Fixing the Desert: Oil Infrastructure and the Governance of Mobility in Southern Tunisia

How did oil infrastructure operate as an architecture for governing desert ecologies in twentieth-century North Africa? This paper examines southern Tunisia through El Burma, the country’s first and largest oil concession, spanning the Tunisian-Algerian border. Initially developed under French colonial authority and transferred to the Italian state-owned company ENI in 1960, El Burma reveals how petroleum infrastructures reshaped desert environments and populations. French authorities long imagined the southern desert as unruly and obstructive, defined by the movement of sand, wind, and rebels across porous borders. By the mid-twentieth century, French and Italian geographers, administrators, and scientists produced geological and ethnographic surveys that classified landscapes and bodies alike. Racialized notions of backwardness justified expanding military zones, border surveillance, and infrastructural encroachment, transforming ecological processes and social mobility into objects of control. Hydrocarbon exploration intensified these dynamics by introducing new ways of knowing and organizing desert space. By 1966, El Burma generated national revenue and symbolized Tunisia’s entry into the global petroleum economy, celebrated as modernization and sovereignty. Yet extraction also reconfigured desert geographies. Exploration technologies translated terrain into seismic data, geological strata, and projected profit, producing fields, blocks, and concession zones. Roads followed patrol routes, drilling rigs occupied pastoral corridors, and pipelines imposed fragile lines of control requiring constant defense against dunes, corrosion, erosion, and political contestation. El Burma’s legacy persists in toxic waste pits, contaminated water, and obstructed grazing routes—forms of negative infrastructure that endure beyond official records. Herders report illness among camels and birds near polluted sites, showing how extraction’s afterlives continue to mediate relations among humans, animals, and oil corporations. Drawing on multilingual archives, geological reports, press sources, and satellite imagery, this paper conceptualizes oil as an infrastructural regime extending from subsurface knowledge to enduring ecological transformation in Tunisia’s southern desert.