Theorizing Sovereignty in Empty Land - Contested Global Landscapes

in value throughout the region, but people talked particularly about the way speculation and rising prices
were taking hold in communally owned lands that had never been subject to market-based transfers.
While private property (melk) is long-established in the intensively farmed oases and urban centers,
communal lands had never been subject to privatization or commercial sale. This was undergoing rapid
change as demand for that land increased.
This was the context in which the solar installation must be understood. The land, sold at a cheap
MAD 1 per square meter was clearly worth a lot more now. 9 People understood the rise in land values
that such a project would engender and the new kinds of competition it would encourage over communal
land situated near economic opportunity--land along the national road where gas stations could be built,
near the solar installation where stores for the employees or tourists could be located, near market towns
where immigrants fleeing drought from the mountains could build their homes to gain better access to
wage labor opportunities. One official described increasing land conflicts in the region: "there is no law
now; it is the law of the jungle, the strong over the weak." This dramatic phrasing perhaps overstated his
case; struggles over land had not reached the level of violence or lawlessness documented in some other
parts of the world. However, he pointed to how to the underlying uncertainty in land tenure was fueling
land conflicts. A former French colonial official described these conflicts as the petits drames du bled [the
petty dramas of the bled, the Arabic word for countryside that entered the French colonial lexicon], but
for the people of region, these were anything but petty dramas (Guillaume 1960: 75). They were struggles
over the right to subsistence from land ostensibly held communally but channeled for the benefit of the
few, the right to receive their individual rights in land that had acquired a new economic value, and the
right to autonomy--the ability to decide themselves, not through a tutelary authority or a single collective
land representative, the disposition of their lands.
9 Discussions about land tenure and titling in the development literature ignore the extent to which many of the most
active market players in land--state actors and private investors--may not want a transparent market in land. In
southern Morocco, the non-market framework for transferring land as it exists in the laws governing collective lands
maintains low prices and simplifies the acquisition process.
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