« Evacuative settler colonialism: Peter Adey, ‘Settler-colonial-evacuative infrastructures of mobility’, Geographical Reserach, 64, 2, 2026, e70057
Sabotage as counterinfrastructure: Kyle R. Matthews, Joanna Kidman, Sophie Bond, Karen Nairn, ‘How does settler-colonialism problematise the concepts of infrastructure and sabotage? Insights from debates about the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa’, Human Geography, 2026 »

Africa’s last settler colony? Robert Flahive, ‘Western Sahara as a design project: tracking the architecture of counterrevolution for “Greater Morocco”‘, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

16Mar26

Abstract: This paper excavates the spatial politics of Moroccan settler colonialism in Western Sahara between 1975 and 2010. Taking the 2010 Gdeim Izik protest, as a starting point, the paper maps Morocco’s spatial strategies of conquest in Laâyoune and Western Sahara. The Moroccan government refashioned Western Sahara as part of ‘Greater Morocco’ to be pursued through what Samia Henni terms the architecture of counterrevolution, the production, destruction, and reorganization of built forms to consolidate control. I detail these spatial transformations across three phases: (1) closing the frontier of Greater Morocco (1975–1991), infrastructure for the elimination of the Native in Laâyoune (1991–2003), and refashioning assertions of sovereignty (2003–2010). By accounting for the Moroccan government’s counterrevolutionary spatial practices in Laâyoune and wider Western Sahara, this paper invites further inquiry into the how both urban space and the built environment serve as resources for analyzing settler colonialism in and beyond Western Sahara.


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