Land and the New Commoning

Abstract

This chapter investigates the genealogy of collectively owned lands in Mgoun to argue that the division of the commons might represent a new form of communal action. It demonstrates how emergent definitions of the common good worked out through land conflicts in places like Ichihn might produce a new politics of the commons. Land conflicts in and of themselves were certainly nothing new in the Mgoun Valley or anywhere else in Morocco. With such awareness, the chapter describes the colonial transformation of collective sovereignty into collective property under the tutelage of the state. By folding collective lands into the state space of positive law, the French Protectorate simultaneously created the commons and undermined it. The chapter then looks into how the French colonial legacy shaped contemporary struggles around land. The chapter then proposes an alternative possibility: marginalized residents pursued hybrid private-property forms in an attempt to forge new kinds of “common action” that challenge assumptions about the death of the commons in the face of neoliberal encroachment.