This paper investigates the emergence of modern discourses and practices concerning national territoriality and bordered political space in the eastern Sahara in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Its primary concern will be to track the mechanisms through which the particular swath of the Sahara that linked the two Ottoman provinces of Egypt and Benghazi was transformed into an active and contested borderland. How did an amorphous, economically marginal desert region that was notoriously difficult to rule become, over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a hotbed of political and diplomatic wrangling between the Egyptian and Ottoman states, both of which were caught up in similar processes of modernization and centralization? Fundamental to the analysis is the process by which Bedouin actors operating in this internal borderland of the Ottoman Empire experienced, and challenged, the onset of new discourses and practices of bordered political space in this period. The local Ottoman rulers in Benghazi, in particular, were preoccupied with forging a new Bedouin policy that would foster enhanced security and stability in this region. And yet, just as both the Ottoman and Egyptian governments sought to find new ways to administer and control this frontier, the various Bedouin tribes who inhabited demonstrated a keen understanding of the new political stakes that had been introduced by Ottoman and Egyptian encroachment. As such, the paper will pay particular attention to previously untapped Ottoman archival sources that document the ongoing struggles of the Ottoman government in Benghazi to respond to Bedouin mobility across the putative Egypt/Benghazi border, which I argue was done by the tribes strategically and self-consciously as a tool of resistance. Through this analysis of the broader political meaning of Bedouin mobility in the eastern Sahara at this crucial juncture in Ottoman and Egyptian state formation, I hope to complicate the prevailing historiography of marginal spaces of the Ottoman Empire by highlighting the salience of its internal borderlands.