The four mountain ranges that cut through Morocco and the desert that sweeps across its southern regions have controlled the movement of people, resources, and power for centuries. Since the pre-colonial era, the governing powers have etched their own imagined boundaries into the landscape, manufacturing a center and a periphery. In this paper, I argue that the drawing of these boundaries is an assertion of power, both over the landscape and over threats to the government’s control. Further, I describe how the contemporary territorial approach to development is a continuation of these same policies. For the pre-colonial government, the mountains divided bled makhzen, the lands over which they had complete control, and bled siba, the lands they ruled only indirectly. After militarily pacifying the entirety of the country, the colonial powers similarly let the mountains divide between maroc utile, the lands which could be “civilized” and benefit from modernization, and maroc inutile, that which they believed could not. Drawing on studies of pre-colonial and colonial policy, particularly the work of Mohammed Naciri, I will describe how creating these dichotomies granted the government the power to redefine the environment and contain perceived and real threats. In doing so, they implicitly denied that these were underlying or widespread threats and were thus able to address them through targeted policies. I will then combine analyses of recent state policy, most notably those by Myriam Catusse, with my own fieldwork researching the implementation of Morocco’s National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) to show that the monarchy continues to follow a similar pattern of power assertion through boundary drawing. By demarcating the “poorest and most marginal” areas of the country, the monarchy is once again symbolically containing poverty to certain quarters and communes. Once contained, it reasserts control and minimizes unrest through two parallel processes. First, it enhances the role of local authorities representing the Ministry of the Interior at the expense of elected officials. Second, the government provides many highly visible grants to individuals in an attempt to reshape both the recipients and their environments.