Theorizing Sovereignty in Empty Land - Contested Global Landscapes

lands under state control to be doled out through opaque and unaccountable procedures while still
retaining ethnic collectivities' formal ownership of those lands.
This process played out differently depending on the location and potential economic value of the
land. In the pre-Sahara, these juridical procedures were of little relevance during the colonial period when
there was minimal foreign interest in these peripheral lands, and the main concern of the French was
establishing some modicum of territorial authority through client Moroccan overlords. In the
contemporary context, however, the dahir of 1919 is quite important for residents of the collective lands
in the south though few are aware of it. The Office of Indigenous Affairs is no longer, but the Ministry of
Interior inherited its tutelary authority and currently, the Rural Affairs Directorate at the Ministry of the
Interior coordinates those same committees charged with allocating collective land, manages the accounts
of the ethnic collectivities receiving rent on the long-term contracts on their property, and otherwise
attempts to resolve the many conflicts and requests for clarification of the ambiguous status of collective
lands. 8 The staff of the Directorate take their work very seriously, scrambling with a meager budget and
inadequate staff to manage hundreds of thousands of hectares on behalf of ethnic collectivities, while also
trying to fulfill a mandate retained from the colonial period to survey and delimit the communal holdings
of each ethnic collectivity. Only a small percentage of communal lands have been delimited in a formal
process that is intended to clearly demarcate a tribe's borders (thereby conflating a social formation with a
spatial one) and formalize the legal status of that land. Once a collectivity's land is delimited and
conflicting claims resolved, that land can be homologuée, a formal procedure roughly equivalent to a title
search that permanently removes competing claims to the land.
8 While the Ministry overseas the funds collected on behalf of the ethnic collectivities, those collectivities have no
access to or control over their accounts and most have never received the money due for contracts on their land since
those contracts started being issued in 1919. In the province of Ouarzazate, the first efforts to disburse the millions
of Dirhams that had accumulated over the previous century to the many collectivities began in 2003. The Ministry's
inability to trace exactly how much money was due to each tribe or to resolve the controversial issue of identifying
eligible rights-holders meant the Ministry did not attempt to distribute cash directly to the ethnic collectivities.
Instead, they established a community development fund to finance economic and social projects around the
province.
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