Multiple colonialism in Western Sahara
The Sahrawi are a hybrid people found in parts of northwest Africa, mostly Western Sahara and they are victims of multiple colonialism. The decision by European powers to include parts of their land in various colonies subjected many Sahrawi to different French and Spanish colonial policies and experiences in Morocco, Algeria, Mauretania and Western Sahara. The Spaniards took control of Western Sahara and when they decided to leave, Morocco, with its irredentist dreams stepped in. Morocco became the new colonial power as it claimed Western Sahara territory as a province. It behaves in the same way as the French did when they claimed that Algeria was a province of France. Morocco exploited the prevailing international climate to advance its colonialistic proclivities at a time when territorial colonialism had become anathema internationally. That climate made the big powers, whether communistic or capitalistic, appear to support Morocco. This way their perceived interests seemed to dictate that they be in good books with Morocco and they thus condoned Morocco's annexationist designs. The fact that Morocco itself used to be colonized by the French and the Spaniards tends to hide the fact that it is a colonial power imposing itself on the Sahrawi. Key words: Western Sahara, colonialism, Morocco, Spain
International Dimensions in the Western Sahara Conflict
The African continent struggled for decades to eradicate colonialism and external forms of occupation. After the end of apartheid, it was seen that the struggle had been completed; however, it seems that the struggle still continues in the case of Western Sahara. The Western Saharan conflict is considered to be one of the forgotten conflicts in the world and the territory is listed as one of the non-self governing territories by the United Nations. It is considered as a conflict of liberation and for the right of self determination against an occupying country- Morocco. The conflict has seen the involvement of various regional and international actors such as Algeria, Spain, United States, EU and the UN all with their interests in the territory. This paper aims to analyze the role played by each actor and how their involvement in the conflict has impacted the conflict. The first section will provide a brief background to the conflict and the legal issues surrounding the conflict. The second part will focus on the regional dimensions in the conflict; the regional actors involved and how the conflict is impacting them. The third part will focus on the international arena and how their involvement has impacted the Sahrawi right of self determination. The final section will dwell on why the territory is important to the international arena.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.