The version presented here may differ from the published version. If citing, you are advised to consult the published version for pagination, volume/issue and date of publication 1 Migration diplomacy in a de facto destination country: Morocco's new intermestic migration policy and international socialization by/with the EU

This article examines contested state diplomatic practices with the aim to challenge structural legal-institutional accounts of these actors' international engagement, which are unsatisfactory in explaining change and acknowledging their agency. Considering contested states as liminal international actors, their diplomatic practices stand out for their hybridity in transcending the state vs. non-state diplomacy dichotomy as well as their structure-generating properties in enabling social forms of international recognition absent legal recognition. The concept is empirically applied to examine the everyday interaction between the representatives of Palestine and Western Sahara and the EU institutions in Brussels. It is argued that there has been a renewal and expansion of the Palestinian and Sahrawi repertoires of diplomatic practices vis-à-vis the EU, which has entailed growing hybridisation. Innovation originated in more "transformative" diplomatic practices capitalising on the contested states' own political inbetweenness, which established relations that contributed to constituting and endogenously empowering them in the Brussels milieu. The way was thus paved for more "reproductive" diplomatic practices that mimic traditional state diplomacy to gain prominence. The impact achieved on "high politics" demonstrates how bottom-up practice-led change may allow contested states to compensate for their meagre material capabilities and punch above their structural weight in international politics.

This article introduces the special issue by explaining why researching change and continuity in the foreign policies of North African states is relevant in spite of these countries' peripheral and 'subaltern' position within the global system. It situates the special issue's content in the context of the extant academic literature on the foreign policies of dependent/Third World/Global South countries, the foreign policies of MENA states and the consequences of the 2011 Arab uprisings in terms of international relations. It then moves on to discuss the case study selection by outlining key commonalities and differences between Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in terms of historical, political and economic foreign policy determinants. The country case studies each focus on a particular level of analysis, from the global -Tunisia's financial predicaments and foreign debt negotiationsthrough the (sub)regional -Egypt's relationship of necessity with Saudi Arabia, Algeria's half-hearted policies towards the conflicts in Libya and Malito the domestic sphere -Morocco's power balance between the monarchy and the Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) heading the government, Libya's extreme state weakness and internal power competition among proliferating private actors -, reaching also the deeper non-state societal level -Mauritania's new forms of social activism questioning the official religious identity and the socio-political makeup of the state. The last part of the introduction critically relates the empirical findings of the special issue to theoretical debates on subalternity in International Relations and Mohammed Ayoob's subaltern realism in particular.

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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.