Staff member Joanna Allan’s book Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea is
due to be released by University of Wisconsin Press in April 2019.
This book tells the story of Saharawi and Equatoguinean
women’s historical struggles against the authoritarian regime of Spanish
Francisco Franco, and explores the nonviolent resistance strategies of women
who continue fighting the ongoing dictatorships in Moroccan-occupied Western
Sahara and Equatorial Guinea.
Since the Spanish exit in 1968, Equatorial Guinea has faced
the authoritarian rule of the Nguema family whilst most of Western Sahara has
been occupied by neighbouring Morocco since 1975. Both of the resource-rich territories
are known by human rights organisations as amongst the worst places in the
world when it comes to repression and lack of civil liberties. Yet Western
states and corporates have no problem with funding these regimes in return for
access to natural resources. Joanna uses the concept of genderwashing to
describe how the Moroccan and Equatoguinean regimes, in partnership with
Western states and corporates, conjure a mirage of promoting gender equality
whilst simultaneously undermining women’s rights –and silencing political
activists - in a bid to cash in on oil, minerals and other resources.
The book is based on fieldwork carried out between 2006 and
2015 in Morocco, the Saharawi state-in-exile/refugee camps in Algeria, and the
free zone of Western Sahara. Joanna also had a rare opportunity to interview
the women leaders of the Saharawi nonviolent resistance movement during an
undercover trip to the occupied zone of Western Sahara in 2014. For the
historical sections of the book, Joanna combines oral histories of older
Equatoguineans and Saharawis with archival research, primarily drawing on the
Saharawi liberation movement’s national archives, and the records of the
Spanish Falange party’s Women’s Section, which opened branches in both Spanish
Sahara and Spanish Guinea, and witnessed the pro-independence radicalisation of
their indigenous students.
Joanna Allan joined Northumbria’s Centre for International
Development as a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow in March 2019.
