Pure and impure risk: Integrating and adapting to landmine danger in Western Sahara’s pasturelands

This article explores the multivalent relationship between nomadic pastoralists and unexploded ordinance (UXO) in Western Sahara. There are more than 7 million explosive remnants of war in the disputed territory, largely placed by the Royal Moroccan Army during the 1975–91 war between Morocco and Western Sahara’s pro-independence Polisario Front. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in and around Western Sahara, this article considers UXO through the concept of ‘matter out of place’ to argue that the normalisation of UXO risk by herders represents an opportunity to think through debates in environmental anthropology, particularly with regard to the construction of risk. The article argues that, as UXO become integrated into Saharan lifeworlds, the risk associated with them becomes assimilated into locally normative understandings of danger and belonging. It considers ‘purity’ and ‘contamination’ through a temporal lens, arguing for a processual understanding of how UXO risk becomes naturalised as part of desert life.