Within the growing literature on de facto states and disputed territories, the parastate stands as the most contentious challenge to international sovereignty and one of the greatest threats to regional security. Parastates are territorial entities that have unilaterally declared independence and control territory claimed by another state. Though parastates have been a part of international studies since the 1960s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have produced a number of breakaway entities that have challenged existing understandings of state theory and security studies. Without full legal international recognition, the de facto statehood of parastates cannot transform into de jure sovereignty. This special section introduces our collaborative project on the nature, scope, orientation, and character of parastates; a small, select, and particularly problematic subunit of the de facto state family. Though many of these examples should be familiar to researchers of disputed territories, we feel some that have been previously categorized as de facto, contested, or even unrecognized states are better understood as parastates due to the indefinite frozen conflict they find themselves in for years, if not decades.

This article argues that the “declarative” parastate of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) claiming sovereignty over Western Sahara is better understood as a hybrid between a parastate and a state-in-exile. It relies more on external, “international legal sovereignty,” than on internal, “Westphalian” and “domestic” sovereignty. While its Algerian operational base in the Tindouf refugee camps makes it work as a primarily extraterritorial state-in-exile de facto, the SADR maintains control over one quarter of Western Sahara’s territory proper allowing it to at least partially meet the requirements for declarative statehood de jure. Many case-specific nuances surround the internal sovereignty of the SADR in relation to criteria for statehood: territory, population, and government. However, examining this case in a comparative light reveals similarities with other (secessionist) parastates. The SADR exists within the context of a frozen conflict, where the stalemate has been reinforced by an ineffective internationally brokered peace settlement and the indefinite presence of international peacekeeping forces. Global powers have played a major role in prolonging the conflict’s status quo while the specific resilience of the SADR as a parastate has been ensured by support from Algeria as an external sponsor. The path to sovereignty appears to be blocked in every possible way.

This article proposes a typology of causal mechanisms whereby transnational relations of recognition constitute conflict actors in frozen conflicts. While the agency of an emerging conflict actor manifests itself in ‘struggles for recognition’ motivated by experiences of ‘disrespect’, responses from different significant others vary in terms of motivations and pathways (mechanisms of recognition). Adapting Honneth’s tripartite division, the typology distinguishes between four forms of recognition: thin cognitive recognition, ‘respect’/rights, ‘esteem’/difference, and ‘love’/empathy. Three transnational corrections are made in order to include transnational relations of recognition, non-state actors, and unstructured social-relational forms of international/transnational recognition. The typology is applied to the conflict of Western Sahara, which has been reshaped by the rise of internal Sahrawi pro-independence groups (based inside the territory annexed by Morocco) as an increasingly relevant conflict actor, with their identity shifting from victims to human rights activists to activists involved in an unsolved conflict. This identity and social-status formation has been the product of transnational recognition from three significant others: the annexing state (Morocco), the contested state-in-exile (SADR), and the international community. The overall effect of intermingling recognition processes, including various instrumental initiatives deprived of mutuality, has been increased struggle and conflict complexity rather than ‘recognitional peace’.

This article examines the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, in order to assess the effectiveness of the remedies provided and procedures followed by the Immovable Property Commission (IPC), a mechanism that was established by Turkey in order to remedy displaced Greek Cypriots. It recommends changes for the improvement of the IPC and argues that with their adoption, the Commission could act as a blueprint for the establishment of similar remedying bodies in other frozen conflicts as well. Such institutions are not only important in terms of states’ compliance with their human rights obligations, but can also contribute to the resolution of the underlying conflict itself.