The Representation of the Moroccan Sahara in El Moudjahid Discourse: A Critical Study

Abstract

This study employs Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to analyse the news discourse of El Moudjahid and explore how political narratives and legitimacy are embedded within the deep structure of news discourse, specifically to legitimize Algeria’s support for the Polisario Front’s territorial claims against Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. The research investigates how media discourse remains a powerful tool for propaganda under the control of the Algerian government.The study emphasises the imperial hubris of Algerian political and military elites, who utilize media as an extension of state power to obscure the motives behind separatism and expansionism. In this context, El Moudjahid functions not only as an information source but also as an instrument for ideological manipulation, ensuring that the Polisario Front’s claims are portrayed as historically and naturally legitimate, while systematically delegitimizing Morocco’s sovereignty. The research examines a key article from El Moudjahid that reports on France’s recent policy shift regarding the Western Sahara issue and Algeria’s subsequent reaction. To deepen the analysis, the study incorporates additional sources, including the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on Morocco’s historical ties with the Sahrawi population. This approach provides access to the universe of discourse related to a geopolitical controversy that has persisted for 50 years. The combination of sources highlights how discourse in news stories or legal statements is not an unquestionable truth or fact; rather, it can be corrupted, distorted, or manipulated, with facts, events, and history undergoing similar illegitimate processes. Thus, as power intersects with discourse, language ceases to function merely as a communicative tool and instead becomes a mechanism of control, manipulation, and power abuse.