Reproduction and Resistance : Female Bodies and Agency in the Sahrawi Liberation Struggle

Abstract: This study sets out to investigate Sahrawi women’s understanding of maternities as bodily and embodied experiences of collective and individual resistance within the Sahrawi liberation struggle against the occupation of Western Sahara. By using the Sahrawi liberation front’s pronatalist politics as a starting point to explore Sahrawi women’s positioning in the liminal space between reproductive health and biological reproduction as a socio-political action, I draw on a decolonial understanding of agency to analyse the relationship between individual health and collective resistance – especially in correlation with the increase of humanitarian projects targeting sexual and reproductive health. As a result of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and desk review, I argue that the change in the social landscape of the camps with the arrival of humanitarian aid provided Sahrawi women with new perspectives on biological reproduction that, in turn, affected the way they contribute to the revolutionary cause, confirming their role as socio-political agents implementing new strategies of survival as acts of individual resistance.