Project
How Highways Decided Morocco's Victory in the Western Sahara Conflict
A capstone argument tracing how infrastructure build-out helped make later sovereignty claims and diplomatic normalization more plausible.
The deck
Capstone presentation — NC State Graduate History Conference, April 2026
Download the full deck (PDF) →
Scroll or swipe through all 22 slides — or open the full PDF above.
Written paper
Overview
Most accounts of Western Sahara keep diplomatic recognition and physical infrastructure in separate stories. This project asked how those stories should be read together.
The capstone's central question was how physical integration, especially transport infrastructure, helped create the conditions under which Morocco's sovereignty claims became easier to normalize.
What to notice
The deck and figures pair diplomacy with infrastructure instead of treating them as separate stories.
A roads-over-time workflow using OSM relation R2559126 and the ohsome history API supports year-end snapshots from 2008 through 2025.
Why it matters
The capstone produced more than a claim. It yielded a reusable evidence set, visual narrative, roads-over-time workflow, and a clearer mechanism for explaining why sovereignty politics cannot be separated from circulation.