Sand
Tomorrow, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will come clattering into cinemas around the world. There will no doubt be talk of plotlines, performances, accents, and fidelity to the source text—perhaps even some mentions of the curious absence of Greek actors. There is less likely to be talk about sand.
But the sand is important. It points us to the film’s indirect involvement in one of the last century’s longest and most successful projects of territorial annexation. Parts of Nolan’s production were filmed on the dunes near Dakhla, a coastal town in occupied Western Sahara and a focal point for Morocco’s ongoing policies to deepen its cultural, economic, and demographic control over the territory. The issue went through the press in July 2025 (here, here, and here), and prompted a petition signed by some 900 artists, journalists, academics, and activists—among them Sahrawi human rights defender ElGhalia Djimi, Greta Thunberg, Javier Bardem, and Pedro Almodóvar.
The background should be familiar to international lawyers. Western Sahara is a former Spanish colony and its people, the Saharawi, hold the right to self-determination of colonial peoples. In 1975, on the cusp of a Saharawi self-determination referendum, Morocco invaded the territory with the concerted support of France’s military and the cover of its diplomats. The majority of the Saharawi population was forced to flee into neighbouring Algeria, where they live in exile to this day in desert refugee camps. Morocco is an illegal occupier.
Less familiar may be the latest phase. Following accelerated urban expansion and intensified commercial fishing in the 2000s and 2010s, the 2020s are now seeing heavy domestic and foreign investment in infrastructure megaprojects. These projects have thrived at the point where European climate commitments and concern over energy security overlap with Moroccan ambitions for development and expansion. They also come amid substantial Chinese investment, integrating Morocco into its global supply chains and satisfying Rabat’s need to diversify alliances amid tectonic shifts in the global geoeconomic order.
This latest phase has included projects such as the billion-euro Tiznit-Dakhla Expressway, and the construction of two wind farms with a combined potential of 400MW (the contracts were won by a consortium led by the Danish-German Siemens Wind Power and the Italian Enel Green Power). The gargantuan UK-Moroccan Xlinks project—since abandoned—had envisioned the construction of 12 million solar panels and 530 wind turbines, whose combined energy would have been bundled along the world’s longest high-voltage submarine cables all the way to the southern coast of England: two possible construction sites were located in the annexed territories. Meanwhile, the construction of a billion-dollar deepwater port in Dakhla is due for completion in 2028, including capacity to export green hydrogen to European markets once production is up and running. The combined effect has been to stitch Western Sahara ever tighter into the administrative, economic, infrastructural, and social fabric of Morocco—while ensuring that this growing patchwork is progressively integrated with its regional partners in Europe and North Africa around an increasingly common set of economic and geopolitical priorities.
These efforts are not limited to concrete. Morocco’s annexation project has also shaded into more or less coordinated demonstrations of soft power. In 2024, footballers of the club Renaissance Berkane arrived at the African Confederation Cup sporting a kit that depicted a map of Morocco including Western Sahara. The ensuing fall-out culminated in a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport that this did indeed violate the duty of political neutrality. In 2030, Morocco will be co-hosting the World Cup; and if Qatar 2022 and USA 2026 are anything to go by, Rabat is likely to be staging more than football matches. The Moroccan National Tourist Office has rebranded Dakhla as the ‘pearl of southern Morocco’, offering everything from quad-biking to windsurfing. A boutique desert festival boasts two weeks of electronic music and communion with nature. And now—at your nearest multiplex—you can see Nolan’s Homeric vision play out on the occupied sands of Western Sahara.
Trojan Horse
Popular mass culture has increasingly become a vehicle for concealed attempts at normalising ongoing violations of international law. Michael John-Hopkins wrote recently on this blog about how Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest sets purported institutional neutrality in tension with state legitimacy, public diplomacy, and the normalization of genocide in Gaza. Saudi and Qatari sportswashing has been linked to international human rights violations, laundered through high impact sport-entertainment collaborations, such as Cristiano Ronaldo’s signing with Al-Nassr in the Saudi Pro League. In these moments, the unruly spectacle of popular culture collides with questions of international legality and the measured diplomatic postures that should condemn them.
This is not new. What is new is the shifting relationship between them. On the one side is the unprecedented reach of globalised media increasingly able to produce shared experiences across cultural and linguistic barriers. Over 130 million viewers from 35 TV markets tuned in to see the Eurovision final. Ronaldo has more than 600 million (!) followers on Instagram. The Odyssey will be projected onto thousands of screens in over sixty countries. On the other side of this are states such as Israel, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, increasingly savvy about how they utilize the messaging potential of this culture to legitimize or normalize the illegal situations in their own backyards—often at the productive intersections between legacy media (football broadcasting, cinema) and social media (Ronaldo’s Instagram, travel YouTubers). In the middle of this stands the faltering of a European tradition of formal diplomatic condemnation, often confused in recent times with the ‘death’ of international law. European states were lead-footed in criticising Trump’s illegal attack on Venezuela. They tied their tongues over the illegal US-Israeli invasion of Iran. And they continue to dither over their duty to enforce the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for the alleged war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Foreign offices across Europe have also yielded their once institutionalised and unquestioned support for Saharawi self-determination to newer Moroccan designs of ‘autonomy’ (explained in detail here by Jamie Trinidad and Stephen Allen).
The question here is not one of legality—but of law’s relationship to popular culture. On one reading, popular culture is a sometimes willing, sometimes unwitting trojan horse for state-sponsored rebrands of internationally unlawful situations. The change is that they are now wheeled out onto a field of contestation on which diplomatic scrutiny is less consistent and rigorous than international legality demands. It is this interpretation that underpins calls for cultural boycotts and the language of ‘sportswashing’. But there is another way to look at this. These moments of collision between popular culture and international legality are moments of deep strangeness. There is a profoundly jarring disconnect between a Eurovision power ballad and the images coming out of Gaza—between a po-faced Hollywood epic and the very real battles that still play out on those lands. As such, these moments of collision can also be moments of illumination, drawing into focus the absurdity of ongoing violations that are often difficult to capture through other mass media—this requires a vocal and well-organised counterculture to put the two side by side.
Take the case of Western Sahara. Annexations are by their very nature creeping. It is only after a military intervention has cracked open a territory that the real business of annexation begins. This slow and laborious process of wholesale incorporation takes place largely out of sight, through the incremental accumulation of disparate measures—legal, social, territorial, economic, demographic, cultural. The administrative equivalence of slow violence, these processes are difficult to capture and communicate, and often lack the flashpoints necessary for headlines. Paradoxically, the attempt to conceal these situations through pop-cultural branding can have the opposite effect of drawing a strange kind of attention to them. Like a flare in the night, they actually end up illuminating the very international wrongs they were supposed to distract from. But this is only possible, as long as there is an active civil society to direct people’s attention away from the lights and down to the doings in the dark.
Ithaca
The real metaphor here is not the Trojan Horse. At heart, the Odyssey is a story about getting home. Whether to an isle in the Ionian Sea or 7 Eccles Street, in its various imaginings Homer’s epic boils down to a simple and intimate human experience: the deep connection that we all forge to a particular patch of soil, the pain of separation, and the overwhelming need to return. The Saharawi women who built the first makeshift camps in 1975 thought they would be home within a few weeks: there are now Saharawis who have lived in the Algerian camps for over fifty years, and the third generation born in exile is already on its feet. People in the camps will tell you about the daily hardships of unpredictable water deliveries and subsistence diets, their dreams of studying or working in Spain, the difficulty of leaving their families to finish school in Algeria, and the frustration of having to return to the camps after graduation—but most of these conversations come back to one simple point: ‘We just want to go home.’ It is an unpleasant irony that one of the most enduring tales of homecoming should be told on the site of one of the twentieth century’s most enduring expulsions. But viewed in all its strangeness, this irony can also be a powerful and jarring reminder of what Europe has recently been all too keen to forget.
Picture: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures