Theorizing Sovereignty in Empty Land - Contested Global Landscapes

projects like neoliberalism are themselves particular, perhaps aspiring to universality but never quite
getting there. The metaphor of friction is effective because it does not predetermine the outcome of such
encounters as either empowering ("resistance") or oppressive (6). Rather, it is contingent and productive
of new relationships that can give universalizing projects traction and undermine them, perhaps even
simultaneously. Such a metaphor guards against ascribing a globalizing character to the Moroccan solar
plan in contradistinction to the local, particular concerns of the people living around the installation. The
global/local binary ignores the ways the Moroccan government explicitly provincialized the project and
the ways that rural contestations over land and regional reconfigurations of livelihoods and land use drew
on other universal claims or processes--aspirations for sovereignty and autonomy, immersion in global
labor markets, and the creeping impact of climate change among them. Perhaps this is no more than an
argument that everything is global now, including the mobilization of small rural communities around the
sale of their collective lands. But what I think is most interesting about this case is the reverse operation,
the ways the solar project was "resized" from a visionary effort to mitigate global warming to a local
development initiative that would bring people jobs or new schools. In doing this work to make the
project local, the government surfaced some uncomfortable connections--between this and other land
conflicts, between the way the government communicates about the land sale and the opacity of other
government rules and procedures, and between a clean energy project and the other extractive industries
operating in the area, such as tourism and mining.
Analyzing the solar plan in Morocco as green grabbing sheds light on the provincializing effects
of the Ouarzazate installation. It trains our attention to the materiality of solar energy--how it is a political
project geared not only to international discourses around climate change and energy transitions but to the
everyday practices of governing marginalized lands and people. This critical framework compels us to
look through the language of cleanliness and carbon emissions and when we do, it becomes apparent that
the CSP plant is much like a silver mine in the way it occupies space and circumscribes people's
sovereignty over the land so as to channel the value created in that land to Moroccan or foreign
companies. As I write this paper, people throughout the region are demonstrating around mines, closing
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