Landing Security: Risk, Endogeneity, and the Archives of Colonialized Planning in Morocco

This dissertation investigates the historical and contemporary relationships between security, development and planning through the lens of collective land tenure in Morocco. Weaving a historical narrative that traces the legal and bureaucratic institutions of Moroccan land management to their colonial roots, I argue that security politics are inextricably tied to the very genesis of development planning.

The title of the dissertation, “Landing Security,” reflects both the centrality of land to my analysis as well as its power to secure allegiances, quell anxieties, and fortify state sovereignty. This power does not only lie in the material possession of land or its potential for economic investment, but also in the bureaucratic processes through which land tenure becomes legitimate, stable, and thus uncontestable. “Landing Security” thus refers to land not as an object or a noun, but as a verb capable of transforming relationships and pacifying the violence of state-building and development.

In contrast to conceptions of planning as a form of state control, I argue instead that development planning is a form of risk management in which a territorialized understanding of culture – including the relationships of subject populations to their land –is constructed as risk. Risk mitigation, in the form of what I call finding “tolerable levels of endogeneity” – or accepting a certain level of locality and tradition deemed necessary for effective control – then becomes the mechanism through which security logics are embedded in state practice. This translates into an obsession with binding development policy to presumably traditional legal, social, and political institutions, thus producing a manufactured path dependency as a proxy for cultural authenticity.

I demonstrate, moreover, that the planning rationalities of the protectorate regime continue to guide the management of collective land in the contemporary Moroccan state, now bolstered by the legal and institutional legacies of the colonial regime. Ultimately, I argue, one of the greatest successes of the French colonial tenure in Morocco was its ability to transform its own archive into the new reference point for cultural authenticity within an ongoing project of modern state-building.

Thesis Advisor: Holly Harriel