Description
Western Sahara remains one of the longest unresolved cases of colonial occupation and territorial militarization in the contemporary international system. Since Spain's withdrawal in 1975 and the subsequent Moroccan occupation, violence has been sustained not only through direct repression but also through military infrastructures that reorganize space, mobility, and conditions of life across the desert. This paper examines the Moroccan Berm and surrounding minefields as colonial infrastructures that materialize occupation through ongoing forms of ecological and multispecies violence. Drawing on political ecology, decolonial scholarship, and critical approaches to infrastructure, non-human agency, and more-than-human relations, the paper analyzes how the wall fragments territory, restricts human and non-human mobility, disrupts fragile desert ecologies, and undermines Saharawi pastoral and nomadic lifeworlds. Central to this analysis is the recognition that non-human actors — including animals, plants, soils, winds, and water — are not passive recipients of colonial violence but active participants in the (re)configuration of territorial control. Based on academic literature, humanitarian and NGO reports, UN documentation, environmental studies, and qualitative interviews, the analysis argues that the Berm operates not merely as a military barrier but as a durable infrastructure of colonial ordering inscribed into the landscape itself, one that enrolls non-human agencies in sustaining and reproducing structures of domination. Its effects extend across bodies, ecosystems, temporalities, and practices of inhabiting the desert, generating forms of slow violence that disrupt not only mobility and ecological relations, but also the intergenerational transmission of Saharawi pastoral and nomadic knowledge. By approaching the Western Sahara conflict through the lens of colonial infrastructures, multispecies relations, and non-human agency, the paper seeks to reposition the conflict not simply as a geopolitical dispute, but as an ongoing process of territorial and ecological domination.