Introduction
The relationship between Algeria and Morocco stands among the most enduringly conflictual bilateral ties in the contemporary world, with repercussions that extend far beyond their shared borders. Since emerging from French and Spanish colonial rule in the mid-20th century, their interactions have oscillated between cautious cooperation and overt hostility. This volatility has been punctuated by border wars, diplomatic ruptures, closed frontiers, and a cold-war-style rivalry for regional dominance that has persisted across generations of leaders from both sides of the Zouj Bghal border crossing. The central question posed here is deliberately provocative: has opposing Morocco become, in practice, Algeria’s long-term national strategy—the organizing logic of its foreign policy, military posture, regional diplomacy, and even elements of domestic legitimation?
Presented so bluntly, the thesis is difficult to defend in its entirety. Algeria is a nation of 32 million people, whose economy is heavily reliant on hydrocarbon rents, with a young and often frustrated population, persistent governance challenges, and security threats along five different borders that have nothing to do with Rabat. To reduce Algerian statecraft to a single obsession would be to caricature a complex foreign policy tradition shaped by historical path dependence and multicausal factors. Yet the inverse claim—that Morocco is peripheral to Algerian strategy—is equally unsustainable.
This analysis advances a more nuanced position: opposition to Morocco has become one of the most durable, institutionalized, and costly principles of Algeria’s regional policy, without fully exhausting the country’s strategic horizons. The argument is developed inductively rather than asserted upfront. It traces the historical roots of the rivalry in colonial border disputes and the 1963 Sand War; examines the Western Sahara dispute as the structural core around which bilateral relations have been organized since 1975; reviews relevant academic literature; considers the understudied identity dimension tied to competing Amazigh claims; documents the rivalry’s expression in diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, military posture, competing development models, and public diplomacy; and concludes by weighing the evidence for and against the central thesis, before questioning the capacity of both states to transcend a zero-sum framework that, according to virtually all empirical measures available to regional economists and political scientists, has impoverished the Maghreb relative to its manifest potential.
Historical Origins: from colonial borders to the Sand War
The seeds of Algerian-Moroccan antagonism predate Algeria’s independence itself. French colonial cartography, over more than a century, redrew the Saharan and pre-Saharan frontier separating what would become Algeria from the Moroccan sultanate, annexing to French Algeria territories—around Tindouf, Béchar, and the Figuig region—that Rabat had historically administered or claimed. Morocco gained independence in 1956, six years before Algeria, and Moroccan nationalists, including the future King Hassan II, initially framed the Algerian liberation struggle as a common Maghrebi cause. They provided sanctuary, arms supply channels, and diplomatic support to the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the 1954–1962 war. Rabat’s expectation—central to the Moroccan narrative of grievance ever since—was that an independent and grateful Algeria would negotiate the return of territories amputated by colonization. This expectation collided with the post-independence Algerian leadership’s doctrine, adopted under Ahmed Ben Bella, that colonial-era borders were sacred and non-negotiable—a principle later enshrined continent-wide by the 1964 Cairo resolution of the Organization of African Unity on the inviolability of colonial borders.
This clash culminated in the brief but foundational Sand War of October 1963, in which Moroccan and Algerian forces clashed in the Tindouf and Figuig sectors. Though brought to a ceasefire within weeks through mediation by the Organization of African Unity and Ethiopian arbitration, the war left a residue of strategic mistrust that never fully dissipated. To Algeria’s new revolutionary elite, the war confirmed a perception of the Moroccan monarchy as an expansionist neighbor aligned with conservative Western interests. For the Moroccan palace, it confirmed a view of Algeria as an ideologically assertive state close to the Soviet Union and willing to use force against a country that had hosted its liberation movement. These competing narratives, however partisan, proved remarkably durable, resurfacing in every subsequent crisis.
Academic Perspectives on the Rivalry
Academic literature on Algerian-Moroccan relations converges, with minor accent variations, on a broadly similar diagnosis. Comparative studies of regional security provision in the Maghreb have characterized both states as competing “regional security providers,” whose overlapping leadership claims generate structural friction independent of any particular dispute. Algerian historians of French Algeria have situated the rivalry within a longer colonial and postcolonial genealogy: works by Stora locate the 130 years of colonial occupation and the independence war at the heart of Algeria’s political identity formation, shaping a distinctly sovereignty-first foreign policy culture that is markedly more suspicious of external entanglements—including Moroccan ones—than Morocco’s own postcolonial trajectory. Studies of the 2019 Hirak protests similarly emphasize that the movement’s central demands were domestic and institutional—centered on transparency and elite accountability—even as state narratives later mobilized external threat rhetoric in the protest’s aftermath. Taken together, this literature does not support a monocausal reading in which Morocco explains all of Algeria’s foreign policy; yet it consistently identifies the rivalry as a structural, not incidental, feature of the regional order, rooted in clashing colonial and revolutionary experiences that produced the two states.
The Amazigh Identity Dimension
One less frequently examined but analytically significant layer of the rivalry concerns competing claims over Amazigh (Berber) identity and heritage. Both Algeria and Morocco host substantial Amazighophone populations—concentrated in Kabylie, the Aurès, and M’zab in Algeria, and in the Rif, Middle Atlas, and Souss in Morocco—and both states have, at varying paces and degrees of sincerity, granted constitutional recognition to Tamazight: Morocco in 2011 and Algeria in 2016. Yet the political significance attached to Amazigh identity diverges sharply between the two capitals, and this divergence has periodically been folded into the broader rivalry. In Algeria, the Kabyle Amazigh movement has occasionally articulated autonomy claims that the central authorities have treated as a security issue. Algerian officials have, on occasion, accused Morocco of secretly encouraging Kabyle separatism as a tool of destabilization—a charge Rabat has consistently denied. In Morocco, by contrast, the palace has chosen to integrate cultural Amazigh recognition—most notably through the 2001 creation of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture and the 2011 constitutional reforms—into an inclusive national narrative centered on the monarchy rather than treating it as a separatist threat. This contrast illustrates how a shared civilizational legacy rooted in the Amazigh substratum common to both societies predating Arab-Islamic conquest has been refracted through the conflictual prism of bilateral rivalry rather than serving, as it could, as the basis for transborder cultural cooperation.
The Western Sahara Dispute as a Central Organizing Fact
While the Sand War shaped the psychological architecture of the rivalry, the Western Sahara dispute provided its durable institutional content. Spain’s withdrawal from its Saharan colony in 1975, precipitated by Morocco’s mobilization of some 350,000 unarmed civilians in the Green March, triggered a conflict that has structured bilateral relations for half a century. Morocco has since annexed and administered most of the territory, presenting an autonomy plan under Moroccan sovereignty as the only realistic basis for resolution. Algeria, while formally rejecting any territorial ambition over Western Sahara, has hosted the Polisario Front’s government-in-exile and refugee camps since 1976, provided diplomatic, financial, and at times military support, and championed the self-determination claim of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in African Union and United Nations forums.
The narratives of each party are total and mutually exclusive. Algiers presents its position as the application of a principle grounded in the UN Charter’s self-determination doctrine and the continuity of its own anti-colonial genealogy. Rabat, along with a growing number of external observers, argues that Algeria is a de facto party to the dispute rather than a neutral sponsor of Sahrawi self-determination, pointing to the Polisario leadership’s location, financing, and institutional dependence on Algerian territory—a charge Algiers consistently denies. The dispute has proven strategically self-sustaining: because sovereignty over Western Sahara is framed by Rabat as a matter of territorial integrity—the most sacred national cause of Morocco—and by Algiers as a decolonization principle, neither government possesses the domestic latitude to compromise without appearing to betray a foundational commitment. This mutual entrapment has, over five decades, transformed a regional territorial dispute into a fixed coordinate around which nearly all other dimensions of the bilateral relationship, and much of Algeria’s foreign policy writ large, have become organized.
Diplomatic dynamics shifted markedly after 2020, when the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara as part of the trilateral normalization agreement with Israel, and momentum accelerated as an increasing number of European and African governments—led by France, given the long-awaited Franco-Moroccan strategic treaty—moved toward explicit or implicit support for the autonomy plan. Algiers interpreted this trend as evidence of encirclement rather than a reason for recalibration, a perception that, if anything, hardened its posture.
Foreign Policy Through the Morocco Lens
Algerian diplomacy since the 1970s has followed a recurrent pattern: initiatives pursued in appearance for their own sake—African solidarity, energy diplomacy, non-alignment, security cooperation—frequently also serve as instruments to contain Moroccan influence. Several arenas illustrate this pattern with particular clarity.
The African Union
Algeria played a pivotal role in the admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic to the Organization of African Unity in 1984, a decision that prompted Morocco’s withdrawal from the pan-African body for 33 years. When Morocco re-joined the African Union in January 2017—substituting its “empty chair” strategy with direct diplomatic engagement—Algeria intensified its own continental outreach, courting Sahelian and sub-Saharan capitals in what amounted to a renewed competition for African recognition of the rival Sahrawi positions.
Normalization with Israel
Morocco’s December 2020 decision to normalize relations with Israel, secured in exchange for U.S. recognition of its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, introduced a wholly new axis of confrontation. Algiers, whose foreign policy identity long integrated solidarity with the Palestinian cause as an ideological principle, interpreted this move as a strategic repositioning that brought Israeli security and intelligence presence to its western flank. Algerian authorities, along with much of the state-aligned press, subsequently promoted the notion of an “anti-Algerian axis” linking Rabat, Washington, and Tel Aviv—a framing that, while likely overstating Algeria’s centrality in Israeli strategic calculations in the Maghreb, nonetheless concretely shaped Algerian threat perception and defense planning.
Breakdown and Escalation, 2021
In August 2021, Algeria formally severed diplomatic relations with Morocco, citing what it termed hostile acts, then closed its airspace to Moroccan civilian and military aircraft, permanently suspended the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline that had for a quarter-century carried Algerian gas through Moroccan territory to Spain, and maintained the land border closure in place since 1994. These measures, still in force at the time of writing, constitute the most severe institutionalization of bilateral hostility since the Sand War, illustrating how a bilateral dispute has come to condition Algeria’s policy on infrastructure, energy, and airspace.
Reconfiguration in 2026
Morocco’s foundational participation in the U.S.-sponsored “Board of Peace” initiative in January 2026—as a founding member, leading financial contributor, and first Arab state to commit military forces within the framework—further widened the diplomatic distance between Rabat and Algiers, consolidating Morocco’s positioning as what one analysis termed the Arab pivot of an emerging regional order anchored to the United States. Algeria, which has cultivated deeper defense and energy ties with Russia and increasingly with China, finds itself on the opposite side of an emerging geopolitical fault line, a divergence that closely tracks—though does not reduce to—the older Algerian-Moroccan rivalry.
Domestic Politics and the Uses of External Rivalry
A substantial body of political science holds that authoritarian and hybrid regimes facing domestic legitimacy deficits often derive domestic benefit from external threat cultures—a dynamic sometimes labeled diversionary conflict theory. Algerian political history offers recurrent illustrations. During the brutal civil conflict of the 1990s, triggered by the annulment of the 1991–1992 elections won by the Islamic Salvation Front, the military-security establishment consolidated an opaque and unaccountable form of power that critics and opposition voices long denoted through the contested but persistent trope of the “power” or “mafia of generals”—a ruling configuration in which military, security, and economic interests were tightly interwoven and largely shielded from electoral accountability. This configuration periodically found it expedient to invoke external threats, Morocco foremost among them, to bolster internal cohesion and divert attention from governance shortcomings.
The Hirak protest movement, which erupted in February 2019 following President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of a fifth presidential term, posed the most serious internal challenge to this system in a generation. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, intergenerational, and centered on domestic demands—ending the grip of the politico-military elite, securing transparent elections and accountable governance—rather than foreign policy grievances. Yet the state’s response to the legitimacy crisis revealed by the Hirak included, alongside real institutional adjustments, a perceptible intensification of external threat rhetoric, in which accusations of foreign interference—often Moroccan and, after 2020, Israeli—occupied a prominent place in official and state-aligned media discourse. This pattern repeated itself during the 2021 diplomatic rupture, which followed a period of persistent social tension and slow political transition under President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
It would be reductive to argue that Algerian governance is *exclusively* organized around this diversionary logic. The state continues to invest substantially in housing, food and energy subsidies, higher education expansion, and industrial diversification efforts, reflecting real and independent domestic development priorities. Yet the recurrent coincidence between moments of domestic political tension and the intensification of anti-Moroccan mobilization in official discourse is difficult to dismiss as coincidental, and constitutes one of the clearest mechanisms by which external rivalry has been woven into domestic policymaking.
The Economic Cost of Confrontation
It is in the economic sphere that the price of prolonged rivalry is most measurable. The Arab Maghreb Union, founded with great fanfare in 1989 by Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, aspired to a common market, coordinated infrastructure, and ultimately a customs union modeled, distantly, on the European integration project. Instead, it has remained moribund for more than three decades, its ministerial councils largely inactive and its founding ambitions unfulfilled. Intra-Maghreb trade remains among the lowest regional integration levels in the world; various estimates place formal trade between Algeria and Morocco at less than three percent of each country’s total trade—starkly contrasting with the trade intensity typically observed between neighboring economies with complementary endowments.
The closure of the land border since 1994—originally imposed by Morocco following a Marrakech terrorist attack that Rabat partly attributed to Algerian security failures, and never reopened despite occasional diplomatic openings—entrenched this separation, giving rise instead to a vast informal and smuggling economy along the frontier that generates neither tax revenue nor regulated employment for either state. The 2021 permanent suspension of the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline ended a decades-old functional bilateral economic interdependence, one of the few to survive previous diplomatic freezes, in favor of parallel and mutually exclusive energy corridors: Algeria redirected its gas exports via the Medgaz pipeline directly to Spain, while Morocco promoted the ambitious Atlantic Gas Pipeline project linking West African gas fields to European markets via a route explicitly bypassing Algerian territory and, implicitly, Algerian leverage over regional transit.
By comparison, regional groupings with far less obvious economic complementarity than that uniting Algeria and Morocco—such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Southern African Development Community, and even the more modest Gulf Cooperation Council—have achieved markedly higher levels of intraregional trade and coordinated infrastructure investment over comparable periods, underscoring that Maghreb stagnation is a political constraint rather than a purely structural or geographic one. Regional integration economists have long argued that a truly cooperative Maghreb could generate substantial welfare gains through integrated transport corridors linking Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, and Tunis; expanded intraregional trade leveraging real comparative advantages—Algerian hydrocarbons and Moroccan manufacturing and agricultural exports; coordinated renewable energy infrastructure exploiting shared Saharan solar potential; deeper and more liquid regional capital markets; a substantially enlarged tourism market; and a markedly strengthened collective bargaining position vis-à-vis the European Union and other external partners. Instead, both governments have pursued largely parallel and non-complementary development strategies—duplicated port and logistics infrastructure, competing rather than coordinated Sahelian and African outreach, defense spending largely oriented toward mutual deterrence—imposing what regional economists have termed one of the world’s most considerable unexploited integration dividends in the developing world.
Military Competition and the Security Dilemma
The material expression of the rivalry is nowhere more visible than in defense budgets. Algeria has maintained one of Africa’s highest military expenditures for more than a decade, officially justified by instability along its borders with Libya, Mali, and Niger, and broader Sahelian insecurity following the 2012 collapse of state authority in northern Mali and the subsequent proliferation of jihadist and separatist armed groups. Algerian authorities consistently frame these expenditures as defensive and regionally oriented rather than specifically directed against Morocco. Morocco, for its part, has pursued parallel and substantial military modernization, diversifying acquisitions among U.S., European, and—since the 2020 normalization—Israeli suppliers, acquiring advanced air defense systems, precision-guided munitions, and unmanned aerial systems, while deepening security and intelligence cooperation with Washington through the annual African Lion exercises, now among the largest multinational military drills conducted on the continent.
Even when each state’s security calculus responds to genuinely distinct threats—Algeria’s southern and eastern borders, Morocco’s Atlantic and Saharan posture—the modernization efforts of each are nearly invariably interpreted by the other through the prism of bilateral competition, producing a classic security dilemma in which defensive acquisitions are perceived as threatening, prompting reciprocal escalation. The closure of Algerian airspace to Moroccan aircraft since 2021, alongside periodic reports of reinforced troop deployments and fortifications along the closed land border, illustrates how the day-to-day management of the relationship has become militarized, absent any open conflict since 1963.
Competing Models of Regional Leadership
Beyond the security and diplomatic dimensions, Morocco and Algeria have in recent years articulated genuinely distinct visions of development and geopolitical leadership for their own regional roles, visions that remain trapped in implicit competition. Morocco has pursued a strategy centered on economic diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and Atlantic-facing infrastructure: expanding Moroccan banking, telecoms, and construction investments across West and Central Africa; promoting the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline as a continental connectivity project; and more recently launching the African Atlantic States Initiative to provide landlocked Sahelian states—many now governed by juntas at odds with Paris and in several cases with ECOWAS—with Atlantic access via Moroccan Saharan ports, positioning the Kingdom as an indispensable logistics bridge between landlocked Sahel and global markets.
Algeria, drawing on its hydrocarbon wealth, larger military establishment, and long-cultivated identity of anti-colonial and non-aligned solidarity rooted in the FLN’s role in third-world liberation movements, has instead emphasized direct engagement with Sahelian governments, mediation efforts in Mali’s internal conflicts (despite the 2024 breakdown of the Algiers Accords process with Bamako’s military government), and a foreign policy identity anchored in sovereignist and anti-interventionist principles. These strategies are not, in the abstract, mutually exclusive; a truly cooperative Maghreb could in principle accommodate both a Moroccan Atlantic corridor and an Algerian Sahelian mediation role. In practice, however, each initiative is systematically read by the other capital as an attempt at regional encirclement, and the diplomatic energy that might otherwise support complementary regional development is instead devoted to mutual containment.
Public Diplomacy and the Media Battle
The rivalry is not only waged through formal diplomacy, defense acquisitions, and infrastructure decisions, but also through sustained competition for international public opinion and media narrative. Both governments maintain extensive networks of aligned media, foreign lobbying arrangements, and academic and think tank outreach designed to shape how the Western Sahara dispute and the broader bilateral relationship are perceived by external publics, particularly in Washington, Brussels, and Paris. Moroccan diplomacy has invested heavily in building relationships with American and European policymakers, journalists, and parliamentarians, efforts that bore significant fruit with the 2020 U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and the broader diplomatic momentum favoring the autonomy plan. Algerian diplomacy has responded in kind, mobilizing its own networks—including sympathetic voices within European advocacy circles for the Polisario, segments of the European left, and the liberation solidarity networks inherited from the FLN’s revolutionary past—to contest Moroccan sovereignty claims and publicize allegations of human rights violations in Moroccan-administered Western Sahara.
This competition has periodically spilled into unrelated state friction. Diplomatic tensions between Algeria and France over historical memory, migration, and most recently the 2024 detention of Algerian-French dissidents occurred in a context where Algiers explicitly linked French policy choices to what it perceives as a pro-Rabat tilt within the French political and media establishment, illustrating how the Moroccan rivalry has come to color even relationships, like that with France, that possess their own long-standing and independent bilateral logic. The result is a regional information environment in which even developments a priori unrelated—a European Parliament resolution, a UN human rights report, a Sahelian coup—are systematically read by both capitals through the interpretive grid of rivalry, confirming the finding that runs through this analysis: not that Morocco explains everything in Algerian policy, but that little in Algeria’s regional policy remains entirely foreign to this rivalry.
Has Countering Morocco Become Algeria’s Sole Long-Term Strategy? An Assessment
Having traced the rivalry across multiple interlocking domains, a more precise verdict on the initial question is possible. The claim that opposing Morocco constitutes Algeria’s *only* long-term national program does not withstand scrutiny. Algeria faces a genuinely broad portfolio of national priorities largely independent of Rabat: maintaining political stability in the context of an unfinished post-Hirak transition; reducing the economy’s heavy dependence on hydrocarbon rents despite years of diversification rhetoric; addressing acute demographic and youth employment pressures in a country where the majority of the population is under 35; ensuring food and water security amid recurrent droughts; modernizing aging infrastructure; and managing a particularly complex and volatile security environment along its Libyan, Malian, Nigerien, Tunisian, and Mauritanian borders, much of which has no direct bearing on the Moroccan file.
Yet the nuanced thesis is equally well supported: rivalry with Morocco has become one of the most enduring, consistently invoked, and determinative principles of Algeria’s regional strategy, disproportionate to its objective weight among Algeria’s many national interests. Few other bilateral relationships so consistently and visibly shape Algerian diplomatic alignment (Israel, the Board of Peace framework, African Union positioning), defense acquisition and deployment patterns, energy and infrastructure policy (the abandonment of the Maghreb-Europe pipeline, redirection of export corridors), and domestic political discourse as does the Morocco file. The rivalry functions less as one interest among others, on an equal footing in the competition for political attention, than as a persistent filter through which a wide range of otherwise unrelated domains come to be interpreted, and frequently distorted.
The opportunity cost of this configuration is considerable and increasingly well documented. North Africa remains one of the world’s least economically integrated regions, despite possessing precisely the type of complementary economic endowments—Algerian energy and capital, Moroccan industry, logistics, and market access—that elsewhere in the world have underpinned successful regional integration projects. The persistence of confrontation, rather than the underlying Western Sahara territorial dispute itself, appears as the most immediate obstacle to regional cooperation, since the dispute could in principle coexist with functional economic relations, as was largely the case during the 1988–1994 period and, in more partial ways, until the resumption of hostility in the 2020s.
Toward Rivalry or Renewal? Prospects for the Maghreb
The trajectory of the North African regional order in the coming decade will largely hinge on Algeria and Morocco’s capacity to build functional cooperation mechanisms that do not require prior resolution of the Western Sahara dispute—a resolution that, given hardened and mutually incompatible positions on both sides, appears unlikely in the short term regardless of shifts in international recognition patterns. Confidence-building measures of the sort that have periodically eased other prolonged regional disputes elsewhere in the world—technical dialogue on shared Sahelian threats such as terrorism, arms trafficking, and organized crime; gradual sectoral economic exchanges insulated from the broader diplomatic freeze; expanded consular and interpersonal contacts for the substantial Algerian and Moroccan diaspora populations with family ties across the closed border—could, in principle, begin to erode the rigidity of the current impasse without requiring either government to abandon its core position on sovereignty.
The realization of such measures depends heavily on domestic political conditions in both countries that transcend the strict bilateral diplomacy framework: the trajectory of Algeria’s post-Hirak political transition and the internal balance between reformist factions and factions attached to the status quo within its security establishment; the pace and solidity of Morocco’s ongoing diplomatic consolidation around its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, which reduces the incentive for Rabat to offer concessions that might be perceived domestically as superfluous; and the broader realignment of external alignments—American, European, Russian, Chinese, and Gulf—that increasingly overlays and hardens the underlying bilateral dispute in places.
Conclusion
The relationship between Algeria and Morocco stands as one of the defining—and costliest—traits of contemporary North African geopolitics. It would be inaccurate, and analytically reductive, to conclude that countering Morocco represents Algeria’s *sole* long-term political and economic program: the Algerian state responds to a genuinely broad range of domestic and regional priorities independent of Rabat, from Sahelian security to hydrocarbon diversification to demographic management. Yet it would be equally mistaken to treat this rivalry as a marginal or merely episodic feature of Algerian policy. Across diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, and defense planning, opposition to Morocco has become one of the most constant, institutionalized, and costly threads of Algerian statecraft since 1962—a pattern that has hardened rather than softened through successive crises in 2020–2021 and 2026. Whether this pattern continues to dominate the North African landscape or gradually gives way to pragmatic, sectoral cooperation will determine not only the future of Algeria and Morocco themselves, but also the stability, prosperity, and integration of the entire Maghreb—a region whose considerable and unexploited potential stands as the most compelling evidence that prolonged rivalry, however deeply rooted in history and grievance, imposes costs that neither society can indefinitely afford.
The analytical task is therefore not to arbitrate which party bears the greater responsibility for the impasse—a question that lies beyond the scope of dispassionate scholarly analysis and to which each camp’s domestic discourse responds predictably and uniformly in its own favor—but to recognize the structural pattern revealed by the facts: a rivalry born of a colonial border dispute, hardened by the Sand War and then by the still-unresolved Western Sahara question, into a self-sustaining organizing logic capable of absorbing and reconfiguring almost every adjacent domain it touches, from Amazigh cultural politics to Sahelian diplomacy to hydrocarbon infrastructure. Measuring this logic, and the considerable margin of maneuver each government possesses to loosen its grip, constitutes the necessary precondition for any future in which the shared geography of the Maghreb becomes an asset rather than, as it has been for the past half-century, a perpetually contested border.