Few bilateral relationships in the modern world have proven as enduringly hostile or as consequential for regional stability as that between Algeria and Morocco. Since gaining independence from French and Spanish colonial rule in the mid-20th century, their ties have swung between cautious cooperation and open confrontation, marked by border clashes, diplomatic ruptures, and a cold-war-style rivalry for regional dominance that has outlasted generations of leaders on both sides of the Zouj Bghal border crossing. The question this analysis explores is deliberately provocative: has opposing Morocco, in practice, become Algeria’s long-term national strategy—the guiding principle behind its foreign policy, military posture, regional diplomacy, and even certain aspects of domestic legitimacy?
The answer is not straightforward. Algeria is a nation of 32 million people whose economy depends on hydrocarbon revenues, with a young and often frustrated population, persistent governance challenges, and security threats along five borders that have nothing to do with Rabat. To claim Algeria’s actions are driven by a single obsession would be to caricature a complex foreign policy tradition shaped by history and multiple causes. Yet the opposite view—that Morocco plays no meaningful role in Algeria’s strategic calculus—is equally unsustainable.
This analysis takes a middle ground: opposition to Morocco has become one of the most enduring, institutionalized, and costly principles of Algeria’s regional policy, without fully defining the country’s broader strategic horizon. Rather than asserting this conclusion upfront, the argument unfolds inductively, tracing the historical roots of rivalry, examining the Western Sahara dispute as a structuring force, reviewing relevant academic literature, exploring the understudied Amazigh identity dimension, documenting rivalry’s expression in diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, military posture, competing development models, and public diplomacy, before weighing evidence for and against the central thesis and questioning whether the two states can break free from a zero-sum framework that has, by most empirical measures, impoverished the Maghreb relative to its evident potential.
Historical origins: from colonial borders to the Sands War
The seeds of Algerian-Moroccan antagonism predate Algeria’s independence itself. French colonial cartography, over more than a century, redrew the Saharan and pre-Saharan borderlands separating what would become Algeria from the Moroccan sultanate, annexing to French Algeria territories—around Tindouf, Colomb-Béchar, and the Figuig region—that Rabat had historically administered or claimed. Morocco gained independence in 1956, six years before Algeria, and Moroccan nationalists, including the future King Hassan II, initially framed Algeria’s liberation struggle as a common Maghrebi cause, offering sanctuary, arms supply routes, and diplomatic support to the National Liberation Front (FLN) during the 1954–1962 war.
Rabat expected an independent, grateful Algeria to negotiate the return of territories lost to colonization. This expectation collided with the post-independence Algerian leadership’s doctrine—championed by Ahmed Ben Bella—that colonial-era borders were sacrosanct and non-negotiable, a principle later enshrined continent-wide by the 1964 Cairo resolution of the Organization of African Unity on the inviolability of colonial borders. The result was the brief but foundational Sands War of October 1963, in which Moroccan and Algerian forces clashed in the Tindouf and Figuig sectors. Though halted within weeks through OAU mediation and Ethiopian arbitration, the war left a residue of strategic mistrust that never fully dissipated.
For Algeria’s revolutionary elite, the conflict confirmed a perception of the Moroccan monarchy as an expansionist neighbor aligned with conservative Western interests. For the Moroccan palace, it confirmed a view of Algeria as an ideologically assertive state close to the Soviet Union and willing to use force against a country that had once sheltered its liberation movement. These partisan readings proved remarkably durable, resurfacing in every subsequent crisis.
Academic perspectives on the rivalry
Academic literature on Algerian-Moroccan relations converges, with minor variations in emphasis, toward a broadly similar diagnosis. Comparative studies of regional security provision in the Maghreb have characterized both states as competing “regional security providers,” whose overlapping leadership claims generate structural friction independent of any specific dispute. Historians of French Algeria have situated the rivalry within a longer colonial and postcolonial genealogy: works by Benjamin Stora locate the 130 years of colonial occupation and the independence war at the heart of Algeria’s political identity formation, shaping a foreign policy culture distinctly sovereigntist and anti-interventionist, far more suspicious of external engagement—including Moroccan—than Morocco’s own postcolonial trajectory.
Studies of the 2019 Hirak movement similarly emphasize the movement’s domestic and institutional demands—centered on transparency and elite accountability—though later, the state mobilized external threat narratives in the movement’s aftermath. Taken together, this literature does not support a monocausal reading in which Morocco explains all of Algeria’s foreign policy. Yet it consistently identifies rivalry as a structuring, not incidental, feature of the regional order, rooted in colonial and revolutionary experiences that produced the two states.
The Amazigh and identity dimension
A less frequently examined but analytically significant layer of rivalry concerns competing claims over Amazigh (Berber) identity and heritage. Both Algeria and Morocco have substantial Amazigh-speaking populations—concentrated in Kabylia, the Aurès, and the M’zab in Algeria, and in the Rif, Middle Atlas, and Souss in Morocco—and both have, at varying paces and degrees of sincerity, granted constitutional recognition to Tamazight, Morocco in 2011 and Algeria in 2016. Yet the political meaning attached to Amazigh identity diverges sharply between the two capitals, and this divergence has periodically fed into the broader rivalry.
In Algeria, the Kabyle Amazigh movement has at times articulated autonomy demands that the central government treated as a security issue, occasionally accusing Morocco of secretly encouraging Kabyle separatism as a destabilization tool—a claim Rabat has consistently denied. In Morocco, by contrast, the palace has integrated cultural Amazigh recognition—including the 2001 creation of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture and the 2011 constitutional reform—into an inclusive national narrative centered on the monarchy, rather than framing it as a separatist threat. This contrast illustrates how a shared civilizational legacy, rooted in a pre-Arab-Islamic Amazigh substratum, has been refracted through the conflictual prism of bilateral rivalry instead of serving, as it might, as a foundation for cross-border cultural cooperation.
The Western Sahara dispute as a central organizing fact
If the Sands War forged the psychological architecture of rivalry, the Western Sahara dispute provided its durable institutional content. Spain’s 1975 withdrawal from its Saharan colony, hastened by Morocco’s mobilization of some 350,000 unarmed civilians in the Green March, triggered a conflict that has structured bilateral relations for half a century. Morocco has since annexed and administered most of the territory, proposing an autonomy plan under Moroccan sovereignty as the only realistic basis for settlement. Algeria, while formally rejecting any territorial ambition over Western Sahara, has hosted since 1976 the government-in-exile and refugee camps of the Polisario Front, provided diplomatic, financial, and at times military support, and defended the self-determination claim of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in African Union and United Nations forums.
The narratives of each side are total and mutually exclusive. Algiers frames its position as the application of a principle grounded in the UN Charter’s self-determination doctrine and the continuity of its own anti-colonial genealogy. Rabat, along with a growing number of external observers, contends Algeria is a de facto party to the dispute rather than a neutral sponsor of Sahrawi self-determination, pointing to the Polisario leadership’s location, financing, and institutional dependence on Algerian territory—a claim Algeria denies. The dispute has proven strategically self-sustaining: because sovereignty over Western Sahara is presented by Rabat as a matter of territorial integrity—the most sacred national cause—and by Algiers as a decolonizing principle, neither government has the domestic leeway to compromise without appearing to betray a founding commitment. Over five decades, this mutual entrapment has transformed a regional territorial dispute into a fixed coordinate around which nearly all other dimensions of the bilateral relationship—and much of Algeria’s broader foreign policy—have come to organize themselves.
The diplomatic dynamic shifted markedly after 2020, when the United States recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara as part of a trilateral normalization deal with Israel, a trend that accelerated as an increasing number of European and African governments—France foremost among them, given the long-awaited Franco-Moroccan strategic treaty—moved toward explicit or implicit support for the autonomy plan. Algeria interpreted this trend as evidence of encirclement rather than a reason for recalibration, a perception that, if anything, has hardened its posture.
Foreign policy through the Morocco lens
Algerian diplomacy since the 1970s has followed a recurring pattern: initiatives pursued in appearance for their own sake—African solidarity, energy diplomacy, non-alignment, security cooperation—often serve as tools to contain Moroccan influence. Several arenas illustrate this pattern with particular clarity.
The African Union
Algeria played a decisive role in the admission of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic to the Organization of African Unity in 1984, a decision that triggered Morocco’s withdrawal from the pan-African body for 33 years. When Morocco reintegrated the African Union in January 2017—substituting its “empty chair” strategy for direct diplomatic engagement—Algeria intensified its own continental outreach, courting Sahelian and sub-Saharan capitals in what amounted to a renewed competition for recognition of the rival Sahrawi positions.
Normalization with Israel
Morocco’s December 2020 decision to normalize relations with Israel, secured in exchange for U.S. recognition of its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, introduced a wholly new axis of confrontation. Algeria, whose foreign policy identity long integrated solidarity with the Palestinian cause as an ideological principle, interpreted this move as a strategic repositioning enabling Israeli security and intelligence presence on its western flank. Authorities and state-aligned media subsequently promoted the notion of an “anti-Algerian axis” linking Rabat, Washington, and Tel Aviv—a framing that, while likely overestimating Algeria’s centrality in Israeli strategic calculations in the Maghreb, concretely shaped Algerian threat perception and defense planning.
Breakdown and escalation, 2021
In August 2021, Algeria formally severed diplomatic relations with Morocco, citing what it termed hostile acts, then closed its airspace to Moroccan civilian and military aircraft, permanently suspended the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline that had for a quarter-century carried Algerian gas through Moroccan territory to Spain, and maintained the land border closure in place since 1994. These measures, still in force at the time of writing, constitute the most severe institutionalization of bilateral hostility since the Sands War, illustrating how a bilateral dispute has come to condition Algeria’s policies on infrastructure, energy, and airspace.
Reconfiguration in 2026
Morocco’s founding participation in the U.S.-sponsored “Board of Peace” initiative in January 2026—as a founding member, top financial contributor, and first Arab country to commit troops—further widened the diplomatic gap between Rabat and Algiers, reinforcing Morocco’s positioning as what one analysis termed the Arab pivot of an emerging regional order anchored to the United States. Algeria, which has cultivated closer defense and energy ties with Russia and increasingly with China, finds itself on the opposite side of an emerging geopolitical divide that closely—and not coincidentally—overlaps with the long-standing Algerian-Moroccan rivalry.
Domestic politics and the uses of external rivalry
A significant strand of political science holds that authoritarian and hybrid regimes facing domestic legitimacy deficits often derive benefit from external threat cultures—a dynamic sometimes labeled diversionary conflict theory. Algerian political history offers recurrent illustrations. During the brutal civil conflict of the 1990s, triggered by the annulment of the 1991–1992 elections won by the Islamic Salvation Front and leading to a decade-long insurgency that claimed an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 lives, the military-security establishment consolidated an opaque, unaccountable form of power that critics and opposition voices long described through the contested but persistent trope of the “power” or the “mafia of generals”—a governing configuration in which military, security, and economic interests were tightly intertwined and largely shielded from electoral accountability. This setup periodically found it expedient to invoke external threats, Morocco foremost among them, to bolster internal cohesion and deflect attention from governance shortcomings.
The Hirak protest movement, which erupted in February 2019 following President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement of a fifth presidential term, posed the most serious domestic challenge to this system in a generation. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful, intergenerational, and focused on domestic demands—ending the grip of the politico-military elite, securing transparent elections and accountable governance—rather than foreign policy grievances. Yet the state’s response to the legitimacy crisis revealed by Hirak included, alongside real institutional adjustments, a perceptible intensification of external threat rhetoric, in which accusations of foreign interference—often Moroccan and, after 2020, Israeli—occupied a prominent place in official and state-aligned media discourse. This pattern recurred during the 2021 diplomatic rupture, which followed a period of persistent social tension and slow political transition under President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
It would be reductive to claim Algerian governance is exclusively organized around this diversionary logic. The state continues to invest substantially in housing, food and energy subsidies, higher education expansion, and industrial diversification efforts, reflecting real domestic development priorities independent of the Moroccan rivalry. Yet the recurring coincidence between moments of internal political tension and intensified anti-Moroccan mobilization in official discourse is hard to dismiss as coincidental, and constitutes one of the clearest mechanisms by which external rivalry has become embedded in domestic policymaking.
The economic cost of confrontation
It is in the economic sphere that the price of prolonged rivalry is most measurable. The Arab Maghreb Union, founded with great fanfare in 1989 by Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, aimed for a common market, coordinated infrastructure, and ultimately a customs union modeled loosely on the European example. Instead, it has remained moribund for more than three decades, its ministerial councils largely inactive and its founding ambitions unfulfilled. Intra-Maghreb trade remains among the lowest regional integration levels globally; various estimates place formal trade between Algeria and Morocco at less than 3% of each country’s total trade—starkly contrasting with the commercial intensity typically observed between neighboring economies with complementary endowments.
The closure of the land border since 1994—originally imposed by Morocco following a Marrakech terrorist attack that Rabat partly attributed to Algerian security failures and never reopened despite occasional diplomatic openings—entrenched this separation, instead fostering a vast informal and smuggling economy along the frontier that generates neither tax revenue nor regulated employment for either state. The 2021 permanent suspension of the Maghreb-Europe Gas Pipeline ended a decades-old functional bilateral economic interdependence, one of the few to survive previous diplomatic freezes, in favor of parallel and mutually exclusive energy corridors: Algeria redirected its gas exports via the Medgaz pipeline directly to Spain, while Morocco promoted the ambitious Nigeria-Morocco Atlantic Gas Pipeline project, designed to link West African gas fields to European markets via a route explicitly bypassing Algerian territory and, implicitly, Algerian leverage over regional transit.
By comparison, regional groupings with far less evident economic complementarity than that uniting Algeria and Morocco—such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Southern African Development Community, or even the more modest Gulf Cooperation Council—have achieved markedly higher levels of intra-regional trade and coordinated infrastructure investment over comparable periods, underscoring that Maghreb stagnation stems from a political constraint rather than structural or geographical inevitability. Regional integration economists have long argued that a truly cooperative Maghreb could generate substantial welfare gains through integrated transport corridors linking Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, and Tunis; expanded intra-regional trade exploiting real comparative advantages, notably Algerian hydrocarbons and Moroccan manufacturing and agricultural exports; coordinated renewable energy infrastructure leveraging shared Saharan solar potential; deeper regional capital markets; a substantially enlarged tourism market; and a markedly strengthened collective bargaining position vis-à-vis the European Union and other external partners. Instead, the two governments have pursued largely parallel, non-complementary development strategies—duplicated port and logistics infrastructure, competing Sahelian and African outreach, defense spending largely oriented toward mutual deterrence—imposing what regional economists have termed one of the world’s most considerable unexploited integration dividends in the developing world.Military competition and the security dilemma
The material expression of rivalry is nowhere more visible than in defense budgets. Algeria has maintained among Africa’s highest military expenditures for more than a decade, officially justified by instability along its borders with Libya, Mali, and Niger, and broader Sahelian insecurity following the 2012 collapse of state authority in northern Mali and the subsequent proliferation of jihadist and separatist armed groups. Algerian authorities consistently frame these expenditures as defensive and regionally oriented rather than specifically directed against Morocco. Morocco, for its part, has pursued parallel and substantial military modernization, diversifying acquisitions among U.S., European, and—since the 2020 normalization—Israeli suppliers, acquiring advanced air defense systems, precision-guided munitions, and unmanned aerial systems, while deepening security and intelligence cooperation with Washington through the annual African Lion exercises, now among the largest multinational military drills on the continent.
Even when each state’s security calculus responds to genuinely distinct threats—not Morocco-specific for Algeria’s southern and eastern borders, or Morocco’s Atlantic and Saharan posture—each side’s modernization efforts are almost invariably interpreted by the other through the lens of bilateral competition, producing a classic security dilemma in which defensive acquisitions are perceived as threatening, prompting reciprocal escalation. The closure of Algerian airspace to Moroccan aircraft since 2021, alongside periodic reports of reinforced troop deployments and fortifications along the closed land border, illustrates how the daily management of the relationship has become militarized, absent any open conflict since 1963.
Competing models of regional leadership
Beyond security and diplomacy, Morocco and Algeria have in recent years articulated genuinely distinct visions for their own regional leadership, though these remain trapped in implicit competition. Morocco has pursued a strategy centered on economic diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and Atlantic-oriented infrastructure: expansion of Moroccan banking, telecoms, and construction investments across West and Central Africa; promotion of the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline as a continental connectivity project; and most recently, the launch of the African Atlantic States Initiative, designed to give landlocked Sahelian states—many now governed by juntas estranged from Paris and, in several cases, from ECOWAS—access to the Atlantic via Moroccan Saharan ports, positioning the Kingdom as an indispensable logistics bridge between the Sahel and global markets.
Algeria, leveraging its hydrocarbon wealth, larger military establishment, and cultivated legacy of anti-colonial and non-aligned solidarity rooted in the FLN’s role in third-world liberation movements, has instead emphasized direct engagement with Sahelian governments, mediation efforts in Malian internal conflicts (notwithstanding the 2024 rupture of the Algiers Accords process with Bamako’s military government), and a foreign policy identity anchored in sovereigntist and anti-interventionist principles. These strategies are not, in the abstract, mutually exclusive; a truly cooperative Maghreb could in principle accommodate both a Moroccan Atlantic corridor and an Algerian Sahelian mediation role. In practice, however, each initiative is systematically read by the other capital as an attempt at regional encirclement, and the diplomatic energy that might otherwise support complementary regional development is instead devoted to mutual containment.
Public diplomacy and the media battle
Rivalry is not confined to formal diplomacy, defense acquisitions, and infrastructure decisions, but also plays out through sustained competition for international public opinion and media narratives. Both governments maintain extensive networks of aligned media, foreign lobbying arrangements, and academic and think-tank outreach designed to shape how the Western Sahara dispute—and the broader bilateral relationship—are perceived by external publics, particularly in Washington, Brussels, and Paris. Moroccan diplomacy has invested heavily in building relationships with U.S. and European policymakers, journalists, and parliamentarians, an effort that bore significant fruit with the 2020 U.S. recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and the broader diplomatic momentum favoring the autonomy plan. Algerian diplomacy has responded in kind, mobilizing its own networks—including sympathetic voices within pro-Polisario advocacy circles, segments of the European left, and African liberation solidarity networks inherited from the FLN’s revolutionary past—to contest Moroccan sovereignty claims and publicize allegations of human rights abuses in Moroccan-administered Western Sahara.
This competition has periodically spilled into unrelated state friction. Diplomatic tensions between Algeria and France over historical memory, migration, and, more recently, the 2024 detention of dual Algerian-French dissidents have unfolded in a context where Algiers explicitly linked French political choices to what it perceives as a pro-Rabat tilt within the French political and media establishment, illustrating how the Moroccan rivalry has come to color even relationships—such as that with France—that possess their own long-standing and independent bilateral logic. The result is a regional information environment in which even developments a priori unrelated—a European Parliament resolution, a UN human rights report, a Sahelian coup—are systematically read by both capitals through the interpretive grid of rivalry, confirming the finding that cuts across this analysis: not that Morocco explains everything in Algerian policy, but that little in Algerian regional policy remains entirely foreign to this rivalry.
Has countering Morocco become Algeria’s sole long-term strategy? An assessment
Having traced rivalry across multiple interlocking domains, a more precise verdict on the opening question becomes possible. The claim that opposing Morocco constitutes Algeria’s only long-term national program does not withstand scrutiny. Algeria faces a genuinely broad portfolio of national priorities largely independent of Rabat: maintaining political stability in the context of an unfinished post-Hirak transition; reducing dependence on an economy still heavily reliant on hydrocarbon rents despite years of diversification rhetoric; responding to acute youth employment and demographic pressures in a country where the majority of the population is under 35; ensuring food and water security amid recurrent droughts; modernizing aging infrastructure; and managing a particularly complex and volatile security environment along its Libyan, Malian, Nigerien, Tunisian, and Mauritanian borders, much of which has no direct bearing on the Moroccan dossier.
Yet the nuanced counter-thesis is equally well supported: rivalry with Morocco has become one of the most enduring, consistently invoked, and determinative principles of Algeria’s regional strategy, disproportionately influential relative to its objective weight among Algeria’s many national interests. Few other bilateral relationships so consistently and visibly shape Algeria’s diplomatic alignment (Israel, the Board of Peace framework, AU positioning), defense acquisition and deployment patterns, energy and infrastructure policy (abandonment of the Maghreb-Europe pipeline, redirection of export corridors), and domestic political discourse as does the Moroccan dossier. Rivalry functions less as one interest among others, on an equal footing in the competition for political attention, than as a persistent filter through which a wide range of otherwise unrelated domains come to be interpreted, and frequently distorted.
The opportunity cost of this configuration is substantial and increasingly well documented. North Africa remains one of the world’s least economically integrated regions, despite possessing precisely the type of complementary economic endowments—Algerian energy and capital, Moroccan manufacturing, logistics, and market access—that elsewhere in the world have powered successful regional integration projects. The persistence of confrontation, rather than the underlying territorial dispute over Western Sahara itself, appears as the most immediate obstacle to regional cooperation, since that dispute could in principle coexist with functional economic relations, as it largely did during 1988–1994 and, more partially, until the resumption of hostility in the 2020s.
Rivalry or renewal? Prospects for the Maghreb
The trajectory of the North African regional order over the coming decade will largely hinge on Algeria and Morocco’s ability to build functional cooperation mechanisms that do not require the prior resolution of the Western Sahara dispute—a resolution that, given hardened and mutually incompatible positions on both sides, appears unlikely in the short term regardless of shifts in international recognition patterns. Confidence-building measures of the sort that have periodically eased other prolonged regional disputes elsewhere in the world—technical dialogue on shared Sahelian threats such as terrorism, arms trafficking, and organized crime; incremental sectoral economic exchanges insulated from broader diplomatic freezes; expanded consular and interpersonal contacts for the large Algerian and Moroccan diaspora populations with family links across the closed border—could, in principle, begin to erode the rigidity of the current impasse without requiring either government to abandon its core sovereignty position.
The realization of such measures depends heavily on domestic political conditions in both countries that transcend the strict bilateral diplomacy framework: the trajectory of Algeria’s post-Hirak political transition and the internal balance between reformist factions and those attached to the status quo within its security establishment; the pace and solidity of Morocco’s ongoing diplomatic consolidation around its Western Sahara sovereignty claim, which reduces incentives for Rabat to offer concessions that might be perceived domestically as unnecessary; and the broader realignment of external alignments—American, European, Russian, Chinese, and Gulf—that increasingly overlays and, in places, hardens the underlying bilateral dispute.
Conclusion
The relationship between Algeria and Morocco stands as one of the defining—and costliest—features of contemporary North African geopolitics. It would be inaccurate and analytically reductive to conclude that countering Morocco represents Algeria’s sole long-term political and economic program: Algerian state action responds to a genuinely broad range of domestic and regional priorities independent of Rabat, from Sahelian security to hydrocarbon diversification to demographic management. Yet it would be equally mistaken to treat this rivalry as a marginal or merely episodic feature of Algerian policy. Across diplomacy, domestic politics, economics, and defense planning, opposition to Morocco has become one of the most constant, institutionalized, and costly threads of Algerian state action since 1962—a pattern that has hardened rather than softened through successive crises of 2020–2021 and 2026. Whether this pattern continues to dominate the North African landscape or gradually gives way to pragmatic, sectoral cooperation will determine not only the future of Algeria and Morocco themselves, but also the stability, prosperity, and integration of the entire Maghreb—a region whose considerable and unexploited potential stands as the most compelling proof that prolonged rivalry, however deeply rooted in history and grievance, imposes costs no society can indefinitely afford.
The analytical task, therefore, is not to arbitrate which side bears the greater responsibility for the impasse—a question that lies beyond the scope of dispassionate scholarly analysis and to which each camp’s domestic discourse predictably responds by blaming the other—but to recognize the structural pattern revealed by the facts: a rivalry born of a colonial border dispute, hardened by the Sands War and then by the still-unresolved question of Western Sahara, into a self-sustaining organizing logic capable of absorbing and reconfiguring nearly every adjacent domain it touches, from Amazigh cultural policy to Sahelian diplomacy to hydrocarbon infrastructure. Measuring this logic, and the considerable margin of maneuver each government possesses to loosen its grip, constitutes the necessary prerequisite for any future in which the shared geography of the Maghreb becomes an asset rather than, as it has been for the past half-century, a perpetually contested frontier.