, individual freedom, free will, the reform of Islam, absolute equality in rights between men and women, and inter-religious dialogue. (Mas 2006, 596; my emphasis)

The association of secularism with unveiling and the promotion of absolute equality in rights between men and women is arguably established and reproduced as a means of countering Orientalist constructions of Muslim cultures, in which the harem, the veil and polygamy were highly charged symbols and they all functioned as synonyms of female oppression (Yeğenoğlu 1998, 100). Indeed, Almond notes that,

[a]mong Muslim female writers, the most frequently encountered objection against Western feminism is one of ethnocentrism: a number of European and American theorists, it is alleged, simply devote their attention to chadors, polygamy and honour-crimes. (2007, 134)

Such objections parallel the challenges posed by Mohanty and Spivak, who have respectively demanded that Western feminist scholarship reject and deconstruct monolithic images of third world women (Mohanty 1988) and that white feminists challenge their own essentialist assumptions that third world women are, as a homogenized whole, subjugated, secluded, illiterate, and violated by their husbands and families (Spivak 1990, 1993b).³ The body of work produced by postcolonial feminists has provided insights into the ways in which representations of women are connected to systems of domination and subordination on national and transnational levels (see Hyndman 2000 and Abu-Lughod 2002). For instance, Nzenza (quoting Alcoff) highlights one such element by stressing that the practice of privileged people speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually ‘resulted [in many cases] in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for’ (1997, 222).

The core of this book develops around a particular set of idealized claims regarding Sahrawi refugee women that I have identified as being repeatedly represented by the Polisario Front to specific non-Sahrawi audiences. In direct contrast to mainstream accounts—which habitually re/create the refugee as a generic and essentialized figure, either as madonnalike figures (Malkki 1992, 33, and 1996, 389) or as weakened, dependent, and victimized womenandchildren (Enloe 1990 and 1991)—Sahrawi women are presented by the Polisario to their Western observers as empowered and liberated women; they are primordial, almost omnipresent, in visual and textual representations of camp life not as victims but rather as key agents, who, to a large extent, appear to overshadow their male compatriots (Figure 1).

This representation of the Sahrawi case could be seen as both taking up the challenge posed by Mohanty and Spivak, and supporting material produced by feminist analysts determined to examine both the positive and the negative impacts of war and exile on gender relations (i.e., Indra 1999b, 16–21; Kumar 2001a, 21, and 2001b, 215ff.). It has been suggested that, since men may be involved in the military and may therefore be absent from civilian settlements, patriarchal structures are often eroded during conflict, and women thus adopt roles and responsibilities previously monopolized by men (see, for example, O’Barr 1985, 23–35; El-Bushra and Mukarubuga 1995; Byrne 1996; Sorensen 1998; Kumar 2001a, esp. 7 and 21). Some of these analysts specifically call for aid provided during times of conflict to counter not merely the harmful effects of conflict, but also to transform gender relations by seizing opportunities for women’s advancement (Kumar 2001b, 221). Indeed, as Moghadam and Kandiyoti remind us, gender equality and female participation are among the noneconomic conditionalities prioritized by Western NGOs and mainstreamed by the new development agenda (Moghadam 1997b, 36; Kandiyoti, in Hammami 2005, 1352; also Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010d).

1. Photograph taken during a parade held in Smara refugee camp, one of the four main Sahrawi refugee camps in southwest Algeria. The parade was organized for non-Sahrawis visiting the camps during the 2007 NUSW Conference (April 2007).

Rather than Sahrawi women being assigned secondary roles in accounts of this protracted refugee situation (as Massad 1995 indicates is the case in texts pertaining to Palestinian nationalism) or treating Sahrawi nationalism as a political movement that fails women (as Abu-Lughod 1998b, 17, stresses is often the case), common representations of the Sahrawi refugee camps emphasize and reemphasize women’s significance as social and political actors (cf. Nzenza 1997, 218). Referring to women’s visibility and centrality in social and political life in the camps (including that given to women in Article 41 of the 1999 Sahrawi Constitution),⁴ this positive impact of the protracted refugee situation is one aspect that has acquired the status of conventional wisdom in the Sahrawi context both over time (from 1975 to the present) and over space (from the camps to audiences based in the West).

However, just as the politics and multiple motivations behind representations of victimized refugee womenandchildren discussed above have been challenged and critiqued, so too must the externally projected portrayal of Sahrawi women as ideal, empowered, and unique refugee women (also see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2009). Rather than taking the Sahrawi as an example that unequivocally supports the notion of refugee camps providing space for positive change, it is necessary to ask why this particular representation has been adopted and reproduced with such ease and precisely how and why it has been naturalized and become part of the regime of the ‘taken-for-granted’ (Hall 1985, 105 in Laffey and Weldes 2004, 28; also, Bourdieu 1985, 729). Indeed, as Abu-Lughod stresses regarding the Middle East,

we have to remind ourselves that although negative images of women or gender relations in the region are certainly to be deplored, offering positive images or nondistorted images will not solve the basic problem . . . about the production of knowledge in and for the West. (2001, 105)

The way in which Sahrawi women have been placed in the national (i.e., Polisario) and international eye must therefore be examined in order to determine how and why the (primarily male) political representatives have developed what I term a gynocentric (i.e., female-centered) policy of international relations directed, specifically, to certain Western audiences.

The consistent repetition of a selected range of oral and written statements and specific visual images pertaining to the situation of Sahrawi women in the camps can be considered to be a coherent body that may be classified as a discourse. I identify this particular discourse as an archive formed by accumulation and repetition (Foucault 1989, 25), which in this case may be viewed as embodying a source of knowledge to be consulted by and transmitted to both Sahrawis and non-Sahrawis. By discourse in this context, I refer to an interconnected body of specific meanings, concepts and images produced by social actors for specific audiences, for particular (often political) purposes. Indeed, Eagleton holds that discourse is social action: while it may purport to describe the world in a specific way, its primary function is performative, as it uses language to bring about particular effects in the observer (1983, 118). The contexts in which discourses are produced and projected are therefore essential, with Ricoeur conceptualizing discourse as an event (1976), which is situated in a particular historical moment and location.

Given that discourses may be utilized to produce specific effects in specific audiences, audiences may not be aware of, or may not identify, the author(s)’ intentions or motivations for creating or enacting a particular representation. Indeed the audience’s interpretation of actions, statements, or processes may be distant from these original authorial intentions, and different audiences will rarely have a common interpretation of the same scenario. On other occasions, however, the distinction between observers and reproducers of a discourse may be blurred, as is the case of individuals and groups who read part of the discourse and then reproduce it themselves through written and oral statements. In this manner, it is possible to speak of a traveling discourse (a term derived from Said’s (1983) notion of traveling theory), in the sense of a discourse traveling between individuals and groups both across time and space.⁵

That the content of a discourse should be reinscribed by separate authors and actors reflects just one aspect in which, beyond the linguistic or thematic components of this body of work, discourse is "both representational and constitutive (Sunderland and Litosseliti 2002, 13; my emphasis). Thus, discourse transcends language per se, by not only transmitting messages to an audience, but also creating itself as both a subject and object of reproduction (Ricoeur 1976, 9), and of study (Sunderland and Litosseliti 2002). In this book, I therefore examine a coherent set of claims and images pertaining to Sahrawi gender relations as a historically and politically based form of representation, while simultaneously exploring the implications of discourses being practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak (Foucault 1972/2006, 54). Since discourses create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe (Said 1979, 94), I argue that this particular representation has played an essential role in creating Western knowledge" about life in the Sahrawi refugee camps, in turn influencing the development of policies and programs implemented there.⁶

I use the term official discourse with regard to this particular representation, first, to illustrate that these terms and concepts are reproduced primarily by Sahrawi individuals in positions of authority within the Polisario and/or NUSW. To an extent, this official discourse can be related to what Anderson refers to as the official nationalism developed by members of sociopolitical and military elites (1991, esp. 86) for political purposes. My conceptualization of a particular set of representations of Sahrawi refugee women as an official discourse is also in line with Kandiyoti’s analysis of "a form of double-speak that upholds the principle of gender equality and social inclusiveness in official pronouncements, while marginalizing women in the allocation of development aid (2007b, 513; my emphasis; also Mani 1989, 88–126, and Sunder Rajan 1993). We could thus reconceptualize this discourse as being intimately related to the aims and motivations of the dominant groups in the camps, and therefore as hegemonic, or authoritative myths" (White 1987, x; also see Darby 1997, 3).

I consider that such discursive structures are often intimately related to the politics of survival, since these are the

stakes, par excellence, of political struggle, the inextricably theoretical and practical struggle for power to preserve or transform the social world by preserving or transforming the categories by which it is perceived. (Bourdieu 1985, 729)

By politics of survival, I refer to the interconnected struggles fought by the Polisario and Sahrawi refugees to ensure that support is obtained from a range of non-Sahrawi state and nonstate actors. Such support both protects refugees’ continued physical existence in the camps and the physical and political survival of the camps as a national project. A useful framework from which to consider the nature of these struggles can be derived from the Copenhagen School of International Relations, with Mälksoo proposing that the politics of survival

not merely signif[ies] the seeking of physical survival for an entity in the international arena but also refer[s] to the quest for meaningful survival; indeed, for survival as a certain sort of being, and the quest to be recognized as such by the significant other(s).(2006, 278; emphasis in the original)

Combined with their underlying demand that the Sahrawi be given the right to self-determination, the Polisario face a "quest for meaningful survival as a political and national entity in the broader international arena, a quest that is directly dependent upon being recognized as such by the ‘significant other(s).’"

I argue that the potential threats to the political survival of the Sahrawi as a people and of the Polisario as a representative body deserving international recognition, in addition to the precarious humanitarian situation that threatens the physical survival of many Sahrawi refugees, are tied in multiple ways to the recognition that gender too is a project which has cultural survival as its end (Butler 1988, 522). I would go further to claim that this case study demonstrates ways in which gender can be intimately related not only to cultural survival but also to political survival. Of particular interest to this analysis, Butler posits (without specific reference to periods of conflict and refugeedom) that "the term ‘strategy’ better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs (ibid). In this book I argue that the official performance" of gender, and more importantly, what I refer to as official repress-entations of gender, have been strategically mobilized to obtain and maintain the humanitarian and political support of particular significant other(s). These repress-entations purposefully centralize certain groups, identifiers, and dynamics, while simultaneously displacing and marginalizing those that challenge official accounts of the camps.⁷

In addition to underlining the hegemonic or authoritative nature of official representations, since discourses exist in relation to other discourses (Sunderland and Litosseliti 2002, 9), these may contradict or compete with each other, at times being examples of resistance to dominant portrayals and modes of being. Indeed, Scott identifies a hierarchy of forms of resistance, highlighting that, while everyday forms of resistance make no headlines (1985, xvii), it is necessary to document and recognize the significance of petty or informal acts of resistance, along with those more explicitly and formally confrontational acts that do make the headlines.⁸ It is precisely due to this a priori acknowledgement of alternatives and the potential for resistance that we must examine the bases, motivations and implications of the privileged terms of engagement and representation that underlie this externally projected official discourse itself.

It is important to stress at this stage that I do not propose that the Polisario, Sahrawi refugees, or non-Sahrawi observers of the camps rely solely on gendered language, images, and concepts, nor do I intend to present my analysis as an overarching explanation of the protracted refugee situation. Rather, the discursive mechanisms that I explore and critique in the following chapters exist simultaneously and in parallel with other multiple, interrelated, and often paradoxical political and representational systems that underpin the refugee situation in local and international context (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011a).

A final usage of the concept of representation which grounds the analysis presented in this book relates to the role of performance in social encounters as demonstrated, for instance, by Goffman in his landmark work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959/1971). In this sense, the existence of a number of (materially and politically) powerful external observers of/in the refugee camps directly impacts the representation of the Sahrawi self to diverse non-Sahrawi others. Dramaturgical analogies have numerous limitations (as Goffman himself noted in his 1959 preface), with Conquergood (1992, 92) recognizing that such analogies may re-create simplistic divisions of social space into front-stage areas of masking and disguise (marked by presence of performance) and backstage areas of honesty and authenticity (marked by the absence of performance). Despite these and other potential limitations, however, I find it useful to conceptualize the dynamics within and beyond the refugee camps as those between different groups of actors and actresses representing various scripts or discourses to a series of audiences. The primary audiences referred to in this book include members of Spanish civil society and the Algerian, Cuban, South African, and Syrian states.⁹

By drawing on insights from performance and performativity studies, the analysis presented in the following chapters rejects a binary opposition between reality and appearance (Conquergood 1992, 84). In order to explore the multiple roles that gender and Islam may play in protracted refugee situations, it is not my primary aim to identify and understand Sahrawi refugees’ purportedly real religious identity and practice, religious belief, or understandings of gender relations per se or to ascertain what specific performances are disguising. Rather, although I do ultimately contrast the Sahrawis’ official representation of secularism to Western audiences onstage, with the religious normality expressed and performed