Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on how the de facto state of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraqi Kurdistan imagines, plans and (re) negotiates its future in Iraqi Kurdistan by exploring infrastructural planning projects in the city of Sulaimani.

Paper long abstract:

After 2003, the maturation of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq introduced new political and economic possibilities in the region. However, recent clashes with the Islamic State (IS) and dropping oil prices have destabilized this "state in the making' into one in "crisis". On the other hand, these changes have also allowed for Kurdish territorial gains and intensifying perceptions of Kurdish unification and independence. How can anthropology research the prospective dimensions of state planning when placed in social spaces of (seemingly) timeless conflict? In its attempts to make an unknown future knowable, development planning and infrastructure present fertile ground for an anthropology of the 'not-yet' (Larkin 2013; Abram and Weszkalnys 2013). Seeing infrastructures as ontologies, their temporalities exceeding human lifetimes (Bowker, 2015), these sites can shed light onto how successive regimes have laid claim to their own temporal and spatial imaginations of statehood and how current regimes are building or deviating from them. Engaging with infrastructural planning developments, as part of and along side the Sulaimani city "master plan", I attempt to draw out how people's experience of their own future relates to that of the state. Which futures are imaginable, how and which projects become developed and finalized? How is the (potential) Kurdish- and Iraqi state imagined and experienced? Thus, this paper engages with issues of temporality, planning, infrastructure and the state in anthropology, by extending theoretical knowledge on, as well as exploring new ways of researching prospective dimensions of life.